The New York Times sensed that the contagion ran deeper than bail bondsmen, payoffs, and light sentences for the city’s second-level criminals. It expressed the belief that major departments in the city were infected by the virus of corruption. But the newspaper, at least at this initial stage, failed to say that Mayor Walker had a measure of responsibility for what was taking place on his watch:
“Till now nothing has come from City Hall to indicate that Mr. Walker is aware of the discredit brought by his associates and subordinates upon his own record,” The Times commented. “When so many cracks show in the structure, there is lowered resistance to stress. The hour has come for the Mayor to summon both the demolition and reconstruction crews. It is not too late for Mr. Walker, who has in no personal way been even slightly connected with any of these scandals, to voice the indignation of the community which has twice elected him.”
But Mayor Walker had no time to pay attention to ivory-tower editorial writers. Hadn’t the electorate reaffirmed its support of his administration at the polls?
The irony of the moment was pointed up by a news item that appeared the same day in The East Hampton Star. It announced with pride that a local resident, Judge Samuel Seabury, “who is very popular with both the summer colony and the permanent village,” had received an investigative appointment from the Appellate Division and that “East Hampton will watch the proceedings with great interest.” The appointment had been made with Governor Roosevelt’s approval; Seabury would carry the city investigation forward for the next two years, finally passing on the evidence to the governor for a final judgment.
The retired Judge Seabury had begun his legal career as a crusading lawyer for the poor and for labor unions. With the approval of the Citizens Union and the bar associations, he was first elected to the city court and in 1907, at the age of thirty-three, he became the youngest justice of the state Supreme Court. In 1914, he was elected on both the Democratic and Progressive party tickets to the Court of Appeals. Two years later he resigned to run for governor on the Democratic ticket, lost, and returned to private practice. But he still nurtured an ambition to hold high political office—governor of New York or even (rather foolishly, since he had no political machine) president of the United States.
On the surface, Seabury appeared to be the patrician lawyer and Walker the man of the people. In their private law practice, the opposite was true. Walker’s minor legal career had not been devoted to aiding society’s underprivileged. As a state senator, he brought some clout to his clients because of his name and visibility. Occasionally, he served as a court-appointed attorney in homicide cases. The law was a place for him to hang his hat and pick up some extra money, but he devoted his main energies to his political career and his personal wanderings.
As a young labor lawyer, Seabury worked for enactment of legislation recognizing employers’ responsibility for the welfare and protection of their workingmen during the time they were on the job—a fairly new concept. He was a firm believer in labor education and labor lobbying.
Seabury was also an advocate of public ownership of city transportation facilities. Corruption was bipartisan. Franchises for privately owned street railways were a source of graft. What shakedowns of whorehouse madams brought in was only pin money for the politicians and police; the railways brought in fortunes for the Tammany bosses themselves.
In one respect, Walker and Seabury had common New York backgrounds. They were both born on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, not far from the Hudson River—Jimmy in a flat on Leroy Street and Sam in the rectory of the Church of the Annunciation on West Fourteenth Street
But they inhabited two different worlds, and fate would make them rancorous enemies. The two men were opposites, and not only in religious upbringing. Jimmy Walker’s father was a carpenter who became commissioner of public buildings in New York City at a time when Irish Catholics ruled Tammany Hall. Seabury’s father, a professor of canon law at the General Theological Seminary, named his son after their ancestor, the first Episcopal bishop in the United States.
Seabury was usually called Judge even though he had left the Court of Appeals in 1916. His pince-nez glasses, center-parted white hair, and starched look gave him an aloof, superior air. He was a knightly crusader who carried a banner of righteousness as his main weapon.
Unknown to all but his closest friends and family, he harbored a grudge against Tammany for not helping him to become governor. Yet he enjoyed the good life. At the height of his career after he left the bench, Seabury had a flourishing general law practice at 120 Broadway and owned a spacious six-story mansion on Sixty-third Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as six hundred acres of land surrounding his large farmhouse in East Hampton. He was a self-made millionaire and lived like one.
Seabury’s serenity was interrupted by the arrival of an urgent cable informing him that he had been appointed the referee to conduct an investigation of the Magistrates’ Courts.
After the Appellate Division assured Seabury that he would have full authority to look into any and all dark and hidden corners, he agreed to take the job. He envisioned his role as that of an independent prosecutor. Indeed, that was how he would conduct the public office for the next two years while his private practice faded away. The newspapers were uniformly pleased with his decision.
As a faithful New Yorker, Seabury was aware of the magnitude of the job he was undertaking—perhaps more so than the mayor who devoted so little time to his day job. In the early 1930s, New York was a big city to play with. Its population was seven million. There was $20 billion worth of taxable real estate; this private property annually brought $535.5 million in revenue. Still, the city was in constant financial trouble, trying to meet its bonded indebtedness.
Six hundred million dollars a year went to run the city government; $286 million was paid to the 148,000 men and women holding city jobs. Thousands of these appointed jobs came directly under the purview of the mayor and Tammany Hall. At best, even for men of real ability and dedication, running New York City was a superhuman task.
The revelations about the corrupt magistrates and his own talks with the Appellate Division justices immediately caused Seabury to broaden the scope of the inquiry. He insisted that not only the magistrates but the attorneys practicing in the lower criminal courts be investigated for “corrupt, fraudulent, unlawful or unprofessional” conduct.
After he was authorized to enlarge the investigation, Seabury appointed Isidor Jacob Kresel as his chief counsel. Kresel, who later became the target of Tammany’s counterattack, was a highly respected member of the New York Bar. A Jewish immigrant from Galicia, who had put himself through college from a crowded Stanton Street tenement by helping to tutor less gifted men at Columbia Law School, he had lifted himself to the top of his profession.
At the age of twenty-three in 1901, Kresel was appointed a Manhattan assistant district attorney; in 1913, he was counsel to the New York State Assembly during the impeachment trial of Governor William Sulzer, a Tammany faithful from the Upper East Side’s Silk Stocking District, who had played the stock market with falsified campaign funds. Sulzer was convicted and removed from office—the only time a New York governor has been impeached. Kresel also had served as a special assistant attorney general in federal antitrust and bankruptcy cases. A year before joining the Seabury staff, he had prosecuted and caused to be disbarred dozens of lawyers for the crime of barratry (stirring up litigation, by, among other means, ambulance-chasing).
The lofty Seabury and the diminutive Kresel—it was said that “he could run under a table wearing a high hat”—made a formidable combination. Kresel, more experienced in a prosecutorial role, set the pattern for the investigation. He didn’t depend on confessions. His technique was to perform the unspectacular job of researching income tax returns, bank deposit slips, records of savings accounts belonging to members of a witness’s family, real estate documents, and brokerage account statements. It was nearly impossi
ble for a big or little fish to slip through such a tight net.
At the same time, Judge Seabury obtained the assistance of Professor Raymond Moley of Columbia University as a consultant Moley was an expert in the field of government and economics. Among other tasks, he supervised the editorial reports that Judge Seabury prepared for Governor Roosevelt about the progress of the investigation. It was a wise appointment for political reasons as well; Seabury realized that he had to protect himself from backstabbing by political enemies in Tammany Hall. Moley was destined to become a leading figure in the group of academic advisers who would later serve Roosevelt in the White House.
One of the first things that Seabury did was to assemble a dedicated staff of tireless young legal sleuths like those who worked on the investigations that would dominate late-twentieth-century politics, from Watergate to Whitewater. Most of them were in their twenties or early thirties; some were barely out of law school. All were hungry and, not incidentally, eager to build their own reputations. Several would go on to become state and federal judges. Oren Herwitz, George B. Levy, and Harold Melniker all joined the staff before they were admitted to the bar. When James H. Goodier, a former U.S. consul to Tahiti, returned to private practice, he found it lacked adventure. He barged into Seabury’s office, proved his enthusiasm, and was hired on the spot.
Seabury liked to call his young staff “my boys.” Speaking to them, he appeared almost Edwardian in manner. “I will not be exceeded in courtesy” was one of his favorite expressions. Rarely would he order one of his lawyers to perform an assignment. He would call him in for a “discussion.” When he wanted something done, the phrase he used was “I would suggest.” When he insisted that it be done, the command took the mild form “I think it might be done this way.”
The young men with whom he labored in his office often were invited to join him at the Bankers Club, where they observed him order his usual roast beef and cigar. When a case carried over into the evening, Seabury and his colleagues went home to dine with Mrs. Seabury. The Seabury “boys” remembered that dinner was usually preceded by one rather mild drink (Prohibition was still in force).
Seabury was aware that both he and his staff would themselves be challenged by Tammany and even by some of the newspapermen who were drinking buddies of Jimmy Walker. Since Walker and a number of other officials under investigation were Catholics and of Celtic origin, Seabury didn’t want it to appear that their religious or ethnic backgrounds had anything to do with the investigation. The staff of lawyers he chose included Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
One of the legal sleuths, Philip Haberman, would be remembered for his ability to unearth Mayor Walker’s hidden bank and brokerage accounts. It was Haberman who would discover a letter of credit given to Mayor Walker by a group of businessmen and politicians—and who played a leading role in cracking the meaning of certain secretive code words that identified Jimmy Walker as the “BOY FRIEND.”
Irving Ben Cooper, a future federal District Court judge, was another young lawyer with street smarts. Lunching on malteds and dime sandwiches, he pursued suspects and developed his own cases, riding in police cars when a witness was sought to make sure that nobody would be tipped off by the cops. It was a dangerous job. When Cooper applied for life insurance, he was turned down as a poor risk.
The investigators made a special effort to appear to be above politics. Seabury was aware that he had to strike a balance between Democrats and Republicans in order to obtain the support of independents as well as the major party voters in the city. Jacob Gould Schurman, Jr., son of the former ambassador to Germany, and a former assistant district attorney, was a Republican; so was Harland B. Tibbetts, who had been a member of Kresel’s law firm. Both were added to the staff.
William Mulligan joined Judge Seabury right out of Harvard Law School, where he had been one of Professor Felix Frankfurter’s brightest students. During the hearings, the silver-tongued mayor turned on the grinning Mulligan and, accusingly, demanded to know his name. The request boomeranged. Mulligan’s Irish name startled Walker and made the spectators and reporters in the courthouse break out in laughter.
Seabury’s boys now covered a cross-section of the city’s legal talent.
At the first meeting of his full staff, Judge Seabury passed along the experience he had gained on both sides of the bench:
“The public will not be aroused to an awareness of conditions in the Magistrates’ courts through a series of graphs, charts and reports. We must divorce this investigation, as far as is possible, from legalistic machinery. There is more eloquence in the testimony of a single illiterate witness telling of oppression suffered from legal processes than in the greatest sermon, editorial or address ever written. Where preachers, editors and lawyers have failed in arousing the public to a consciousness of unjust conditions these simple, unlearned witnesses will succeed.
“Let’s attack this subject man-fashion. Do not be discouraged—the facts we bring out are going to sink into the public’s mind long after Jimmy Walker’s wisecracks are forgotten.”
Then he uttered a slogan that they all took to heart: “Old heads for counsel—young heads for war.”
That was to be their watchword for the next two years.
The Depression had weakened President Hoover and his chances for reelection. Judge Seabury dreamed that the national attention he gained from what became known as the Seabury investigations would make lightning strike—and even lead to his nomination for president at the 1932 Democratic convention. He hoped to overcome ex-Governor Smith’s effort to win the nomination a second time and even thought he might, miraculously, beat out Roosevelt, whose political operatives had begun to work behind the scenes almost from the moment he became governor.
Seabury knew that he would need the public’s acceptance and support during the investigation. A little over a month after his appointment, on September 29, 1930, he addressed a meeting of leaders of the bar and members of the press in the New York County Courthouse. Anyone expecting spectacular revelations was disappointed.
“There are two paramount questions,” Seabury said, defining the scope of the inquiry. “What are the conditions in the Magistrates’ courts? Is justice being done? The essential facts can be ascertained only by laborious investigation. They do not lie patent upon the surface—they must be brought to light.”
The newspapers played the story on the inside pages; no fireworks. But not long afterward, the investigation would produce page-one banner headlines all over the country.
Just as the investigation was about to begin, a strange voice from the past was heard. Lincoln Steffens attempted to help calm the storm clouds gathering over New York. His crusading reporting in McClure’s magazine and in The Shame of the Cities was a quarter of a century behind him; his personal reputation was linked to the muckraking years of the early 1900s. But now, at age sixty-four, he was behind the times.
“The thing to do,” Steffens told the Citizens Union, “is to have a frank talk with Jimmy Walker, and say, This won’t do. Of course, we know that vice, lawlessness and civic corruption cannot be eliminated but at least it should be kept under control. After all, the people will be satisfied with nothing less than the outward appearance of decency, no matter how bad things are beneath the surface.’ ”
Unfortunately, it would not be that simple. Steffens was as wrong about Jimmy Walker and the need for the Seabury investigation as he would be in his 1931 book, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, where he famously said about Russia, “I have been over into the future, and it works.”
For after observing the tough methods employed by Seabury and his sleuths in their game of hares and hounds, Walter Lippmann, the influential New York Herald Tribune columnist—who at the time thought much less of Governor Roosevelt than he did of Judge Seabury—wrote:
“Samuel Seabury is the most terrifying biographer that Tammany has had in modern times.”
SEVEN
The Tin Box Brigade
During the autumn of 1931, in the county courthouse in Lower Manhattan, the Honorable Thomas M. Farley, sheriff of New York County, president of the Thomas M. Farley Association, leader of the Fourteenth Assembly District, and Tammany Hall Sachem, sat on the witness stand. The Seabury investigation had already spread from the magistrates themselves to the police, the sheriffs, and almost everyone connected to the judicial system and the affairs of the City of New York.
Farley was trying to explain how he accumulated nearly a half-million dollars in six years on an annual salary of $8,500. His interrogator was Judge Seabury. Their dialogue would go down in American musical (Fiorello!) and municipal history:
SEABURY: Where did you keep these moneys that you had saved?
FARLEY: In a safe-deposit box at home in the house.
SEABURY: Whereabouts at home in the house did you keep this money that you had saved?
FARLEY: In the safe.
SEABURY: In a safe?
FARLEY: Yes.
SEABURY: In a little box in a safe?
FARLEY: A big safe.
SEABURY: But a little box in a big safe?
FARLEY: In a big box in a big safe.
SEABURY: Was the big box in the big safe fairly full or crowded when you withdrew this money?
FARLEY: I didn’t withdraw it all at once. That is money that was in the safe-deposit box—
SEABURY: When you first drew it, Sheriff, was the box then crowded or very full?
FARLEY: Well, it was full and plenty in it.
SEABURY: More and plenty?
FARLEY: Yes.
SEABURY: And, Sheriff, was this big box that was safely kept in the big safe a tin box or a wooden box?
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