The next day, Arthur Hale Woods, the police commissioner of New York City, was reading a newspaper on the second floor of the central office. Downstairs, his men were claiming that that they might be getting close to solving the Ruth Cruger mystery. Privately, they were telling him that they were fairly sure she had just run away from home like so many others before her. Case closed, they said. But Woods saw the headline PRETTY GIRL SKATER MISSING and wasn’t so sure that “case closed” would be enough.
Woods placed the newspaper back on his monumental desk. By now, Ruth had been missing for a week. The police were deploying a massive public effort to cast their net over the entire Atlantic seaboard. Some of the papers even suggested that Ruth had been kidnapped and sent into the city’s serpentine underworld of white slavery. Henry Cruger believed that his daughter had been drugged with a vial needle before being forced into that cab and onto parts unknown. Mr. Cruger publicly criticized the police with great furor. “The Fourth Branch Detective Bureau is not doing the work that should be done,” Henry told the Times. On his desk, Woods had two crystal inkpots and a black candlestick telephone that wound its way to a box on the wall. There was a brown wooden intercom for communicating with his secretary. He thought about Mr. Cruger’s words.
Woods, tall and thin, straightened his tweed jacket as he rose from his chair. Even at forty-seven years old, he still kept his hair short on the sides, just like in the old days, though it was now only peppered with black. At his new bride Helen’s insistence, he had finally shaved his mustache, even though he thought it just brought out the bags under his eyes. Best not to argue with the niece of J. P. Morgan, he would tell her.
On the long table next to his desk lay a street map of New York City, dimpled with push pins. Smaller maps were hung on the walls. Woods had been commissioner since 1914, after being promoted by Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, the “boy mayor” of New York who had been elected at age thirty-four. After Woods’s small inauguration in his office, the mayor, tall and thin himself, pulled his new police commissioner aside and said, “You big fool.” Woods promised that he would cut vice, clean up the gangsters, and kick the deadly Black Hand gangsters straight out of New York. These words were big talk from a former Groton English teacher.
The commissioner’s office was located on the second floor of the police central office, located in a new white building at 240 Centre Street. They jokingly called it the White House. The building was huge, humming with electricity, and had its own dispatch center. In the basement was a gun range with special interrogation cells just for the detectives. The old Italian Squad had occupied the first floor. Sometimes, Woods would go up to the observation deck that looked out over the whole block. He could see the bar called Headquarters down on the first floor of the opposite street. Over on the other side, Woods saw the canvas tents of the Italian gun dealers who sold pistols and blackjacks to his own policemen.
Two weeks after his first day as commissioner, Woods, the mayor, and New York corporation counsel Frank Polk were walking through the lunchtime crowd in the Park Row Plaza outside City Hall. It was early spring, just past one o’clock on a sunny day, when an old man with a sunken face emerged from the shifting crowd. He pointed a pistol at the mayor. Woods was about two jumps away, but somehow made it in one. Woods slammed the old man to the ground—but not before the man’s gun fired in a quick blast of smoke and fire. People scattered and screamed.
The mayor sat up and patted his suit, looking for blood. He was unscathed. But Mr. Polk had been shot in the left cheek of his mouth. As Woods held the would-be assassin down, the mayor, who had also pulled his gun, towered over him.
“Why did you try to shoot me?” he asked.
Later that day, when cops ransacked the old man’s apartment, they found a steamer trunk filled with letters and anarchist pamphlets. The would-be assassin’s name was Mike Mahoney. A blacksmith by trade, he had been out of work for a very long time. Before his arraignment, the cops took him into a room at Central, where 250 detectives—all of them masked—looked him over to see if they recognized him. None of them did. They feared a more insidious conspiracy.
“We are dealing with strange forces,” they all agreed.
Before that moment on the plaza, Woods’s voice as commissioner was almost inaudible. There were rumors that people at police headquarters didn’t even know what he looked like. But now—after jumping to stop an assassin—Woods had the power to start enacting some of his more radical ideas. He could run instead of walk.
During his first year in office, Woods locked up two hundred known criminals. He went after labor strikers, Black Handers, anarchist bombers, and reinstituted the Italian Squad. He enacted new uniform regulations to ensure that every officer’s brass buttons shone at a shared level of brilliance. Woods even created the first domestic bomb squad to combat foreign spies and terrorists. Everyone knew him now.
But Woods wasn’t just hard-boiled. The massive city map on his table was also lined out with his play streets program, whereby traffic would shut down on certain roads so that tenement kids could play stickball without fear of being run over. The police put out signs attached to cement blocks that said DETOUR as kids in hiked-up pants and white shirts laid down grounders. At the same time, out in the blue part of the map lay Woods’s controversial Harlem River Floating Station, an aquatic headquarters in the middle of the Hudson to be used in the event of emergency or terrorist attack. Woods’s nimble imagination was ready for apocalypses both small and large. He even started a project in Flatbush with police dogs called the Barking Squad.
As Woods looked over the map, his shadow crossed the streets of Harlem, otherwise known as Italian territory. Woods always thought of his friend Joe when he thought of the Italians. Every time Woods walked through the front door of headquarters, he expected Joe Petrosino, the larger-than-life cop who ran the Italian Squad, to walk out of his office to the right, smiling for all the world. Woods preferred that image in his mind, instead of the other one.