BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (44 page)

This left Tweed’s lawyers in a painful box; the judge’s anger at the perceived insult now threatened to shade their every step during the trial. Lawyer John Graham begged Davis for a chance to explain the petition. “I ask that you give me an opportunity to show that our facts are true,” he argued. “You leave us through the whole trial under an imputation which we feel to be utterly unjust.”

“No, Sir,” Davis ruled.

Failing that, Graham asked the judge at least to allow Tweed to select a new team of lawyers who hadn’t offended him. “We fear that it will injure our client,” added lawyer Willard Bartlett.

This too Davis denied. “The trial must proceed.” There would be no explanations, no substitutes, no delays. Tweed would have to live with the result. “I will give no time to counsel to mutiny against their client.”
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It then took seven days to choose a jury, twelve men in New York City who could credibly claim impartiality on the subject of Tweed. Dozens had to be rejected, including fourteen on the first day alone, most for admitting to be biased in the case. Charges of jury tampering erupted almost immediately: Peckham had hired four Pinkerton detectives to shadow the jurors, prospective jurors, and even Tweed’s brother Richard around the courthouse to prevent foul play, and he’d assigned lawyers to investigate each potential juror for hints of prejudice.
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Tweed’s lawyers, in turn, hired their own detectives to shadow the Pinkertons—sleuths trailing sleuths. On the sixth day of jury selection, one of the Pinkertons reported something suspicious: He had followed the jurors on a lunch break and seen juror eight, a man named Ellis H. Lubry, speak briefly with Police Captain Walsh after he’d seen Walsh talk privately with Tweed, then seen Walsh talk privately to Tweed again. Walsh took the witness stand and insisted the detectives had made a mistake, that he was personal friends with Lubry and Tweed both and hadn’t discussed the case at all, but Davis quickly dropped Lubry from the panel.
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At the same time, for the final jury seat, Davis approved a man named John Calvin Lloyd who openly admitted bias. Asked if he thought Tweed and his gang guilty, he’d said “Some of them were undoubtedly guilty,” and he acknowledged a prejudice against Tweed “on account of his moral character.”
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The actual trial took just four days to complete as prosecutors repeated mostly the same testimony from the first trial, only more briefly. At issue was the same “omnibus” indictment with 220 misdemeanor counts. Witnesses included clerks from the Comptroller’s Office and the Broadway Bank. Sam Tilden made a return appearance to explain his famous chart. J. McBride Davidson, a safe maker, described submitting false bills to the county through auditor James Watson and contractor John Keyser, also home with immunity, explained his Tax Levy warrants. Prosecutors chose not to re-call plasterer Andrew Garvey, fearing Tweed’s lawyers would embarrass him on cross-examination, but instead they produced Garvey’s brother John who recounted a conversation two years earlier where Tweed told him it would be better for him if John’s brother Andrew stayed away in Europe.
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OOTNOTE

Tweed’s lawyers called just three defense witnesses, including Bill Copeland, the clerk who’d copied the original Secret Account disclosures that ended up in the
New-York Times
. Copeland acknowledged that he’d never seen Tweed sign any of the warrants.

Judge Davis gave the case to the jury late Wednesday night, November 19. He read aloud his final instructions by the light of candles placed in empty beer bottles on his desk to supplement the gas chandeliers on the ceiling. Tweed waited in the courtroom until after midnight as the jurors deliberated. Reporters described him as jittery and restless, jumping up and down, holding brief whispered talks. When the judge adjourned the court at 3 am, Tweed went home for a few hours’ sleep but appeared again early the next morning with his son William Jr. When Judge Davis called the jurors in at 10 am to check on their progress—they’d been locked up overnight to work—they reported they still hadn’t reached a verdict and asked Davis to explain one of the legal counts in the indictment. Then they retired for more talks.

Forty-five minutes later the jurors came back. “How say you, is William M. Tweed guilty or not guilty?” Davis’ clerk, a Mr. Sparks, asked them. This time, they had an answer. The foreman stood at his chair. “Guilty,” he said, “guilty on all four of the counts.” He handed the clerk a list:

“Guilty–1,2,3,4 counts.

“Davidson accounts–Counts 213 to 216, inclusive.

“Garvey Accounts–Counts 37 to 60, 69 to 100, 122 to 200.

“Keyser Accounts–Counts 1 to 36, 61 to 68, 100 to 112, 113–116, 117–123.”

Judge Davis quickly deciphered this complex formula to mean that the jury had convicted Tweed on fifty-one of the fifty-four items in the indictment, each with four subparts: 204 counts altogether. He polled them to confirm their unanimity, then he let them go: “Gentlemen of the Jury: You have had a very arduous work… The Court feels bound in discharging you to tender you thanks for the attention you have paid and for the anxious manner apparent to do your whole duty in this case. You are discharged.”
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After the jurors had left their box, Davis then asked the sheriff, Matthew Brennan, who had arrested Tweed originally two years earlier, now to take Tweed into custody again and hold him until Saturday—three days later—when lawyers would return to argue procedural motions and Davis would pronounce his sentence. Then he gaveled the court adjourned.

Tweed looked pale as Brennan led him out through a side door and down a corner stairway to Chambers Street to avoid crowds in the corridors and on the sidewalks. A reporter described Tweed, his son and his son-in-law Arthur Maginnis as in tears. A carriage whisked them away to Tweed’s office on Duane Street. After some time alone with his family, Tweed left the building and rode up Broadway to see his lawyer John Graham, then he spent the night at his son’s home on Fifth Avenue, formerly his own mansion. As a convict under Sheriff Brennan’s custody, two deputies dogged his every step. They even stayed in Tweed’s bedroom at night as he slept, refusing to leave him unguarded.

Thursday morning, Tweed left his son’s home at 10 am, rode to Duane Street and stayed in his office until 7 p.m. before going home; messengers brought him breakfast from Delmonico’s restaurant. An “intimate friend” described the Boss as being in “excellent spirits” as he worked through the day arranging for possible time in jail, transferring more properties to his son Richard and, through Richard, to his daughter-in-law Eliza, William Jr.’s wife. Friday he spent at his lawyer’s office again preparing for the case.

On Saturday, Tweed returned to Judge Davis’ courtroom along with the two deputies and his sons. As he reached the doorway to the crowded chamber, Sheriff Matthew Brennan pulled him aside privately, looked him in the eye, and took his hand: “I hope you will bear up, Bill,” he said.
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“Ah, I have tried to bear up, Matt. I never thought it would come to this.”

As Tweed entered the courtroom, a reporter noted how Tweed had changed just in the past few days since the conviction: “Physical and mental prostration marked his step, his carriage and his look; there was no bravado and no cringe.”
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Tweed took his seat quietly, no greetings, no handshakes. As lawyers jousted over opening arguments, Tweed shifted his hands, crossing them, dropping them, swinging them at the wrist, reaching into his pockets, gripping the wooden chair arms.

Prosecutor Lyman Tremain, a tall, plump man, then rose to his feet and addressed the judge. It was time for Davis to impose sentence. Tremain’s proposal jolted the room. Rather than asking for a single penalty of $250 in fines and a year in jail—the maximum for a misdemeanor—he asked instead that Judge Davis impose separate sentences for each of 102 separate offences based on the 204 counts on which the jury had found Tweed guilty. That would produce a total punishment of more than a hundred years behind bars and a fine of over $25,000.

Tweed had expected it—Tremain had hinted at the unusual request on Wednesday—but hearing the words spoken out loud hit a nerve. His face turned pale; he held his head in his hand. “Your motion is perfectly startling,” his lawyer John Graham argued, jumping to his feet. This abrupt, surprise change in the ground rules put the entire trial under false pretenses, he argued: “That we should have been [sitting] upon a volcano like this from the beginning [and] that the jury should have been kept in utter ignorance of the fearful consequences that were to follow from its action.”
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He quoted Wheeler Peckham’s own opening statement from the first trial where Peckham explained the basis of the small single penalty and Judge Davis’ own holding then that “there can be but one single judgment” in the case.

When prosecutors stuck to their point, Graham became emotional. “Your Honor, we are taught, from the time we enter this world, to ask for mercy; and those prayers which we put up in our own behalf must teach us to render deeds of mercy to…..”
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He stopped in mid-sentence.

Noah Davis would have none of it, though. He’d been waiting over a year for his chance to send Tweed to prison and wasn’t about to lose it now. Sitting stiffly at the bench in his black tie and black roles, his cheeks turned red, he heard the arguments and brushed Graham’s points aside. The lawyer’s quotes from him and Peckham had come from the first trial, not the second, and he had researched the point again in the meantime. Any misunderstanding by jurors on the issue “could have no legitimate effect even if expressed.”
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“Mr. Tweed, stand up,” the judge’s clerk finally insisted. Tweed rose at his chair. “William M. Tweed, have you anything to say why sentence of the Court should not be passed upon you?” Tweed, perhaps confused—he hadn’t spoken a word out loud during the trial—held his tongue as lawyer Graham interrupted: “Nothing… he has spoken through his counsel.”

As Tweed continued standing, Judge Davis now began speaking, his eyes focused on the defendant, referring to pages of notes. “William M. Tweed, you stand convicted by the verdict of an intelligent and honest jury of the large number of crimes charged against you in this indictment,” he began, building momentum as words tumbled off his tongue. “Holding a high public office, honored, and respected, by a large class of the community in which you lived, and, I have no doubt, beloved by your associates, you… saw fit to pervert the powers with which you were clothed, in a manner more infamous, more outrageous than any instance of a like character which the history of the civilized world contains.”

As Davis continued this lashing, he tone noticeably shifted: “he grew red and excited, uttered his words with strong emphasis, and struck his clenched fist on the desk,” one reporter wrote.
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Tweed stood at his place the whole time. The judge’s oration lasted thirty-one minutes; in it, he accused Tweed of “defiance” merely for acting calm during the trial. Reporters noted how Tweed straightened himself to stare back in Davis’ face, at times gripping both his hands to the back of a chair. “Few honest men could have looked as honest,” one wrote of him at that moment.
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“It is the duty of this court to pronounce upon you a sentence that may be in some degree adequate to your crime,” Davis finally concluded.
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He now explained his own complicated math for setting a sentence. He specified fifty-one of the 102 counts on which Tweed had been convicted and fined him the maximum $250 on each—$12,750 altogether—plus three other counts on which he fined him six cents each. At the same time, he specified twelve groups of guilty counts on which to base a jail term of twelve years, triple the term he’d recently given Ned Stokes for murdering Jim Fisk. Because the crimes were misdemeanors, he ordered that Tweed serve his time in the city penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island, a place no less notorious than the state prison at Sing Sing.

Then, before adjourning the court, he announced plans to settle one other score. He ordered Tweed’s lawyers to return to his chambers the following Monday to address their earlier charge that Davis was biased. Davis hadn’t forgotten it. He’d give them all a tongue-lashing, charge them with contempt, and fine three of them $250 apiece.
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Sheriff Matthew Brennan led Tweed from the courtroom out a side door to a private nearby lobby where Tweed stood shaken with his sons and brother. One reporter described him as “utterly broken,” despondent and tired;
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another wrote how Tweed hid his face in his hands and wept.
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They left him alone some time, then guards brought him downstairs to Sheriff Brennan’s private office to wait while his lawyers scoured the city, still hoping to find a judge willing to intervene and stop the proceeding. At one point, they arranged for dinner to be sent over from Delmonico’s restaurant. As Tweed picked at his food, his mind wandered and he thought of Slippery Dick Connolly, his former comptroller who’d deserted him to the reformers and fled to France. “Dick is living in clover on $3,000 a year, and he is the cause of all this trouble and ought to be where I am,” he muttered.
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