BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (14 page)

Telegraphs flashed the news downstate and the response was electric. Tweed had promised home rule and he’d delivered it. A few voices complained: Horace Greeley’s
Tribune
claimed that the new law “surrenders the City to the rule of Tweed and Sweeny for a number of ensuing years. We believe our friends in the legislature have made a mistake.”
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But the large majority disagreed. To James Gordon Bennett Jr., Tweed had shown “it takes a general to lead an army.”
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Hundreds of local Tammany-ites gathered to celebrate at East Broadway and Canal Street—a triangle they now called Tweed Plaza
^F
OOTNOTE
—complete with balloons, fireworks, Chinese lanterns and “good tunes” from Fink’s Washington Band.

With the ink barely dry on the charter, Oakey Hall put his own pen to paper and exercised his new power as mayor to make appointments: twenty-odd police and fire commissioners, health officials, and dock and park board members in an initial set. He made a point to include high-profile Republicans in the mix: Judge Henry Hilton to the Public Parks Board and police commissioner Henry Smith—who’d helped Tweed crush the Young Democrats a few weeks earlier—to the new Police Board. Tammany had grown skilled at placing Republicans in a handful of visible city posts to create a veneer of fairness. Even Chester Alan Arthur, future Republican president of the United States, held a job as counsel to New York’s city tax commission at $10,000 per year during this period, one of about eighty “Tweed Republicans” in Tammany-controlled slots.
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But the two most important names stood out: William M. Tweed as Commissioner of Public Works and Peter B. Sweeny to head the Public Parks Board.
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The mayor’s letter to Tweed virtually gushed: “I beg you to take [it] so that you will not deny me the pleasure & the public the justice of hearing your affirmative answer. I shall ask you to take it untrammeled and I feel already assured that in your hands the [Public Works] Department will augment the glory of the City & your fame.” He signed it: “With cordial regards, Believe me, Your obliged friend and ob[edient] S[erva]nt. A. Oakey Hall.”
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The
Albany Argus
was hardly less effusive: “Senator Tweed is to take charge of the bureau of Public Works. A man of comprehensive plans and of indomitable energy, Senator Tweed will make his administration of this department notable in the history of the city. He will be to New York what [Baron George] Haussman has been to Paris.”
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Peter Cooper, New York’s most respected merchant, also gave Tweed a compliment on the occasion, an invitation to appear at the annual commencement ceremony at Cooper Union Institute: “It would give me great pleasure to have you on the platform,” he wrote.”
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Sometime in mid-April, about a week after the charter became law, the four met again behind closed doors in Albany, this time in Peter Sweeny’s room at the Delavan House: Sweeny, Oakey Hall, Connolly, and Tweed. The City Hall “lunch club,” soon this group would be branded for posterity as “the Tweed Ring.”

They’d come to Albany because the legislature was preparing to take up the Tax Levy bill, which set the city’s annual budget for the coming year, and they planned to use it to tie up loose ends. Tweed and Sweeny had become masters of hiding little kickers in the tedious, arcane package. This year, two items topped their list: extending aid to parochial schools despite opposition from upstate Republicans—crucial to their immigrant friends—and perfecting their control of the city government. This last part included making the comptroller an appointive office to guarantee Connolly his place for five more years and allow him to avoid a threatened election contest, formally stripping the city’s aldermen of their financial oversight powers, and closing down the old county Board of Supervisors.

At the last minute, they decided to add one more. Tweed remembered watching Oakey Hall draft the idea on paper as they sat around Sweeny’s hotel suite that day. It involved a chance to make money—a great deal of it. The old Board of Supervisors, which they planned to abolish in the legislation, had collected a pile of unpaid bills over the years: vouchers from city contractors that the supervisors had never approved, either because of poor documentation or because they’d just fallen through the cracks. Taken together, they amounted to millions of dollars. Why not pay them now, all at once, and clear the books, someone suggested. And while they were at it, they could collect the normal bill-padding percentages on the whole amount.

It seemed easy. To implement the idea, they’d simply create a special
ad interim
Board of Audit consisting of three people: Hall as the mayor, Connolly as comptroller, and Tweed as president of the old Board of Supervisors. These three would audit “all liabilities against the County of New York incurred previous to the passage of this act,” according to Hall’s draft, and pay them.

At least at first, their purpose was more than simply to pocket graft. As Tweed explained it later, they wanted “to reimburse … those who had advanced the moneys for the passage of the charter.” The legislative war in Albany had cost them a fortune, hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to key legislators. At its height, messengers literally had carried bags of cash from the city to Albany by train.
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To pay for it, Tweed had taken a collection from all his friends who stood to gain—the lunch club, top city bureaucrats, his Erie Railway cronies Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, and major city contractors. Plasterer Andrew Garvey and furniture maker James H. Ingersoll, for instance, each claimed to have paid $50,000 into the pool; furnisher-plumber John Keyser and Oakey Hall $25,000 each.
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The “Republican Legislature had to be bought, and, as I understood it, Mr. Tweed had to pay the money, and I thought it right and proper for him to reimburse himself,” as Tweed’s clerk E.A. Woodward explained later. It was only fair.
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But the sheer size of the potential pot quickly dwarfed any such rationale. Money became a purpose in itself, four rich men seeing an easy chance to get much richer. Tweed’s testimony given years later is the only direct account of the meeting.
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Oakey Hall would deny all of it, claiming he’d never been part of any such scam, that he himself had been a victim of fraud. Sweeny and Connolly would keep their mouths shut about it till they died.

But according to Tweed, it went this way: every one of the old Supervisors’ bills would be padded by 50 percent and each of the four—Tweed, Connolly, Sweeny, and Hall—would receive an equal share of 10 percent. The final ten-percent share would go to the bookkeepers—James Watson, the county auditor who worked for Connolly, and E.A. Woodward, the supervisors’ clerk who worked for Tweed—who’d prepare the paperwork and keep things secret. Tweed considered Watson “a very confidential man” who “had my confidence to the utmost degree”; Woodward had been doing his bidding for over a decade.
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He trusted them both completely.

The Albany legislature passed the Tax Levy bill on April 26 and, about a week later, the wheels started turning. Records showed that the new
ad interim
Board of Audit—Hall, Tweed, and Connolly—met only once, in Connolly’s office on May 5, 1870, and transacted only one item of business—adopting a resolution proposed by the mayor:

That the County Auditor [Watson] collect from the…. Board of Supervisors all bills and liabilities against the county, incurred prior to April 26, 1870, … and that the evidence of the same be the authorization for the same by the said Board…. on certificate of clerk or president, and that thereupon the said County Auditor annex the voucher to the appropriate blanks for our signature and action as directed by the section aforesaid and payment.”
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The dense legal language made a simple point: Once Watson had collected them and Tweed had signed them, the old bills stood. They’d never need to “audit” anything.

Watson started promptly. All through May, he and Woodward, the two bookkeepers, scampered about City Hall collecting the old bills—some 190 items altogether going back to 1868, many claiming costs for work on the new County Courthouse recently opened on Chambers Street. The Courthouse, the largest local government building besides City Hall itself, had taken more than ten years to build and was a show-stopper: a four-story “Anglo-Italianate” marble temple with a unique octagonal, three-story rotunda topped by a stained-glass skylight, decked with cast-iron stairways, tile floors, painted ceilings, interior columns, and exquisite detail. Its 120,000 square feet now housed the Comptroller’s Office, the sheriff’s and district attorney’s rooms, and every major local court. Originally budgeted at $250,000 in 1858, its cost already had topped $3.2 million by 1869 amid repeated charges of graft, though none ever proven.
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Other bills covered a potpourri of odds and ends: legal services, carpets, carpentry work, plumbing, plastering, furniture, stationery, and safes. The claimants ranged from the
New York Daily News
for advertising to Oakey Hall himself for running his old district attorney office. Together, they added up to a staggering sum: $6,312,541.37 (or more than $120 million in modern dollars).

The bookkeepers assembled the paperwork and then began walking it around to collect signatures, first to Tweed, then to Connolly, then to the mayor. Tweed remembered clearly how he’d done it: “Woodward brought me over a batch of bills on which I wrote my name, ‘Wm. M. Tweed, Ch., Chairman.’ “ There were “quite a number of them, and I certified ‘approved and correct;’ some of those I wrote those words over myself.”
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But before the paper-passing could finish and the bills be paid, they began to quarrel. Connolly complained; he wanted a bigger cut. As Tweed explained it in his own words: “Watson came to see me, and said that Connolly wasn’t satisfied with the ten per cent; he wanted twenty. I asked him what was the reason of that. He said that Connolly said that he had to take all the responsibility and the risk, and the thing couldn’t be done without him. I said: ‘It couldn’t be done without me either.” Tweed and his auditor batted the problem around for a few moments; finally, Tweed agreed to change the deal, but only on his terms: “Give Connolly twenty, and you must give me twenty-five, and give Mr. Sweeny ten percent,” he said.

When Watson explained that the new numbers didn’t add up, Tweed quickly concocted a solution: shortchange the odd man out: “see [Oakey] Hall and tell him that expenses are ‘so heavy we can’t afford to give him but five.’”
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With the new deal in place, money began to flow. All through June and July 1870, a complex web of warrants, checks, and vouchers began working its way through the New York financial system. The city issued 190 warrants (authorizations for payment) based on the Tax Levy provision totaling $6.3 million and, of this, the overwhelming bulk—$5.7 million—landed in three bank accounts: John Ingersoll, the furniture-maker, Andrew J. Garvey, the plasterer, and Woodward, Tweed’s own clerk. In fact, most of the other contractors apparently took their city checks and simply signed them over to Woodward, who deposited them in his own bank account with the notation “E.A.W.” One contractor, plumber John Keyser, later complained that he’d never even seen his checks at all, that Woodward had simply taken them and forged his endorsements. “Watson, at that time, told the tradesmen who had bills against the city that I would manage the matter,” Woodward explained later, and they all cooperated smartly. Of the large amounts that ended up in Ingersoll and Garvey’s back accounts, they too transferred large sums to Woodward, who ended up with about $3.6 million, or about 65 percent of the total.

Of this, Woodward then deposited $932,858.50—26 percent—into the Broadway Bank checking account of William M. Tweed.
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In addition, the city issued eleven warrants as part of the process totaling $384,395.19 to the New-York Printing Company—Tweed’s company—which in turn issued a check the same day for $104,333.64, deposited the day after that by Tweed, bringing his grand total to $1,037,192.14.
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A much more convoluted trail connected Sweeny and Hall to the Tax Levy vouchers. Woodward would claim later that after paying Tweed and keeping some for himself, he transferred the rest of the money back to Watson. “[Watson] told me that he had to pay it to the Comptroller [Connolly],” he explained later, “and give some to the Chamberlain’s office [Sweeny].”
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In fact, a large amount of money ended up with James M. Sweeny, Peter B. Sweeny’s brother—Tweed alone wrote him checks for $75,000 in June and July. During those months James paid his brother a total of $228,120 through two different banks, both in cash and securities. In one case, he deposited $10,000 to pay for his brother’s stock in the Mutual Gas Company; in another, he paid $4,200 for his brother’s shares of the New York Bridge Company; in another, he paid $74,900 for his shares of the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Rail Road.
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The connection to Oakey Hall was even more indirect: On June 7, attorney Hugh Smith—who’d received funds from Watson—purchased 1005 shares of stock in the Suspension Bridge and Erie Junction RRG. Five months later, he transferred 173 shares to James M. Sweeny and 162 shares to an account labeled “blank.” Then, the next day, Tweed transferred 162 shares to Hall.
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