BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (40 page)

CHAPTER 17

MARKED

“ The best philosopher that ever lived was spat upon by an antagonist who was arguing with him. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the saliva from his face and said: ‘That is only a digression; now let’s get on with the argument.’”

—
A. OAKEY HALL
, in his speech on being nominated for mayor, November 25, 1869.
¹

T
HE news electrified New York City: Boss Tweed had been ordered arrested. Less than a week after the state attorney general had empowered them to bring charges against the Ring, Charles O’Conor and his prosecutors had marched into the chambers of State Supreme Court Judge Wilton L. Learned in Albany and charged Tweed and two city contractors, furniture-maker James Ingersoll and plasterer Andrew Garvey, with “deceit and fraud.” Citing Samuel Tilden’s explosive new affidavit, they demanded that Tweed return $6,312,000 in stolen loot—the total amount paid by the county under the 1870 Tax Levy vouchers, every penny of it considered suspect since none had been properly “audited” as the law required.

On Wednesday morning, October 26, they’d asked Judge Learned for an arrest warrant and he’d issued it promptly, setting bail at a sky-high one million dollars, ten times larger than the $100,000 bail set for former-Confederate-president Jefferson Davis in 1867 for treason.
²

As word spread Thursday morning, curiosity seekers jammed Tweed’s office at the Public Works Department on Broadway. A group of tough-looking men—“white-coated roughs ornamented with slouched hats,” as a
New-York Times
reporter put it—lined up outside Tweed’s door. “What, arrest our Boss?” one of them laughed. “You don’t know him.”
³
Over on Wall Street, stock exchange speculators treated it as a joke. “Tweed! Why he is the incarnation of American progress,” one said. “He can steal more than anybody else. He ought to be made President (laughter) in Sing Sing.”
⁴

Tweed heard the news that morning and hardly flinched. He’d been absorbed that week with other problems, campaigning for his seat in the state senate. A few days earlier, he’d drawn 1,500 supporters to one rally at Centre and Pearl Streets
⁵
and presided at the opening of a new Tweed Club on East Broadway that drew hundreds of the Boss’s friends, all described as “men above suspicion,” to enjoy the brass band and sip champagne.
⁶

Any normalcy for Tweed, though, was a shallow illusion. At City Hall, he kept an uneasy truce with the new regime. He still presided at the Public Works Department and met regularly with the city Board of Apportionment—Sweeny, Hall, and himself—but the board’s new fourth member, “Handy Andy” Green, cast a pall on any back room chatter. They met in the mayor’s office rather than Tweed’s Duane Street lair and bickered constantly. Typically, when Green and the mayor locked horns one time over a question of whether to pay claims to six charities while making others wait, Tweed settled the argument by freezing Green out—in this case, by referring the decision to a special committee composed of himself, Hall, and Sweeny. Green could only watch and take notes.
⁷

Stepping out on the streets, to the theater, or his favorite restaurants, he faced sneers or ridicule. Newspapers had plastered their pages with Tilden’s new chart showing how Tweed had personally pocketed over a million dollars in county Tax Levy payouts, painting him a criminal; Thomas Nast’s
Harper’s Weekly
cartoons made him a laughable, vicious clown. Standing six feet tall and three hundred pounds, Tweed couldn’t help but be conspicuous anyplace he went. His found refuge only in his office or across the sound in Greenwich.
^F
OOTNOTE
8

Tweed had chaired a meeting of his Tammany General Committee a week earlier and found it demoralizing. “The Tammany ‘braves’ looked more like chanting the deathsong than sounding the war-whoop,” one observer in the room wrote.
⁹
Tweed gave them a pep talk but his glum look that day sparked rumors that he’d lost $4 million in Wall Street speculation.
¹⁰

Now, with a judge having ordered his arrest, Tweed saw final disaster written on the wall. He spent Thursday in his office working at his walnut desk. He scribbled out urgent notes to friends asking them to provide bail
¹¹
and finalizing the transfer to his son Richard of his seven most valuable real estate holdings around New York City worth some $750,000 including his Fifth Avenue home, his Fort Washington farm, and the “circle property” (Columbus Circle)—recording the deeds he’d signed in August.
¹²
That week, Tweed had paid $22,359 from his own pocket for salaries of Public Works Department employees, mostly pipe layers and repairmen, whose wages had not been covered yet by Andrew Green. The good will gesture only backfired, sparking more ridicule about his stolen money.
¹³
By then, Tweed had started burning his personal records in his office fireplace and told Ingersoll and Garvey, his codefendants, to do the same.
¹⁴

Hours passed that day and nothing happened. At one point, Tweed sat down with one of the newspaper writers who now stalked his office constantly waiting for him to stumble. “Yes, the exhibit [Tilden’s table] does look bad, very bad,” he told him, “but, sir, I have not received a cent of that county money.” In fact, Tweed suggested that Tilden had misconstrued a totally innocent transaction: He’d loaned money to Ingersoll and Garvey earlier and they were simply repaying the debt, he claimed. That explained the suspicious cash transfers into his account at the Broadway Bank. But Tweed never spelled out this defense, either then or later at his trial, making it sound hollow. Still, “I am not going to run away,” he insisted, “you may depend upon that.”
¹⁵

Even now with his world crashing around him, Tweed enjoyed these daily verbal jousts with the newspapermen: “Although ‘interviewed’ and badgered at least nine times a day by ‘one of our reporters, [Tweed] is always calm and great, if not perfectly grammatical—and that defect may be chargeable to the reporters,” conceded even George Templeton Strong, the merchant-diarist and Sam Tilden’s Gramercy Park neighbor.
¹⁶
Tweed stayed on friendly terms even with the reporter from the
New-York Times
, his chief accuser. “Good by, my son; come again any time,” he told him in closing one interview that week.
¹⁷
In another, asked about a critical story, he assured him: “You have never misrepresented me.”
¹⁸

The sheriff failed to come for Tweed on Thursday and Tweed went home to Greenwich, taking the ferry across Long Island Sound to Connecticut. He could have stayed there beyond the reach of New York justice but chose instead to return the next morning, a fittingly rainy day. By the time he reached Broadway, he had to push past dozens of lawyers, newsmen, and politicos to reach his office. Reporters described him as looking tired and depressed and noted that he wasn’t wearing his famous diamond pin. When word came that the arrest was imminent, he grumbled: “Well, they’ve been talking about this for the last six weeks. It’s time they did something.”
¹⁹

At 12:30 pm, Sheriff Matthew Brennan, a stout 49-year-old with thick mustache and whiskers, appeared on the sidewalk leading half-a-dozen somber men in dark suits. Brennan pushed his way up the stairs to Tweed’s office and knocked crisply at the door. “Good morning, Mr. Tweed,” he said.
²⁰

Tweed looked up from his desk, his room jammed with people, and returned the greeting. “Good morning.”

Brennan had received the arrest warrant that morning from Wheeler Peckham, one of O’Conor’s lawyers who had hand-carried it down from Albany. O’Conor and Peckham wanted to make certain that Brennan personally executed the order. Brennan, a Tammany Sachem like Tweed and a member of Tweed’s Americus Club, had a strong independent streak. Born in New York in 1822 of immigrant parents, he’d been one of the first American Irishmen to reach political prominence, a police captain in the 1850s and a power at Tammany, owning a saloon near the Five Points neighborhood with his brother. As comptroller through the mid-1860s, he’d been honest enough that Tweed would push him aside for Slippery Dick Connolly. Tweed had picked Brennan to run for sheriff in 1871 to replace renegade Jimmy O’Brien only as a peace gesture to reform-minded Young Democrats.

Now, O’Conor trusted Brennan for the most sensitive arrest of his career.

“Take seats, gentlemen,” Tweed said as Brennan stepped forward. There’d be no whiskey or cigars this morning. Tweed’s sons Richard and William Jr. sat together on a sofa; his lawyers pulled chairs up to the desk. Others stood around the Boss in a circle. One reporter described Sheriff Brennan as walking over to Tweed at this point, putting a hand on his shoulder and saying with a nervous laugh, “You’re my man”—what the reporter saw as “a deliciously cool joke” since normally the sheriff would simply drag a man off by the collar.
²¹

“Mr. Tweed I have an order for your arrest,” Brennan announced, a half-dozen newsmen scribbling notes to record the scene.

“I expected it,” Tweed said, “but not quite so soon. However, I have my bail ready and you can take it here if you will.”

“I will,” Brennan said. “Who are your bondsmen?”

Tweed then listed some of the richest men in New York City, all standing gloomily around the room: Erie Railway president Jay Gould who’d come to pledge $1 million, builder Terrence Farley, real estate dealer Benjamin P. Fairchild, and contractor Bernard Kelley who’d each pledge $300,000, and publisher Hugh Hastings who’d pledge another $100,000. Together, they’d secure a bond totaling $2 million, the required double amount of the $1 million bail.

Brennan then asked everyone but Tweed, the lawyers, and the bail bondsmen to leave the room. It would take three hours to complete the formalities behind closed doors as Brennan’s deputy Judson Jarvis cross-examined each bondsman and drew up legal papers. After they’d finished, Tweed showed Brennan the door and the sheriff departed with his bond, a copy of which landed quickly in the newspapers. Under the arrest order, Tweed remained free but his troubles had only begun. In twenty days he’d have to answer the legal complaint, followed by a trial, perhaps indictments, perhaps jail. His bondsmen—Jay Gould especially—would face weeks of harassment.
^F
OOTNOTE

After Brennan had gone, Tweed spent another hour sitting privately in his office with his sons and lawyers that day, then he took the afternoon ferry home across the waters to Greenwich. Over the next week, he tried to shrug off the indignity and act as if everything were normal. He still had an election campaign to finish. The next Monday after a weekend away, he came to his Broadway office carrying toys he’d bought for his youngest sons, four-year-old George and eight-year-old Charles. Tweed had become a grandfather by now, as his son William Jr.’s wife Eliza had given birth to a baby daughter.

One of the newspaper reporters hovering about the office asked Tweed if he were going to resign. “What for, I would like to know,” he snapped, having answered the same question a dozen times already. “I am here legally, and have done nothing that can remove me legally from here, and in this position I am going to remain. Is that plain enough?… I am going to fight this fight against me to the bitter end.”
²²

-------------------------

As the election campaign reached its crescendo, Thomas Nast’s anti-Tweed cartoons in
Harper’s Weekly
catapulted him to rarified fame and he seized the opportunity with gusto. He made money hand over foot that fall from the drawings that sprang so easily from his fingertips. Copies of his new 1871 “
Thomas Nast’s Illustrated Almanac
” sold like hotcakes at 30 cents apiece with over a hundred original drawings and columns from humorist Mark Twain. Nast had produced two new illustrated pamphlets that year, “
Dame Europa’s School
” and “
Dame Columbia’s Public School, or Something that Did Not Blow Over
,” both of which sold to worldwide audiences. He matched his regular cartoons in
Harper’s Weekly
with drawings for the satirical weekly
Phunny Phellow
and freelance painting. All told, he’d earn $8,000 for his work in 1871 including $5,000 for his Tweed drawings alone.