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Stranger Than Fiction

February 2025

Crime Busters
by Dean Jobb

New York City in the early twentieth century was a hotbed of crime and corruption—and this made it a crucible for developing new methods of catching the bad guys. Here’s a roundup of recent books that showcase the exploits of the early detectives who matched wits with killers, gangsters, terrorists and other ne’er-do-wells.

 

Author and television presenter Steven Johnson is well known for his uncanny ability to draw connections between great inventions, great minds, and pivotal events in history. His Emmy-winning documentary series How We Got To Now explored how ideas and innovations—from sewer systems to refrigeration and clocks—have shaped our world. His 2006 book The Ghost Map showed how pioneering efforts to trace the source of an 1850s cholera outbreak in London revolutionized our understanding of how disease is spread. Four years ago he branched into true crime with Enemy of All Mankind, which connected a single act of piracy—the 1695 capture of a treasure ship in the Indian Ocean—to the rise of multinational corporations and today’s globalized world.

In The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective (Crown), Johnson shows how Alfred Nobel’s 1866 invention of dynamite—intended to make it safer to use explosives in mining, construction and other industries—had the blowback effect of arming radicals and extremists with a deadly new weapon. “Dynamite gave small bands of humans command of more energy per person than they had ever dreamed of having before,” he writes. “Dynamite, quite literally, gave them power.” The horrors of modern terrorism—bombings, suicide attacks, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians—can be traced to one scientist’s good intentions gone wrong.

Early dynamite bombs, some with crude timing devices, were known as “infernal machines,” and two early groups adopted the technology. The Fenians bombed targets in London and other British cities in the 1880s to back their demands for Irish independence. Anarchists, who objected to big government and were willing to fight for a world of autonomous communities freed from top-down rule, are the focus of Johnson’s book. They ambushed and blew up Czar Alexander II in 1881 and the movement soon crossed the Atlantic as Russian emigres and exiles took refuge in the United States.

Johnson connects the dots to show how anarchist bombings and plots in America led to the creation of modern detective forces. This, in turn, hastened the adoption of an array of forensic and crime-fighting advances, from fingerprinting and the use of bomb-disposal experts to new filing and information-management systems to keep track of criminals and security threats.

New York, a magnet for immigrants at the turn of the last century, became the focus of antiterrorism efforts. Johnson shows how a reform-minded commissioner, Arthur Hale Woods, and Detective Joseph Faurot turned the city’s notoriously corrupt police force toward antiterrorism efforts. A federal law-enforcement agency, the Bureau of Investigation—the forerunner of the FBI—would soon take over the battle, wielding a new weapon of its own: information. “The primary unit of measure of law enforcement’s prowess became the size of the organization’s file cabinets,” notes Johnson. And, ironically, the anarchists’ dream of destroying the state helped to create “a regime of state surveillance that would become nearly ubiquitous by the middle of the twentieth century.”

Johnson is a master of making connections and tells this story of cause and effect, action and reaction, with a keen eye for detail, gripping scenes, and a cast of characters that ranges from the fearless activist Emma Goldman to New York police commissioner-turned-president Theodore Roosevelt.

 

One high-profile law-enforcement figure of the era who was on the front lines of the battles against anarchist bombers merits only a passing reference in Johnson’s book. William J. Flynn served as New York’s chief of detectives, headed the U.S. Secret Service, and ran the Bureau of Investigation. His detectives and agents locked up counterfeiters, Black Hand blackmailers, and German saboteurs. Jeffrey D. Simon tells his story in The Bulldog Detective: William J. Flynn and America’s First War against the Mafia, Spies, and Terrorists (Globe Pequot/Prometheus).

Simon, an expert on the history of “terrorism” as well as current threats, considers Flynn “one of the most respected and influential detectives and law enforcement officials” of his time. “Long before Eliot Ness and the Untouchables went after Al Capone and the Italian mob in Chicago, Flynn dismantled the first Mafia family to exist in America.” During World War One, one newspaper asserted, he “probably did more than any one man to rid this country of foreign spies.”

Flynn’s tenacity earned him the nickname “Bulldog” and his size matched his reputation as a big man. He was six feet tall and, after years of desk work, his weight ballooned to three hundred pounds. He was, noted one reporter, “large, mountainous almost, up and down as well as circumferentially.” Becoming a detective was his childhood dream and after stints as a plumber, tinsmith, and minor league baseball player he snagged a job at a federal prison in New York, where he learned the tricks of the counterfeiting trade from inmates. It was the perfect training for the Secret Service in the days before the agency’s role expanded from protecting the nation’s currency to protecting the president.

Flynn’s success in cracking counterfeiting rings led to a stint as New York City’s chief of detectives in 1910. His efforts to overhaul the detective force failed, however, and he quit the “thankless job,” as he described it, within a year. “I found that a lot of people”—from his political masters to street cops on the take—“were working against me.” He returned to the Secret Service, was quickly promoted to the agency’s chief, and spent the war hunting down German spies and saboteurs. He scored a coup in 1915 when a German operative left a briefcase on a New York commuter train while one of Flynn’s agents was shadowing him. It contained a trove of documents that exposed a network of German spies plotting attacks on American soil.

His downfall was the Wall Street bombing of 1920, which killed more than 30 bystanders and sparked a massive manhunt. By then he was head of the Bureau of Investigation and his failure to catch those responsible forced him into retirement in 1921. He reinvented himself as a celebrity detective. His investigations of German spies were popularized in silent movies and he edited Flynn’s, a detective magazine that included tales of his exploits as “Chief Manhunter for Uncle Sam.” The hulking detective, a rival scoffed, had “a good deal of a fat head.”

While Simon does an admirable job of reconstructing Flynn’s career, the bulldog detective remains a distant figure. Men under his command shouldered the bulk of the investigative work and made most of the arrests. And Flynn went out of his way to dispel the notion that he—or any other detective—possessed the superpowers of a Sherlock Holmes. The key to solving a case, he once told a reporter, was “steady hammering . . . Hammer away at it, here a little, there a little until the men you are after are either apprehended or dead.”

 

In the early 1900s, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was in dire need of a chief manhunter. Jewish refugees fleeing Russia and Eastern Europe flooded in, creating the world’s most densely populated slum and, as author Dan Slater puts it, “an incubator of delinquency.” Crime was rampant. Gangs ruled. Before the rise of the Mafia in America, this ghetto was the stronghold of New York’s underworld, where a generation of Jewish gangsters—“boys of the slums,” one newspaper called them—controlled empires built on gambling and prostitution.

Slater, an author and journalist, chronicles the rise of these gangs and the pushback from within New York’s Jewish community in The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld (Little, Brown and Company). It’s a riveting read that immerses readers in a seedy, vice-filled world. The book is filled with memorable characters—gamblers and reformers, pimps and sex workers, thugs and gunmen, corrupt policemen and Tammany Hall fixers—whose lives intersected in the small-townish world of the Lower East Side.

The main protagonists are a well-known crook and a little-known crime-buster. The crook is Arnold Rothstein, a gambler and bookmaker dubbed the “Big Bankroll” who got his start on the Lower East Side. He ran an illegal casino, backed swindlers who needed cash to stage elaborate cons, and graduated to financing union thugs and bootleggers. He was so powerful and so brazen that fixing the 1919 World Series—triggering the Black Sox Scandal that roiled professional baseball—was just another day at the office.

The hero on a collision course with the dark forces Rothstein represented was Abe Schoenfeld. The son of a Lower East Side labor activist, he was on a mission to expose the vice kingpins who were preying on the vulnerable and destroying his community. New York’s established and respectable Jewish Uptowners—products of earlier waves of immigration who had become wealthy as bankers, businessmen, and professionals—also wanted to intervene. The vice and violence, they feared, would tarnish the image of law-abiding Jewish New Yorkers, fuel anti-Semitism, and provoke a backlash against all immigrants. With these deep-pocketed supporters paying the bills, Schoenfeld led an anticrime crusade and formed an Eliot Ness-style squad within the New York Police Department that became known as the Incorruptibles.

Slater’s story hinges on the murder of Herman Rosenthal, a gambler who was gunned down outside a hotel in 1912 after threating to blow the whistle on a corrupt cop (the underworld assassins responsible included one of Schoenfeld’s childhood friends). The fallout from the sensational case emboldened reformers and kickstarted Schoenfeld’s war on crime.

Slater, a master storyteller, creates vivid scenes and memorable characters as he skillfully adds just enough background information and historical context to flesh out the story. The result is a dramatic, richly detailed story that propels readers toward the outcome of this struggle for the soul of the Jewish community—and New York itself. Once you’ve reached the last page, keep reading. Almost eighty pages of source notes document Slater’s thorough research, and they’re packed with intriguing details, additional findings, and commentary as fascinating and engrossing as the narrative itself. It’s like sitting in on a lively book club chat with the author.

 

Dean Jobb’s latest true crime book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada) tells the incredible story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. It’s a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Canadian bestseller. Find him at deanjobb.com.


Copyright © 2025 Dean Jobb

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