BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (50 page)

Thousands of curiosity seekers mobbed the Hudson and East River banks with opera glasses and telescopes as the
Catalpa
approached, hoping for a glimpse of the ex-Boss. Now they cheered as his boat reached Pier No. 47 on the Hudson. Legs wobbly, Tweed tripped and almost fell while walking down the gangway; an Irish workman caught him by the arm and yelled “Hooray for the ‘ould Boss.”
⁶³

He threaded his way across the wharf, stopping to shake hands or share a smile with an occasional friend. At the curb, he boarded a waiting carriage and sat in the back as a policeman closed the door behind him. As it rode off, crowds followed, carriages with reporters and people chasing on foot. One newsman described how Tweed sat quietly in his carriage seat peering out a window, seeing the streets of home for the first time in eleven months, and stroking his white beard. At Ludlow Street, spectators jammed the sidewalks all around the jailhouse as the carriage entered through a gate directly into the jail’s courtyard. After a few minutes, Warden Watson stepped outside and announced: “Yes, gentlemen; Tweed is locked up in his room.”
⁶⁴

On seeing the warden for the first time since causing so much trouble by his escape, Tweed told him simply, “Well, I thought I’d come back to you.”
⁶⁵

He ate dinner privately that night with his son William Jr., his former secretary Foster Dewey, and his brother Richard. They stayed and talked well into the night. “He is crushed and broken. He has lost his old buoyancy and defiant spirit,” Dewey told reporters afterward. “He seems desolate and desirous of companionship more than anything else. He is a mere wreck of his former self.”
⁶⁶

Of his time away, Tweed had spent almost four months at sea, mostly nauseous and seasick, traveling from New Jersey to Florida to Cuba to Spain and back again to New York City, and weeks more behind bars on Cuba and in Vigo. “His curious, ill-conceived escape netted him ten months of running from the frying pan to the fire,” historian Leo Hershkowitz would write.
⁶⁷

Tweed would later admit to paying $60,000 in bribes to arrange the breakout, a remarkably large transaction arranged from his jail cell in total secrecy. Just as remarkably, no accomplices ever would be identified or charged in the escape, even “Hunt,” whom Spanish authorities had delivered into American hands. Tweed would never reveal any of them, except to say that no New York City official or policeman had been involved. Nor would anyone betray Tweed for the $10,000 in reward money. Pressed about it later, Tweed would argue he hadn’t really broken out of anything. “I did not escape from the jail,” he’d say, “but left my own house.”
⁶⁸
Only one thing was clear. This was the last time. Asked if he would ever permit Tweed to visit his family, the sheriff said “No, sir…. Tweed shall not escape from me again.”
⁶⁹

CHAPTER 21

LAWYERS

“ For Tweed there was some sympathy as a man who had been broken down by the prosecution and who had some manly qualities, but for a greedy thief like Connolly and a wily trickster like Mr. Peter B. Sweeny—‘brother, there is none.”

—
EDITORIAL COLUMN
in the
New York Tribune
, June 8, 1877.
¹

“ The abuse you get only shows the outrageous injustice which public officers who do their duty get.”

—
FRANCIS BARLOW
, in a letter to Attorney General Charles Fairchild, June 25, 1877.
²

“ These men are dead socially and politically. Let us force them to put the money they have stolen back into the City Treasury and leave their punishment to a higher power.”

—An unnamed “
PROMINENT LOCAL POLITICIAN
” commenting on Sweeny, Connolly, and Tweed, June 7, 1877.
³

F
RIENDS joked that Tweed himself had overseen the building of the Ludlow Street Jail near his old neighborhood on the lower East Side back in the early 1860s: “If Mr. Tweed had known he was going to patronage it,” one said, “he would have made the rooms … more commodious.”
⁴

He adjusted quickly back to life behind bars, but eleven months on the run had taken a toll. Dr. William Schirmer, his personal physician, examined Tweed on his first day back and found him a physical wreck. Tweed had lost a full hundred pounds of body weight since leaving the city—mostly from nausea and seasickness during the ocean crossings. His blue eyes had “lost their brightness,” the doctor reported, and his voice had turned feeble; he spoke now in an undertone, walked with a cane, his hair and beard ghostly white. What’s more, Tweed’s diabetes had worsened and weakened his lungs, leaving him often breathless. Still, he retained “remarkable possession of all his faculties.”
⁵

For days after returning to dry land, Tweed could barely look at food: “I can’t get the motion of the ship out of my head,” he complained.
⁶

Slowly, he began to heal. The warden gave Tweed the same two-room suite on the jail’s first floor he’d occupied before the escape, though he now charged Tweed $75 a month for the privilege. Here, he could look out his own window at shoppers from the Essex Street market or carriages on Grand Street. He decorated the room with flowers, a piano, and photographs, and he convinced Luke Grant, the prison servant, to again act as his personal aide for a small fee. After a few days, Dr. Schirmer found Tweed walking circles in the jail’s brick-enclosed courtyard side-by-side with his son, William Jr., who came most days to visit. He enjoyed entertaining old friends like veteran Republican wire-puller Thurlow Weed who’d come to “try to cheer him up,” he said.
⁷
He avoided politics like the plague. Sent a reporter’s written question as to whether he planned to make damning exposures against Samuel Tilden as the newspapers had speculated, Tweed returned it with the word “No” written in large letters and underlined heavily in blue pencil.

Why cross swords with Tilden now? Tweed had his own problems. Even putting aside bad health, his future looked utterly bleak. He faced jail for the rest of his life. Having lost his trial in
abstentia
, he owed the state $6.3 million and, even if he could free himself under debtor laws,
^F
OOTNOTE
he still faced trial on twenty-eight criminal indictments. The state already had confiscated all his property they could find. Poverty, unimaginable a few years earlier, now haunted his future. Tweed’s real estate holdings worth over $2 million in 1871 had lost fully two-thirds their value since he’d transferred them to his children, who’d sold them to raise cash. His savings had trickled away: legal bills of $445,000, family expenses of $40,000 each year, $450,000 in losses on the Metropolitan Hotel, $30,000 to send the family to Europe in 1872, $100,000 in bank settlements, among many others. “I have recklessly parted with a great deal of money,” he conceded.
⁹
Scandal had destroyed his credit. “Sir; Physically and financially I am in trouble,” he wrote to James Ingersoll around this time, asking if he’d have “the goodness” to drop several lawsuits against his family.
¹⁰
One nephew, Frank Tweed, son of his brother Richard, couldn’t find work at all in New York City; “the name of T—d rendered it difficult,” his sister-in-law complained, as if the name itself had become a curse.
¹¹

He faced a grim reality—he might not have long to live. More than anything, he wanted to go home and spend his last years in Greenwich with his wife and children and find some dignity.

That winter, hope came to him in the form of an idea. E.A. Woodward, who had been Tweed’s clerk at the county Board of Supervisors back during his glory days and had once helped Tweed arrange payoffs and “percentages” for his circle, had fled New York City after the disclosures but was arrested that summer in Chicago and brought back to stand trial. Woodward had found a way out, though. Held like Tweed in the Ludlow Street Jail, he’d hired a lawyer who’d quickly negotiated a “compromise” with prosecutors for his release. He agreed to pay $150,000 in restitution, make a full confession, and testify against any other Ring members brought to trial. Woodward had stayed loyal to Tweed during the scandals and Tweed was glad when he came by for a talk one day during his first week back in New York City.

Woodward had a suggestion: Tweed should speak to his new lawyer, John D. Townsend, and get some new advice.

John Townsend, short, with receding hair, small eyes, and a crisp mustache, had been a child prodigy when he’d started Columbia University at just thirteen years of age in the late 1840s, but he’d left soon to see the world. He sailed as a junior officer on the clipper ship
Flying Cloud
on its record-breaking 89-day trip to San Francisco and tried his luck at the California gold mines. Failing there, he came back to Harvard Law School and launched his legal career. Now, 41 years old, Townsend barely knew the famous Boss Tweed when he came to his room at Ludlow Street Jail. Townsend had no illusions that Tweed was anything but what the newspapers said he was: guilty as charged. Still, he sympathized. “Personally, Tweed was the pluckiest man I ever met,” he said of their first meeting. “Not a man in a thousand could have survived the terrible strain he has lived under for more than a past year.”
¹²

Townsend saw only one way for Tweed to save himself: to stop his denials, admit his guilt, and pay his penalty. After two years in prison, ten months as a fugitive, and facing a hopeless future, Tweed had little desire to fight and was ready to listen. Also, he now had something to get off his chest—the truth. His truth, something he’d thought about during his months as a fugitive. Only Tweed wanted to tell it in the right forum and under the right conditions. His truth had value; it should set him free. Free, that is, from jail.

“At first it was not an easy matter to induce Mr. Tweed to beg for mercy,” Townsend recalled.
¹³
Ever since the first
New-York Times
disclosures had appeared in July 1871, Tweed had adamantly denied doing anything wrong. He’d prided himself in keeping secrets and protecting friends—even long after they’d betrayed him. Beyond sheer stubbornness, Tweed knew his enemy. He’d seen how the prosecutors had strong-armed his case, vilified him, and tried to destroy his family. Worst of all would be going hat-in-hand to Samuel Tilden, a man from whom he expected nothing but scorn. He and Tilden had been enemies for years and, besides, Tilden as a “reform” candidate for President of the United States had no reason to waste his mercy on Tweed.

Sitting with the Boss in jail that day, Townsend had an answer: Why not go
around
Tilden? Tilden was governor, but the state had delegated responsibility for prosecuting the Ring cases to Charles O’Conor. Townsend knew O’Conor from his work on the Woodward “compromise” and everyone respected O’Conor’s reputation: a hardliner but honest, above politics, and fiercely independent.

With Tweed’s blessing, Townsend made the long trip by carriage up to Fort Washington at the northern tip of Manhattan Island past Central Park and the rural areas beyond, where O’Conor lived stoically in semi-retirement on Washington Heights overlooking the Hudson River. O’Conor, gruff, moody, gray-haired with start features, had served for five years without pay as the state’s lead prosecutor of the Tweed Ring by the time Townsend came to visit him in mid-December 1876. He was tired. At 71 years old, his career since the 1840s had been legend: district attorney, brilliant litigator, bar association leader. An unapologetic states rights ideologue and Civil War Copperhead, O’Coner had built a national profile and received 21,559 votes for President of the United States in 1872 running on the “Straight-Out Democrat” (states’ rights) ticket. Harshly opinionated, he’d made waves just that month by slamming President Grant as “The drunken Democrat [from] the Galena gutter, besmeared with the blood of his countrymen slain in domestic broil.”
¹⁴

O’Conor had viewed the Ring prosecutions through a stark moral prism. His goal had been civic vengeance, to punish thieves and make them suffer visibly for their crimes. Now, he recognized the effort had largely failed. Most of the Tammany crowd had escaped his noose by fleeing the country or turning state’s evidence. No civil lawsuit had been brought against Oakey Hall and no effort had been made to extradite Sweeny or Connolly from Europe.
¹⁵
Only a pittance of stolen money had been returned to the city and none but Tweed had spent much time behind bars. No wonder the public increasingly considered him a scapegoat.

O’Conor invited John Townsend into his house that morning and, sitting in the parlor by a warm fireplace, he listened to Townsend’s proposition: a Tweed “compromise” similar to Woodward’s, complete with a full confession. He was intrigued. The proposal offered him a new chance. “[T]he spectacle of Tweed upon his knees asking for mercy and consenting to be a witness against his associates in crime would have more effect as a preventive against future associations of like nature, then would the recovery of all the money that had been stolen,” Townsend recalled his saying.
¹⁶

John Townsend hurried back downtown to Ludlow Street. Telling Tweed the news about O’Coner’s reaction, the former Boss agreed to try the approach. Tweed sat down at the small wooden desk in his jail cell, put pen to paper, and poured his heart out onto the page: “All further resistance being hopeless, I have now to make and only seek … unqualified surrender,” he wrote. Tweed, in the letter, proposed to O’Conor that he would hand all his property to the state, answer every question, confess his crimes, and help the prosecutors however he could. “I am an old man, greatly broken in health, and cut down in spirit and can no longer bear my burden [facing] hopeless imprisonment, which must speedily terminate my life.”
¹⁷

When he finished, Tweed sealed the letter in an envelope and handed it to Foster Dewey, his loyal former clerk, who went riding up to Fort Washington to hand it directly to O’Conor. O’Conor looked it over; before answering, he felt obliged to discuss it with the governor.

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

Samuel Tilden had reason to be distracted when Charles O’Conor came to his door at Gramercy Park that day in mid-December. Just four weeks earlier, on November 7, he’d won a remarkable victory. He’d soundly defeated Rutherford Hayes in the popular vote for President of the United States, and he held a lead in electoral votes: 184 to 165, one short of victory. A cloud hung over the outcome, though. Three Southern states remained undecided, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, as did a single electoral vote from Oregon, amid charges of violence, bribery, and ballot box fraud. Each campaign had sent squads of “visiting statesmen” to monitor the final vote counting by local boards in the contested states. Some Democrats threatened violence should Hayes’ Republicans cheat them out of their victory. President Grant, taking the talk seriously, had brought troops marching into Washington, D.C. in case things got out of hand. Just days earlier, on December 6, the four contested states each had sent competing slates of electors to the U.S. Congress, charged under the constitution to untangle the mess. But Congress itself was stalemated, split between a Democrat-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate.