The Mail and Express reported appointment as a patrolman cost $300, promotion to sergeant, $1,400, and advancement to captain, $14,000. Policemen made back their investments by taking bribes.

As Luc Sante observed of Big Bill in his book Low Life, "It was well known that he was corrupt; he in fact admitted as much quite readily." By 1891, Devery was a captain. In 1893, he assumed command of the red-light district’s Eldridge Street Station. Reportedly, he told his men during his inaugural address: "If there’s any graftin’ to be done, I’ll do it. Leave it to me."

Devery believed in protecting lives and property while leaving vice alone. He favored segregated red-light districts to concentrate the whorehouses, gambling dens, and round-the-clock bars. As this was unlikely to happen legally, he chose to ignore sin, provided he was paid to ignore it.

His payoff routine was subtle. Sam Myers, his bagman, was a tailor. Anyone who wanted a favor from Devery went to Sam for a fitting. He charged one thousand dollars for an ordinary one-pants suit. Devery later stopped by and picked up the money.

By the early nineties, police corruption had become a little rank. In 1894, a State Senate investigating committee summoned him to testify. Devery "turned aside most questions with the insouciant assertion that ‘touchin’ on and appertainin’ to that matter, I disremember.’" The evidence against him was so strong that the Board of Police Commissioners fired him in 1894. He was then indicted for extortion. A jury acquitted him in 1895. Meanwhile, a State Supreme Court ruling had restored him to duty. The Police Commissioners then exhumed some old charges to try again. But Devery promptly obtained another Supreme Court order forbidding the Commissioners to bring him to trial.

Tammany regained City Hall in 1897 by electing Robert A. Van Wyck mayor. Van Wyck, a puppet of Tammany boss Richard Croker, appointed Devery chief of police. The mayor praised Devery as the greatest police chief New York ever had.

While he was chief, Devery boasted, there had been only two holdups and one safe blown, and the safe cracking had been a an honest mistake. Two days later the safecrackers sent Devery a note of apology, saying they were from out of town and meant no disrespect.

As M. R. Werner wrote in Tammany Hall, the Police Department under Devery "chartered vice and controlled graft." Devery, Frank Farrell, a professional gambler, and State Senator Timothy D. "Big Tim" Sullivan formed a syndicate to handle protection services for gambling establishments. In 1900, The New York Times exposed its activities. Herbert Asbury, in The Gangs of New York, broke down the syndicate’s monthly income from pool rooms, crap games, small and large gambling houses, pawnshop swindles, and the numbers. The annual grand total was $3,095,000. The scheme was airtight, since between Sullivan and Devery, the syndicate united the powers of the police, the legislature, and the State Gambling Commission.

Big Bill Devery remained chief of police until 1901, when a Republican state legislature abolished the office. Mayor Van Wyck then appointed Devery Deputy Police Commissioner, with even greater powers than before.

One of the Deputy Commissioner’s duties was presiding at administrative trials. He never fined a policeman for breach of duty, only for getting caught. Devery once suspected a policeman of being drunk. He ordered him to open his mouth and blow his breath in the Deputy Commissioner’s face. The policeman refused. "That is right, my man, " said Devery, dismissing the case, "keep your mouth shut all the time. If you do that you won’t get into trouble here."

He was fired in 1902 when reformer Seth Low, became mayor. Devery was now a rich man, dividing his time between a West End Avenue mansion and a profitable real-estate operation in Rockaway.

Devery always provided good copy for the newspapers and, like Barnum, took it all as advertisement. His admirer, "Dock Walloper Dick" Butler, described him around this time as "the John L. Sullivan of politics, a mountain of a man, a fine specimen of humanity, standing about five eleven and weighing about two hundred and sixty…He had a red face and a wavy black mustache…He was always smoking cigars…getting away with ten or fifteen before breakfast."

"Touchin’ on and appertainin’ to" was his way of beginning any discussion. In his speeches, Chief Devery included himself in "the Big Five": Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and Devery. His daily prayers ran thus: "God bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife, we four forever more, Amen." His office was a pump in front of a saloon on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, where he stood nightly from about nine o’clock, transacting business.

Croker had been boss for nearly two decades when Tammany lost the 1901 mayoral election. He left the Hall on election night and never returned. On September 19, 1902, Charles F. Murphy, cold, silent, and ruthless, became the new boss. He believed Devery, the Deputy Police Commissioner openly allied with vice and gambling, a disgrace rather than an asset.

Despite the cold shoulder, Devery ran for Democratic district leader in the Ninth Assembly District in 1902. The Ninth took in Chelsea from Twentieth to Thirtieth Streets and from Seventh Avenue to the North River. He opposed Tammany incumbent Frank Goodwin, who had "borrowed" $25,000 from the Chief, promising to get Devery Tammany’s nomination for Sheriff. Goodwin failed to deliver or to repay the money.

The campaign would be spectacular. What Butler described as "the biggest political excursion in the city’s history" – all of it free – departed the West 25th Street piers around nine o’clock one hot July morning in 1902. There were nine boats, loaded down with 18,000 women and children.

There were bars and bands playing dance music. Butler wrote, "As for free lunch, you never saw so much wholesome food in all your born days. Every barge had a counter on which were piled thousands of sandwiches and corned beef and cabbage, baked ham and beans, roast beef, tongue, cheese, clam chowder, hot ears of corn, kegs of pink lemonade, pickles, bottles of milk, hot coffee, cakes, pies, fruit soda, candy, ice cream, and ginger ale pop." The Chief and his lieutenants served the old ladies and the nursing mothers with infants in their arms. The rest could grab for themselves.

Ten hours later, they returned, fireworks, bombs, rockets, and Roman candles soaring and six bands playing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Devery told the women that he hoped they had had a good time, that he knew they had not come to hear a speech, but if they had husbands and brothers and fathers, he would appreciate it if they would induce them to vote for the man who did things for the people.

On September 1, 1902, he held a beer fest and barbecue on a vacant lot at 10th Avenue and 29th Street. Devery went through sixty barrels of beer (20,000 glasses), two roast bullocks (1,700 pounds of roast beef), and 15,000 rolls. The Chief said, "When I get to the Tammany Committee and the State Convention, I’m goin’ to make it hot for a lot of people….And my partin’ advice to you people is to take the other fellow’s money, take anythin’ you can get, but vote Devery."

Primary Day, September 16, 1902, was riotous. Both sides, and especially Tammany, who needed fraud to counteract Devery’s generosity, used repeaters and floaters from other districts. Devery bought the votes of the Tammany repeaters and floaters. "There were twenty-six election districts," Butler wrote, "and nothing but fights in every one." Devery won a sweeping victory, polling more votes than there were men, women, and children in the district. He marched through the streets with torches and a brass band, and when he arrived at the Pump, five thousand were waiting for him.

All for naught. Murphy denied Devery his seat, ruling with a straight face that the Tammany committee was the sole judge of its own membership and that Big Bill was unworthy of it "on account of the wholesale fraud and corruption at the primary election." Devery lost in the courts (the case is still valid precedent in this state, although it hasn’t been followed since the Forties). The Democratic State Convention ejected his delegates despite the Chief’s rip-roaring oratory and a thumping new song from his ever-present brass band:

The delegates at Saratoga, They all must fall in line, They must vote with Mr. Devery, Mr. Devery, every time.

He ran for mayor the following year. He was enraged by Murphy’s refusal to accept him, saying, "I’ll run for mayor or turn flip-flops off the Flatiron Building. I’ll do anything for the people." Butler wrote, "Maybe it would have been better if he turned flip-flops. It cost him sixty thousand dollars to run for district leader on the slogan, ‘Everybody have a drink on me.’ Running for mayor on the same platform would have cost him two million dollars, and naturally he was beaten…in the primary."

He bolted the Democrats to run as the People’s Independent in November. His ballot symbol was the Pump. He declared himself vaguely in favor of municipal ownership (more patronage jobs), establishing a recreation pier or a free bath along every half mile of the City’s waterfront, the sale of beer after church hours on Sunday, and the free conveyance of children on street cars to and from school. "This is the occasion," Devery roared, "when the downtrod will rise in their might, an’ when they do that you kin bet that they’ll make the Charles Murphys…look like calico dogs stuffed with saloon sweepin’s." "In the political graveyard there won’t be anythin’ more interestin’ that Murphy’s sarcophagus," Devery said. "One of the lines on the stone will be ‘Devery done it.’"

Murphy’s orators replied that Devery, not Tammany, had been responsible for graft under Van Wyck. Devery riposted by successfully connecting Murphy to the ownership of a hot sheet hotel, saying, "The trouble with that feller is that he’s got a red light around his neck, and consequently he sees red in whatever direction he looks." On Murphy and graft, Devery said, "He’s goin’ through the bluff of bein’ decent, but look at his record….He’s for Murphy, an’ he ain’t satisfied to use his hands. He wants to get in and use a steam shovel."

And he made no impression at all. According to The Encyclopedia of New York City, Congressman George McClellan Jr., the Tammany Democrat, polled 314,782; mayor Seth Low, the Republican-Fusion incumbent, polled 252,086; and 28,417 votes were divided among Devery and the Prohibition, Social-Democratic, and Socialist Labor candidates.

Devery said, "I spent my own money, and I had some fun." He retired from politics and moved to Far Rockaway. With Frank Farrell, Devery bought an American League baseball franchise. They moved it to New York, named the team the Highlanders, and operated the team until 1912, when they sold it to Colonel Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Houston, who renamed the franchise the Yankees.

Devery became fond of poring over his thirty-six scrapbooks of press clippings which he had cross-indexed elaborately. He died in Far Rockaway on June 20, 1919. For years after his death, Dick Butler wrote, his friends remembered him by painting the old pump "red, white and blue on the Fourth of July and painting it gold and silver and decorating it with holly wreath on Christmas and New Year’s. On St. Patrick’s Day we paint the pump green."

Nothing of it remains.

In the spring of 1902, the lawman swung down from the train. He was nearly fifty and a trifle stocky now. But he had worked for Wyatt Earp and known Doc Holliday, he had upheld the law in Dodge City and kept the peace in Tombstone. His shooting hand had lost none of its cunning, the .45 still swung on his hip, and as they say in Texas, he was one of those men it don’t do to fuck with.

Bat Masterson had been in Manhattan for barely two weeks when he was pinched for playing a rigged card game and carrying an unlicensed handgun. Welcome to New York.

William Barclay Masterson was born November 24, 1853 in Illinois. He stuck it out on the farm until 1871, when Bat and his brother Ed lit out for the Territory. They ended up broke in Dodge City, Kansas. They became buffalo hunters for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Working seven days a week, sunup to sundown, he slew thirty to forty buffalo at a time, skinned them for the hides, took the best cuts of meat, and left the carcasses to rot.

Bat also took revolver lessons from Wyatt Earp, a professional lawman and killer. With the art of the gunfighter — perfect accuracy with revolvers under pressure of time and emotion (less than one second to draw, aim, and fire) — he learned a master’s wisdom. Handguns are meant for killing the other fellow and nothing else. Don’t take out the gun unless you mean to kill him. Shoot first. Don’t miss. If you don’t drop him with the first shot, you may not have a second. Within three years, Bat and other hunters had killed most wild buffalo in Kansas. The herds still ran in Texas. But the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 had reserved them to the Comanche. Details, details. Masterson and his brother Ed went to Adobe Walls, Texas to go hunting.

The Native Americans disagreed with Bat’s employment decision, raised a war party, and put Quanah Parker in command. Half Comanche, half Irish, Parker was brave, ruthless, and wily. He enjoyed a ferocious reputation, and the rumor of his coming encouraged many buffalo hunters to go north for the summer. Bat and Ed stayed. On the morning of June 27, 1874, Quanah Parker rushed Adobe Walls with a thousand horsemen. Thirty-eight men, women, and children returned fire. The numerous dead and wounded warriors convinced Parker that war paint, however blessed by medicine men, did not stop .50 caliber slugs. He withdrew out of range to besiege the town, organizing roaming patrols of warriors to intercept escapees.

That night, Bat and Ed evaded the Comanche and rode for Dodge City to get help. Although a heavily-armed column was already riding to the town’s relief, the boys were welcomed as heroes and, as the hunting was over for the moment, became scouts for the U.S. Army at seventy-five dollars a month.

Bat stopped in Sweetwater, Texas, where luck at the tables and the charms of Molly Brennan, a pretty, sweet-natured whore, delayed his departure. Unhappily, Molly had previously entranced Melvin King, a cavalry sergeant at the local post. On January 24, 1876, Bat and Molly were dancing in a saloon when King entered, drunk, jealous, and armed. Molly turned to calm him. King shot her dead. She slumped into Masterson. King shot Bat, shattering his hip. Masterson drew while falling. He hit the floor. He aimed. He sent one shot through King’s chest, sending him before that Higher Court from which there is no appeal. All this took about a second and a half. After his recovery, Masterson and his brother Jim went to Dodge City. Wyatt Earp, the chief deputy marshal, hired them as deputies. The town was a railhead, where cattle driven north from Texas by cowboys boarded the Santa Fe for shipment to slaughterhouses at Omaha, St. Louis, and Chicago. Usually the cowboys were ready for rest and recreation, or just recreation, when they rode into Dodge.

Masterson was about five feet, nine inches tall. He limped. He wore a cane and derby hat, black suit and waistcoat, white shirt, black string tie, and two Colt revolvers. However, he preferred knocking down drunks with the cane to shooting them. Hence his nickname.

In 1877, Masterson became county sheriff. He was 26 years old. His brother Ed had succeeded Earp as chief deputy marshal of Dodge City. One evening, a drunk blew a hole through Ed’s stomach while being arrested. Ed managed to kill him, walk two hundred yards to a saloon, and collapse. He died an hour later in Bat’s arms. Richard O’Connor in his biography of the lawman quotes Bat: “Ma’ll never forgive me for letting Ed get killed.”

Then he arrested the four men who had been with the drunk. The legend said he hunted them down and killed them. Not so. They were held for trial. Nor was Ed buried at Boot Hill. That was for transients and criminals. Ed Masterson went to the town cemetery. After his defeat for re-election in 1878, Bat signed up for the Royal Gorge War. The Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroads both wanted to build through the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River to the silver mines at Leadville. There was room for only one. From March to May, 1879, Masterson commanded a flying squad of Santa Fe gunmen. Before the lawyers settled things and spoiled the fun, he had even seized the Rio Grande’s station and roundhouse at Pueblo, Colorado with 33 men and a Gatling gun.

Bat then took up gambling, his livelihood for the next two decades. Early in 1881, he was wrapped in a bedsheet, playing cards in a Kansas City whorehouse when he received a telegram from Earp, then U.S. Marshal for the Arizona Territory at Tombstone (how, I wonder, did Earp know to reach him there?).

Earp needed someone to help Luke Short keep the peace in his Oriental Saloon in Tombstone. Luke’s booze was cheap, his girls good-looking, and his games not too obviously rigged. The competition were hiring toughs to break up his shop. Luke paid Bat four dollars an hour as a card dealer. This was then more than most men then made in a week. But the job was riskier than most. A losing player, convinced the dealer was cheating, might shoot first and ask questions later. Bat’s reputation helped: he didn’t have to kill anybody at the Oriental.

Although Masterson occasionally helped Earp track members of the Clanton gang, rude fellows with a weakness for gunplay and robbing stagecoaches, he was absent when the Clantons had their personal encounter with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday at the O.K. Corral (Masterson cordially disliked Holliday: he thought the lunger a petty, greedy, and dishonest cardsharping drunk). A telegram had come from Dodge City asking Bat to help his brother Jim. Jim owned a half interest in a saloon. He had fallen out with his partner, A. J. Peacock. Peacock and his brother-in-law Al Updegraff proposed to salve A. J.’s wounded feelings by killing Jim. Bat stepped from the noon train to find Peacock and Updegraff on the platform. They had brought not peace but .45s. After ten minutes of gunplay, Updegraff was down with a bullet through his lung. Peacock and Bat were under arrest. The judge let off Peacock with a warning. Bat pled to firing his pistol on a city street and paid an eight dollar fine.

He drifted to Trinidad, Colorado, where he was elected city marshal, and then to Denver, where he went into business. In 1891, he married Emma Walters, an actress he had met in Trinidad. She began civilizing him and it took, mostly. He bought and operated the Palace, a theater and gambling hall, booking the entertainment, which ranged from highly artistic presentations featuring babes in tights to boxing matches.

He also became a boxing promoter and referee. He promoted a match in El Paso in 1901. Then the Texas Legislature prohibited prizefighting. Judge Roy Bean, “the law west of the Pecos,” invited him to stage the contest in Langtry, Bean’s town. Bat arrived to find the town crawling with Texas Rangers, sent to stop the match. Bean suggested that everyone wade the Rio Grande to Mexico. They did. The fight went one round. Bat closed the Palace and left Denver in 1902. The authorities had encouraged his departure: now, not even the Queen City of the West had time for an old gambler and gunman.

Despite his early arrest (Bat was acquitted), he liked New York. And he went into a new line of work. In 1903, after hearing Bat recount life on the frontier, William Lewis, editor of the New York Morning Telegraph, hired him as a reporter.

Founded in 1839 as a religious weekly, the Sunday Morning Visitor, the Morning Telegraph was among the city’s oldest papers. It was a breezy daily focusing on sports, racing, and the theatre. The paper was published from an old car barn at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street. Alfred Henry Lewis, the muckraking journalist, once joined Bat for drinks. They strolled a block or so to some Hell’s Kitchen dive, full of young thugs, noisy with brag and bluster. Then they noticed the old man in the doorway, with the cold gray eyes gazing from under the derby. “The bar fell quiet as a church,” a reporter wrote, “as the old gunfighter (who now had a permit to strap on the equalizer) made his way to the brass rail.”

Its editors were unconcerned with the law of defamation, which got Masterson in trouble. In 1906, while reporting a murder case, Bat described the jury’s verdict of guilty as “lynch law” and “mob rule”, and the jurors as “Herkimer County bushmen.” He was fined fifty dollars for contempt of court: forty-two dollars more than for firing a pistol on the streets of Dodge City. The newspaper rewarded him with a column, “Masterson’s Views on Timely Topics,” which appeared three times a week, “but never weakly.”

Theodore Roosevelt had met Masterson in the eighteen-eighties, when T.R., then a Dakota rancher, had joined a posse and captured two horse thieves. The two men had struck it off well. In 1904, President Roosevelt offered Bat the post of U.S. Marshal for the Oklahoma Territory. Bat courteously declined, writing, “Some kid who was born after I took off my guns would get drunk and look me over. The longer he looked the less he’d be able to see where my reputation came from. In the end he’d crawl around to a gunplay and I’d have to send him over the jump. I’ve finally got out of that zone of fire and I hope never to go back to it.”

T.R. persisted. Within two years he talked Masterson into becoming Deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York. Bat’s admirers presented him with a 14-karat gold badge, studded with four diamonds. Some said it was a part-time job. In fact, Masterson appeared at the office only for his paycheck (nor did T.R. do this for him alone: Edwin Arlington Robinson, the poet, was appointed a clerk in the New York Customs House upon orders from the President that he draw his paycheck, never appear for work, and write verse full time). Bat never stopped writing for the paper and became its sports editor.

Violence still passed near him. Shortly after midnight on July 16, 1912, Bat was at the front table in the Metropole Hotel with former Assemblyman Richard “Dockwalloper Dick” Butler and other sporting and theatrical people when Herman Rosenthal, the gambler, stopped to chat. Rosenthal had given District Attorney Charles S. Whitman the goods on Police Lieutenant Charles Becker. After a few minutes’ talk with Bat and Butler, Rosenthal was interrupted by a message that someone needed him outside. He stepped through the revolving door and met Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie, Dago Frank, and Whitey Lewis. They were professionally associated with one Big Jack Zelig, who specialized in violence tailored to his clients’ needs. Becker had requested “the big job.” It was done. Unfortunately for Becker, they talked. The bad lieutenant went to the death house in 1915.

On October 25, 1921, Bat went to the paper despite a bad cold. He wrote his column. As he leaned back in the chair to read the copy, his heart stopped beating. A reporter looked in a few minutes later. He thought the old man had fallen asleep. He lies in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, beneath a granite marker bearing his name, dates of birth and death, and the words, “Loved by Everyone.”