Scoundrels in Law: The Trials of Howe & Hummel, Lawyers to the Gangsters, Cops, Starlets, and Rakes Who Made the Gilded Age

By Cait N. Murphy

From the critically acclaimed author of Crazy '08 comes the thrilling true story of the most colorful and notorious law firm in American history. Scoundrels in Law offers an inside look at crime and punishment in the nineteenth century, and a whirlwind tour of the Gilded Age.

Gangsters and con men. Spurned mistresses and wandering husbands. Strippers and Broadway royalty. Cat killers and spiritualists. These were the friends and clients of Howe & Hummel, the most famous (and famously rotten) law firm in nineteenth-century America.

The partners gloried in their reputation and made a rich living from it. William Howe left London a step ahead of the law to find his destiny defending the perpetrators of murder and mayhem in post-Civil War New York, in an age of really good murders. A dramatic, diamond-encrusted presence, Howe was one of the great courtroom orators of his era, winning improbable acquittals time after time.

Abraham Hummel enjoyed a quieter but perhaps more fearsome notoriety, shaking down high society so well and so often that receiving an envelope with the law firm's name on it became almost a rite of passage.

The partners bestrode Gilded Age New York with wit and brio, and everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Lola Montez had a part in their story. In Howe & Hummel's prime, it would not have been unusual to see a leading politician, a pickpocket, a Broadway star, a bank robber, and a socialite all crowded together into the waiting room of their offices, located conveniently across the street from the city jail.

Howe and Hummel were not particularly good men. They were perfectly ready—even eager—to lie, cheat, and bribe on behalf of their clients. They did stop short of murder, though, a principle that played a critical role when the famous firm imploded in a truly spectacular web of deceit gone wrong.

Through the windows of the dingy premises of Howe & Hummel, readers can glimpse the Gilded Age in all its grime and grandeur. Cait Murphy restores this once-famous duo to their rightful place in the pantheon of great American characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9780061999475

Cait N. Murphy

Cait Murphy is the author of Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History and has worked at Fortune, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong. She lives in New York City.

Book preview

SCOUNDRELS

IN LAW

THE TRIALS OF HOWE & HUMMEL,

LAWYERS TO THE GANGSTERS, COPS, STARLETS,

AND RAKES WHO MADE THE GILDED AGE

Cait Murphy

My siblings have long been my personal defense team.

Though they have higher ethical standards than Howe & Hummel,

I nevertheless dedicate this book to them.

Mairead Walsh Murphy Nash

Brendan Woods Murphy

Robert Finn Murphy

Joan Byrne Murphy Sleeper

Katherine Siobhan Murphy Grogan

Mary Cullene Murphy

John Cullen Murphy

Contents

Preface

Chapter One - The Legend Begins

Chapter Two - The Ghastly Trunk

Chapter Three - Sisters in Law

Chapter Four - Gangsters of New York

Chapter Five - Murder, Inc.

Chapter Six - The Mandelbaum Salon

Photographic Insert

Chapter Seven - The Accidental Reformers

Chapter Eight - The Play’s the Thing

Chapter Nine - The Ice Man Cometh

Chapter Ten - Three Shots and an Affidavit

Chapter Eleven - The Legend Ends

Note on New York City’s 19th-Century Justice System

Note on Sources

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Cait Murphy

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

DECEMBER 20, 1905

After deliberating for 130 minutes, the jury filed back into the courtroom. The trial had lasted only a couple of days, but it had really taken more than four years to reach this moment, as a run-of-the-mill divorce turned into an epic of debauchery, mendacity, and not a little humor. At the heart of it all was lawyer Abraham Hummel. Bald, wiry, gorgeously mustached, and not even five feet tall,¹ Hummel was a friend to chorus girls and gangsters, to anarchists and high society. Except, that is, when he was their enemy. He wasn’t choosy.

Hummel did have his principles. Not many, it has to be said. Indeed, they can be counted on one hand: He believed in being paid in cash, up front; he believed in winning; he believed discretion was the better part of affluence; and he believed that the calculated effrontery that had served him so well for so long would never fail. But now, as the clock ticked past 3:00 and the clerk asked for the verdict, that last principle was looking shaky. So it proved. Guilty, called the jury foreman, of one count of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

The judge announced the sentence—a year in jail and a $500 fine. And then Hummel made the long walk: out of the court, up the stairs and over the Bridge of Sighs,² that awful link between the freedom of the court, where Hummel had had so many glorious moments, and into the Tombs, the New York City jail.³

He was ordered into cell 122, on the second tier.⁴ One likes to think that the cops chose the cell with intent, for this was a room with a particular view. If Hummel stretched up on his tiptoes to peek out the window, he could see the exact site of his dingy old office.

As he settled into his uncomfortable surroundings, so different from his townhouse on the leafy precincts of the Upper East Side, Hummel might have thought back to 1863. That was when he first crossed the threshold of 89 Centre Street to ask for a job as an office boy at the premises of William Howe, a lawyer with oodles of brio but a decidedly small-time practice. Six years later, Hummel, age 20, was a full partner. Howe and Hummel became a glorious partnership and New York’s most famous lawyers. They made a fortune, and a reputation, that glittered in their own time to such an extent that there was a common toast in the bars of New York. Here’s how, one drinker would suggest. The expected response: Here’s Hummel.⁵

When Howe died in 1902, he was eulogized as the dean of the criminal bar.⁶ Hummel soldiered on, honoring his mentor by continuing under the old name. Of course, that made business sense, too. At this point, Howe & Hummel was a brand. There was not a criminal within a thousand miles who had not heard of Howe & Hummel, wrote District Attorney Francis Wellman, a frequent opponent.⁷ Open 24 hours a day during their peak years, Howe & Hummel was the first phone call for villains of all varieties; cops or court clerks were paid to tip the partners off to likely cases.⁸

An hour after going into the Tombs as a prisoner, Hummel was in the corridor chatting with reporters, who had always liked the little fellow for his gift of pith. He assured them that he was innocent as a newborn babe—something that hadn’t been true at least since the Civil War. Four hours later, he was out on bail. But seven months after that, he was disbarred, and in 1907 he took what was known as the ferry of despair to the jail on Blackwell’s Island, his mustache shorn, to serve his sentence. When he got out in 1908, he set sail for England. Howe & Hummel was finished.

• • •

But it was a great ride while it lasted.

From 1869 to 1902, the two had a wonderful time of it, displaying a puckish humor (cable address: LENIENT)⁹ and a legal flair that made them the favored advocates for scoundrels of all kinds. Like any memorable partnership, there were enough differences between the two to make each of them stand out individually. Howe was fat; Hummel was tiny. Howe was Catholic; Hummel was Jewish. Howe was married three times;¹⁰ Hummel was a bachelor. Howe was known for his oratory; Hummel excelled at subtler arts. They shared a love of the racetrack and a cheerful disregard for ethical niceties.

Hummel was the more diffident of the two. Much of his work—breach-of-promise suits, often with a dash of blackmail—was necessarily done in private, usually in his office.¹¹ This contained a brazier to burn incriminating evidence. But he was also front and center in a number of high-profile cases—the obscenity charge against the play Sapho, the prosecution of a greedy spiritualist, the defense of a cat-killing philanthropist. As a regular first-nighter on Broadway and a habitué at Delmonico’s, the great restaurant of the era, Hummel was a man about town.

One of the partnership’s notable opponents, Arthur Train, said of the big-headed lawyer in 1908, Of law, he knew and knows nothing.¹² That was unfair. Hummel’s formal legal training was sketchy and quite possibly nonexistent. But he learned enough on the job to annoy Train and other district attorneys, and he was masterful at teasing out legal inconsistencies. He was an acknowledged expert in theatrical and matrimonial law.

Howe was the more self-consciously outrageous character. An amateur Shakespearean, he loved the theater of the courtroom. He used his voice as an instrument, going up and down the scale from low whisper to angry roar. Violent death was his specialty; he defended an estimated 650 defendants charged with murder or manslaughter.¹³ Howe didn’t get all the great murders, but for 30 years, he got more of them than anyone else: Billy Forrester, the chief suspect in the murder of Benjamin Nathan, a locked-room mystery of a famous financier that riveted the city; Ella Nelson, the spurned mistress with the smoking gun; Carlyle Harris, the medical student who killed his child bride; Martin Thorn, who dismembered his love rival; Edward Unger, another body chopper; cop killer Handsome Harry Carlton.

Howe liked cases that looked hopeless, and he particularly liked making closing arguments of such spirit and profound lack of logic that the jury could hardly fail to be moved. He was so often driven to tears by his own oratory that other lawyers suspected him of keeping an onion in his handkerchief.¹⁴

By the 1880s, no account of a trial featuring Howe failed to mention his girth (which kept expanding) and his dress, which ran to technicolor waistcoats and dollops of precious stones. Rubies and emeralds sometimes appeared, but it was diamonds, glorious diamonds, that became his trademark. Why? I like diamonds, he said simply. I love their glitter and sparkle.¹⁵ But the man had a tougher side, too. When burglars had the gall to break into his home, Howe seized a revolver and blazed away, coolly letting the criminal fraternity know that he had a gun in every room. I don’t object to burglars as clients—they are pretty good clients he said, But I seriously object to them operating at my house."¹⁶

Howe became so famous, and notorious, that in 1890 when his dog Rover got loose in Central Park, the trivial incident made the papers.¹⁷ A few years later, a would-be juror admitted to prejudice on the basis that Howe appeared for the defense: My impression has always been that Mr. Howe never appears in a case except it is a desperate one.¹⁸ Although, like Hummel, Howe might never have set foot in a law school, his criminal expertise was respected enough that he was part of the team that revised the state penal code in 1882,¹⁹ perhaps on the fox-guarding-henhouse principle.

Between them, Howe and Hummel covered the landscape of 19th-century society. That took some doing. New York City in their heyday was incredibly stratified. The notorious Mulberry Bend, made famous by writer Jacob Riis, was the worst part of America’s worst neighborhood, the notorious Five Points. The three-acre area, an elbow-shaped excrescence sited three minutes’ walk from police headquarters and five from Howe & Hummel, was the most densely populated patch of land in the world. In this spider web of lanes with names like Bandits’ Roost and Blind Man’s Alley,²⁰ multiple families might share a single basement room, bereft of water or light. The area was vermin-ridden, smelly, and crime-wracked; Riis described it as a vast human pig-sty.²¹

Just a few miles away, but worlds apart, splendid mansions rose along Fifth Avenue, home to the robber barons who were importing European masterworks by the boatload and hosting parties that made Roman excess look like a Shaker picnic. The era in which Howe & Hummel thrived is sometimes known as the Gilded Age; the gilt, however, covered a tiny fraction of the population. Language, culture, and economics, moreover, kept different groups apart. The poor might never leave their neighborhoods, and except for the occasional slumming expedition, the rich had no reason to visit the likes of Mulberry Bend.

In between was a burgeoning, energetic middle class, whose desire for self-improvement and something like stability would, over time, with many fits and starts, come to define the city. In the same way that the 20th-century welfare state cut the knees out from under the personalized politics of the 19th-century Tammany political machine, the drive to create a more ordered city took a toll on a legal firm that won many of its customers by exploiting the unofficial law of the lower class, the contradictions of the respectable middle, and the power structures of the upper.

When Howe & Hummel was in its prime, though, it thrived by connecting across the entire social spectrum. New York’s destitute could hardly afford the partners’ fees, but the people who made their livings off the teeming masses, such as Danny Driscoll, leader of the Whyos gang that ruled the Irish underground, found their way to Howe & Hummel as regularly as high-society rakes, for whom a summons to that address was the worst kind of news. Here is how one contemporary described a typical scene at 89 Centre Street, circa 1890.

The waiting room benches were always filled, and filled with the damnedest collection of people you ever saw. I’ve seen [actress] Lillian Russell in there surrounded by pickpockets, Tammany heelers, and bunco men. [Republican] Boss Platt was there quite a bit and so was [Democratic Tammany leader Richard] Croker, and Hungry Joe, the card shark. There were dope peddlers, green-goods men, bookmakers, and any number of queer-looking murder witnesses. There was enough there for a couple of wax museums and a freak show.²²

The offices of Howe & Hummel were an embarrassing place to be seen. Once a prominent businessman met a friend in the tatty reception room,²³ an ugly place in which to ponder one’s sins, whether social or criminal. So you are here, too? Hope she was a pretty girl and you didn’t have to pay too high for your little experience, the businessman joked with bleak bravado. His companion shrugged, There are two things that no one who enjoys life can escape—death and Howe & Hummel!²⁴

The lawyers knew too much to be invited to the best parties, and they would never forsake their private table in the back room at Pontin’s restaurant for the worst dives, but they flitted across social distinctions with unique facility. It takes only one or two degrees of separation to link Howe & Hummel to almost anyone who was anyone in Gilded Age Manhattan—from Kit Burns, who ran a famous dog-fighting establishment, to Mark Twain, whom they represented in a contract dispute, to the likes of Stanford White, the patrician architect whose murder in 1906 by a demented Pittsburgh playboy was a sensation.

Considering Hummel’s extensive theatrical practice, it makes sense that the firm had dealings with Lillian Russell, P. T. Barnum, and Buffalo Bill Cody. But it is by no means obvious that minister Henry Ward Beecher, boxer John L. Sullivan, stockbroker Hetty Green, anarchist Emma Goldman, animal rights pioneer Henry Bergh, and, at least in spirit, the courtesan Lola Montez, would all make appearances in the Howe & Hummel epic. Even a young Winston Churchill had a walk-on. During a visit to the United States, he sat at the judge’s side during a case in which the firm was involved.²⁵ And it was a Churchill cousin, William Travers Jerome, who eventually took Hummel down.

Their criminal clients were a fascinating bunch, too. There was George Leonidas Leslie, the gentleman bank robber who ended up murdered in a ditch. The saloonkeeper known as the wickedest man in New York, John Allen, was a client, of course. So was Fredericka Marm Mandelbaum, the city’s biggest fence, who laundered money and disposed of goods for all the top crooks, including Adam Worth, who went on to fame and occasional fortune as the thief who stole, and fell in love with, Gainsborough’s portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire.²⁶ Howe and Hummel also played a major role—not that they intended to—in the events that led up to the creation of the Lexow Committee, which investigated police corruption in the mid-1890s.

Their office displayed none of this eminence. Sited in a neighborhood of warehouses and tenements where the air smelled of too many people and not enough plumbing, 89 Centre Street fit in. The building could generously be described as modest. The partners wasted no money on décor, or even on washing the windows, whose dusting of grunge afforded some privacy to the unfortunates within. The reception room in front featured a large safe, stuffed with coal to feed the pot-bellied stove. There were also a few cheap chairs and benches, a permanent collection of litter, and random piles of books. In the back, there was a warren of small rooms. Each partner had his own office, and when the telephone arrived, they invested in that useful implement. Hummel had a special phone under his desk. When a client asked if he knew a judge, he would make a show of picking it up and hold an imaginary conversation. The subtext, of course, was that victory was assured.²⁷

When the money was good, and sometimes just for the hell of it, Howe and Hummel were happy to take up the kind of marginal cases and unpopular causes that other lawyers avoided—cop killers and anarchists, for example. On more than one occasion, the partners forced the legislature to rewrite laws in which they had found loopholes, one of them big enough to release hundreds of people from jail. Howe once got a charge against a thief dismissed because the complaint accused him of stealing a draw not a drawer. The judge had to agree that the charge is not worth the paper it is written upon.²⁸ The police clerks were more careful after that.

Any lawyer who takes high-profile, controversial cases will make enemies. Neither Howe nor Hummel suffered fools gladly, even when the fool was on the bench, and they had long-running feuds with several of the more incompetent judges. Those pesky anti-sin reformers, Charles Parkhurst and Anthony Comstock, couldn’t stand the two, whose business would have gone under in a society that took the Ten Commandments—or even the liquor laws—seriously. In general, though, the partners were widely liked. Howe simply radiated bonhomie and good humor, an important element in his ability to seduce juries, and Hummel was the pet of Broadway. One district attorney, DeLancey Nicoll, defended Hummel in his last case, and another, Arthur Train, had a soft spot for the duo.

Though Train came up against the firm only a couple of times late in their career, he was fascinated by the pair, featuring them prominently in his nonfiction accounts of crime and punishment. It was not enough. Eventually, Train purged the partners from his system by writing a novel, The Confessions of Artemis Quibble,²⁹ a humorous roman à clef about the firm of Gottlieb & Quibble. Confessions is broadly fictional, but it includes so much detail that is known to accord with the facts of life at Howe & Hummel that it really deserves to be seen as source material. Here for example is Quibble (i.e., Hummel) on his partner, who was singularly successful in murder cases: Gottlieb (i.e., Howe) could, I believe, have wrung tears from a lump of pig iron, and his own capacity to open the floodgates of emotion was phenomenal.³⁰ And here is Quibble/Hummel on what made the practice go ’round: We made money, and that was what we were out for—and we made it every day—every hour; and as we made it we divided it up and put it in our pockets.³¹

One of Train’s predecessors in the DA’s office, Francis Wellman, couldn’t stand Hummel, but he liked and admired Howe as both a first-rate verdict getter and an opponent who schooled him in the legal arts. The great and only William F. Howe,³² Wellman wrote, was a genius in just the kind of work he had chosen for himself.³³ In the middle of one of their most famous tilts, Wellman referred to his corpulent opponent as a bully good fellow.³⁴ The newspapers of the time were similarly kind to the partners, who were always good for a story or at least a quip; they might also have had a pet reporter or three on the payroll.

• • •

Howe & Hummel did not spring out of a void. The firm was the creature of a particular time and place. Immediately after the Civil War, New York grew at a rate never seen before or since. In the early 1870s, parts of the city were still rural enough that an ordinance was passed to restrict the movement of goats; by the time the Howe & Hummel shingle came down, there were subways and automobile traffic. The city got bigger, busier, faster, more crowded, and more interesting. New York had more of everything good and bad—more wealth and more poverty, more charity and more greed, more optimism and more despair. A slew of late 19th-century books about the city all explored the same theme. Their titles tell the story: Sunshine and Shadows; Darkness and Daylight; Mysteries and Miseries; Light and Shadows.

It was also the era of Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic political machine that ran the city, with occasional interruptions, for the better part of 50 years. New York was nominally democratic in this era. Men were certainly free to vote—repeatedly, for that matter—but the public played a trivial role in determining what did, and did not, get done. True political power was in the hands of a few disreputable pros, who pushed the levers of the machine.

The most enduring, beautiful, and notorious monument to Tammany excess sits just a couple blocks north of the side of Howe & Hummel’s offices, in the form of the New York County Courthouse—known more familiarly, then and now, as the Tweed Courthouse. William Marcy Tweed bossed Tammany for years; for him, the construction of the courthouse was a personal savings plan. It ended up costing about $12 million, a good fifty times the original estimates, and featured such brilliantly creative accounting as a $41,000 bill for a single broom.³⁵ When Tweed failed to spread the graft around widely enough, though, an associate squealed. In late 1871, Tweed was arrested. Asked his occupation by the prison keeper, he purred: statesman. Eventually, Tweed was tried and convicted in the basement of the building that was his downfall; he died before it was finished. But Tammany lived, a force in the city well into the 20th century and essential context for the world in which Howe & Hummel operated.

Swelled by industrialization and immigration, the city became an ideal petri dish for the growth of a professional criminal class. This, in turn, was greatly helped in its nefarious doings by the decidedly unprofessional state of the police. At the same time, the legal profession was a mess. As one law historian put it, Howe & Hummel was perfectly suited to a time when the criminal bar consisted mainly of de-frocked priests, drunkards, ex-police magistrates, and political riff-raff of all sorts.³⁶

Between 1846 and 1871, becoming a lawyer in New York was a simple matter: be male, over 21, of good moral standing, and with requisite qualifications. These requirements were never spelled out,³⁷ and the quality of the bar began to sink to the level next below that of patent mongering,³⁸ according to a lawyer of the old school. Judges were pawns of the political system, which was itself spattered through with corruption. Under the circumstances, a firm like Howe & Hummel was bound to happen. If the partners showed contempt for the law, there was reason for that contempt.

That is an excuse, not a justification; better men behaved better. Reading through the boisterous press of the era, the charisma of Howe and Hummel emerges with a clarity that time cannot weaken. It is tempting, while in their company, to see them simply as valiant advocates for their clients. Aggressive defense, even of the nasty, is a necessary part of the justice system. But Howe and Hummel went well beyond that. They bribed judges. They suborned witnesses. They lied and cheated. They slandered victims, maligned the innocent, and helped seriously awful people slither back onto the streets. The representation of gangsters paid well, for example, and no doubt brought a picaresque thrill. But such representation also released vicious people who went back to preying on their poor and struggling neighbors. Howe and Hummel were fascinating and skilled and likable and sometimes they fought the good fight. They were far short of nobility.

When Hummel was being sentenced, prosecutor William Travers Jerome asked for the maximum, calling him a menace to the community for 20 years.³⁹ Granted, Hummel was to Jerome what the white whale was to Ahab, but the DA had a point. Running an office that was, by one’s account, a cesspool of perjury⁴⁰ is not an avocation worthy of praise. But however one adds up the ledger of Howe & Hummel’s career, one thing can be said: There was never a dull moment.

This is their story.

Chapter One

The Legend Begins

William Howe and Abraham Hummel were public men, conducting their business in open court and appearing regularly in the press. Occasionally, they would even write for a favored paper. Is Marriage a Failure? asked Hummel in one article. No, concluded the divorce lawyer and lifelong bachelor.¹ Can Lawyers Be Honest? he asked in another.² Yes, said the blackmailer disbarred once for bribery and again for conspiracy. Their offices were one of the sights of the city, featuring a 25-foot-long³ sign in blaring capitals: HOWE & HUMMEL’S LAW OFFICES. Illuminated at night, the sign cocked a massive snook at the prohibition against advertising for lawyers.

But for all their notoriety, the two were elusive, their inner lives a blank. They never talked about their ambitions or their legal philosophy or even their favorite baseball teams; they didn’t weigh in on the great issues of the time. Howe’s daughter did not go to the parties that made the news, and Hummel’s private life was a cipher. In fact, the two went out of their way to shield their secrets. The great scandal sheet of the day, Town Topics, revealed that they were on the short list of people deemed immune from criticism.⁴ Presumably, this privilege came at a price. The point is that Howe and Hummel were willing to pay it. The key to their success was their ability to keep a secret; high profile notwithstanding, they practiced this skill on themselves first of all, and forever.

So there are gaps in their story—two of them of significance. The first is that little is known of their lives before they became famous. One of Howe’s legal contemporaries, Theron Strong, said that it was impossible to induce him to dwell on the experiences of his early years.⁵ That wasn’t quite true. Howe did give a general account of his life in the introduction to the book he coauthored with Hummel, In Danger, or Life in New York: A True History of a Great City’s Wiles and Temptations (1888). This curious volume was written in the kind of baroque prose favored by Victorian moralists. A blackmailer was a licensed fiend in human form, and houses of prostitution were invariably dens of iniquity. One particularly unlikable roué was described as having hyacinthine locks and lustrous black eyes. Lurking beneath the schmaltz, though, was a dandy guide to the Manhattan demimonde, offering directions to low saloons and a veritable how-to manual of theft and burglary. For female shoplifters, the authors recommended a specially designed hand muff, with wire instead of stuffing; jewelry is slipped into the space, and then a special slide drops it to the bottom. With one of these muffs, shoplifting is so easy as to be successfully practiced by novices, they encouraged. In the summer, they suggested that the well-dressed shoplifter should hang a bag from a corset; this sits beneath a dress with a slit. Cover the gap with a shawl; then drop the goodies down the hole and out you go.⁶

Howe offered a short autobiography in his introduction to In Danger. He said he was born in Massachusetts, the son of an Episcopal clergyman, but spent most of his boyhood in England, where he went to King’s College London, then practiced at the London bar.⁷ He returned to the United States in the 1850s and began practicing law in 1857 or 1859.⁸

There is no documentary evidence to support this account, however, and the chronology is tricky. An alternative version has it that Howe did spend part of his youth in England, but hardly a prosperous one, as there was a hint of Cockney in his speech. He might have had some kind of medical training, and his re-entry into the United States could have been a hurried one—as a parolee (or ticket of leave man) a step ahead of the law. Or maybe he wasn’t born in the United States at all. In an 1874 case in which the operators of a bawdy house sued the firm, Howe referred to becoming a naturalized citizen.⁹ For the purposes of our story, it’s best simply to see Howe as a man who washed up in New York to make his fortune—as so many others did, and do.

There is less muddle about Hummel’s background, but not much more information. By all accounts, he was born in Boston, came to New York as a young boy, and grew up on the Lower East Side, where he went to public schools. That is about all that is known. The only glimpse of his young life he ever offered was a curious article he wrote in 1892 about his pleasantest Christmas surprise: his mother redecorated his room from a plain everyday affair into an Aladdin bower, giving particular attention to his collection of owls.¹⁰ Why a Jewish mother is giving out Christmas surprises, or why Hummel bothered to write about it, was left unsaid. Still, the owls were a nice touch. Hummel was a devoted brother to two sisters and an attentive uncle, but nothing is known of his parents, their occupations, his education, or how he came to 89 Centre Street in the first place.

One would like to know how a teenaged Hummel went from making fires and doing odd jobs to becoming so valuable to Howe that he was made a partner before he was old enough to vote. How did he learn his craft? Was there a particular case that tipped Howe to the younger man’s interesting qualities? A moment of silent recognition between the two? If anyone ever asked, the answers have vanished.

The second big gap is how they became famous. Few reputations are made overnight, but it’s not unreasonable to expect to be able to look back and say: Here is the turning point. Or here. Or there. Not in this case. Rather, there was a period of obscurity, a gradual increase in prominence—and then Howe and Hummel were everywhere.

Howe’s distinctive sense of drama revealed itself early, and many classic Howe & Hummel strategies were tested before the partnership became famous. There was, for example, the inversion of an obvious, damning fact into something else entirely. The pair would perfect this tactic in later years, but Howe first took it out for a walk in 1860, when he got a pickpocket released on the basis that just because a cop saw the prisoner put his hands into pockets not his own, that did not prove the prisoner’s attempt to steal to be an act of picking pockets.¹¹ In 1862, Howe had his first murder—a squalid domestic affair in which the murder weapon was gin. He might have also done a brief stint as a military lawyer that year. He made more of a name out of uniform, though, getting enlistees out of military service on the basis that they were drunk when they signed up. For this, he became known as Habeas Corpus Howe.¹² Other incidents pop up—the defense of a man accused of stealing a pistol, more pickpockets, the occasional madam. One imagines Howe hanging around the Tombs with the other small-timers, hustling for cases. He got a lot of them, but it was all decidedly trivial.

Perhaps Howe’s charisma began to pay off as he accumulated connections around the courthouse. Perhaps Hummel’s entrance into the partnership made a difference. Perhaps the timing was simply right for their kind of law. It certainly helped that after the Civil War, crime in New York got more organized and more ambitious—and there was more of it. By the early 1870s, there were 30,000 thieves, 2,000 gambling dens,¹³ thousands of prostitutes, and a critical mass of highly skilled bank robbers and con artists. There were enough criminals to create a distinct subculture, complete with its own language. Blue ruin was bad gin;¹⁴ yeggs were bank burglars; and kirk buzzers specialized in working around churches.

By the time Hummel got his name on the sign in 1869, the firm was acknowledged as one of the biggest criminal practices in New York.¹⁵ It didn’t hurt that the partners had developed excellent relationships with the officials at the Tombs, which they entered at will. For each client a keeper sent their way, Howe & Hummel returned a percentage of the fee.¹⁶ Quantity led to quality. In the following decade, the partnership began to attract a distinctly better grade of crime.

The partners also had most of the better whorehouses in their pocket by the early 1870s; this was a lucrative business, with many repeat customers. They got $3,200 to defend one such case—asking for a few hundred, then $1,000 more, then another $500, and so on.¹⁷ Those particular clients, the Beaumonts, believed that Howe & Hummel had diddled them. They were quite right, of course, and the case was settled out of court. From then on, the partners acted with more discretion. They cultivated a reputation as honest rascals, taking a lot of money all at one time, rather than squeezing the same lemon repeatedly, as they had with the Beaumonts. This was not a matter of ethics, but efficiency. Frightening people, innocent or guilty, became to a very large extent our regular business, mused the invaluable Quibble, Hummel’s fictional counterpart. Our reputation grew, and in the course of a few years, the terror of us stalked abroad through the city.¹⁸

Not that it was all smooth sailing. Hummel was disbarred in 1872 for a few years for a bit of careless bribery upstate,¹⁹ and Howe went bankrupt in 1875. (One of his major creditors, unsurprisingly, was a jewelry firm.²⁰) But all in all, when the two waxed nostalgic over the old days, they must have looked back on the 1870s with fondness. It was during this decade that Howe & Hummel began to be noticed.

For that, much of the credit must go to the tale of the blonde, the botched abortion, and the trunk. But first, there was Jack Reynolds.

An illiterate drifter, Reynolds entered a basement grocery on January 29, 1870, informed the owner, William Townsend, that they were brothers, and demanded a place to sleep. Townsend demurred, noting there was barely enough room for his wife and six children. So Reynolds stabbed Townsend dead, in full view of two of the victem’s daughters and sundry neighbors. As the cops dragged Reynolds away, followed by an angry crowd baying for his blood, he cried out defiantly, Hanging is played out. At the station he gave his occupation as thief.²¹

Assigned to the case, whose peculiar futility made it a natural draw for the press, Howe defended his unsympathetic client with zeal. There was no doubt that Reynolds had killed the man; the only hope was that an insanity defense might save his life. When he went to trial three weeks after the event—a delay considered unconscionably long—the case drew a large crowd, including such a noticeable complement of pickpockets that the judge issued a warning (a few spectators had their wallets lifted anyway).²²

Howe labored to establish a pattern of mad behavior—the defendant’s frenzied resistance; his wild and incoherent speech; a suggestion of epilepsy (a term used interchangeably with mental illness); the idea that his client’s less than keen mind was driven mad by the sight of a knife.²³ Each side brought in experts. The doctors’ duel did not go Howe’s way, though, as even some of his own medical witnesses decided that on the whole, Reynolds might have been nuts but he was not legally insane.

So Howe changed tack, arguing that just because Reynolds seemed sane when the doctors examined him did not mean that he was at the time of the crime. Besides, there might be insanity that showed no symptoms and that the experts simply could not see; raving maniacs could look normal on occasion, after all. Howe even flirted with the philosophical, getting a physician to admit that no man will be able to say positively where sanity ends and insanity begins.²⁴ Reynolds’s madness, Howe argued, was proved by the act: Would any sane man, he asked, without revenge, without malice, without gain, without notice, have committed so horrible a crime?

The lawyer strung together the shaky links of his defense in a 90-minute closing argument of wonderful ingenuity and not a little insult. There can be few examples of an advocate disparaging his client with such florid enthusiasm. Reynolds was a poor, miserable, dirty, filthy, half-savage, half-idiotic wretch²⁵ with a lopsided skull; a vacant, dejected imbecile; this poor, demented, God-forsaken wretch, knowing nothing, [is] entirely oblivious to all the senses and faculties of the human mind. And Howe closed with a bang, urging the jury:

Oh, gentlemen, to violate the living temple which the Lord hath made—to quench the human flame within a human being’s breast—is an awful and a

Reviews for Scoundrels in Law

[jmcilree_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I stopped reading; it was tedious.I stopped mid-chapter on the theatre clients Howe & Hummel defended. It was endless series of vignettes on the mostly minor lawsuits of the theater crowd. There was a chapter on murderers. There was a chapter on thieves. Story after story of people and incidents I don’t care about.The writing is mediocre and her humor is sophomoric. I suppose she’s trying to wink at the reader but for me it was painful.

[jztemple · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A marvelous book, well written and very enjoyable. The scoundrels in question are Howe & Hummel, a pair of shady but somehow very likeable lawyers who practiced in late nineteenth century New York City. They were the Johnny Cochran of their day, acting in service to the rich and famous, the notorious, the crazy and many others. Murphy's narrative style makes the story easy to follow in spite of the many names and places mentioned. Some knowledge of American history isn't necessary, but having some familiarity with the names and events makes the book even more enjoyable. Very much recommended.