BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (33 page)

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Barely had the shocks finished roiling Manhattan—first Judge Barnard’s injunction freezing city finances followed by Tweed’s ugly temper tantrum—when a new bombshell hit in the headlines, again shining the spotlight on “Slippery Dick” Connolly, the comptroller. Burglars had broken into Connolly’s office in the new County Courthouse and stolen hundreds of vouchers from locked file cabinets, vouchers that covered the very same expense items listed by the
New-York Times
in its Secret Accounts stories.

Only a few days earlier, the citizens’ investigating committee had asked Connolly to produce these very same vouchers for their examination. The theft had every sign of a cover-up, someone trying to torpedo the investigation by destroying evidence.

Connolly, already exhausted after days of harassment from his Ring “friends,” heard the news on reaching his office Monday morning, September 10. Connolly’s office occupied a large, high-ceiling suite on the second floor of the new Courthouse. William Murphy, a private watchman on duty Saturday night, had left his post for a three-hour break and returned to find shards of broken glass on the floor and part of the door’s glass window covered by cardboard. He thought nothing of it at first, seeing nothing out of place. Stephen Lynes, the county auditor, heard the news on arriving at work Monday morning and made a quick inspection. He discovered that two locked wooden closets had been forced open, the locks ripped off. Seven pigeonholes had been emptied from one cabinet, three from another. Checking his records, he found that the empty boxes had contained vouchers—original claim forms used by contractors to support city payments—for 1869 and 1870, three thousand of them, tied in bundles labeled “armories and drill rooms,” “adjusted claims,” and “county liabilities.” Lynes remembered seeing them in their normal places the prior Friday afternoon, he told police; someone must have stolen them over the weekend.
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Experts examining the door concluded that the burglars, working from the outside, had cut the glass with a diamond—and who owned a more famous diamond in New York City than Tweed? They’d made a hole just wide enough for a hand to reach inside and unlock it. Still, carrying so much paper out of the building unseen would have been difficult; the missing vouchers would have filled two bushel baskets, or three to four cubic feet. And both Murphy and Edwin Haggerty, the building’s janitor who lived in an upstairs apartment with his wife, claimed they hadn’t heard anyone enter the locked courthouse over the weekend.

Within hours, word of the robbery flashed all over town and newspaper reporters descended by the dozens on Connolly’s office. Connolly invited several into his private room and sent for Murphy, the watchman, to tell his story. He described the robbery as “singularly unfortunate to himself” since it might have destroyed evidence that could clear him of charges.
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Whoever had committed the crime had known exactly what to look for, which cabinets and pigeonholes to pilfer. Nothing beyond the specific cabinets had been touched; no money or other papers were missing and nothing was out of place.

Connolly’s laments aside, though, the news had a startling impact. It raised the darkest suspicions: Connolly or “the Ring” must have been behind it, a desperate effort to protect themselves. It fed the worst image of Tweed’s circle as desperate men willing to stop at nothing, especially after Tweed’s ugly outburst against George Jones and the mayor’s harassment of the
New-York Times
and
Harper’s Weekly
that summer.

The news created a flurry even on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of the Erie Railway and the Hannibal and St. Joseph, railroads in which Tweed was said to hold positions, both tumbled in value as did city bonds. Rumors swirled around the trading floor that Connolly might dump bonds on the market to punish his Wall Street enemies.
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Anything was possible with these Tammany criminals.

But people also quickly noticed several things about the robbery that didn’t make sense: For one, Connolly’s office routinely kept copies of all the stolen information. They could replace it instantly. Every city expense was recorded in a ledger book, and none of the ledgers had been touched. The only items missing—the contractors’ original claim forms—could be easily reconstructed from other records. If someone were trying to cover up a crime, they’d failed miserably, and anyone familiar enough with Connolly’s office to know exactly which pigeonholes to rob would have known this. Besides, why should Connolly break into his own office to steal evidence? He had a key to the front door, and he could have more easily “misplaced” the documents than pretended to steal them.

But if Connolly hadn’t done it, then who did? Gossips produced a long list of suspects that day: Some pointed to Oakey Hall, the mayor, perhaps trying to incriminate Connolly to drive him out of office. Others pointed to Matthew O’Rourke, the
New-York Times
writer and former comptroller employee, perhaps wanting to steal the records to prove his newspaper’s charges. Others suggested the newspaper itself, fearing that the original vouchers might clear Tweed and Connolly of wrongdoing. Police investigators only added to the confusion by their own lackadaisical probe. Some officers who saw the hole in the glass door were overheard whispering: “Too thin.”
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Whoever knew the truth wasn’t talking, but guesses abounded and the accusations pointed mostly back to Connolly. The crime, after all, was committed in his office and involved his records. He’d have a hard time proving his innocence.

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No one reacted more sharply to news of the voucher robberies than A. Oakey Hall, His Honor the Mayor. If Hall was looking for an excuse to save himself by pushing Connolly out the door, he’d now found a dandy.

That morning, without bothering even to talk first to his comptroller, Elegant Oakey sat down in his City Hall office, took pen in hand, and laid down the law. He wrote Connolly a stern letter asking for his resignation. The 1870 Tweed charter denied him the right to fire Connolly outright, but Hall decided that now, under the circumstances, a firm demand would suffice. “I have just been informed by the Superintendent of Police that last night the offices of the Finance Department were secretly invaded,” he wrote. “Our constituents have a right to hold you responsible.” No evidence had connected Connolly to the crime, but that didn’t stop him from pointing his finger. Was it a way to shift suspicion away from himself? “With great personal reluctance, I officially reach the conclusion that the exigency requires your retirement from the head of the Finance Department... and ask… for your resignation.”
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A few hours later, when Tweed welcomed Sweeny, Connolly, and the mayor for their regular daily angst session at his Duane Street office, Hall quickly pulled out the letter and used it to confront Connolly directly. He no longer asked him to resign but
insisted
on it. Sitting across the polished mahogany table from Connolly, he read the letter aloud to Connolly’s face as Tweed and Sweeny watched. Connolly, a larger man physically than Oakey Hall, didn’t flinch, though his eyes probably narrowed into two tiny slits behind his gold-rimmed reading glasses. “Hall, don’t send me that letter,” he said, according to sources. “The public demand your resignation as much as my own. We must sink or swim together.”
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He knew nothing about the voucher theft, Connolly insisted.

But Hall ignored him. He handed the letter across the table to Connolly but Connolly refused to touch it. “You may mail it to my office or to my house, but I will never take such a letter from your hands,” he said.
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That night, Hall would send it to the newspapers. By the next morning, it would be plastered all over town, exposing the schism to the world.

Tweed barely said a word during this entire exchange. The fact that he didn’t put his foot down and demand that his friends stop tearing each other apart reflected his own shrinking voice within the group. By one account, Tweed already had found himself being chastised in these private meetings: Oakey Hall had “timidly suggested” at one point that Tweed consider stepping down, to which Tweed had snapped back: “I am prepared to resign at once if the rest (Sweeny, Connolly, and Hall) will do so.” Tweed, asked about the incident, denied it ever happened.
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Jimmy O’Brien, who still kept an office in City Hall to stay abreast of the gossip, found this story unlikely. Hall would never have dared turn against Tweed, he told people that day. “If Hall ever asks Tweed to resign, he’ll never ask another man,” he said. “Mr. Tweed [would] give Hall’s tree such a shaking that there would be no plums left on it.”
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In any event, after the meeting that morning, Oakey Hall seemed pleased with his own performance. He left Tweed’s office on Duane Street and didn’t object when a newsman from the
New York Sun
tagged along and badgered him with questions. The reporter described Hall’s bubbly mood, how he stepped out onto the sidewalk wearing a reddish-gray suit looking “such as a third-rate clerk at Lord & Taylor’s would disdain to wear.” The mayor entertained the newsman, chatting non-stop as they walked together across Chambers Street and City Hall Park. “I’ve made up my mind that no earthly power will draw a word out of me. I’ve been dreadfully busy,” he said. The reporter scribbled notes as Hall talked about the sacrifice he’d made taking public office, how he’d given only one dinner party since becoming mayor. Reaching the marble edifice of City Hall, the mayor stopped on the front steps and lifted his arm to point at a bank building across the street on Broadway with a flag on top reading “Security.” “This is the flag I mean to have for the next year over the City Hall,” he said.

Then, “with the air of a grand seigneur of the time of Louis XIV, the Mayor took off his hat and waved it to the
Sun
reporter as the latter bade his pleasant companion good day,” the reporter wrote.
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Hall’s good humor that morning, coming amid a storm of crises—robberies, lawsuits, and fraud charges—seemed strange and sparked its own rumors that the mayor had lost his mind. “I am so overwhelmed with business that I am in a maze,” Hall told another reporter that day. “My brain is so occupied that I should hardly know what I was talking about.”
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But behind closed doors, Oakey Hall made plans. He had every intention to force Connolly out. Legally, the city charter gave him only one recourse against Connolly if he refused to go, impeachment, but the mayor had a better idea. He invited August Belmont, the German banker and national party chairman, to visit his City Hall office that afternoon and they met privately for a full hour. Hall may have offered Belmont the comptroller’s job on the spot. Belmont, a respected figure in international finance, would have restored credibility instantly to city bonds in world markets. Belmont played along. After seeing Hall, he made a point to be seen visiting the Comptroller’s Office in the new Courthouse and refused to answer questions from newsmen.

That night, the mayor dined with friends at the Manhattan Club. The next day, on Saturday, he devised a newer plan: Instead of Belmont, he found another taker for the comptroller’s job: George B. McClellan, “Little Mac,” the former Civil War general and 1864 Democratic presidential nominee. McClellan, sacked by Abraham Lincoln from his command of the Army of the Potomac after the Antietam bloodbath in 1862, had spent three years in Europe after the war, traveling through Switzerland and France, meeting Prussian army chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke and selling American-made munitions. He’d returned stateside in late 1868 and now enjoyed a role as elder statesman. He’d recently settled with his wife Ellen in a new home he’d built on Mt. Orange, New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan, and had accepted the post of chief engineer of New York’s Docks Department and trustee of the Atlantic and Western Railroad, giving him together a healthy income of $20,000 per year.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, October 7, 1871.

The mayor visited McClellan, still trim at 45 years old, and “Little Mac” happily agreed to Hall’s offer to become Comptroller so long as Connolly first agree to leave. The chance to be a hero again, saving the city from scandal, appealed to McClellan. The mayor left an acceptance letter for him to sign when the time came.

Things seemed to fall into place that Saturday for Mayor Hall. Through intermediaries, he heard that Connolly finally had agreed to step aside, promising to send his resignation to City Hall by 5 pm that day in exchange for Hall’s promise to choose a trusted replacement as comptroller: either Belmont or McClellan.

But late that afternoon, waiting in his office for Connolly’s resignation letter, the mayor grew impatient. He received a telegram from his wife Kate who was staying just across the river at their weekend retreat in Milburn, New Jersey, saying one of their daughters was ill. He should come home quickly. By then, Tweed and Sweeny both had left the city for their weekend homes, Tweed’s in Greenwich and Sweeny’s at Lake Mahopac. At 9 pm, hearing nothing from Connolly, Oakey Hall too decided to leave his office to join his wife and sick daughter.

He thought nothing of the silence from Connolly and didn’t bother to check if anything had gone wrong. Business could wait until Monday.