BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (45 page)

After a while, Tweed recovered his composure enough to grumble at the judge who’d just sentenced him to over a decade behind bars. When a reporter slipped into the room and asked him about it, Tweed blasted it as “pretty severe” and Davis’ attitude as unprofessional. “I can’t help my looks, but I know I didn’t cry; but I never felt defiant,” he said. “He had no business to keep me standing all that time to be lectured; his duty was to pass sentence and no more.”
⁵³

Tweed napped on the couch as the clock ticked past midnight. Finally, at 1 am, the sheriff told him it was time to go to jail. A crowd still jammed the sidewalks outside on Chambers Street at that hour, still hoping for a glimpse of the ex-Boss. Deputies twice had sent empty carriages with shades drawn rushing off into the night trying to trick them into leaving. Now, they led Tweed to a corner of the building where lights had been darkened and two carriages had pulled up to the entrance. Tweed stepped out into the night and scampered across the sidewalk and entered the front carriage, which he shared with his brother, the sheriff, and one of his lawyers. After a short ride through the bumpy cobblestone streets, they reached the Tombs, the city jail. They led Tweed inside through the iron front gate. Here, Tweed happened to spot a familiar face, a watchman he knew from the neighborhood. He stopped to shake the man’s hand. “John, how are you? I never expected to meet you here like this.”
⁵⁴

“Yes, Mr. Tweed, I am sorry,” the man answered, shaking his head.

The night warden was caught unaware by the arrival of his new celebrity inmate. He’d assumed that Tweed would be taken to the jail on Ludlow Street to hold him until his transfer to Blackwell’s Island. He had them wait in a hallway while a cell was prepared. Finally, Tweed shook hands with his son and then followed the warden past sleeping convicts through the jail’s lower tier. They stopped at cell six, a dark, narrow cave with cement floor and iron bed that smelled from thirty-five years of urine, sewage, and despair. Here, the warden locked Tweed inside. Exhausted, he slept soundly on his first night in jail.

CHAPTER 19

PRISON

“The reporters did this.”

—T
WEED
, on reading newspaper coverage in his cell in the Tombs, the morning after his sentencing by Judge Davis. November 24, 1873.
¹

T
HE Tombs, built in 1838 on landfill over a swamp, got its name from its odd architectural design, based on a photograph of an ancient Egyptian crypt. Its stone basements had long ago sunk in the mud causing walls to crack. Foul sewage smells permeated the lower floors; disease, lice, rats, and filth thrived in the dampness. Obsolete and overcrowded, the prison contained two hundred narrow cells that often held two or three prisoners apiece, including fifty reserved for women. Most inmates lived on starvation diets: dinners of bread and tea, breakfasts of bread and coffee, and a bowl of soup for lunch. Cigars, tobacco, or fruit could be purchased only through a black market at twice their normal value.

For Tweed, Sunday in this depressing dungeon seemed a virtual reprieve. He spent the day in his cell reading newspapers and writing a long letter to his wife. When Sheriff Brennan came to visit and asked how he felt, he said: “as well as I can be under the circumstances. I am cold.”
²

By Sunday night, the warden had moved Tweed into a larger room in the front of the building, heated and furnished with a bed, chairs, and a green carpet; he even had a broken window fixed for his new guest. Tweed, able to spend his own money on comforts, arranged to have meals delivered from Matron Foster’s Restaurant, a popular nearby haunt, rather than touch the prison’s food. His wife Mary Jane and daughter Josephine both came to visit along with his son William Jr., brother Richard, and former private secretary Foster Dewey. Tweed asked the warden to keep newspaper reporters away from his distraught family, and the warden agreed.

Rather than a quick stop
en route
to Blackwell’s Island, though, Tweed ended up spending a full week in the Tombs. Sheriff Brennan decided to wait before moving him, both to give Tweed’s lawyers a chance to find a friendly judge to intervene and to give “the old man” time to prepare. Matthew Brennan had never been close with Tweed during their Tammany hay-day, but now he showed concern. Brennan even joined Tweed in jail on Thanksgiving Day to share roast turkey with Mary Jane, the older Tweed children, and lawyer John Townsend. Tweed’s plight became a popular theme for Sunday church sermons all over the city and country, an object lesson in sin: “The sight or thought of William M. Tweed in a convict’s dress will do more to enlighten the men who most need the enlightenment,” the
New York World
opined.
³

Religion aside, though, city fathers had little charity for the former Boss. Reports of his sentimental Thanksgiving family dinner set tempers flaring. The next day, District Attorney Francis C. Barlow sent Brennan a blistering note scolding him for his leniency, accusing him of “violation of duty.” When the sheriff demurred, Barlow issued firm orders: “that William M. Tweed be at once removed to the place of imprisonment designated by the court.”
^F
OOTNOTE
4

Brennan made the transfer the next day. Tweed’s family came to the Tombs to see him off; Mary Jane and three of his daughters waited with him in a parlor on the Leonard Street side, barely holding back tears. At 2:40 pm, when the order came to move, Tweed held his wife once more and let his son help him put on his coat. They walked together over the “Bridge of Sighs”—the prisoners’ name for the corridor connecting their prison cells to the in-house police court—then stepped out onto Centre Street. A few policemen nodded their heads in respect as Tweed walked past. “Here’s Tweed!” shouted bystanders waiting on the street to see him. Tweed still drew a crowd, part well-wishers, part vagabonds and street urchins. Deputies had to push them away for Tweed to reach the carriage that carried him through narrow allies to the pier at 26th Street on the East River. Here, they boarded the steam ferry
Bellevue
. “Perhaps I ought to be grateful to [my enemies] for affording me the pleasure of a carriage ride and a sail,” Tweed cracked, standing with his son and a few lawyers on board as the boat drifted away from shore and out onto the currents and they watched the squat brick buildings and church steeples of Manhattan recede into the distance.
⁵

Blackwell’s Island, just 800 feet wide and less then two miles long, sat halfway between Brooklyn and New York, a cold, windswept place. No bridges or telegraph lines connected it to either city; treacherous East River currents swept along both its banks making even the routine boat passage bumpy and dangerous. The city had purchased the island in 1828 as a place to banish undesirables, the sick, the poor, and the insane. It now held a prison, an almshouse, and hospitals for contagious diseases like smallpox. Its stone quarry, worked by convicts from the penitentiary, had produced materials to build one of the hospitals and the new lighthouse on its northern tip. The Charity Hospital alone held 763 patients including some 150 quarantined with fevers and twelve diagnosed with smallpox; the Lunatic Asylum held another 1,400 inmates.
⁶

Reaching the Island, Tweed looked down at the dirt while crossing the gangway. He embraced his son William Jr. one last time before a sheriff’s deputy led him to the penitentiary and delivered him to Warden Joseph Liscomb. Liscomb had promised newspaper reporters that he’d treat Tweed just like any of the four hundred other inmates under his change, including nine he punished by having iron balls chained to their legs. A guard sat Tweed down and asked him to state his name and age. Tweed gave his age as 50 years old, his profession as “statesman,” his religion as “none” though he explained that his relatives were Protestants. They measured his weight at 268 pounds then took him to the barber to shave off his beard and crop his hair, then gave him a bath. They took away Tweed’s clothes and gave him a convict’s uniform to wear: striped pants, shirt, cap, and a “larceny jacket,” though none properly fit over Tweed’s large body. A prison doctor examined him and pronounced Tweed fit enough to live in one of the prison’s cells, each being seven feet long and 3-and-a-half feet wide with stone floor, iron bedstead, and a small grated iron door.

Tweed’s own personal physician had sent a note suggesting he be placed instead in the prison hospital, noting his recent shocks, delicate condition and history of apoplexia-anguinea, but the doctor disagreed. Instead, they moved him into cell 34 on the second tier, then left him alone.

Tweed slept badly the first night. His body didn’t fit in the tiny cot, a bare iron frame with stretched canvas and no mattress. He suffered chronic diarrhea, shivers, and prostration. He breakfasted on the standard coarse bread and coffee and spent the day inside his cell with William Jr., his only visitor. Occasionally he stood at the cell’s door, head bowed. “You have brought me here to die,” he told one official who examined him.
⁷

The second day, Tweed’s personal physician, Dr. Schirmer, came to see him and again argued to move him to the prison hospital. That night, the prison doctor reexamined him and agreed. Warden Liscomb ordered Tweed moved. There were rumors that Tweed had only hours to live. Myer Stern, a member of the Charities and Corrections Commission that oversaw the prison, visited the Island that day and gasped at Tweed’s condition. “Tweed would have been killed in forty-eight hours” without a change, he later claimed.
⁸

Rules demanded that all prisoners on Blackwell’s Island do forced labor; most convicts worked in the stone quarry, the carpentry shop, the shoe shop, or the bakery. Some served as nurses in the Lunatic Asylum. For Tweed, they now assigned work as an orderly at the prison’s hospital, which would allow him to eat and sleep with the sick prisoners, a sharp improvement from his cramped cell. The hospital occupied a large room on the prison building’s fourth floor; it held seventeen patients on two rows of cots, with two desks, cases of medicine, a window facing the city and a hot stove.

The change suited Tweed. Here, he would work under direction of the doctor and a senior orderly; his duties included changing patients’ bandages, giving them medicines, keeping their records and keeping them company. His spirits lifted over the next few days and his health returned. He fell into a pattern: He woke each morning at 6:30 am and enjoyed the freedom of the orderly room. Making the best of prison life, he soon managed to win some privileges. Warden Liscomb began to trust him; perhaps he enjoyed hearing Tweed tell stories of backroom politics from the city. He sympathized with Tweed’s age, his bad health and soft living, things that made him different from the other inmates. After a few weeks, he allowed Tweed to move into a private room in the prison’s center building where officials stayed. The room was sparse but it had a bed, desk, chairs, and a window.

Commissioner Stern, for his part, began giving passes to Tweed’s sons William Jr. and Richard and his private secretary Foster Dewey so they could visit him regularly, despite prison rules that generally limited visits to once a month. Tweed’s wife Mary Jane came too, every ten days or so. Tweed had hardly been the best husband to her during their twenty-eight year marriage. It’s not unlikely he was unfaithful to her, given his long trips to Albany and his high-living style. Still, he’d kept any affairs highly discreet; rumors of mistresses remained rare and unproven despite hostile newspapers hungry for slander against him. She stayed loyal to him now, even if her own health had begun to break under the stress. A degenerative eye disease was starting to steal her vision. In a few years, she’d be functionally blind.

All Tweed’s visitors brought him newspapers so he could follow events in the world from his solitary island. That December, as Tweed adjusted to the penitentiary, he read that Oakey Hall, the only one of his old Ring cohorts who’d stayed in Manhattan and faced his accusers, had won an outright acquittal in his third criminal trial. A jury had found him “not guilty,” issuing its verdict on Christmas Eve and sparking celebrations in the courtroom, cheers shouted and hats thrown in the air. Well-wishers had mobbed Hall as he crossed the snowy sidewalk to his carriage; congratulations poured in from respectables like Peter Cooper and Henry Ward Beecher who weeks earlier had treated him like a leper.

With Elegant Oakey now exonerated and free, Tweed found himself the only Ring member being punished. His name had been blackened far beyond the others. Even behind bars, he caused controversy. When another Charities and Corrections Commissioner, Lambeer, came to Blackwell’s Island in mid-April for an inspection, he learned of Tweed’s living arrangements and acted shocked. He’d seen Tweed with his door open, unguarded, a dozen steps from the exit on the verge of escape, he claimed. “A woman comes [to Tweed’s room] in the morning, cleans his room and lights his fire. He boards at the Warden’s house. He goes to his breakfast from eight to nine, to his dinner between nine and two, and to his supper between five and six,” Lambeer told newspaper reporters, and repeated rumors that the prison carpentry shop had produced “costly furniture, tables, aquariums, flower stands, &c.,” all for Tweed. “People at the Union League Club told me, ‘Why, Tweed lives on the fat of the land,’ and I denied it.”
⁹

“Luxurious treatment!” screamed the newspapers, demanding investigations.

Myer Stern, the commissioner who’d ordered Tweed’s original transfer to the prison hospital, had to defend himself from charges of favoritism and whispers of bribery. “The sentence which consigned Tweed to prison did not enjoin us to torture him or to undermine his health,” he insisted.
¹⁰
He described Tweed’s private room as merely a “large cell” justified by the ex-Boss’s age, size, and poor health. “William M. Tweed might, in the eyes of his bitterest antagonists deserve no greater consideration than the meanest culprit, the burglar, the highwayman, or the shoplifter, but he certainly is entitled to no less consideration.”
¹¹

After a loud public meeting, the commissioners agreed that Tweed must return to the hospital. But a few days later, when word of the transfer reached the prison, several inmates who’d befriended “the old man” faked having cases of smallpox, causing a panic on the Island and giving Tweed a few more days of comfort.
¹²

Two months later, on June 19, Tweed enjoyed his first chance to leave the penitentiary since becoming a prisoner. Foster Dewey, his former private secretary, had filed a lawsuit claiming he’d been cheated on a $1,000 payment he’d made to the Seventh Ward Tweed Association and the lawyers had asked that Tweed come to testify as a witness. Warden Liscomb accompanied Tweed for the passage by rowboat across the East River that morning; a coach carried them to the Courthouse on Chambers Street—the same building where Judge Noah Davis had sentenced him to prison and where Andrew Garvey’s frescoes still decorated the ceilings. Crowds gathered on the sidewalk to see the former Boss on his first reprieve in six months. “There he goes.” “There’s the old man,” people said as he walked by. He wore a white straw hat with black band, eyeglasses dangling from a black cord around his neck, his white necktie neatly knotted. Tweed’s beard had grown back but now had a ghostly white color. Still, friends noted a healthy, ruddy pink in his cheeks. His smile revealed that he’d lost an upper front tooth. He basked in the attention, shaking hands, waving, winking as he made his way up the courthouse stairs. Inside the judge’s chambers, he laughed several times listening to the lawyers’ arguments, a novelty after his months of isolation.
¹³