Somewhere there’s a politician on the take, a building inspector looking the other way, a trustee pilfering a trust’s assets, a corporate chief executive officer cooking the books. You can count on it. With somewhat less certainty, you can count on it that someday someone, a suspicious auditor, a bilked investor, an investigative reporter, will start asking questions. And when the answers start coming, there’ll be a trial, perhaps some jail time, maybe even some restitution. Case closed and soon forgotten.
And then there’s Boss Tweed.
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As Kenneth D. Ackerman writes in his absorbing “Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York” (Carroll & Graf, 437 pages, $27), “except for his stealing, he would have been a great man; but then had he been honest, he wouldn’t have been Tweed and would not have left nearly so great a mark.”
Ackerman — a Washington lawyer who has fashioned a notable career chronicling the tarnished politics of the Gilded Age — notes that Tweed “left enormous footprints” on New York City. Not the least of those is the grand, and recently restored, county courthouse that is known familiarly to New Yorkers as the Tweed Courthouse — and that was, rather fittingly, the means of his downfall.
William M. Tweed grew up on the Lower East Side in the 1820s, and as a popular and physically impressive young firefighter caught the eye of Tammany Hall, the powerful New York Democratic organization. By 1863, Tweed was the Tammany boss and the city’s public works commissioner. As such, Tweed “had a finger in every pie,” writes Ackerman, including the Brooklyn Bridge.
By the early 1870s, Tweed’s activities began to concern the editors of The New York Times. A story about fraud in contracts for repairs and rentals of the city’s armories “delivered a solid punch, but not more,” Ackerman writes.
The Times next turned to the construction and furnishing of the courthouse, and the evidence walked in the door in the person of “a long-time Tammany hack.” “Here’s the proof to back up all the Times has charged,” he told Editor Louis Jennings, “copied right out of the city ledgers.”
The Times played the information big, over three days in July 1871, running the “Secret Accounts,” line by line, on the front page. Taken “together, they painted a stunning portrait — geysers of cash flying out from the city treasury, amounts impossibly large for their stated purpose.”
The entries, Ackerman writes, “raised an obvious question: Where had the money gone?” The man who figured it out, linking payments made to contractors to transfers to Tweed, was Samuel Tilden, a reform-minded lawyer who was defeated for president in the contentious 1876 election.
Tweed was arrested and there was a series of trials, finally resulting in his conviction. While in prison, he made a detailed confession and testified before an investigating committee. He caught a cold, which worsened into pneumonia, and he died in April 1878 at 55.