BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (46 page)

Tweed had written a letter to his sister-in-law Margaret, Richard’s wife, around this time saying that he got plenty of exercise in prison, ate well, and walked a quarter mile each day. He slept soundly.
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When Tweed’s turn came to testify, all eyes in the courtroom turned his way. He kissed the bible after taking his oath and spoke quickly. His largely backed Dewey in his testimony,
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then he lingered in the courtroom after the trial had ended. When the warden led him back outside to the street and a cheer greeted him on the sidewalk, he broke into a grin; an “expression of almost tearful pleasure suffused the face of the fallen chieftain,” a reporter noted.
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Warden Liscomb took Tweed directly back to Blackwell’s Island that day and Tweed returned to his daily hospital work. He’d have to wait six more months for another chance to cross the East River again. By then, he’d served more than a full year behind bars—the legal maximum penalty for a misdemeanor crime—and his lawyers had applied for a
habeas corpus writ
to free him. Judge Noah Davis himself had broken the law, they argued, by imposing a sentence larger than the statutes allowed. Now, they said, Tweed was being held illegally.

The warden again accompanied Tweed across the river for his court appearance, this time taking the steam ferry rather than a rowboat because of cold December winds. Tweed wore a low-crowned felt hat that covered his white hair; friends again commented on his healthy look, how the “enforced regularity of the life and the salubrity of the air on the Island” had agreed with him; gone was the “defiant confidence” that had once defined him.
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Tweed’s court appearance that day proved inconclusive; the judge, Comstock, deferred action until the next week. The warden took Tweed back to prison but they returned to New York again and Tweed this time entered the court surrounded by ten lawyers including his son, William Jr. Newsmen described him as talking vivaciously with a circle of relatives, politicos, policemen, and clerks while waiting for the judge to start. He read a newspaper as lawyers argued other cases. When his own came up, he snapped to attention, but the hearing again ended inconclusively. Judge Comstock refused to release Tweed but he set the stage for a hearing before the state Court of Appeals in Albany.

Tweed returned to Blackwell’s Island that night and he soon spent his second Christmas in prison, enjoying a dinner of corned beef, vegetables, soup and bread served in the prison hospital. A few of the inmates deprived themselves of their meals to save extra portions for “the old man” so he could eat seconds.

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The world went on without Tweed. Voters in New York State elected Samuel Tilden their new governor in 1874. Noah Davis, the judge who’d sentenced Tweed to prison, won promotion to chief justice of the state supreme court. Lyman Tremain, the prosecutor who’d recommended Tweed’s long sentence, won election to the United States Congress. Each had built his career on the same high-profile credential, his role in punishing the villain now locked away on Blackwell’s Island.

Oddly, one of Tilden’s first acts as governor was to issue a pardon for James H. Ingersoll, the city contractor whose inflated bills for repairing county armories had dominated the
New-York Times’
original 1871 disclosures. A jury had convicted Ingersoll of felony fraud shortly after Tweed and sentenced him to five years in prison, making him the only other Ring member to see the inside of a penitentiary. Now Tilden had freed him solely on condition that he testify against other defendants. Which ones? With Sweeny and Connolly in Europe and Oakey Hall acquitted, Tweed didn’t take long to figure out that he was the only one left.

Tweed’s own lawyers stayed busy too. Following his appearance before Judge Comstock in December, they took their case to the Court of Appeals in Albany that would take another six months, until June 15, finally to rule on the merits. Finally, good news for the former Boss: They ruled for Tweed unanimously. Judge Davis had been wrong, they decided. He’d overstepped. Tweed had been tried under a single misdemeanor indictment and could only be sentenced to a single misdemeanor penalty—a $250 fine and one year’s imprisonment—despite the fact that the jury had convicted him on 204 individual counts. That meant Tweed should have been released from prison the prior November 22, seven months earlier. They ordered him now released immediately.

The ruling brought a rush of excitement. Foster Dewey, who’d gone to Albany to help Tweed’s lawyers on the appeal, was thrilled and ran back to tell the Boss. He took an overnight train from Albany and reached Blackwell’s Island by 11 am the next morning. “We have got it!” he shouted, finding Tweed.

Tweed reacted coolly. He’d been disappointed before and, after nineteen months on Blackwell’s Island, he’d grown comfortable with the routine—waking early, working in the hospital now as its recording clerk, keeping the books and noting each patient’s coming and going, his medications, diagnosis, and progress. “Well, I expected it, but not so soon,” he told Dewey,
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showing little interest in leaving right away.

In fact, Tweed apparently smelled a rat. Samuel Tilden now reigned as governor in Albany with an eye toward a presidential nomination the next year and he had no intention of setting him free. Tilden had made Tweed the centerpiece of his “reform” resume, the reason voters had sent him to Albany in the first place. Tilden had anticipated the Appeals Court ruling and taken precautions. He’d quietly pushed through the Albany legislature a new law, the Public Remedy Act, authorizing the state to sue for funds stolen from local governments. Using it, he’d sent his prosecutors Charles O’Conor and Wheeler Peckham to file a new civil lawsuit against Tweed demanding repayment of $6.3 million—similar to the earlier suits stalled on appeal. They’d brought the case to Judge Noah Davis in New York City. Davis, sporting for a chance to re-engage, had promptly issued new orders for Tweed’s arrest, to be executed whenever Tweed was freed from Blackwell’s Island, if ever.

Noah Davis had reason to embrace this new line of attack. Having himself been the judge who had issued Tweed’s twelve-year prison term, he’d taken the appeals court’s reversal personally. Charles O’Conor had wasted no time taunting him over it. In a letter to Davis that month, he described how the decision gave Tweed the “grim satisfaction [of a] public humiliation of the judge who pronounced the illegal sentence.”
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Davis now obliged by setting things straight; he fixed bail on the new lawsuit at $3 million, the largest bail ever yet imposed on any person by any judge in the United States and triple the amount of county funds ever actually traced to Tweed by Tilden’s famous chart. And, O’Conor boasted, if they needed to raise it to $5 million to keep Tweed from walking free, they’d happily do so.
^F
OOTNOTE

At the same time, as extra insurance, prosecutor Wheeler Peckham convinced the local New York District Attorney, Benjamin Phelps, to apply for a fresh warrant for Tweed’s arrest based on an old 1873 indictment charging Tweed with fraudulently obtaining the mayor’s signature on one of the original Tax Levy warrants. Around the sheriff’s office, old timers spoke nostalgically of Tweed—“He was the best of the lot.” or “He stood his imprisonment like a man.”—even as they prepared to lock him up again.
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Tweed, meanwhile, looked frantically for an exit from the maze. He waited on Blackwell’s Island as his lawyer, David Dudley Field, made the rounds in Manhattan trying to find any wealthy soul willing to stand as bondsman for all or part of the $3 million bail. He got cold shoulders wherever he went. Anyone standing with Tweed could expect blistering public criticism plus prosecutors’ probing into their personal finances and business affairs—all likely to land in the newspapers. With Tilden as governor, who would want to link themselves to Tweed?

The prosecutors, taking no chances, now sent a deputy sheriff to Blackwell’s Island to take Tweed into custody immediately on his release. Finally, on June 23, a full week after the Appeals Court’s ruling, the odd game of musical chairs began. The warden ordered Tweed to be freed. He sent word to the prison hospital late that night after other inmates had gone to sleep. Tweed got up from his cot in the dark room, took his packed bag, and followed a guard to the warden’s office. Here, they weighed him, measured him, and returned his civilian clothes. Then the deputy, McGonigal, stepped forward and took him into custody. “You are my prisoner, Sir,” he told Tweed, to which Tweed replied “Oh, I know that. I’m ready to go with you.”
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Tweed wore a dark suit as a rowboat carried him and the deputy across the East River through the midnight darkness. In Manhattan, a carriage took them to the home of Tweed’s nephew Alfred Sands on East 26th Street to spend the night. The next morning, Tweed and the deputy rode together to the District Attorney’s office on Chambers Street in the new Courthouse, Tweed wearing a black coat, blue trousers, white vest and tie. His pocket watch dangled from a black cord across his shirt. He sat on a sofa and drank several glasses of ice water as the lawyers haggled over last-minute details. Friends who hadn’t seen Tweed since he’d entered prison nineteen months earlier gasped at the changes in him. He looked weak and fragile now. “His hair has become white,” a reporter noted, “his figure, once erect, is now bent. He is still robust, but his corpulency [sic.] appears to be unhealthy.”
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Still, they noted, he “walked briskly and with an upright bearing, now and then nodding smilingly in response to the salutation of some friend.”
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Tweed took his place in the Court of Oyer and Terminer and stood as District Attorney Phelps asked that he enter pleas on the two latest indictments. His lawyer David Dudley Field objected: Tweed had already pleaded “not guilty” on twenty-two other indictments and he’d had no opportunity to study the newest charges. After some argument, they all returned to the District Attorney’s office to iron out details for posting bail: $4,000 for the two new charges and $1,000 each on fourteen older indictments.

Afterward, Tweed led the entourage—his sons, the lawyers, and the deputy sheriff—out into the sunshine on Chambers Street where a crowd of curiosity seekers instantly surrounded them. While waiting for a carriage, Tweed leaned against an iron stair railing and stared blankly into space. They rode the short distance to Tweed’s office on Duane Street—a place he hadn’t seen in over six months—where deputy sheriff McGonigal now arrested him again on the $6.3 million civil suit and demanded $3 million in bail. This time, Tweed had none to offer.

With his prisoner in custody, they all piled back into carriages again—Tweed, the sheriff, his sons—and rode up Broadway to Delmonico’s restaurant where they enjoyed lunch in a private parlor off the main dining room. Then McGonigal and Tweed left the others and stepped outside for the final leg of their journey, the brief ride to Ludlow Street where the jail stood. Here, the warden, William Dunham, had prepared a first floor apartment for the former Boss with a bedroom and sitting room facing the street. He slept well that night; it seemed he only slept well now in jail.

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Ludlow Street Jail looked more like a library than a prison with its red brick front, walled-in exercise yard and eighty-seven cells, each with bed, washbasin, and wide, barred window, placed smack in the commercial district of lower Manhattan next to the Essex Street Market.
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OOTNOTE
Originally designed as a debtors’ prison, it now housed both “boarders”—prisoners who paid for their keeping—and non-paying inmates. For fifteen dollars a week, one could eat decent meals at a dining table and sleep in a sparse but comfortable room. Those who couldn’t afford it lived upstairs in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot cell, emptied their own slop-pails, and ate by themselves.

Tweed had reason for hope on returning to Ludlow Street, just half a mile from his old boyhood neighborhood and three blocks from what they used to call “Tweed Plaza.” His lawyers had filed two new sets of motions to win his freedom: one to reduce his bail from $3 million down to a manageable size and the other to quash the backlog of over thirty indictments hanging over his head. Meanwhile, Tweed asked to be left alone. He refused to see reporters or politicians, limiting his company to his family, his doctor, and his lawyers. He studied the daily newspapers and bristled at one story saying he kept a stock of fine wines to drink behind bars; Tweed claimed he’d stopped drinking altogether on the advice of his doctor.

In late July, though, the picture darkened. Judge Barrett, the latest to hear his legal motions, rejected them all. He refused either to lower Tweed’s impossible $3 million bail or to vacate any of the old pending indictments filed since December 1872. Tweed knew that no appeals judge would help him now; he’d become too hot to touch. Looking forward, he saw an endless web of prosecutions. Eleven criminal indictments still hung over him in addition to the state’s $6.3 million civil suit. If he beat one, they’d only arrest him to face another, with bail set deliberately out of reach. So long as Sam Tilden sat in the governor’s mansion with an eye toward the White House, he could expect no mercy. Meanwhile, his lawyers’ bills had grown astronomically, nearing $400,000. His losses on real estate topped another $1 million and family expenses were draining him $50,000 per year. At this rate, he’d soon be a pauper. He hadn’t been allowed to see his two youngest sons, six-year-old George and ten-year-old Charles, in almost two years.