The Bobbed Haired Bandit
Stephen Duncombe & Andrew Mattson
“And then suddenly, there was Celia Cooney . . . diminutive, seeming actually less than five feet as she stood before the fire of cameras and the eagerness of thousands of eyes. She wore the same seal skin coat, the sight of which terrorized Brooklyn storekeepers as the sight of Robin Hood’s green doublet terrorized fat abbots.”
—Mitzi Kolisch, Brooklyn Citizen
“The arrival of the couple from Florida bordered on the spectacular,” The New York Times reported; the crowd that arrived to “cheer” the president stayed to “jeer” the bandit. As much as it must have insulted the sensibilities of the Times’s editors, it was not the president, however, who most people came to see. The Bobbed Haired Bandit was expected: The morning papers had published the hour of her arrival, and the crowds assembled to see her. The Brooklyn Eagle estimated that there were ten thousand people there to see that bandit and fewer than five hundred “to view the departing chief executive of the nation.” After all, Celia Cooney was a home-grown celebrity, and Silent Cal did not pack a baby automatic or a sharp tongue. Girl Bandit Cheered On Arrival, the New York Evening Journal headlined on page one. The public’s priorities were clear.
Women outnumbered men in the excited mob that gathered just to see her: “They hung from every stairway and rail landing leading from the train level.” Ring Lardner commented that Penn Station was “so crowded with photographers and hero worshippers that the detectives can’t hardly get the couple out. Everywhere the little gal is greeted with smiles and murmurs of approval and the only wonder is that some of her admirers did not rush up and kiss her.” The police attempted to keep the platform clear, but then they made the mistake of opening a special gate for all of the newspapermen and photographers, and the “unruly throng” surged through and “jammed the platform”:
The crowd left the presidential party flat and rushed to catch a glimpse of her. Stairways were thronged. Hundreds of faces pressed against the grilled fences. Camera men who a moment before had been snapping the nation’s chief executive rushed to points of vantage to photograph the nation’s most talked about bandit.
“The sound of an approaching train was heard.” The press was all elbows. The cameramen set their machines. A hush fell over the crowd. “I haven’t had a thrill like this in the game before,” a photographer was overheard saying. “Chasing the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ across three states is nothing compared to this.” The train had almost come to a standstill now. “They’ll bring her out on a stretcher,” someone called.
The Daily News reported:
An army of photographers shoved and upbraided each other, seeking a vantage point from which to photograph her. In their turn the photographers were jostled and eclipsed by surging waves of humanity, in which each individual was regardless of everything but his chance to see the bobbed-hair bandit.
It took ten minutes for the police to clear the way to open the door of the car in which Celia and Ed were riding. Standing in the crowd on the platform was a full complement of police brass. The men who led the Bobbed Haired Bandit hunt for Police Commissioner Richard Enright were impatient to get their hands on Celia Cooney. The chief of detectives himself, Inspector John S. Coughlin, and Detective Captain Daniel Carey, who ran the day-to-day investigation in Brooklyn, were both part of the platform party.
Detectives Casey and Gray were unprepared for the crush that faced them. Captain McCloskey who had been assigned the task of getting the couple to police headquarters downtown didn’t have enough officers to manage the mob. At first they drafted the railroad detectives to aid them, but even they were not enough.
After all of the other passengers had exited the train, the detectives decided it was time to move the prisoners. Edward Cooney was handcuffed to a tired, unshaven Detective Carey. With the collar of his brown overcoat turned up and his brown cap “pulled low over his face,” Cooney was quietly taken out the other side of the car and rushed up a back stairway. But the “police and station guards were almost powerless when the moment came for the girl to alight.” Celia had a guard of four strong men surrounding her, and as they got out of the train, “immediately a battery of flashlights was let go that sounded like a cannonade.”
“Grinning behind the magazine she held to hide her face from the cameras,” the gungirl stepped onto the platform. As the “flashlights exploded and motion picture cameras ground,” Celia recalled, “there was a wham, bang, flash that made me think the whole place had been hit by lightning.” She blinked her eyes, threw a hand up in front of her face, and ran the gauntlet of reporters and cameramen. Then the “crowd rushed in” under “a whole barrage of flashlights” and “amid the wildest excitement.”
The detectives propelled Mrs. Cooney toward the stairs: “Most of the crowd from the train went one way and we went another, up some iron steps. As we neared the top some man gave a yell, ‘Here she comes,’ and then there was such a yelling you would think it was a ballgame.”
They were heading for the street toward the Thirty-first Street exit where two police cars awaited, engines running. The Cooneys were to escape their pursuers in a motorcar once more. The windows of the buildings facing the exit were crowded with curious men and women who were literally climbing the lampposts for a good view. But the detectives and their prisoners could not reach the exit where the cars were standing; the crush of the mob was too intense. When they reached the concourse, Celia recalled:
I never saw such a sight. Do you know how big that Pennsylvania Station is? Well, it was filled, jammed with people crowding, yelling, pushing. “Hi! Yes, that’s her! The Bobbed Haired Bandit.”
Finding themselves blocked by the surging crowds, they bullied their way to the nearby headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad police. Sitting down to get their breath, the detectives placed a telephone call to police headquarters asking for reserves to clear a path that would allow the beleaguered party to make its escape. The reserves, including a squad of mounted police, arrived and quickly set to work cutting a swath through the mob. “From the temporary refuge the police sallied out at ten minutes to four o’clock.”
“The cops had their clubs out—and even then we nearly got pushed off our feet,” Celia remembered. The detectives were determined to make the final push: “A rush was made by the party for a waiting automobile in the station’s driveway. The girl was swallowed up by the swirl of humanity. Only the little lavender pink hat she wore marked her passage through the crowd.” The wedge of officers struggled against the press of bodies. “Again the barrage of flashlights came as the slight girlish figure was half led and half carried through by detectives with uniformed policemen and special officers of the Pennsylvania [Railroad] bending every effort to clear a passageway.”
But then there was more trouble. From out of nowhere a “little fellow pushes in waving a piece of paper all excited.” It was a writ of habeas corpus. The detectives were none too pleased: “Who the———are you?” Casey and Gray demanded.
The excited little fellow waving his arms about was Sam Leibowitz, a thirty-year-old criminal defense attorney from Brooklyn. The young lawyer was making a name for himself among Brooklyn judges, lawyers, and “the professional criminal fraternity” as an exceedingly capable and ambitious criminal attorney. But outside this small world he was unknown. A case like the Bobbed Haired Bandit could change this.
Leibowitz would soon be very well known. Within a year he would successfully defend Al Capone on a shooting rap, and from then on there was rarely a high-profile case in New York in which Leibowitz was not somehow involved. At the time of his retirement from criminal defense his record was nearly perfect. Out of 139 capital murder cases Leibowitz took on, he won 132 straight acquittals and bargained six lesser sentences. Only one of his clients went to the chair, and that man, Leibowitz claimed, had withheld critical information. Other lawyers of the time, such as the great Clarence Darrow, are better remembered, but as a criminal defense attorney Sam Leibowitz was one of the best.
In the spring of 1924, however, Samuel S. Leibowitz was a near nobody. The newspapers consistently misspelled his name, transposing the “ei” in his last name, and sometimes giving him an erroneous middle initial “I.” And to Detectives Casey and Gray he was simply a pain in the ass.
As Celia remembers, Casey and Gray were “awful sore” about the arrival of the lawyer. The detectives thought they had the Cooneys all sewn up. All the way up on the fast train they had “pumped” the Cooneys “full of hop about getting off lighter” if they “pleaded guilty and wouldn’t have a lawyer.” Celia didn’t “know whether we were simps or not,” but “we believed them.”
Inspector Coughlin expected that his minions would rush the suspects directly to police headquarters downtown for questioning. From there they would be taken to District Attorney Dodd’s office in Brooklyn for more questioning. They were to be arraigned in a police court that very afternoon and then indicted by a Kings County grand jury “without delay.” When Sam Leibowitz stuck his mug in, frantically waving those writs of habeas corpus and yelling “it’s the law, it’s the law. Don’t you know it’s the law!” in the detective’s faces, all hope of a speedy resolution vanished.
The writs of habeas corpus ordered Captain McCloskey to produce his captives “forthwith.” Leibowitz had argued before a State Supreme Court judge that since the Cooneys had been arrested without a warrant they were actually being detained illegally and their seizure was unconstitutional. One judge was unconvinced and turned him down, but the lawyer found another who reluctantly agreed. The lawyer wanted Celia and Ed out of police custody, and quick. He told the papers that he wanted to keep them from “being put through the ‘third degree’ by the police and to ensure them every protection guaranteed by the law.” His plan was to get the Cooneys taken before a magistrate and then straight to jail in the custody of the department of corrections. Jail was a far safer place for them than the quiet office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Dodd where the D.A. could sweat them.
The writ and the little lawyer infuriated the haggard cops, but they had a more immediate concern: to get the celebrated criminals out of Penn Station and away from the increasingly pushy mob of onlookers. They piled into their cars, and Leibowitz jumped in with them. With the mounted police and the reserves clearing a path through the thousands, they drove south from Thirty-first Street down Seventh Avenue, bypassing police headquarters where a crowd was awaiting the arrival of the girl bandit, heading toward the Supreme Court on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan, where yet another crowd was gathering to witness the Bobbed Haired Bandit and her confederate dragged before a judge in handcuffs.
At 4:15 in the afternoon they were ushered into the courtroom of Justice Leonard Giegerich. Leibowitz couldn’t expect much sympathy from this judge. The day before it was Giegerich who had denied him his writ in the first place. According to Celia, Leibowitz “was just getting good started in a speech when somebody got up and said: ‘Your honor, who is this man? I don’t believe he’s their lawyer at all.’” Assistant District Attorney Walsh from Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Acting District Attorney Driscoll wanted Samuel Leibowitz out of the courtroom. Before the dispute got out of control Justice Giegerich stepped in and took command.
“Put them on the stand,” Justice Giegerich demanded of the Cooneys. Ed was first in the witness chair.
“Do you approve the employment of counsel?” Sam Leibowitz asked him.
“No sir,” Ed replied.
Leibowitz pulled out a letter written by Ed’s brother Tom and showed it to him. “Did he have authority to hire a lawyer for you?” the lawyer asked.
“No.”
Leibowitz tried another avenue: “Do you object to his hiring a lawyer for you?”
“Yes, sir.”
What kind of a defense was this? Leibowitz couldn’t even get his own client to admit to being his client. Frustrated, Leibowitz asked Ed to read the letter he had handed him:
Brother Ed: We have retained Counselor Leibowitz to represent you and Celia. Do whatever he tells you. Don’t worry. We will do all we can to help you. Brother Tom.
After he read it, he didn’t know quite what to think. Ed “appeared confused” and changed his answer to a more ambiguous “undecided.” One reporter noted that Ed had “wilted.” He “faltered, stumbled for his words, almost cried.” At the table together, Celia was Ed’s lifeline: “When her husband appeared confused in the courtroom, she bent
forward and listened to him. He leaned forward like a child seeking comfort, and when he looked up again his face was composed.” When Celia took the stand the same reporter painted a very different picture:
There is something strange about this twenty-year-old girl—something fascinatingly unusual in her manner. She is not pert, not aggressive. If she were of a different social order, one would say that she is dignified and had absolute poise and balance. As she sat on the witness stand beside Justice Giegerich in Manhattan Supreme Court, her voice was even, clear, cool. It was not defiance. It was again-poise. . . . The girl was calm, certain of every word and action. Where does she get her strength? It is more than a physical matter. It is something which comes from her mind, untrained as it is.
Celia’s answer was decisive. The judge asked, “Do you desire counsel?” “No,” she replied. “Everybody seemed glad, but Leibowitz,” Celia remembered. Another report had the lawyer “stunned,” and not surprisingly. Celia and Ed were throwing away their right to a first-rate lawyer, and Leibowitz’s first chance to make front-page news as a criminal defense attorney was rapidly disappearing. After Celia’s curt response, there wasn’t much else to argue. Justice Giegerich dismissed both writs, and Celia and Ed were officially surrendered to the police. “Edward Cooney had to be supported as he left the courtroom for District Attorney Dodd’s office; she walked out with a firm step,” remarked the reporter from the Brooklyn Citizen. The detectives hustled them out of the courtroom toward a waiting automobile.
It took some doing to get them into the car. The press had followed them downtown, and “a battery of cameras greeted their appearance in the corridors.” As they hit the street, they were met by yet another crowd of two thousand people. Anywhere the Bobbed Haired Bandit appeared, a mob of press and onlookers swelled up. Fortunately for the police, the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge is just blocks away from the tall granite columns of the State Supreme Court, and in minutes the vehicle holding the Cooneys had left the crowds and cameras of Manhattan behind and was headed over the bridge to Brooklyn. Having cleared the legal hurdles, the detectives were eager to get the couple to District Attorney Dodd’s office for some serious “sweating.” When Celia and Ed reached the Court Street offices of the Brooklyn D.A., they were met by an even larger crowd of the curious than the one they had just escaped. Court Street was “filled.” The hometown mob was a little less adoring than the one across the river. “This time,” Celia remembered, “they booed and yelled at me something disgusting. And one woman yelled out, ‘I hope they hang her.’”
The detectives herded their prisoners through the crowds and into the Brooklyn courthouse. Safely inside, with all outside doors locked behind them, the couple took an elevator to an office on an upper floor where Assistant District Attorney Thomas C. Hughes was seated behind a large desk, smiling, openly pleased with himself now that the criminal couple was caught. In the room with him were two other Brooklyn A.D.A.s, Police Captains Carey and McCloskey, and the couple’s chaperones, Detectives Casey and Gray.55 For Celia’s benefit, three policewomen were also present. Celia didn’t like them: They were “dressed like anybody else—you’d have thought they were manicures or stenographers, and they eyed me up and down to look at my clothes and hat and shoes and whispered about me not being bobbed haired at all.”
Hughes began the questioning. After trying to “lay a lot of stuff on us that we hadn’t done—holding up a milk wagon, and robbing a truck and shooting at a cop,” Celia, “calm and straightforward in her statements,” took the lead and made a complete confession. Speaking clearly and looking over to Ed periodically for support and affirmation, Celia admitted to all ten jobs they had done in Brooklyn, beginning with the first Roulston robbery on January 6 and ending with the botched National Biscuit job on April 1 that led to their capture. The district attorney’s office prepared ten separate charges of assault and robbery against the pair based on this confession. “Her attitude, Mr. Hughes said,” and the New York Herald-Tribune reported, “was that of a girl who had ‘come to the end of her rope’ and was willing to tell everything and take her punishment.”
Whether Celia was “willing to tell everything” is debatable. She admitted to the ten robberies, but she also made sure that her version of the Bobbed Haired Bandit story was heard by the attending cops and prosecutors, as well as the journalists who were sure to interview the lawmen later on. One delicate topic was the taunting and threatening notes to the police that were attributed to the girl bandit. In her confession to Hughes, Celia admitted to writing two of these notes to the police but denied writing the note that called the detectives a bunch of fish peddlers. Later, in her newspaper memoirs, she claimed just the one note that cleared Helen Quigley (which, incidentally, calls the police “dirty fish peddling bums”) and denied writing any others. Celia also took pains to point out the moral code that she and Ed had followed in conducting their crimes. As the A.D.A. reported to the press: “They were careful never to take money from the persons of their victims, confining their search to cash registers and stamp drawers.”
At one point Hughes claimed he asked her “Why did you really go into this business?” “Only to provide a good home for the baby when it arrived,” Celia replied. She elaborated: “Eddie remarked to me one night how easy it was to get away with hold-ups. I agreed, and we began to think of doing it. We kept coming back to having a baby on $30 a week.” Maybe remembering the newspaper reports of Ed’s and her free-spending ways, Celia wanted to set the record straight:
When I went into that that first store and said “Stick ‘em up,” I wasn’t seeing diamond earrings and gin and jazz and a good time—
I was thinking of pretty little pink shoes, pink leather baby shoes like the ones I saw on Atlantic Avenue, and I was thinking, if I can get away with a big wad once and quit, maybe this baby that’s coming won’t have the rough time I had.
She told the A.D.A. that she had hoped their final robbery would raise enough money so that they could get a new, clean start in Florida and, in a Herald-Tribune reporter’s words, “the baby would be born in a real home with flowers about the door and green grass and trees.” Robbed to Get Home for Baby Girl was the normally unsympathetic Herald-Tribune’s headline on this day. Celia’s assembly of her own story seemed to be working.
Ed described the shooting of Nathan Mazo at the National Biscuit office as a gesture of chivalry as much as an act of violence. “I was afraid she would be hurt,” Ed told Hughes, explaining that the cashier had thrown Celia to the floor in an attempt to grab her gun. “I shot through the door more to impress the man he couldn’t hurt my wife than to hurt him.” Ed also claimed that “we had decided to make the biscuit company haul our last job holdup. I knew that drivers brought a lot of money into the office.” He echoed Celia, claiming the stickup was just to get enough money to get down to Florida where “he would have gotten work from a man he knew and ‘gone straight.’”
Hughes was pleased that he had obtained a full confession from the lips of the Bobbed Haired Bandit, and he seemed charmed by the couple. “They are much in love with each other and each desires to shoulder most of the blame,” the A.D.A. reported, and, including a plug for Ed’s much maligned masculinity, added that “certainly her husband acts in a most manly way toward her and she in turn would save him if she could.”
Following Celia’s lead, and knowing a good story when they heard one, the Herald-Tribune, one of the two papers to report in any depth on this first meeting at the D.A.s office, led their day’s article on the Bobbed Haired Bandit with this:
Celia Cooney, Brooklyn’s bobbed-hair bandit, dreamed of the tiny stranger that was to come to her, and she resented the fate that ordained that her baby would be born in a cheap furnished room. Her husband was a mechanic for $30 a week. It was difficult for two to get along. But with three, and with all the incumbent expense—.
With this pregnant pause the paragraph ends, leading into details of the robberies committed in the name of the then-unborn babe.
Others were not buying-or selling-Celia’s morality tale. The New York Times reported essentially the same story, but from a different angle. With a condescending air befitting its stature and audience, the Times reported that “notwithstanding the fact that there are facilities in New York which permit the birth of children at little or no expense, Celia Cooney stuck to her original story that it was because of the expected baby that she and her husband . . . turned to a career of crime.” The Times then sniffed that Celia felt “the world owed them a living.” More perceptively, the Times reporter went on to comment that Celia “seems to consider herself the heroine of a melodrama.”
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