BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (60 page)

Chapter 19

1. No good deed goes unpunished, and Brennan would later suffer for his kindness to prisoners. About a month after sending Tweed off to Blackwell’s Island, Brennan would take custody of another Tammany-ite, former state senator Henry Genet convicted of stealing government property. When Brennan’s deputy allowed Genet a few last liberties, Genet returned the favor by slipping away and escaping to Canada. An angry trial judge punished Brennan and his deputy both by imposing fines of $250 and 30-day sentences in the Ludlow Street Jail.
   

2. Bail in American courts today is limited today almost exclusively to criminal cases, not civil lawsuits, and while failure to pay a civil judgment today can result in bankruptcy, it is not a cause for imprisonment. Debtors’ prisons in America generally were phased out a century ago. Under modern practice, the state’s entire plan to keep Tweed locked away by setting unreachable bail on civil cases would be invalid.
   

3. Today, it is the site of the Seward Park High School.
   

4. Joseph Johnson, a former “Big Six” fireman under Tweed, would tell reporters it was “well known” that Tweed’s imprisonment on Ludlow Street was ”merely nominal” and several of his excursions were “to the residence of a lady in Fifth Avenue, near Thirty-ninth street.” The address vaguely matches that of a Mrs. MacMullin, mentioned in similarly unsubstantiated Tweed rumors eighteen months later. But there is no evidence that Tweed enjoyed more than the seven or eight “excursions,” or that he visited her on any of them.27
   

Chapter 20

1. Weehawken is today the site of the New Jersey end of the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting traffic to mid-town Manhattan.
   

2. Within a few blocks of the Staten Island end of today’s Verrazano Bridge, the start of the New York City Marathon.
   

3. The Whiskey Ring frauds involved corruption in implementing federal liquor excise taxes; the Credit Mobilier involved graft and bribes in building the transcontinental railroad; the 1875 “salary grab” was an attempt by Congress to double its annual pay, including two years of retroactive salary at the higher level, repealed in response to the public outcry; and the “Mulligan letters” detailed Blaine’s suspicious dealings with the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, a scandal that followed him for life.
   

4. It would be New York’s Senator Roscoe Conkling, a Republican, who’d blast Hayes civil service reforms the next year by saying: “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and used of the word ‘reform.’”18
   

5. Henry Hall blew the whistle on Young in a letter to Washington, and Young submitted his resignation to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish shortly thereafter. His career in the diplomatic service ended abruptly.
   

Chapter 21

1. He would attempt to win release that summer under the so-called 60-Days Act that allowed debtors, on petition of a creditor, to assign their property away and, this done, be released. The effort failed because the State of New York, his largest creditor, refused to cooperate.
   ⁸
   

2. This quote is almost certainly a fabrication from a reporter who was not abroad ship during the voyage, but Tilden would have no way of knowing this for certain.
   

3. How or why the “confession” leaked is another mystery. Townsend felt concerned enough to send Fairchild a prompt denial: “I notice that the ‘World’ has several columns today giving what they say is the Confession of Tweed [and] assure you that I have furnished no part of it,” Townsend wrote. The fact that he was ready with a newspaper comment, though, still points in his direction.
   ⁴⁴
   

4. These cases involved claims by a Joseph Navarro who’d contracted to sell the city 10,000 defective water meters for $70 each, and which the city refused to accept. Navarro demanded payment. Tweed, who’d signed the original contracts in 1870 as Public Works Commissioner, was prepared to testify that the contracts had been riddled with fraud and need not be honored.
   

5. Townsend responded with an angry public letter detailing the entire course of back-channel talks with Fairchild, accused Fairchild of “incompetence” and “”dishonesty,” and charged him with sharing Tweed’s private “confession” with political friends. According to a
   New York Tribune
   reporter who saw the document, “The copy submitted to Mr. Fairchild, when returned yesterday, bore marks of having passed through many hands; for there were annotations in different chirography after almost every name on the list of those whose checks Tweed holds,” each person apparently having been checked with. Fairchild later would claim he’d shown the “confession” to only six people: Tilden, Peckham, Whitney, Bigelow, Nash, and his father S.T. Fairchild.
   ⁶⁷
   

   Fairchild, in his own defense, published a report a few weeks later pointing to “fatal variances” between Tweed’s written and his oral statements, claiming that “in one of my interviews with Tweed, he volunteered a statement to me which I knew must be false.” He also argued that Tweed’s property had no value to the state and that the statute of limitations had passed on most of the people against whom Tweed might have testified.
   ⁶⁸
   

   The most vicious finger-pointing came from Carolyn O’Brien Bryant, Fairchild’s go-between, who published a scathing series of letters claiming, among other things, (a) that Tweed had lavished money on two secret paramours, a Miss Garrett and a Mrs. MacMullin, “whose influence had been as potent for evil, as that of his estimable wife had been for good on his career,” (b) that Tweed had had a chest in his room at Albany’s Delavan House filled with $1,000 bills to pay off legislators, and doled out $150,000 in the 1868 Erie fight alone, and (c) that Tweed openly planned to lie in his confession, saying “if swearing was all that was necessary, he would give them all they wanted!” Tweed denied all of Bryant’s charges, they had no corroboration, and were not pursued by the aldermen’s investigating committee.
   ⁶⁹
   

Chapter 22

1. “Honest John” would later be accused by Mayor William Havemeyer of charging the county more than $30,000 in excess costs for his sheriff’s department work, but it would never be proven. “Fraud permeates every part of your bills to such an extent that one honest spot would be a sort of relief,” Havemeyer would say in a letter. Kelly sued Havemeyer for defamation over the attack but Havemeyer died before the suit came to trial. See Werner, p. 278-279; New-York Times and other newspapers, December 1 and 2, 1874.4
   

2. This conclusion cited an analysis by Henry Taintor, an accountant with the prosecution team, who had examined some $30 million is city payments under the Tax Levy, the Courthouse, and other accounts, and estimated than only about 15 percent —$2.5 million—had gone for legitimate purposes, the rest being graft. Applying these proportions to all accounts would raise the fraud estimate to $45 million. Total city and county debt rose from $36.3 million in January 1869 to $97.3 million on September 14, 1871.
   

   Later estimates would peg the total plunder by Tweed’s regime much higher, up to $200 million according to Matthew O’Rourke writing years after the fact. These stratospheric numbers, which have become staples of the Tweed legend, have to be assumed to contain a good share of fluff and drama.
   

Chapter 23

1. Typically indecisive, though, Tilden in 1880 would leave his friends hanging until the last possible moment, waiting until actual convention balloting had started to pick a presidential nominee, before sending his letter of withdrawal.
   

2. The structure survives today and houses the New York Film Academy, the Union Square Theater, and a liquor store.
   

SOURCES

Archive Collections:

Library of Congress (“LC”):

• Henry Dawes papers.
  

• Hamilton Fish papers
  

• Horace Greeley papers.
  

• Andrew Johnson papers
  

• Abraham Lincoln papers
  

• Manton Marble papers
  

• George B. McClellan papers
  

• Edwin Stanton papers.
  

• William Seward papers
  

• Stanton papers
  

• Andrew Johnson papers
  

National Archives (“NARA”):

• State Department, Ministry to Spain.
  

• United States Marshals, Treasury Department.
  

New-York Historical Society (“NYHS”):

• Richard Connolly papers.
  

• Charles Fairchild papers.
  

• Andrew H. Green papers.
  

• A. Oakey Hall papers.
  

• Thomas Nast papers.
  

• Henry Fox Taintor papers.
  

• Samuel J. Tilden papers.
  

• William M. Tweed papers.
  

New York Municipal Archives (“NYMA”):

• John Hoffman mayoral files
  

• A. Oakey Hall mayoral files
  

• New York County Board of Supervisor files
  

New York Public Library (“NYPL”):

• George Jones papers
  

• A. Oakey Hall scrapbooks
  

• John T. Hoffman papers
  

• Thomas Nast scrapbooks
  

• Samuel J. Tilden papers
  

• Tammany Hall scrapbooks
  

• William M. Tweed papers
  

New York State Library (“NYSL”):

• John Hoffman papers.
  

• Legislative reports (cited below)
  

• Tammany Scrapbooks
  

New-York Times archives (“NYTA”):

• Fletcher Harper Sr./Jr. papers
  

• George Jones papers.
  

• Henry Raymond papers.
  

Newspapers and Journals

• Brooklyn Eagle
  

• Congressional Globe and Congressional Record
  

• The Daily Register
  

• The Evening Free Press
  

• The Evening Post
  

• Frank Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated
  

• Gotham Gazette.
  

• Harper’s Weekly
  

• The Leader
  

• The Nation.
  

• The Star
  

• New York Journal of Commerce
  

• New York Evening Telegram
  

• New York Herald
  

• New York Sun
  

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• Washington Post
  

Government Reports

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• “
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• “
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• “
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• “
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• “
  Tweed Ring: Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Aldermen appointed to investigate the ‘Ring’ Frauds, together with the Testimony elicited during the Investigation
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