"Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid."
--OSCAR WILDE
CHAPTER XXIII
THE BUG COPS THE PLEA
IN HIS TRIAL IN JUNE 1941, CHARLIE WORKMAN RAN INTO a well-stacked deck, aged in the telling.
Beyond the glib and slickly polished Allie Tannenbaum, sporting an ensemble of Death House green for his role in Newark's Common Pleas Court, the state had Abe Reles, an even more assured witness. And beyond Lady Justice's two newly enlisted acolytes, the prosecution roster included the woman known as Ruth Sands.
The chief defense counsel, Samuel I. Kessler, had an understandably difficult time trying to shake Tannenbaum and Reles loose from the stories they had been reciting with such fastidious attention to detail since the year before. The best Kessler could do was to establish for the benefit of the jury that they had been very bad boys indeed before their switch to the forces of light. Big Allie readily conceded a personal role in "about six" murders--something akin to Jack the Ripper saying he had once kissed a maiden against her will. Little Abe, more candid about his work record, confirmed that the roster of the dead came to "about eleven" in his case. Had he killed all those innocents himself! Heavens to Betsy, no. "I was just part of the picture," said the baby gorilla. Part? What part? Reles answered that one with no sweat: "Two of us shot a fellow, but how you gonna know who murdered him? Sometimes there was maybe three or four doing the shooting." Splendid. Now about those eleven instant stiffs. Wasn't there one who was strangled in Abe Reles' own home, with the whole family, in-laws and all, on the premises? No. "They were way in the back," said the witness, showing more impatience than anger. "They were five rooms back."
With that kind of testimony, no juror needed to be hit over the head to conclude that the prosecution's stars, given to so much naughtiness before their nobler instincts took hold, might well be the types to tell a fib in the courtroom. But there was another side to that coin, too. The jurors would have had to come from Mars not to know that the man on trial wasn't exactly a model citizen himself. Even without hearing an ounce of evidence on his background, it had to be pretty clear to them that Charlie Workman had come from the same Brooklyn murder co-op as the men who were now trying to put him in the hot seat at Trenton.
There was a question from the start, then, about how much good the defense could do for itself by dwelling too much on the tawdry characters of Tannenbaum and Reles. The trick was to knock their stories down, and on that score Kessler had a little luck with the forlorn state's witness in the black dress, Ruth Sands, brought over to Newark by Vic Herwitz because he had remembered that she seemed to know so much about the murder of the Dutchman.
While the paramour of the departed Danny Fields could not be shaken from her account of Workman's bitter two-day confessional in his Chelsea apartment after his perfectly rude intrusion on Dutch Schultz in that pissoir in the Palace, she did knock down Allie Tannenbaum's testimony that he had heard the Bug's account of the shooting expedition in her place. This was a curious item in the trial. Back in 1939, Mrs. Sands had told Vic Herwitz that Tannenbaum had seen Workman in the apartment. Now she testified that her house guest's only visitors on those two days were Paul Berger, the Lepke husky who was in the card game set up to soothe the triggerman's tattered nerves, and Heinzie Teitelbaum, the relay runner who had brought that get-out-of-town message from Mr. Buchalter. As for Tannenbaum, who would walk away clean as a jaybird and become an honest lampshade salesman in Atlanta once he sang his last aria for Bill O'Dwyer, it is well to note that he had told the story both ways himself. In some
sessions with the Brooklyn interrogators he said he had seen Workman in the Sands apartment; in others he said he had seen the Bug about a week later.
Kessler produced a bombshell witness of his own in the person of Marty Krompier, even then still showing lingering signs of the slugs he took in the Hollywood Barber Shop on that night when all the guns went off. Krompier had a brand new version of the Newark bloodletting. He said the man who shot the Dutchman wasn't the defendant Workman but the witness in the green suit, Allie Tannenbaum. How did he know that? Well, he said he had the misfortune to run into Tannenbaum in a Broadway bar in February 1938 and one thing led to another and he said to the big guy, "Why don't you let me alone? Haven't you done enough harm to me already?" And--
Q. (by Kessler) Just what did he say?
A. He said, "I know the rumor's going around that I hurt you. It's a lie. As a matter of fact I was on the other thing in Jersey."
Q. What happened then?
A. I didn't want to talk to Tannenbaum. I grabbed my hat and coat and started for the door. He grabbed me by the hand and whispered, "Let's get this thing straight. I hit the Dutchman." |
On cross-examination, Prosecutor Wachenfeld could do no more than establish that, like his own stars, with that juicy minimum of 17 murder missions between them, Marty Krompier was no altar boy either. Krompier had to admit that apart from his endeavors as a manager in the honest sport of boxing his varied career had brought him into contact with people like Dutch Schultz, although he insisted that the Dutchman was more like a good buddy to him than a business associate.
Workman's case was helped considerably by such Newark eyewitnesses as Jack Friedman. The Palace's co-owner swore that the Bug was nothing like the menacing guy in the topcoat who ordered him to hit the deck just before the heavy action began. And Marion Seaberg testified that Workman did not look like the man she had seen fleeing along East Park Street.
This kind of record, along with Marty Krompier's story and the doubts cast upon Allie Tannenbaum's veracity through the cross-examination of Ruth Sands, must have conveyed at least a suggestion of reasonable doubt to the jurors.
It was all in vain, however. Amid some high courtroom drama, the defense collapsed when Workman tried to establish an alibi for his whereabouts on that big night six years before.
As the trial went into its second week, Louis Cohen, owner of the Stuyvesant Funeral Home in New York, testified that he had employed Charlie Workman as a manager and car dispatcher--salary, $45 per--from 1933 to 1936. Cohen swore that the Bug had been diligently at work directing his hearses on their rounds--try to imagine a man more qualified for the job--when the prosecution contended that he was across the river on the errand that would make Arthur Flegenheimer a customer of some competing funeral home. And the witness wasn't just trusting to fragile memory. He had payroll records to prove it.
What defense lawyer could ask for more in a case of murder?
The trouble was that Bill O'Dwyer, over in his office in Brooklyn, was listening to a telephoned playback of that testimony from Frank Bals, his top detective, and he didn't like the sound or the smell of it. He told Captain Bals to have Cohen trailed when he left the witness stand and came back to Manhattan. "Let's see who he meets or talks to on the phone," O'Dwyer said.
Well, the funeral salesman must have talked to lots of people, especially over his bugged wires, because at 9:30 that very night he found himself in the cavernous Municipal Building in Brooklyn, ever so dark and forbidding, answering all kinds of sticky questions and telling quite a different story.
In this session, under the steel-edged interrogation of Frank Bals rather than the gentle guidance of Samuel Kessler, it turned out that Cohen had not employed Charlie Workman for anything like three years. He had employed him for two weeks, $90 worth, and it wasn't to dispatch the dead but to deal with the living in the person of some union troublemakers among the drivers. And how did he happen to employ a man like that with no direct experience in the funeral business except as a supplier of corpses? Well, Louis Cohen's brother-in-law had brought Mr. Workman down to the Lower East Side mortuary to "straighten out" the labor thing. And who was Louis Cohen's brother-in-law? Why, it was Isidor Friedman, professionally known as Danny Fields. And had Danny Fields prevailed upon him to set the new man up with a business card--Charles Workman, Mgr., Stuyvesant Funeral Home--"for the sole purpose of providing an alibi and a cover" for the Murder Inc. gunman?
"That is correct," said a very unhappy Louis Cohen.
But that wasn't all. Just to nail the lid a little more securely on the defense coffin, Frank Bals proceeded to crack Max Katz, a Cohen driver waiting in the wings to corroborate the prefabricated alibi. The next step for Cohen himself, naturally, was Mr. O'Dwyer's inner sanctum on the fourth floor. The Bohola Boy, later elected Mayor of Sodom and Gomorrah but driven into the exquisitely corrupt sanctuary of Mexico (as President Truman's Ambassador, that is) when the Kefauver Crime Investigating Committee hearings in 1951 linked him a trifle too warmly with Don Francisco Costello and also kicked up some dust about Albert Anastasia escaping the Murder Inc. net, had a highly satisfactory chat with the hapless defense star.
It may be assumed that Bill O'Dwyer, since deceased, suggested to his uneasy visitor that the penalties for perjury were rather severe in New Jersey, as in New York. He may even have hinted that apart from any perjury rap across the river it could be most unhealthy for an honest undertaker on the island of Manhattan to get involved with the likes of a lifetime delinquent such as Charlie Workman.
In Newark the next morning, June 11, Bill Wachenfeld greeted Judge Daniel J. Brennan with a request to reopen the cross-examination of the defense witness Cohen. When the Judge granted it, Workman, the soul of correct courtroom behavior up to that moment, bounded out of his chair, livid with emotion.
"May I take the stand, Your Honor?" he called out. "Please let me take the stand."
"Not now," the Judge said.
Two guards wrestled the Bug back into his chair but as Cohen neared the stand he whirled toward him, calling out, "Mr. Cohen, Mr. Cohen, I don't want you to commit perjury." Restrained again, he shouted, "I'm all right. Let me alone. For God's sake, let me alone." Then he turned to his bewildered chief counsel and said, "Let me take the stand. What the fuck is the matter with you?"
The banging gavel silenced Workman at this point and Cohen, nervously turning a straw hat in his hands, took the stand and confessed that he had lied the day before. He said that his books had been falsified to show that three-year employment record for the defendant. So the Bug wasn't dispatching funeral cars in Manhattan on the night the four new corpses were being set up in Newark--or, in any event, he couldn't make that story stick.
The defense called for a recess.
Four hours later Sam Kessler came back into the courtroom and announced that his client wanted to enter a plea of non vult.
The lawyer was dejected. He knew the case almost certainly had been lost but was convinced that he had an excellent chance to upset it on appeal. Workman, for his part, with his emotion-wracked parents on hand in the conference room and backing him all the way, wanted to go for broke on the stand or gamble on a plea. Kessler could not in good conscience let the Bug submit himself to Wachenfeld's cross-examination; he knew that the worst possible witness for Charlie Workman had to be Charlie Workman himself. While he never would say so, even to this day, it is a fair assumption that the lawyer, down deep, felt from the beginning that once the hard question was put to him--did you kill Dutch Schultz?--the defendant either would have to come up with a pure Academy Award performance in perjury or put himself in the electric chair. Ethically, of course, Kessler could not wittingly let Workman tell the big fib under oath in any event. And so the defense side came asunder.
Wachenfeld did not oppose the non vult plea once Workman conceded that he understood it was tantamount to a confession of guilt. Then Judge Brennan asked the defendant to rise.
The sentence was life at hard labor.
The Bug, in his 34th year and hardly at home in state prisons for all the nine arrests since his early teens, took it without flinching.
Catherine Workman, the woman who loved him, gasped.
William L. Vieser, an associate defense counsel, then gave the reporters a copy of an "order" which the defendant had addressed to Sam Kessler before the plea was switched. This is what it said:
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"I, Charles Workman, being of the opinion that any witness called in my defense will be intimidated and arrested by members of the District Attorney's office or police officials and not wishing members of my family and others to be subjected to humiliation on my account, do hereby order you as my counsel not to call any witnesses in my defense except myself. And I forbid you to call any other witnesses to the stand.
"I further state if such witnesses are called I will openly state in court I do not want them to testify."
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Removed to the prison floor, Workman was permitted a brief visit with his kid brother Abe, who threw his arms around him and wept uncontrollably. The detectives guarding the Bug heard him give this advice to Abe Workman: "Whatever you do, live honestly. If you make 20 cents a day, make it do you. If you can't make an honest living, make the government support you. Keep away from the gangs and don't be a wise guy. Take care of Mama and Papa and watch 'Itchy' (a younger brother). He needs watching."
The Bug's piece of wisdom about staying on the straight and narrow even if it meant leaning on the government for the rent money had a curious echo years later in Charlie Workman's own branch of society. Marty Krompier, of all people, was arrested in 1960 on a charge of fraudulently pocketing $1,269 in welfare payments in New York's Long Beach while he was earning a small living as a delivery man for a camera store.
After the sentencing of Workman, a Bronx detective who knew Emma Flegenheimer called her up to tell her that the man accused of murdering her son was going to prison for a long time.
"I'm so glad to hear about it," said the aging woman. "Thank God, thank God."
For her, the book on Arthur was closed at last.
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