BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (19 page)

Now, months later, Copeland had come back to O’Brien with a problem. He seemed troubled. Copeland had seen things in Connolly’s office that bothered him, he said, and he did not know what to do. O’Brien had been his patron; now he needed advice. “I told Mr. O’Brien about them, because he was the only friend I had in public life,” Copeland remembered. “I would have come to the mayor had I known him.”
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But for now, Copeland did not know Oakey Hall and he didn’t trust Connolly, Watson, or Lynes enough to confront them.

Copeland’s desk at the Comptroller’s Office was in a room next to Watson’s but separated by a wall lined on both sides with wooden cabinets. These cabinets each held pigeonholes for filing records. “I could not hear anything going on there,” he said.
³³
Copeland had been assigned the tedious job of taking vouchers on claims after they had been paid and filing them away in the right pigeonhole. Watson and Lynes normally kept the closets unlocked during business hours: “every person in the office had access to those pigeon-holes,” Copeland explained.
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Watson himself kept the most private, sensitive records in a desk drawer in his private office, but even these normally weren’t locked. Stephen Lynes, the bookkeeper, would review them regularly to record in his ledger books. Watson, Lynes, and the other clerks were responsible for keeping meticulous track of city spending; Lynes himself recorded every disbursement of city money in a ledger, no matter how big or small, and only gave his approval to pay money from the treasury after checking the voucher to assure it had all the required signatures. Lynes countersigned every warrant and obtained a receipt from every contractor who received a check. One ledger, called “County Liabilities,” Lynes kept personally and never allowed it to leave the room.

Copeland learned the system over time and, after a while, began to notice odd things about vouchers he was filing, particularly bills from large city contractors involving the new County Courthouse itself. For one thing, he said, many of the vouchers, despite having the needed signatures—Tweed’s, Connolly’s, and the mayor’s—had never been sworn to by the contractor as required by city rules. They contained no affidavit or supporting document to prove the claim. And some claims on their face seemed ridiculously large: “it was utterly impossible that the furniture, cabinet-work, and fittings itemized as having been furnished to the County Court-house [could have been used by] any dozen buildings”
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—awnings costing $18,000, carpets enough to cover miles of hallway, plaster enough for acres of buildings, expensive repairs to structures that were brand new.

Sometimes he saw the contractors themselves—men like plasterer John Garvey—come to the office along with Tweed’s clerk from the Board of Supervisors, E.W. Woodward, to meet privately with Watson carrying large envelopes. He may have noticed the envelopes bulged with money, checks or cash.
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Copeland tried to examine the vouchers, he said, but spying under his supervisors’ noses made him uneasy. One time he’d begun copying items from Lynes’ “County Liabilities” book but had to stop when Lynes saw him, abruptly came over and took it away; Watson and Connolly would be “very angry if he found out that anyone but him” had touched these particular records, Lynes told him.
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What should he do? Copeland asked. He’d never been in such a pinch. If something illegal was going on, whom could he talk to?

Jimmy O’Brien listened closely. He knew the city fraud game; he’d attacked it in his anti-Tammany speeches while dirtying his own fingers all the while. His recent claim of $350,000 in dubious sheriff’s expenses had been one attempt at loot; according to Tweed, there’d been others. O’Brien all during his years as sheriff had had an arrangement with a friendly county supervisor to present padded bills, pocket the difference, and pay the supervisor a bonus for getting them approved.
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Still, nobody ever seemed to have proof of foul play; the grafters always hid the trail. Vague charges had languished for years and the recent Astor committee had made Connolly untouchable—despite the
New-York Times
and its daily lambastes. Hard evidence could be worth a fortune. In fact, O’Brien could count the value in dollars and cents. He still had a following in New York City; he’d given donations to the right charities and kept his name afloat with local clubs, a political base for the future. With solid proof of Tammany fraud, records taken straight from the Comptroller’s Office, he’d have enormous leverage, either to settle his financial claims against the city, win back his place at Tammany, or perhaps fight them all if they refused him.

After listening to his friend Copeland, O’Brien gave him the advice he’d asked for: First thing, he said, Copeland must say nothing about his suspicions, it must be their secret alone. Instead, he should start copying. Anything in Connolly’s records that looked out of place, wrong, or incriminating, he must copy with as much detail as possible. The job might take days, weeks, or months, but would be worth his while. Then, O’Brien told his friend, Copeland must bring the copied records back to him. He, Jimmy O’Brien, would know what to do with them. Copeland would take the up front risk; after that he wouldn’t have to worry.

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New Year’s Day, 1871, found Bill Tweed, Boss of Tammany Hall, basking in glory, the toast of New York City: fresh from a major election victory, hero of Home Rule, rich, powerful, and popular. Everyone he met called him friend; strangers rushed up to give him gifts. He arrived at the mayor’s annual City Hall New Year’s reception and received the loudest ovation: “The applause was deafening and long continued—cheer upon cheer ringing from the throats of the Great Almoner’s admirers,” a newsman wrote, “while [Tweed] stood with outstretched right arm, vainly endeavoring to” talk to supporters.
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On Christmas Eve, some “friends” had given him a diamond shirt-front pin weighing ten and a half carats, valued at $15,000, said to be “more closely approximate [to] a calcium light in brightness.”
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Tweed wore it “like a planet in his shirt front,” one admirer said.
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At the Americus Club Ball at the Academy of Music that week, he danced and laughed: “Boss Tweed had a bouquet, a $15,000 diamond, a ripping good time, partners by the score, a superb supper, and more attention than anybody else,” wrote a society reporter for
The Star
. He “did all the [dance] figures as he should, and made a hit with his double shuffle. His partners—thirty of ‘em—expressed their unbounded satisfaction with his efforts to please them, and all the boys cried out amen.” Tweed’s Americus club mates indulged his penchant for showy outfits: they wore “blue uniforms, liberally upholstered with gold trimming.”
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The
Evening Telegram
dubbed him “The Monarch of Manhattan and his Merrie Men” and covered its front page with a drawing of Tweed dancing an Irish jig to a drummer’s beat, his large body lighter than air as famous admirers looked on.
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A few days later,
The Star
carried drawings of him at another party clog dancing side by side with Oakey Hall.
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After all, Tweed’s city was booming: manufacturing concerns up from 4,400 to 7,600 in a decade, factory jobs up from 90,000 to 130,000, stock prices up on Wall Street, numbers of bankers and brokers up from 170 to 1,800 and rents near City Hall up almost 1,000 percent since the War, and property values up all over town.
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Property owners saw values rising high and taxes staying low; not surprisingly, both the East Side and the West Side owners associations smiled on Tammany.

Tweed had much to enjoy: his new thoroughbred horse Alderney Bull, his new farm in Westchester County, and his arrival at the pinnacle. Early in December, the
New York Sun
, apparently as a hoax, had suggested that New Yorkers collect money to erect a bronze statue of Tweed in a public park—perhaps Tweed Plaza at Broadway and Canal Street—to be finished on time for Tweed’s birthday the next April. Joke or not, self-proclaimed friends quickly formed a “Tweed Testimonial Association” that within weeks raised over $10,000 for the project from city officials and contractors—even from former Young Democrats like Jimmy O’Brien. Rumor had it that Tweed had originated the idea himself to see which “friends” would contribute the most money. Fawning newspapers tripped over themselves to suggest designs.

Oakey Hall too luxuriated these days in his profile as the city’s most flamboyant mayor. Friends called him Mayor “O’Hall” after he wore a bright emerald-green suit on Saint Patrick’s Day, or Mayor “Von Hall” for officiating at German beer festivals. His clothes often made bigger splashes than his speeches: “The Mayor was dressed in a blue swallow-tail coat, with brass shamrock buttons, white vest, black doe-skins, and calfskin boots,” read a clipping from one appearance that year. “While speaking he kept his hands under his coat-tail, and appeared as he usually does in public.”
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Hall enjoyed trading
bon mots
with literati: “Here [in New York City] you enjoy extensive freedom—freedom in newspaper abuse; freedom to gamble in Wall Street; freedom in marriage; freedom in divorce; free lager; free fights; free love!” he told the city’s New England Society late in 1870, sparking a grumpy reply from Horace Greeley in the
Tribune
: “New York must be delivered from the thralldom of the Hall family. It is wearied of Tammany Hall, Mozart Hall, all the political halls, Oakey Hall, and alcohol.”
⁴⁷

“[Hall’s] first message as Mayor, in point of perspicuity and attractiveness, might have been written by Thackeray,” a friend quipped.
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Critics ridiculed the mayor as a puppet of sinister Tammany wire-pullers: “Mr. Peter B. Sweeny is said to have remarked of Mayor Hall that ‘he is a useful man; he is always ready to make a speech, and will make any sort of speech we tell him to,’” the
Evening Free Press
reported.
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But Oakey Hall regarded all press as good press and walked the extra mile for ink.

Peter Sweeny, for his part, focused his energies these days on his new role as Czar of Central Park—already a New York showpiece though only part-finished. Sweeny had cosmopolitan tastes; during his yearly trips to France he’d met novelist Victor Hugo, Paris city planner Baron Haussmann, and artist Jean Corot.
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Applying his continental airs to New York, he began spending money at a wild pace; he doubled city park expenses from an average $250,000 per year before to over $550,000 in 1870 and almost $400,000 in the first ten months of 1871 while collecting piles of unpaid bills.
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“The greatest fault which Mr. Sweeny can find in the old [Park] Commission is one inexplicable to a member of the City Ring—that they did not provide comfortable offices for themselves. This, of course, he will immediately correct,” the
Times
chided.
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In a famous encounter, Sweeny cracked down on Professor Waterhouse Hawkins, a renowned geologist hired to make plaster models of dinosaur skeletons for the city’s new Paleontological Museum of Animals, including a “Hadrosaur”—similar to an exhibit at London’s Crystal Palace. Sweeny and fellow board member Henry Hilton decided to stop him, apparently incredulous that prehistoric creatures ever existed. They ordered workmen to barge into Hawkins’ office, smash his models with hammers, bury them in the park, and destroy his scientific notes. In his Park Commission report that year, Sweeny dismissed the museum itself as designed for animals “alleged to be of the pre-Adamite period” and blocked its $300,000 cost as excessive for “a science which, however interesting, is yet so imperfect.” He claimed the museum would block line-of-sight park views for nearby homeowners.
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While at it, he reputedly also ordered a whale skeleton donated by Peter Cooper painted white to look more authentic.

Long time park patrons gasped. Andrew Haskell Green, the respected, visionary leader of the Central Park Commission since its 1857 inception, who’d guided its design and was kept on the board when Sweeny took control, now refused to attend meetings for fear of being connected to scandal.
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Sweeny’s spending and patronage, graft notwithstanding, was making Green’s own ambitious plans now a possibility, but it rubbed against Green’s ethic of frugal penny-pinching and long-term planning.
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