BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (38 page)

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Samuel Tilden returned from Rochester angry but resolute. He’d discovered his mission. He knew he’d carried an awkward goal to the convention: to convince his party to amputate its strongest arm, Tammany Hall, that delivered thousands of patronage jobs, millions of government dollars, and dozens of winning candidates on Election Day. He’d hoped to remove a cancer without killing the patient. He’d failed, but he had walked away standing on his feet.

Ever since engineering the takeover of the city Comptroller’s Office by Andrew H. Green a few weeks earlier, Tilden had gloried in his tactical triumph. He’d cut the heart out of Tweed’s moneymaking operation in a single stroke and the victory changed him. Instead of hiding in his library with his books and in his uptown club, he now took every opportunity to show his face publicly—at the Comptroller’s Office, at City Hall, at the Courthouse. It was Tilden who had organized the dissidents at Rochester and who constantly appeared with Andrew Green offering advice. Tilden even came to the Tombs police court alongside city prosecutors when they brought Haggerty and Balch, the two voucher robbery suspects, up for questioning.

Tilden had now conceived a two-front war on Tammany: one public, the other secret. Publicly, he planned to beat Tweed in the November elections and destroy his base in the state legislature. Privately, he aimed to build a legal case to put him behind bars. He insisted that Democrats lead every step of the reform effort. Whatever conspiracy of inner demons drove him at this key point, pushing Tilden to emerge and seize the public spotlight—outrage at scandal, personal ambition, revenge at a bully who’d mocked him over the years—he left no doubt of his commitment, pushing aside lucrative client work as the battle heated up.

Reformers, starved for a leader, delighted at the change. Ever since the Cooper Union mass meeting in early September, they’d worked as a disorganized band top-heavy with dilettantes: Wall Street magnates, uptown club members, and elite lawyers. Now, they rallied behind Tilden. “A number of active leading men at my house last night all agreed to stick by you through thick & thin,” his ally Henry A. Richmond telegraphed from Buffalo that week.
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Some even showed gratitude by showering him with money, though Tilden never asked for it: “I beg to send you herewith my check for $500- to assist in the good fight against rogues & corruption in which you are engaging & in which you have the warm support of every honest man,” August Belmont wrote.
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“
You
must not be allowed to spend any money for your election. Your noble conduct has made all honest Democrats your debtors,” echoed Royal Phelps, enclosing a check for $250.
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Tilden alone had the stature to corral so many egos. People listened to him. When Robert Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to pull two quarreling anti-Tweed leaders together for a meeting, he appealed to Tilden: “The only way is for you to ask them [and] then when you get us together use your authority and influence…”
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Tilden knew that Rochester had been a fiasco for him. He’d laid down a goal and failed miserably. No compromise, he’d said. “Action and not words can save us, but it must be complete and decisive action,” he’d written an upstate friend before the convention.
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Instead, he’d “weakly yielded” to threats and been “cajoled and swindled,” as the
New York Tribune
put it. Horatio Seymour, who’d left the convention in disgust, blasted the whole affair: “The anti-Tammany men were in disgrace,” he wrote Tilden from Utica.
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Now, all the principal anti-Tammany factions had agreed to form a new coalition based at Apollo Hall, the old theater on West 28th Street where they held meetings, including dissident Germans, Young Democrats, Swallowtails, and reformers from the Committee of Seventy. Tilden agreed to join them, even if it meant sinking his own “regular” party.

To lead the battle in November elections, the Apollo Hall group nominated an eclectic slate of candidates rich in high-profile Tweed enemies, starting with Jimmy O’Brien for state senator and Tilden himself for state assemblyman.
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It included Republicans like former Civil War General Franz Sigel for city register, a favorite with German immigrant. To oppose Tweed for the state senate in Tweed’s own heavily-Irish district, they chose Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, a popular, world-renowned Irish patriot recently landed in America. Rossa in Dublin had co-founded the nationalist Fenian movement and edited the newspaper
Irish People
. The British had jailed him for sedition and treason but recently granted him amnesty on condition he leave his homeland. He’d received a hero’s welcome on arriving in New York City.

All October, Tilden threw himself into the campaign: He spoke to noisy rallies, torchlight parades, and street corner meetings. At every stop, he blasted Tweed and his circle. Practice made him a good rabble-rouser despite his flat voice and bland delivery. “Are you going to send selfish, unprincipled men into power—men whose object is robbery and rapine, men whose sole object is to enrich themselves and plunder the working class?” he asked ten thousand cheering supporters outside Apollo Hall one night, evoking shouts of “No, never!”
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To an Irish crowd on 23rd Street, he appealed to self-interest: “These men had pretended to be your friend,” he told them. “What is the result? Why … they have enabled your enemies … to say [it] proves beyond a doubt that you are not fit to govern yourselves at all.” He drew loud applause pledging “I cannot die with a good grace until this work of redemption is accomplished.”
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To another: “They betrayed the Democratic Party. They betrayed Democratic principles. They betrayed the people of this City.”
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When Apollo Hall’s coffers drew low, Tilden dipped into his own pocket to contribute $10,000 for expenses and raised more money from friends.
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With the city’s eyes riveted on the exciting campaign, Tilden could now turn to the secret part of his plan—building a legal case to put Tweed in jail. He’d later claim he started this work almost by accident: “happening casually in the office of the comptroller of the city of New York,” as he put it, Andrew Green asked him to look at a legal paper he was preparing to send the Broadway Bank. The paper involved allegations by one of the city contractors, plumber John Keyser, that the endorsements on his paychecks from the county had been forged. Whether it was Green who asked Tilden to investigate or Tilden who pressed the idea on Green, by early October he’d thrown himself into the project.

Sam Tilden needed no search warrant or subpoena to prod the Broadway Bank into giving him any record he wanted; the imprimatur of Green and the Committee of Seventy sufficed.
^F
OOTNOTE
32
The Broadway Bank, located near City Hall, was a Tammany favorite; it held accounts for virtually every key machine figure including Tweed himself. He quickly assembled a team to help him, including Henry Taintor, an accountant he’d worked with on railroad litigations, and two full-time clerks named George W. Smith and P.W. Rhoades. Together, they began wading through the oceans of data.

From this jumbled mass of numbers and accounts—the Broadway Bank records plus those of the Comptroller’s Office—Tilden hoped to find a pattern, a link to connect the exorbitant city spending sensationalized in the
New-York Times’
Secret Accounts and the personal enrichment of a single person: Tweed. On its surface, the job looked daunting. Beyond the sheer mass of papers and ledgers to examine, no one item stood out. The overall pattern screamed fraud, but each individual entry appeared perfectly in order. If thieves they were, they’d covered their tracks well.

Only the Keyser warrants broke this pattern and gave Tilden his opening.

The
New-York Times
disclosures that summer had listed sixteen warrants (payments) as supposedly being issued by the county to Keyser under the 1870 Tax Levy for work on city armories and the new Courthouse. But Keyser had sworn that he’d never seen any of them and insisted his endorsements were forged. Tilden now took these warrants—essentially cancelled checks—and examined them closely. He noticed an odd pencil mark on the back of each one, the letters “E.A.W.” or “E.A. Woodward,” each in the same handwriting. To solve the riddle, he called in two senior clerks from the Broadway Bank, Arthur Smith and Ansel Parkhurst, both of whom handled accounts for Tweed. Tilden sat down with them and showed them the warrants, and Smith quickly recognized the pencil mark as being the initials as Edwin A. Woodward, Tweed’s clerk at the county Board of Supervisors. Woodward had his own separate account at the bank, and the pencil marks suggested that Woodward had taken Keyser’s warrants and deposited the money directly into his own account. Tilden quickly confirmed this fact by checking Woodward’s records.

The implication was alarming. The term “money laundering” would not be invented until decades later, but the concept of moving money from account to account, hiding it under borrowed names, transforming it from cash to check to credit to cash again, all for the purpose of removing any trace of its origin or destination, struck home. To prove such a thing, Tilden would have to reconstruct the money trail for these warrants, a cumbersome process that would require his clerks to compare thousands of transactions in these accounts, scouring inputs and outputs for patterns.

It was grueling, painstaking work. Tilden and his clerks buried themselves in the Broadway Bank records, working long hours into the night, straining their eyes by gaslight and candlelight to decipher hand-written ledgers with columns of tiny numbers. They cramped their fingers making full transcripts of all the suspect accounts—Woodward’s, Keyser’s, Ingersoll’s, Garvey’s, and Tweed’s. Then they laid them side by side for comparison. They tracing the warrants marked “E.A.W.,” looking for withdrawals from one account and deposits into another of similar size and occurring on nearby days. In some cases, they had to “deconstruct” complex transactions into smaller pieces, examining individual deposit slips and checks. Since all the suspect Keyser warrants stemmed from the 1870 Tax Levy, they decided to reconstruct all the Tax Levy payments, comparing them with deposits and withdrawals from the accounts.
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In the process, they covered dozens of spreadsheets with calculations and crosschecked their entries against hundreds of bank documents. At one point, Tilden asked Smith, the Broadway Bank clerk, to produce every slip for every deposit into Tweed’s account and found that many were in Woodward’s handwriting, not Tweed’s. Parkhurst, the teller, confirmed having seen Woodward make several of the deposits himself.
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Word of his secret project leaked and Tilden panicked when newspaper reporters approached him over it, not wanting to tip his hand. He flirted with them in a strange dance. Sometimes he’d hint at sensational disclosures: “Mr. Tilden is busily engaged in collecting evidence … that may be rather startling even to those who now think they have heard about all the ‘revelations’ that could possibly be made,” one reported.
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But when a
New-York Times
writer planned to reveal details, he pleaded for time. “Indeed, we will be successful,” he coyly announced for attribution, “but a few more days will amply satisfy us, and develop more than has even yet been suspected.”
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Having plowed through mountains of detail, Tilden now summarized his findings in an affidavit and an attached table: “Identification of the parties receiving the proceeds of the warrants drawn for allowances made by the Special Board for Audit, under section 4, of the county tax levy for 1870.” Beneath this dry-sounding title lay pure dynamite. The table identified 190 payments approved by Tweed, Connolly, and the mayor under the 1870 Tax Levy and traced what became of the money in each case. Its simple visual shape pointed a clear accusing finger. It showed deposits and transfers among bank accounts laid side-by-side, column-by-column, moving sideways across the page from the county treasury to Ingersoll to Keyser to Woodward. Out of the $5,710,913.96 total approved by the county, a full $932,858.50 ended up in the final column on the page: the personal bank account of William M. Tweed.

In a separate table, Tilden showed eleven additional payments from the county to the New-York Printing Company totaling $384,395.19, and a transfer of $104,433.64 occurring on the same day to Tweed, bringing his total to just over $1 million.
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It was a stunning intellectual feat, one of the earliest examples of an “audit trail”—a fundamental compliance tool used today by financial regulators around the world. Tweed had pocketed the money; no one could doubt it. No longer could he hide behind Connolly, Hall, or anyone else. Tilden had tied him to the crime with a clear, direct chain of evidence. Tweed could deny it all day long but he’d only look ridiculous.