Double Your Money – Part Thirty One
The New York County Courthouse scandal, 1871
The building standing at 52, Chambers Street in Manhattan was designed in 1858 by John Kellum as a statement of the greatness of New York and the esteem in which the law was held. By 1871 it stood as the living embodiment of one of the most egregious examples of municipal corruption. The villain of the piece was William Magear Tweed, who headed the Tammany Hall, the Democratic party’s organising committee in New York from 1858 and was elected to the New York senate in 1867.
The initial legislation specified that the new courthouse should not cost more than $250,000 but by 1871 more than $13 million had been spent on the building, with Tweed instrumental in pushing through the requisite increases in budget. And there was remarkably little to show for such the money and what there was far from impressive, consisting of a collection of gloomy rooms and dark halls, decorated with ugly, fake marble. One of the largest rooms, reserved for the Bureau of Arrears of Taxes, had no roof. The crowning glory of the building, the grand dome atop the temple of justice was never built.
Many smelt a rat but such was Tweed’s hold over the levers of power that he considered himself above the law. It took a combination of a disgruntled Tweed ring member, ex-Sheriff James O’Brien who supplied evidence, the investigative journalism of the New York Times and the indefatigable lampoonery of Thomas Nast whose cartoons were published in Harper’s Weekly to bring Tweed and his associates down in the autumn of 1871. Although Tweed tried to buy the Times off, it was the cartoons of Nast he feared most, famously commenting, “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.” The Tweed Ring offered Nast $500,000 to go to Europe to study art but the cartoonist refused.
The mountain of evidence pointing to wrongdoing grew ever larger and a meeting at the Cooper Union established a 70-strong committee, under the leadership of Samuel J Tilden, to bring about the fall of Tweed and his associates. The Tammany was crushed in the elections that autumn and Tweed’s associates did what all fraudsters do – upped sticks and fled to Europe or Canada. Only two faced trial – Mayor Hall, whose defence was “an ineradicable aversion to detail”, was acquitted whilst Tweed was tried and convicted of forgery and larceny in 1873 and sentenced to a 12-year stretch.
Tweed’s sentence was reduced to a year on a legal technicality but he did not enjoy his liberty for long, being arrested a second time on a charge of stealing six million dollars from the state of New York. Although under arrest, Tweed was allowed to visit his home under guard and on one such visit, in December 1875, he managed to elude his escort and fled to Spain via Cuba. But Nast was to prove his nemesis again – he was recognised thanks to a Nast caricature and in November 1876 was returned to New York and held in Ludlow Street Jail awaiting trial where he died on 12th April 1878.
At the time it was estimated across all their activities the Tweed Ring pocketed some $20 million but later estimates put the figure at anywhere between $40 and $200 million.
So how did they do it?
Such was Tweed’s insouciance that it was not very sophisticated. Companies under the control of the Tweed Ring would bill the city for work not done or if they did do some work, would submit vastly over-inflated invoices. The work which was done was deliberately substandard requiring it to be put right. And who did that? You guessed it, other Tweed Ring controlled companies. The fraud was committed with an element of humour. A cheque was made out to Fillippo Donnoruma and endorsed by Phillip Dummy, another to T C Cash and a ledger entry for brooms etc was for a whopping $41,190.95.
A popular pastime at the time was to calculate how far the furnishings and materials charged to the city would have stretched – one newspaper reckoned from New York to New Haven.
The courthouse finally opened in 1881.
