BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (53 page)

Reactions from the public at large were even harsher. New York mayor Smith Ely, Jr., hearing the news, couldn’t believe his ears. Sweeny had originally offered to pay the city $600,000 to settle the charges before he’d left for Europe back in 1873, Ely told reporters, and he blasted Fairchild now for agreeing to accept $200,000 less.
⁶²
Tammany Boss John Kelly accused prosecutors of having given Sweeny a special back channel to Tweed “compromise” talks so he could scuttle any agreement that might hurt him.
⁶³

For Tweed, the Sweeny deal meant something worse: he’d been cheated. His testimony had become worthless though his draft “confession” had doubtless been used as a bargaining chip. John Townsend, hopping mad, wrote a quick note to Fairchild insisting he keep his bargain: “I am just informed that you have effected a settlement in the case against Peter B. Sweeny & there is reason to believe that the amount obtained was secured, in a great degree, by the use you have made of the statement I furnished to you… by direction of my client, Mr. Tweed. Under the promise that he should be discharged if any use was made of that statement, I now request the fulfillment of your agreement.”
⁶⁴

Fairchild, stung at the criticism, made Townsend wait six days for an answer. He denied everything: “After careful examination I have come to the conclusion that the testimony which said Tweed could give as shown by said statement would not justify his release,” he wrote in a terse letter, returning the package, failing to mention any of the hints or understandings he’d made with Tweed or his lawyer.
⁶⁵
In fact, Fairchild hadn’t even bothered waiting for Townsend to receive the answer before he leaked the letter to a gaggle of reporters after a late-night dinner at the Manhattan Club.
⁶⁶
Townsend read it in the
New York Tribune
before he’d even seen it.

Recriminations came quickly.
^F
OOTNOTE
Excuses aside, though, Fairchild had crippled his political prospects in New York State; neither Sam Tilden nor Horatio Seymour, his two mentors, could help him. Fairchild’s own allies gasped at his bungling of the case. “You have refused to let Tweed out to tell the story of these frauds, and so we must look elsewhere,” William Whitney complained. Tweed, in his statement, had suggested a Public Works deputy, William King, as someone who could corroborate his claims. “Now why is King kept away, and why should not he be allowed to come back,” he asked.
⁷⁰
“That Fairchild attempted to suppress the full truth about the Tweed Ring seems clear,” Whitney’s biographer, Mark Hirsch concluded.
⁷¹

Even Noah Davis, the judge who’d originally sentenced Tweed to twelve years’ imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island, blasted the attorney general’s decision on the Sweeny case. “The worst feature of [the Tweed ring crimes] is, that notwithstanding that all these crimes have been so clearly proven …, nevertheless the whole body of those conspirators against the city and its treasury go substantially unwhipped of justice,” he announced from the bench that December. “To my mind, this presents a spectacle so abhorrent to my notion of justice,… a parody of public justice.”
⁷²
With one exception: Tweed.

That year, the state Democratic party snubbed Fairchild at its annual convention by denying him re-nomination to his post as Attorney General, courtesy primarily of Tammany leader John Kelly, offended at Fairchild’s duplicity in the affair.

In December, meanwhile, Peter Sweeny left New York City and sailed for Havre on the steamship
France
, where he would spent the next twelve years living in Paris and raising his one son, telling anyone who’d ask that he’d been fully exonerated in the Tweed Ring scandals and had a judge’s statement to prove it.

CHAPTER 22

CLEAN BREAST

“ I can’t; I am in the same condition as a man who is a good swimmer—you tie his hands and throw him in the water, and say: ‘Swim, you are a good swimmer,’ but he will drown… Give me [books and records] to refresh my memory, and I will tell you all I know in that connection.”

—
TWEED
, asked to testify about bills in the Albany legislature he’d influenced seven years earlier, September 21, 1877.
¹

“ Nathaniel Sands was taken care of as Tax Commissioner, at fifteen thousand dollars a year’; Mr. Henry was made Dock Commissioner; Joseph F. Daly was made a judge, at fifteen thousands dollars a year, for fourteen years.”

—
TWEED
, asked how he’d “taken care of” the New York Citizen’s Association to stop it from criticizing his regime. September 28, 1877.
²

M
ONTHS passed and still he sat in jail. Summer came and the hot sun made the neighborhood around Ludlow Street stink from wretched smells of garbage abandoned in the filthy streets and nearby market. Tweed kept a photograph of his estate in Greenwich with its wide green lawns and soft, cool breezes off the Long Island Sound—a place he hadn’t seen in four years. He hung it on the wall and thought of it often while locked inside the stuffy, crowded jail.

Tweed had given up trying to defend himself against the barrage of lawsuits that prosecutors still threw at him; he had no more money to lose. He figured his financial worth now at barely $5,000, compared with $3 million at its height, and he knew he’d never walk free except by an act of kindness from the state. Following Townsend’s advice, he formally instructed him to confess judgment in every case. “My defenses … have been disclosed to the Attorney General personally in several interviews on his personal assurance to me that if I made such statement I should be released from confinement,” he wrote, Fairchild’s double-cross still sticking in his throat.
Ultimately, he’d confess to three more lawsuits raising his total outstanding debt to some $25 million.
³

Tweed still wanted to talk, now more than ever, and plenty in New York City still wanted to hear him, even if not the Attorney General. He wasn’t without friends, even now, people prepared to help him for their own reasons.

For instance, there was John Kelly. Kelly, square-faced and full-bearded, had never fit with Tweed’s crowd when they held the whip hand at Tammany Hall. Kelly had grown up poor on New York’s Hester Street but was good with his fists and smart with numbers, a quiet, serious man. He’d risen fast in the rough-and-tumble Tammany of the 1850s, an early Irish face in the party’s upper hierarchy. He became a Sachem while winning elections as alderman, congressman, and ultimately sheriff, a job where he’d admitted collecting a fortune of $150,000 in fees for arresting criminals, collecting fines, and running local jails. Here he’d won his nickname “Honest John.”
^F
OOTNOTE
Tilden’s reform crowd had hand-picked Kelly to challenge Oakey Hall for mayor in 1868 against Tweed’s machine, but Kelly had fallen sick that year, chronic bronchitis worsened by public speaking and a parade of personal tragedies: Kelly’s wife and his 21-year-old son both had died of consumption and a daughter had shown worsening symptoms.

Kelly needed rest. He left the city that year and spent the next two years abroad traveling with his daughters in Europe, North Africa, and the Holy Land. He returned in late 1871 just as Tweed’s regime was collapsing in scandal, bringing home from Italy four large religious oil paintings that he donated to the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Back in New York, reformers turned again to Kelly, this time as a fresh face to rebuild a demoralized Tammany Hall. Kelly seized the chance and took firm control. He had himself appointed Comptroller, the same post earlier held by Slippery Dick Connolly and reformer Andrew H. Green, so he could watch the city’s money and keep things clean. He made a sensation by ousting two corrupt city police board members, backing Governor Sam Tilden’s war against the upstate Canal Ring, and keeping Tammany free of scandal. Soon, he controlled virtually every appointment in Gotham.

Critics called him a “dictator,” but Kelly denied it. “I never dictate the nomination of any man,” he once told a reporter with a wink. “My advise is often asked, and I always give it freely and frankly.”
⁵
He held court each day in a small brownstone on Lexington Avenue behind closed shutters and dim chandeliers—the gloomy darkness suited him— wearing a plain suit and a small gold watch chain. But people who knew him never trifled with the figure behind the mild blue eyes and gentle nature. “John Kelly is a man who never forgets an injury,” Oakey Hall said of him. “Beneath [his] mastiff face and neck slumber the passions of hatred and revenge.”
⁶

John Kelly felt particular hatred these days toward Charles Fairchild for his high-handed treatment of Tweed. Kelly had volunteered to act as a go-between during the “compromise” talks and heard Fairchild give the same misleading come-ons as Tweed had. He felt he’d been used when Fairchild torpedoed the deal. Kelly recognized value in the old Boss. Tweed was a disgraced man, but many of the city’s immigrant poor still admired him. He’d stolen money, but paid his penalty in prison and now wanted to make amends. To “Honest John,” Tweed’s case presented an opportunity: Let him talk. The old man on the witness stand publicly confessing his crimes, fingering all the crooked thieves of his era, would prove how serious the new “reformed” Tammany was in cleaning its own house.

Kelly pulled strings and things happened. He gave his blessing and, on July 17 that year, the city’s Board of Aldermen voted to launch its own investigation of the Tweed scandals and the state’s bungled prosecutions. They appointed a three-member committee with Democrat Samuel Lewis as chairman. Its charge would be broad: to take public testimony on “all the facts and circumstances connected with the organization known as the ‘Tweed Ring.’” Its star witness, speaking out for the first time, would be the former Boss himself.
⁷

Tweed arrived by carriage for his first day before the aldermen wearing a blue flannel suit, the color contrasting starkly with his white hair and white necktie. From his jailhouse carriage, he got out and hobbled up the marble steps of City Hall, escorted by Deputy Sheriff McGonigal, the same officer who’d arrested him at Blackwell’s Island two years earlier and now helped the old man along. The walk made Tweed breathless by the time he reached the Common Council room, a large chamber with high ceiling, cut crystal chandeliers, a polished wood dais, tall windows facing the park, and public galleries behind a brass rail.

Tweed had shaved off his beard and now wore a thick gray mustache; those close enough to see remarked how well he looked sitting at the witness table. When he stood up, though, they saw the cost of his years behind bars. Tweed could barely take two steps without a cane, his legs too weak to carry his large body. “He stoops more than usual in walking, and the scanty hair on his head has been bleached somewhat whiter,” a
New York Herald
writer noted.
⁸

The session lasted just a few minutes that day. John Townsend, Tweed’s lawyer, had taken sick and couldn’t attend and Tweed refused to testify without him. The aldermen agreed to a delay. Three days later, though, he came back and this time he didn’t disappoint either the panel or the small, curious crowd dotting the chamber—a mix of reporters, politicos, and old cronies. Sitting at the witness table with his now-healthy lawyer at this side, Tweed took his oath and cleared his throat. Hugh Cole, the committee’s lawyer, began the questioning. “I believe you are a native of the State of New York, Mr. Tweed?”

“I am, sir.”
⁹

“When did you first enter into public life?”

“In 1852, I think, sir,” he answered. “I was Alderman in 1852 and 1853. I have been Supervisor, Commissioner of the Board of Education, Representative in Congress, and State Senator.”

It didn’t take long for Tweed to find his voice and startle the crowd. As the counsel led him through a description of his early days with the county supervisors in the 1850s, Tweed quickly launched into a detailed account of bribes given and taken, skimming of county contracts, and plots to fix elections, naming names of county officials who played along, dead and alive. A week later, at the aldermen’s next session, he identified long lists of city contractors who’d cooperated in the bill-padding schemes, including even Jimmy O’Brien, the famous ex-sheriff now basking in celebrity as source of the
New-York Times’
famous “Secret Account” disclosures. Tweed detailed how O’Brien had attempted to extort $150,000 from him during the 1871 disclosures and how he’d sold his unpaid claim of “sheriff’s expenses” many times over. Then at the next session, he told the origins of the 1870 “Tweed Charter” and explained the bribes, favors, and backroom deals he’d made to win its approval in the state legislature, again naming senators and assemblymen who’d played the game.

Tweed gained confidence as he spoke. “Mr. Tweed manifested no nervousness, but answered the questions… promptly, fully, and with the old-time rapidity of speech,” a reporter wrote.
¹⁰
His disclosures—particularly his finger pointing—startled former friends all over town, people who’d long ago disowned him, assuming he’d never squeal. Tweed had always kept his tongue; “the most timid never dreaded being betrayed by Tweed,” the
New York Tribune
noted, “no one doubts that he is telling a great many awful truths.”
¹¹

Each time he’d testify, people he’d mentioned by name would virtually stand in line to call him a liar. “There is not a word of truth in it,” Isaac Oliver insisted of the Supervisor disclosures.
¹²
Jimmy O’Brien angrily rounded up reporters after Tweed’s revelation of his extortion attempts. “There is no truth in the story. I never sold Tweed my claim against the city,” he insisted.
¹³
At the next session, Tweed slammed him back by producing a copy of the actual sales document from O’Brien and presenting it publicly. “That settles Jimmy O’Brien,” he told the panel.
¹⁴

Similarly, after Tweed had detailed some of his pay-offs to newspapers, the
Albany Argus
flatly denied his claims: “it is simply and wholly false; false in detail and false in total, without one shadow of foundation from the commencement to the end.”
¹⁵
Tweed opened his next day before the aldermen by presenting a package of letters and cancelled checks proving $778,000 paid to that newspaper. “Men whom I have benefited in every way think that I am not able to defend myself, but I want them distinctly to know that I am—and that I am going to do it.”
¹⁶

By the fourth session, Tweed’s regular dissertations to the aldermen at City Hall had become a hot ticket. Crowds crammed the galleries and nearby hallways long before the opening gavel, wondering whom the old man would finger next. By his fifth day, the flood had become a torrent. “Several hundred persons were turned away yesterday from the Aldermanic chamber,” the
New York Herald
reported. “Every seat in the gallery was filled,” echoed the
Sun
; “the seats and every foot of standing room within the rail which divided the commoners from the sacred persons of the Aldermen were occupied by politicians.”
¹⁷

The committee settled into a pattern of meeting once or twice a week all through September and October and Tweed came to relish the carriage rides from Ludlow Street Jail to City Hall, about a mile away, the fresh air, the exercise, and the attention. The more he spoke, the more fluently the words rolled off his tongue as he sat at the witness table, particularly as he explained the inner workings of the Ring, the 1870 Tax Levy central to so many probes, his splitting of spoils with Sweeny, Connolly, and Oakey Hall. “He seemed bursting with facts and figures, and a pertinent question would open a flood-gate of volubility,” a
New York Tribune
reporter put it.
¹⁸
Sometimes he took on a “jaunty air,” wrote another reporter, “the promptness with which his answers were given almost baffled the skill of the short-hand reporters.”
¹⁹

Tweed recognized that the public had its eye him and that his future freedom could depend whether people believed we was leveling with them. When his lawyer John Townsend told him not to answer one particular question on election frauds because it was overly broad, Tweed bickered with him in public. “Well, you must recollect that if I don’t answer the [question] they will say that I don’t want to answer them,” he argued. When Townsend suggested he should let his lawyer take the blame, Tweed snapped back: “Yes; but they won’t blame you for it. They will only blame me.”
²⁰