Profile of Charles Becker on Famous Like Me

Charles Becker (July 26, 1873 - July 30, 1915) was a New York police officer executed for allegedly ordering the murder of a Manhattan gambler, Herman Rosenthal. Becker was the first American policeman executed for murder and the scandal that surrounded his arrest, conviction, and execution was one of the most important in Progressive Era New York.

Charles Becker was born in the village of Callicoon Center, Sullivan County, New York State. He arrived in New York in 1890 and joined the Police Department (NYPD) in November 1893. Becker first came to public notice in the fall of 1896 when he arrested a prostitute named Ruby Young on Broadway. Young was in the company of the novelist Stephen Crane, who appeared in court next day to refute Becker's allegations against her.

In 1902 and 1903 Becker was one of the leaders of a patrolman's reform movement agitating for the introduction of the Three Platoon System, which would have significantly reduced the number of hours the beat policeman was expected to work. In 1906 he was seconded to a special unit working out of police headquarters to probe the alleged corruption of Police Inspector Max Schmittberger, who had been widely hated within the NYPD since giving detailed testimony to the 1894 Lexow Committee investigating police corruption in New York. Partly as a result of Becker's work, Schmittberger subsequently stood trial, and Deputy Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo was so satisfied with his work that when Waldo became Police Commissioner in 1911 he had Becker, by then a lieutenant, appointed as head of one of the city's three anti-vice Strong Arm Squads.

Becker used his position to extort substantial sums, later shown to total in excess of $100,000, from Manhattan brothels and gambling houses in exchange for immunity from police action. In July 1912 he was named in the New York World as one of three corrupt policemen involved in the case of Herman Rosenthal, a failed gambler who alleged his illegal businesses had been badly damaged by the rapacity of the city's corrupt police. Rosenthal was murdered two days after his story appeared in the press and the District Attorney, Charles Whitman, made no secret of his belief that the gangsters who killed him had committed the murder at Becker's behest.

Becker was arrested on 29 July 1912, and tried and found guilty of murder that fall. The verdict was reversed on appeal on the grounds that the trial judge, John Goff, had been biased against the defendent, but a retrial in 1914 reaffirmed the original conviction. Although contemporary newspapers were unanimous in asserting his guilt, Becker went to the electric chair in Sing Sing protesting his innocence, and several later authors, including Henry Klein, writing in 1927, and Andy Logan, writing in 1970, have suggested he was wrongly convicted. Charles Becker was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery, Brooklyn, on 2 August 1915.

Although undeniably a brutal and extremely corrupt man, contemporaries testified that Charles Becker was also markedly intelligent, particularly by the standards prevelant within the NYPD at that time. He showed little interest in the after-hours drinking activities of his police colleagues, preferring to return home to help his wife, a special needs schoolteacher, mark her pupils' homework. On Death Row, he gained the respect of his fellow prisoners by reading aloud to them for hours at a time from newspapers and cowboy books.

Becker's only son, Howard P. Becker, later became Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. A daughter, Charlotte Becker, conceived shortly before his arrest, died in 1913 less than a day after her birth and is buried alongside him at Woodlawn Cemetery.

The Becker-Rosenthal murder is the subject of Michael Bookman's God's Rat: Jewish Mafia on the Lower East Side.

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