Books: “Shadow Men” by James Polchin

Does justice serve only the rich and not the poor? The question is debatable but in fact, it drove a criminal trial in 1920s Westchester County, New York. In “Shadow Man: The Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege That Scandalized Jazz Age America,” author James Polchin digs into the case with zeal.

It begins mysteriously: one night, the body of Clarence Peters, a 19-year-old apprentice sailor, is found on a roadside in New Rochelle. The only things on his person are a pair of dice, a pack of playing cards, four loose buttons, an unopened pack of Chesterfield cigarettes and a ladies’ handkerchief embroidered with two small lavender pansies in the corner.

Within a day, a young man named Walter Ward confesses to killing Peters. He claims that he was the victim of blackmail by a group of “shadow men” (including the sailor) to whom he had already paid $30,000. He gave no further details.

Ward was a wealthy guy whose family owned the Ward Baking Company, one of the largest chain of bread factories in the country. Some claimed the good-looking Walter and his fashion-plate wife Beryl were the models for Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby.”

But as the case progressed, some things  seemed off: The bullet that killed Peters had only pierced his shirt, not his outer garments. Also, it looked like Peters had been killed elsewhere and then placed at the side of the road. The County Republicans in power were eager to close down the case before the 1922 election. The Democrats wanted to know more.

The DA meanwhile could never quite figure out why Ward was being blackmailed. Was it the huge debts he racked up playing the horses? Some extramarital hanky-panky that the very proper Walter wanted to hide from his wife and father?

The book skillfully guides us through the blind alleys the DA pursued, while presenting a vivid illustration of the denizens of the 1920s underworld. We’re escorted through secret flats in Harlem where Ward enjoyed assignations with women. (He had also been rumored to frequent men-only parties at several hotels.) Polchin suggests that Peters might have had the goods on Ward and that the latter panicked.

Ward himself suffered very little. While awaiting trial, he was placed in the same relatively luxurious “jail apartment” that another scion, Harry K. Thaw, had inhabited some 15 years earlier.

The trial was as closely followed as the OJ Simpson trial in the 1990s. Everyone from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Governor Al Smith took an interest in it. The New York Daily News conducted a fierce campaign to put the “rich guy in jail.”

Dems and Republicans at each other’s throats? A brazen flouting of justice by a wealthy man? The case, as presented in “Shadow Men” feels, a century later, as relevant as ever. Like this review? Follow me at acsntn.substack.com. Thank you!