Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD - The Moral Crusade | 5

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Officers in early New York didn’t just police the city’s vice economy; they profited from it. But when America’s first professional vice fighter Anthony Comstock strong-arms the NYPD into enforcing his vision of morality, he also transformed how and what we police. From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.Empire City is made with a commitment to ensure the stories of those who were and are still impacted by the NYPD are always part of the stories we tell ourselves about the police, about America, and about democracy.Voices & References:Amy Werbel https://www.fitnyc.edu/creative-nexus/faculty/directory/werbel-amy.phpBill Williams, descendant of Clubber WilliamsJennifer Wright https://www.jenashleywright.com/Lust On Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock https://www.amazon.com/Lust-Trial-Censorship-American-Obscenity/dp/0231175221Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionisthttps://www.amazon.com/Madame-Restell-Resurrection-Fabulous-Abortionist/dp/0306826798Follow Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD on the Wondery App or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/empire-city/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Empire City early and ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Wondry. As a parent, I've noticed that the world is wild, and it resists our attempts to impose order on it. Weeds invade the garden, sprout their wings, and choke the tomatoes. Mice build nests in the walls of bedrooms. Children color recklessly outside the lines. Teenagers fight against the labels we give them and the safety we're training them for,

because they're still young enough to remember that they're as nameless as flowers. And each of us craves the sweet taste of things that we're not supposed to want. The process of trying to take control of this chaos starts in our minds, in our homes and schools, how we're taught to police each other and the world around us. When I was a kid, I remember coming across people and messages that were trying to organize my world into strict categories. Teachers rolled old televisions into classrooms with goofy public service videos that would educate us about what to watch out for. Hello there. They would warn us about the dangerous things, like cavities or drugs.

A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country in the form of newsstand obscenity and is threatening to pervert an entire generation of our American children. Or in this case, the dangers of porn. The narrator is a white man standing in a classroom with an American flag hanging from a pole. Never in the history of the world have the merchants of obscenity had available to them the modern facilities for disseminating this filth. It didn't start with the internet, folks. Even back in this dude's day, it wasn't hard for people to get their hands on porn. And this film has lots of examples.

Pictures of naked people that we should all be outraged about. But don't worry. The eyes and nipples have been redacted with black stripes to protect us. And in this day especially, we should all be so scared of this, I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of what's really being policed. He is even enticed to enter the world of homosexuals, lesbians, sadists, masochists. And why he's so afraid of it. This weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the communist masters of deceit.

Ah, yes, communism. But it's not just the porn the Communist Party pipeline. Sex-mad magazines are helping to create criminals faster than we can build jails to house them. When I was younger, I used to just tune this kind of stuff out. But reflecting on it now, what fascinates me is his solution. The law is our weapon. He wants to get the police involved. And you and I have a constitutional guarantee to police protection of our welfare. But what's interesting is that for him, policing doesn't start with police departments.

It starts with us, recognizing the seeds of evil in our own desires. And he's recruiting us to surveil each other. If you see something, say something. Report objectionable material to the police. Every arrest and prosecution, every conviction is a step in the education of the public to the solution of the problem. And he really wants you to know that the law is on your side when you do. We have a constitutional guarantee of protection against obscenity. The narrators write about that part. There is a law that focuses directly on obscenity. And the guy that created that law

sounded a lot like him. He started his crusade all the way back in the 19th century. But back then, the police were not on his side. In fact, they were one of his biggest obstacles. So to win his battle, America's first professional vice fighter would have to completely redefine what policing even is. Oh God, deliver us, Americans, from evil. From Wondery and Crooked Media,

I'm Chinjarai Kumunika, and this is Empire City, Episode 5, The Moral Crusade. What's the first step to growing your business? Getting people to notice you. But how do you do that? Two words, constant contact. Your struggle with expensive, slow, But how do you do that? Two words, constant contact.

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Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca If your idea of fun is paying for sexy time, then 19th century New York might have been the place for you. After the Civil War, New York's population has ballooned to over a million people for the first time. And with that explosion of people, there's also an explosion of sex work. All kinds of folks are selling sex, either as their main job or as a side hustle. There's around 600 brothels and late-night spots spread throughout lower Manhattan. Sex is everywhere. There is a brothel that is operating in plain sight with sex workers hanging out the

windows. Amy Werbel, an expert on this moment in New York history, says that inside that brothel, men are paying $5 each for a particular kind of show. And it was called the Busy Fleas. Women would strip each other naked, they would kiss and lick each other, and then the men could choose one Busy Flea to take upstairs. Or you could pay more and you could take more than one Busy Flea upstairs. Brothels like these also offer a treasure trove of illicit delights. Porn, sex toys, homemade aphrodisiacs, and after the invention of the phonograph,

dirty records. Now some of these dirty records are poems and songs about sex with names like The Virtues of Raw Oysters, which starts with the words I'm dying for skin. But there are also records about other things that respectable people aren't supposed to talk about. Like this version of the famous soliloquy from Hamlet,

but rewritten to be about syphilis. He starts out, to pee or not to pee, that is the question. To drug and pee, to pee for a chance to burn. Hey, there's the rub. So people are in this brothel doing their thing, working, playing, listening to the latest hit about venereal disease, when suddenly there's an unusually loud knock on the door. Now, if I was in this situation, I might be panicking, like, is this the police? When the madam opens the door, standing in front of her is a bulldog of a man with big mutton chops, and he's frowning. The man steps inside, and instead of choosing a woman, he pulls out a notepad. He meticulously documents the show.

He stays to see the entire thing and writes about every horrible thing that he saw. The man's name is Anthony Comstock, and he's no cop. Anthony Comstock, he was like a cartoon caricature of an evangelical vice fighter. He called himself a soldier of the cross. Comstock is determined to rescue as many people as he can from the dangers of sexual pleasure, whether they want to be rescued or not. He's horrified at the unapologetic indulgence in front of him. And his first thought might have been to go to the police.

But at this brothel, that's not going to work. The police are regular customers. The brothel is right behind the 15th Police Precinct. And when Comstock stepped in, there was probably a cop right next to him getting a lap dance. They're all over the place. And a lot of people will probably stop their crusade right there once they realize they'll be going up against a whole lot of horny, violent police officers.

But Comstock is just getting started. And to get why this guy isn't about to back down, you got to understand how he grew up. Comstock grows up believing that God is constantly watching you. If a person reads even one illicit book or sees one pornographic image, that they would carry the sin of that with them forever. Comstock was raised in a small religious town in Connecticut that was founded by Puritans. And that's probably where he learns that if he wants to enter those sweet pearly gates,

he has to stay on the straight and narrow. Any aberration from a life of devotion to God is going to land you in the fires of hell, quite literally. He believes in a hell with serpents and winged demons and fire. Comstock has big fundamentalist energy. He's fueled by religious fervor. And according to his diaries, by his own shame and guilt. He writes about probably masturbating. He is 18 years old and he keeps writing, I sinned again and I'm so upset with myself and I need to try harder.

Comstock felt that he had failed God. And he thought that if he could clean up vice, he could make up for his own sins in the eyes of God and be allowed to enter into the kingdom of heaven. But for the time being, he was stuck here on earth, forced to participate in worldly struggles. He fought in the Civil War, but the other soldiers made fun of him for being religious and prude. So when he got out? He decided that he would be a soldier for the Lord and he would go and fight the fiercest battle one could possibly wage. A holy war.

He had never been to New York City before, but he had heard about all the wicked pleasures on offer here. And when he gets here, he sees it with his own eyes. Smut, prostitution, sex for sale, everywhere. And it's not just that people are paying for sex. Something even deeper and more instinctual sets him off. He sees the whole system of arousal as the problem. Like if you could get rid of arousal, then you could get rid of sex outside of marriage.

So he starts asking around to find someone, anyone to join his crusade. He gets a tip from this police officer that the gentlemen who are the trustees of the Young Men's Christian Association, better known as the YMCA, have also been concerned about the flood of pornography in New York City. I always thought of the YMCA as the people who made the only gym in New York that I can almost afford. And of course, the namesake of a disco classic. What I didn't know was that during Comstock's time, the YMCA is a pretty powerful and rich evangelical group. They want to promote Christian values, and they have plenty of that Gilded Age money to do it. So Comstock writes a letter to one of the YMCA bigwigs, inviting them to join him in cleaning up the city.

And the next day, one of the most powerful people in the YMCA actually shows up at the department store where Comstock works. And says, you're the person we need. And so they cut a deal. They'll unleash Comstock on New York City to hunt down porn anywhere he can find it. We'll pay you three times your salary. You can quit your job as a clerk. And from that moment,

Comstock becomes America's first professional vice fighter. Comstock gets to work. He starts spending his nights wandering the streets, seeking out the filthiest, most godless displays of moral turpitude. That's when he visits that brothel on Green Street and dozens of others.

By the time Comstock shows up, the NYPD sees sex work as a part of city life that's not going away. One early police captain is recorded saying that as long as the brothels aren't bothering anyone, they quote, it would be better for them to remain than to be removed to a place where they would disturb the public. So since the police don't really care, Comstock goes above the police department, directly to the district attorney. He goes to the DA and he says, you have to do something about this. And then the DA is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, I'll do something about it. But the DA doesn't do anything about it.

He sends the cops to make a few small arrests of sex workers for show, and then lets everybody off. And Comstock is just absolutely outraged. You see, the problem isn't that the police don't see sex work as crime, or even that they're customers. Because actually, the police aren't just customers. The brothel madam is just paying the police to protect. They're basically like a protection service for the brothel.

They're making money from the brothel. Absolutely. They're participating in it. Absolutely. It's just part of the ecosystem of sex work in New York City in the 1860s and 1870s. This racket was growing all over New York. Comstock is up against a machine, an increasingly violent machine.

And if he's going to save the city from sex and gambling, he isn't just going to have to go around the NYPD. He's going to have to find a way to force the police to join his religious agenda. Agenda. in sports, corporate fraud. In our newest series, we go to Baltimore, where in the spring of 2017, a police corruption scandal shocked the city. At the heart of it was an elite plainclothes unit called the Gun Trace Task Force. It was supposed to be the Baltimore Police Department's best of the best, a group of highly decorated detectives who excelled at getting drugs and guns off the streets. But they operated with little oversight, creating an environment where

criminal cops could flourish by falsifying evidence and robbing suspects. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge American Scandal Police Corruption in Baltimore early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. Oh yeah, it just heats up. It just absorbs the heat. Okay, oh, I got something for you guys to look at too. Oh wow. It's the summer of 2023, and I'm sitting inside a house in New Jersey looking at brass knuckles from the 19th century. They look old, brown, and thinner than I expected, but they look sharp.

Even imagining being punched with these makes me wince. Those are his brass knuckles. What's it like to hold those in your hand? Quite awesome. What do you feel? They fit my fingers perfectly. The fingers belonged to a man named Bill Williams, but those brass knuckles were worn by his great-grandfather, Alexander S. Williams, one of the most infamous officers to a man named Bill Williams. But those brass knuckles were worn by his great-grandfather,

Alexander S. Williams, one of the most infamous officers in the history of the NYPD. He'd be talking, and there'd be a trouble. He probably would slip them on. Nobody would notice it, and right down you go. Maybe break a cheekbone, too. Right around the same time Anthony Comstock descended on New York, Alexander Williams got transferred to a neighborhood called the Tenderloin that was a hotbed of brothels and gambling.

And by the time he got there, Williams had already built up a legendary reputation for intimidation and violence. According to one account, just two days after he's assigned to patrol a new jurisdiction, Williams hunts down the two toughest characters in the neighborhood. When he finds them, he raises his club and beats them both unconscious. Then he picks one of them up and hurls him through the plate glass window of a saloon, and then does the same thing to the other guy.

This is how Williams develops his self-explanatory nickname, Clubber. He was not afraid of anybody. He could probably, you know, dominate people with his will because he was a cop and he kind of figured, well, I'm a cop, so who's going to mess with me? These days, it's pretty standard to call police law enforcement. But that's not quite how Clubber Williams sees his job. For him, the rule books don't matter. He even claimed

there's more law in the end of a nightstick than in a Supreme Court decision. In his new assignment in the Tenderloin, Clubber starts to make the rules as he sees fit, or to put it more accurately, as it fits his bank account. In fact, Clever William coins the neighborhood's nickname while he's talking about how much money he stands to make from bribes. He says that for most of his early days on the police force, he's been poor, eating chuck steak. But with the number of bribes he stands to make, he says, now I'm about to have a bit of tenderloin.

Here's one way it worked. A few days after you open the doors to a new brothel or saloon, you get a visit from a police officer like Williams. They ask for an initiation fee, maybe something equivalent to a hundred bucks or two hundred bucks or maybe even five hundred bucks. Then, every month, the police come back for more. If you don't pay, they arrest you and take you to jail. The NYPD has basically become extortionists, pimps in uniform, and it's making cops like Williams a lot of money. He liked the good things in life. You know, he liked to eat well.

I'm sure he had, like, you know, drank well. They went to nice restaurants. He probably threw good parties. Bill Williams says that part of Clubber's legacy is well known in the family. He had a couple of yachts. His wife was Eleanor. They called them the Eleanors. I believe that he eventually had four of them.

You know, Eleanor I, Eleanor II, Eleanor III, Eleanor IV. Star of the Pendulum, sung by Mr. Winf Denny. In fact, Williams' control and exploitation of the vice industry becomes so legendary in New York, two black composers named Bob Cole and Billy Johnson record a song ridiculing him called Czar of the Tenderloin. The czar, the czar, the czar of the tenderloin. Clubber Williams is an example of all the moral indecency and corruption that Comstock wants to put a stop to. If Comstock is going to take on Cleber Williams and his fellow officers

to save all these sinful souls, he's going to need real power. So he goes over the heads of the police chief and the district attorney and the mayor all the way to the federal government. This is actually a really important moment in American history that almost nobody knows about. They send Comstock to Washington, D.C. to lobby for the first federal law which will make circulation of obscenity illegal. In 1873, Comstock goes to D.C. He may have been just one guy, but he represented a growing movement of evangelical reformers trying to clean up America's cities. And Comstock and his allies are able to convince Congress to pass the Comstock Act, a federal law that's still on the books today.

The Comstock Act is the first major federal anti-obscenity law in American history. It makes it illegal to send, quote, obscene, lewd, or lascivious, immoral, or indecent materials through the U.S. mail. The Comstock Act defines obscenity so broadly that it can be used to go after not just people making pornography, but sex workers, brothel owners, activists, journalists, and writers. This is the first time that obscenity becomes illegal in federal law with a mechanism for enforcement. So now it is illegal to send obscenity through the U.S. mail, and Comstock is appointed an inspector for the United States Postal Service.

As an inspector, Comstock isn't a cop with the NYPD. He's actually even more influential. He's a federal inspector with national authority. He's even allowed to carry a weapon. And he makes it clear that public enemy number one is dildos. I mean, like, not just dildos, but really anything he considers pornographic. Some of his financial backers at the YMCA are like, wait, is this what we signed up for? The leadership of the YMCA says, you know what, this isn't really the direction we want to go.

We want to build gymnasiums. We want to have libraries. We want to offer all kinds of healthy entertainments for young men to keep them from getting into trouble. But this doesn't stop Comstock. In fact, it presents a new opportunity. Comstock and a few of his backers create a new organization called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. And it gets incorporated by the New York State Legislature. And the Incorporation Act says that one half of all of the fines that are collected will go to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. And so when someone gets fined $500 for producing, you know, a photograph of a nude woman, $250 goes to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. So it sounds like there's a real incentive there to find stuff that goes beyond any kind of ethics or morals.

There's an economic incentive. Is that right? It's a racket. You know, the more porn he finds, the more money they have to find porn. The same way the NYPD has a financial stake in keeping the sex trade going, Comstock and his society now have a financial stake in destroying it. But Comstock has an advantage. Because of that incorporation act, the police are now legally required to make arrests whenever Comstock orders them to. With Comstock at the wheel, the NYPD is now forced to take on Vice.

The cops start confiscating enormous quantities of porn and other sexual objects. He writes such meticulous records. Every book he burned, he weighed. So he's constantly recording how many pounds of pornographic books he's burned, how many photographs, how many dildos he's sent to the incinerator in New Jersey. And all of this is listed. And I feel like, who are these account books for? And I thought, you know, they're really kind of for God.

Shit is getting weird. Under Comstock's leadership, the NYPD helps him to seize and destroy 134,000 pounds of books, 190,000 dirty photos, 130,000 newspapers, 20,000 letters, and 60,000 rubber sex toys. It's hard for me to imagine a dude like Comstock forcing a thug like Clubber Williams to seize dildos. And let's be real, Clubber's not going to do anything he doesn't want to do. Clubber ignores Comstock and lets a whole stretch of 6th Avenue run like it's Vegas, with gambling houses all up and down the strip. But on the whole, Comstock gets better and better at weaponizing the NYPD. And when police try to say no to Comstock, he says, look, I get that you're police, but I'm the feds.

You got to fall in line. The police really hated Anthony Comstock. He was a snitch. You know, he was sort of forcing them to take on cases they may not have thought were important. And it's not all smut mags and sex toys. Comstock forces the police to raid brothels, saloons, and even theaters where someone might be in the balcony with an escort, getting what they paid for.

In one case, Comstock uses the NYPD to shut down a play. Later, when the producers were brought into court... A police officer shows up as a witness for the defense, saying that, you know, this theatrical production was a lot of fun. I took my family to it several times. So I made the arrest, but I don't think these people are really guilty of anything. Even the police start to wonder, where will this end? But Comstock is about to catapult his campaign to a whole other level when he focuses all of his cunning and federal authority on a new enemy,

women who are determined to make their own reproductive choices. After successfully bending the police to his will, Comstock's in Bolton. He's ready to expand beyond pornographers and brothel keepers. Now he's setting his sights on abortion providers. Abortion has always been part of America's history. The notion that this is something people didn't do in the past is very, very wrong. Author Jennifer Wright says the practice of abortion goes far beyond American and even European history. I promise you there has never been a society in history without abortion. In mid-19th century America is no exception.

Abortion is considered a folk practice, and it's not heavily policed. If you opened the Herald in the early days of sensationalistic journalism, you'd also see the early days of sensationalistic advertising. You'd find a motley crew of exaggerated personalities selling their various potions and wares, making all kinds of outrageous claims. And alongside ads for carriage horses and tooth powders, you'd see listed Madam Restell, female physician. Madam Restell spent a fortune on advertising. The mixtures were crude and dangerous by modern medical standards. They were made of things like turpentine and tansy oil.

This was a time where you could smash any herbs you wanted into a pill and say, okay, this will help with your insomnia. This will help with your headaches. This will help with your heartburn. But Ristel's pills effectively ended pregnancy. And she realized that there was a massive demand for them very quickly as soon as women started taking these and finding that they were effective. She opens an office on Greenwich Street and starts providing surgical abortions. And she adds a boarding house where women can recuperate. Madam Restell paid really close attention to her patients after they'd had abortions. She would sleep in the same bed with them to make sure that they weren't running a fever.

She would bring them soup and meals three times a day. And in under a decade, Restell becomes a millionaire. As soon as Madam Restell started making money, she was riding through town in a gorgeous carriage. She was covered in diamonds. She wore beautiful clothing. She starts throwing extravagant parties and riding down Fifth Avenue decked out in silk and jewels. But she does have haters, moralists and preachers, including the Archbishop of New York. And around the time that he was getting ready

to buy a plot of land and build his house on it, he said something unpleasant about Madame Ristel in one of his sermons. Madame Rostel was outraged and she outbid him by over $100,000 for this plot of land. Wow. And she built her mansion upon it. She really did not give any fucks. No, she didn't. Never give a fuck about anything.

The mansion she builds is four stories tall in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with ornate marble columns and a line of mahogany stables along 52nd Street. On the bottom floor, Madame Ristel keeps her office, and throughout the day you see people going in and out, often carrying bottles of pills and chemicals,

always keeping an eye out for the police. By the time Estelle becomes famous, new laws had made abortion a minor crime if it's performed before the quickening, the first time a mother can feel a baby kicking, usually around four months into pregnancy. Abortion before quickening was still just a misdemeanor. It was never punishable by more than a year in jail if you performed one. And the vast majority of the time, you were just going to be punished with a fine. And the fine would probably be something like $100.

And Madame Rostel was charging patients up to $100. So it wasn't considered a terribly serious offense. But even though the police mostly leave her alone, Madam Ristel's patients become a target for the NYPD. There was a police stationed outside of Madam Ristel's mansion for a while, and newspapers said that's a very good thing for the policeman because he is going to get so many bribes from people going in and out of that mansion. As usual, under the guise of protecting

women and children, the police are just finding a way to line their pockets. The NYPD has their hands in all kinds of illegal businesses. Extorting Ristel's patients is just a way for them to add abortion to the list of things they can profit from. And Madam Ristel knows exactly what they're up to. She despised the police. She hated them because she saw a lot of them as corrupt. When people come to visit me, they have to, like, bring a tip for the police officer. But that's how the NYPD, the regular police, are moving. Everything changes with Anthony Comstock. This is a dude who literally weighs the dildos he confiscates.

How do you think he's going to feel about Restelle? Madam Restelle flies in the face of everything Anthony Comstock believes. Comstock hates abortion. He believes that childbearing is a woman's highest possible purpose. And so he sets out to eliminate the obscenity of abortion in New York City. Now, what's considered obscene, that's anything Anthony Comstock says is obscene. So that extends to any pictures of nudes, but it also extends to any information about abortion, or certainly sending any birth control pills through the mail, or providing anyone with information on how they might find an abortionist in their city,

or how they might perform an abortion upon themselves. Madam Ristel keeps providing abortions, but she's forced to do her work more discreetly. She stops using the kind of ads she printed at the beginning of her career, because now those ads will get her thrown in jail. And that's not all because of Comstock. The Comstock Act plays a huge part, but there's a broader cultural shift happening as well. You can see it in the way newspapers change how they write about her. When Madame Rostel first started being written about, they write about how she's so pretty, she's so charming to talk to.

She has this really interesting philosophy about people having less children. And then as abortion becomes more taboo, it shifts. And then she starts getting written about as this horrible demon who has no respect for the laws of marriage. Then it becomes Madame Rochelle is trying to destroy society as we know it. And she has to be ideally burnt at the stake, but at least incarcerated. The papers start calling her the wickedest woman in New York. Anthony Comstock is determined to stop her, so he comes up with a plan. One night in 1878, Ristel hears a knock on her door. She doesn't recognize the man standing in front of her, but welcomes him into her waiting room. It's Comstock in a disguise.

Anthony Comstock concocts a story that he has a lady friend who is pregnant and she needs not to meet. She was becoming very ill and this pregnancy might kill her. And Madame Ristel gives the pills to Anthony Comstock. She says, these aren't infallible, but have your lady friend take them. If they haven't worked by later in the week, you bring her back to me, and then we'll proceed from there. With that, Comstock walks out the door. Because Ristel had provided him with, quote, obscene information, he now has the power to put her in jail.

I think this was the highlight of Anthony Comstock's life. I think he would have felt, this is going to be the thing that really shows New York high society that they have to respect me because I can go for the richest person in town. The next day, Comstock returns to Madam Ristel's office with the police. They tell her she's under arrest. Ristel says, fine, but there's something I need to do before we leave. She tells them that she's going to need to have a lovely oyster lunch first and she makes him sit and wait while she just delicately eats oysters one by one

until she's ready to go. Restelle is arrested. The judge sets her bail at $10,000. She pays it and goes home. And it's pretty clear that she's about to be made an example of. It's possible she'll be in prison for years. But that's not what happens. Because on April 1st, 1878,

a chambermaid finds her nude body in the bathtub with her throat cut. Her obituary in the New York Times reads, End of a criminal life. Most historians have gone with the coroner's theory that Madame Rostel's death was a suicide. But what if it was murder? Hear me out. We know she had enemies.

The reporting is inconsistent. The New York Times reports that the tub was filled with blood, but the New York Tribune says that there was no blood in the water. It had washed away. Reports also say that her house had a burglar alarm, and when the alarm was examined, it was found that the bells had been disconnected. But for me, the thing that seems most shaky

about the idea that Madame Rostel committed suicide is the nature of the alleged suicide itself. In recent years, one coroner put it this way, women do not cut their throats when they commit suicide, and they certainly never commit suicide naked. That's what told me this was a homicide. Of course, there's no way to know for sure what happened. But whether Madam Ristel's death was a suicide or a murder,

it didn't stop women in New York from continuing to provide abortions. Ten days after Madam Ristel's apparent suicide, the police arrest another woman for providing an abortion. The papers describe her as a disciple of Restelle. And the cop that arrests her is Clubber Williams. Comstock uses the larger cultural shift to force cops to target abortion providers and more of the sex and gambling houses that had inspired his crusade. But for the most part, those arrests are just for show. Unwittingly, Comstock actually makes smut more fashionable. Saloons and concert halls, more popular.

Theater producers actively try to get Comstock to denounce their shows as obscene so they can say, come see the show Anthony Comstock doesn't want you to see. And that allows Clubber Williams and his fellow officers to extort even more money from the underground economy. Comstock tries to take Williams down, testifying against him in front of a grand jury in 1883. He takes the stand and presents what seems like damning evidence,

proof that Clubber knew about various illicit establishments throughout the city and chose to do nothing. But not only is Clubber not disciplined, he's promoted, and eventually he rises to the rank of police inspector. When I look back at how all of this played out, I'm trying to understand, who was actually protected by any of this? In some ways, the NYPD were more honest about that than Comstock.

For them, all this policing wasn't about religion or saving the city from sin. It was about making sure that they could dip their beaks in and profit wherever sin was happening. And after all the porn raids and federal policies, corrupt cops like Williams

and moral crusaders like Comstock end up more powerful. But sex workers, sex educators, people who provide abortions, and the women who need them all wind up in the crosshairs. Women were still having abortions, but they couldn't go to anyone for help. They couldn't even read about how you could effectively perform an abortion on yourself. So you saw so many women just throwing themselves downstairs, using any spiky objects they could find, drinking poison, doing anything they could

to try to induce an abortion. And it is truly, truly horrifying. Anthony Comstock has the blood of thousands of women on his hands. For an all tooief period between 1973 and 2022, there was some level of federal protection for women seeking abortions and for abortion providers. But since Roe v. Wade was overturned, states have continued to outlaw sending abortion medication and information through the mail, bringing renewed concern about the Comstock Act. Living in a society where our bodies, our pleasures, and even our survival are constantly surveilled and legislated means that we're always playing defense. While the powerful make a mockery of ethics and justice, we're forced to contort ourselves to fit inside and between boundaries

that never made sense and justify the choices we make about our own lives. What so many folks want to see just once is for those who police us to have to explain their behavior, for them to be put on the stand while we watch and judge. That's next time on Empire City. Follow Empire City on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

If you have a tip about a story you think we should investigate, please write to us at Wondery.com. Empire City is a production of Wondery and Crooked Media. I'm your host and executive producer, Chinjarae Kumunika. For Crooked Media, our senior producer is Peter Bresnan. Our managing producer is Leo Duran. Our senior story editor is Diane Hodson. Our producer is Sam Riddell. Bowen Wong and Sidney Rapp are our associate producers.

Sound design, mixing, and original score by Axel Kukutye. Our historical consultant and fact checker is History Studios. For Wondry, our senior producer is Mandy Gorenstein. Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our coordinating producer is Mariah Gossett. The executive producer at Push Black is Lily Workne. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geismar, Katie Long, Tommy Vitor, and Diane Hodson. Executive producers at Wondery are Nigery Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent. Was there a crime committed?

As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't. Guilty by Design dives into the wild story of Alexander and Frank, interior designers who in the 80s landed the jackpot of all clients. We went to bed one night and the next morning we woke up as one of the most wanted people in the United States. What are they guilty of? You can listen to Guilty by Design exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.