A police inspector suggested that Walker enter by a side door, but he replied—throwing the reporters in his wake a colorful quote for tomorrow’s feature stories—“I’m used to traveling in crowds.” One gentleman managed to break through the police escort to ask the mayor to use his influence and get him a seat inside the courthouse. Walker quipped, “I’d be most happy to give you my seat.”
There were squads of cops inside and outside the courthouse. Among the parentless rumors that went the rounds was that a large delegation of Reds was coming to demonstrate for their own political purposes. Five members of the police department’s Radical Squad quickly arrived and took up their task of mingling and scrutinizing the crowd. (The Reds failed to materialize.)
Among the “vital statistics” reported in the New York Daily News, the straphanger’s newspaper, which had the largest circulation in the city, was that the first man trying to get into the courtroom arrived three hours before the doors opened. Unemployed at the moment, this man, one Max Shardinsky, told the guards that, after looking at the meager employment ads and finding nothing, he decided to attend the hearing without one of the necessary passes. He was turned away.
A second unemployed man arrived five minutes later. Asked to identify himself, he declined, saying that one couldn’t be too careful these days, with investigations going on all over the city. “You’ll have to see my lawyer,” he exclaimed.
It was Uptown rather than Downtown that held the passes to get in. The pass holders and well-dressed crashers who knew someone who knew someone spread themselves on benches and camp stools—seven hundred people in a room for three hundred. Some of the spectators brought lunch. Before the hearing started, a pass from a district leader was enough for a seat. The Democratic—or pro-mayor—spectators were a clear majority.
When Jimmy Walker entered the courtroom, Judge Seabury and his aides were already seated at the counsel table. The two sides did not acknowledge each other. Applause and cheers broke out for the mayor. The Hofstadter committeemen moved to their elevated judicial chairs behind a varnished oak railing.
With a confident air, Jimmy Walker sat down in an armchair to the right of the committee.
Judge Seabury had been given rather unusual advice by some of the experienced litigators on his staff: “Don’t look Walker straight in the eye when he’s on the witness stand. He has an uncanny ability to stare you down. Once he’s eyed you, you’re liable to be stunned and confused, like a deer caught in a car’s headlights.” Apparently Seabury kept the warning in mind. Front-page pictures in newspapers all over the United States later showed him staring at Walker, but most of the time he seemed to be glancing at the mayor sideways.
Mayor Walker put on his horn-rimmed spectacles, looked at a waiver of immunity, and signed it. But in response to the subpoena, he failed to produce any records of his savings accounts, brokerage accounts, or safe-deposit boxes.
Arnold Rothstein as he appeared in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, fighting a bankruptcy receiver’s attempt to collect $366,000 from him in July 1928. At one time, that was only “walking-around money” to the politically connected gambling czar of New York. Several months later, on November 4, 1928, the 46-year-old gambler was gunned down in the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street by an “unknown” assailant. His “unsolved” murder touched off a crisis in the Tammany circles around Mayor Jimmy Walker. (UPI/Corbis/Bettmann)
Governor-elect Roosevelt and Mayor Walker in the conference room of the Roosevelt home in New York City in December 1928. The two Democratic officials had known each other since before World War I when both served as state senators in Albany. They discussed transit, harbor development, and traffic legislation. Walker is wearing spats; Roosevelt is wearing braces on both legs. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)
Tammany Sachems at the dedication of the new Wigwam on Union Square in 1929. Left to right: New York Surrogate James A. Foley (son-in-law of the late Tammany boss Charles Murphy); Mayor Walker; John Voorhis, Grand Sachem of the Tammany Society at age 100; former governor Alfred E. Smith; John F. Curry, the Manhattan Tammany leader. (New York Daily Mirror)
Governor-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in December 1928, drawn from life by S. J. Woolf. (New York Times Magazine)
Three New York State governors in 1930: Franklin D. Roosevelt, two years before he interrogated Jimmy Walker and was nominated for president; Herbert H. Lehman, then the lieutenant governor, who succeeded Roosevelt in Albany in 1933; Alfred E. Smith, who served four terms beginning in 1919, before becoming the first Catholic to run for president, in 1928. With Jimmy Walker’s support, Smith unsuccessfully sought the nomination again in 1932, but it was Roosevelt’s turn. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
Jimmy Walker, running for his first term as mayor in 1925, was a protégé of Governor Alfred E. Smith. Left to right: Allie, Walker’s first wife; Smith’s daugher, Emily; and Mrs. Smith. (New York Daily Mirror)
In 1927, at the age of the twenty-three, Betty Compton (left) appeared in the musical Funny Face with Fred Astaire, his sister, Adele (center), and an unknown actress. That year she began to be courted by Mayor Walker. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
“Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May,” Jimmy Walker’s most popular song, which he wrote before entering politics, found an attentive audience in Betty Compton, the second Mrs. Walker. The lyrics foretold their relationship. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
Mayor Walker and Police Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney leading a police department parade in 1931. (Associated Press)
Like a winner at the racetrack, Jimmy Walker poses inside a floral horseshoe during a dinner honoring him, given by the Jewish Theatrical Guild at the Hotel Commodore in 1931. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
Two mayors: During a pleasure trip to Berlin in 1928, Jimmy Walker poses in the garden of Herr Ober-Burgermeister Boess. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
Gene Tunney, the heavy-weight boxing champion who defeated Jack Dempsey in 1926, gets the Walker-Whalen treatment on the sidewalks of New York before an assembly of U.S. Marines. (Culver Pictures)
Charles Lindbergh got his ticker-tape parade in 1927 after flying from Long Island to Paris solo in The Spirit of St. Louis. Grover Whalen, the city’s official greeter (in top hat), sits in front of Lindbergh and Jimmy Walker. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
Allie Walker with Mayor Walker in 1930, before their marriage broke up, receiving a bouquet of roses at their home in Greenwich Village. (New York Daily Mirror)
Mayor Walker’s last hurrah on Fifth Avenue—the “beer parade” to repeal Prohibition in 1932. Not long afterward, he appeared before Governor Roosevelt to answer charges about his sources of income. (International News Service)
Governor Roosevelt surrounded by members of his engineering staff in August 1932, when Mayor Walker was “on trial” before him during the hearings in the Executive Chamber in Albany. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)
A portfolio of five newspaper cartoons drawn in August 1932 during the Albany hearings, with Mayor Walker on the witness stand before Governor Roosevelt—at the same time that Roosevelt was the Democratic nominee for president. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)
Carefully Weighed. (New York Mirror)
The Carriage Awaits Without. (Brooklyn Eagle)
Just in Time. (Washington Post)
Plenty of Fuss. (New York Post)
All in the Game. (New York Post)
Mayor Walker in the witness chair in the spring of 1932 at the New York County Courthouse to answer charges about his sources of income, including a secret brokerage account. Here he is interrogated by Samuel Seabury, counsel, before a joint state legislative committee, during the citywide investigation of corruption. (New York Daily News)
Judge Samuel Seabury—Jimmy Walker’s nemesis—relaxes in 1933, a year after the end of the citywide “Seabury investigation” that exposed corr
uption in the mayor’s tin-box administration. Seabury, a retired jurist, was invited by Governor Roosevelt to present the evidence that led to Walker’s resignation. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
Tammany Hall stalwarts representing New York at the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago, which nominated Governor Roosevelt to be president: Brooklyn’s John H. McCooey, Manhattan’s John F. Curry, and Mayor Walker, who backed an embittered Alfred E. Smith for the nomination. (New York Daily Mirror)
Whistle-Stop Campaign: On October 18, 1932, Governor Roosevelt boarded “The Roosevelt Special” for a campaign swing around the country, beginning in Albany. No believer in a back-porch campaign, F.D.R. insisted on speaking in towns large and small before he was elected president. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)
The Republican-Fusion mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1937, during his second term of office. (New York Public Library Picture Collection)
Reunion of old foes and friends: Mayor La Guardia, ex-Mayor Walker, and James Farley at a dinner in 1937. La Guardia appointed Walker impartial arbitrator of the garment industry, while Farley was President Roosevelt’s postmaster general. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)
Close allies in New York and Washington: President Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mayor La Guardia campaigning in Manhattan (1940) for F.D.R.’s third term. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)
During the Second World War, when Mayor La Guardia was named head of the Office of Civil Defense (1942), Eleanor Roosevelt served as his assistant. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)
Domestic relations: Ex-Mayor Walker and Betty Compton were married by the mayor of Cannes on April 19, 1933, while they were living in Europe. The rotogravure pictures of the Walkers in their Riviera home appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in November 1933. (New York Herald Tribune)
Jimmy Walker, private citizen, in self-imposed exile, 1934. He lived with Betty in England, making frequent trips to the Continent, before returning to the United States in 1935, after he was cleared of his tax woes. (Private Collection)
In 1936, after they had returned from Europe, Betty and Jimmy adopted a daughter, Mary Ann, and lived quietly in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (Private Collection)
After Walker returned to New York in 1935, he frequently served as a toastmaster at charitable events. Here he is at a fund-raiser for the Disabled American Veterans, with Frank T. Hines, administrator of veteran’s affairs, and Vice Admiral Ross T. McIntire, the Navy surgeon general. (Disabled American Veterans)
After the death of President Roosevelt in 1945, former Mayor Walker attended a dinner of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union with union head David Dubinsky, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harry Hopkins, F.D.R.’s closest adviser. Walker served as impartial arbitrator in the garment industry in New York. (ILGWU photograph)
Mayor La Guardia, snow-sprinkled, chased fires to show his concern for the firemen and the fire victims. In 1942, when he had already been in office for nearly ten years, he turned up at a fire on the Hudson River pier at Forty-third Street. (New York Daily Mirror)
Seabury pressed him on the Equitable Coach deal that had led to the $10,000 letter of credit for his European junket. There had been a second application from Service Bus, a competing company, to sell the city surface transportation. Walker favored Equitable, which owned no buses, over Service, which had a large fleet.
Walker’s memory failed him about the details but enabled him to get his first applause—and the chairman’s gavel. “Any petitioner for bus service would have to have, say, 1,000 buses,” he said. “Now, if they had 5,000 besides, they would probably keep 4,000 in a garage.” (Laughter.)
Seabury informed him that the Equitable Coach Company had offered only promises, while the Service Bus Company already had buses up and running.
Walker replied, “I would not know about that. That is evidently a matter of communication. Why, the best offer that the city ever had came from a company on Long Island, and upon investigation it turned out they were in the hay feed business [laughter—gavel] and yet in their communication, it was the most attractive offer.”
Walker was a reluctant witness, looking at Seabury and refusing to make things easy—mostly to the applause of the crowd. At one point he became indignant and told Seabury, “Remember, I am still the mayor of the City of New York.”
When one of the Democratic assemblymen protested that the committee had no right to concern itself with “a man’s private life,” Walker broke in, “Oh, run for mayor and you will read all about your private life in the newspapers.”
As the grilling intensified, Walker complained to Chairman Hofstadter: “I don’t believe that your counsel or you have any legal right to inquire into the operations of an executive’s mind or to cross-examine him about why he reaches his conclusions, any more than I have a right or you have a right to examine the Governor as to why he makes an appointment or why the President of the United States vetoes a bill.” (Laughter—applause.)
Walker and his cronies on the state legislative committee branded the entire investigation a “Red plot.”
One of Walker’s strongest Tammany supporters, Senator John J. McNaboe, muttered: “You have Reds and Communists in here! I want you people to go on record as approving prying into a person’s private affairs, particularly his wife. I want a ruling to find out whether this is Russia or the United States!”
Assemblyman Steingut added, “Why, in the darkest days of Russia nothing like this would ever take place.”
As the proceedings continued into late afternoon of the muggy May day, Jimmy Walker began to show his irritation. Out of earshot of the stenographers, he muttered something under his breath directly at Judge Seabury: “You and Frank Roosevelt are not going to hoist yourself to the Presidency over my dead body!”
Walker’s insolent remark did not appear in the hearing transcript or, in fact, in any of the newspapers. But Louis Molloy, one of Seabury’s assistant counsel, told his colleagues that he had clearly heard Walker half-whisper the angry words, not once but several times.
In his best thespian manner, the mayor alternated between humor and indignation. He turned to Seabury and the committeemen and said, “The Mayor of the City of New York has a great many things to do. Will you please not keep me in this room any longer than you have to, away from the duties I have to perform?” This was the first time anyone had ever heard Jimmy Walker complain that he had to leave center stage to go to work.
Judge Seabury began to hit pay dirt when he queried the mayor about the $10,000 letter of credit, which Walker had obtained from J. Allen Smith, the influence peddler, the day before Equitable Coach was granted its franchise. The mayor brushed off the gift as an innocent transaction to help a friend.
But the $10,000 was pocket change compared with the hundreds of thousands in stock profits Walker received—he called the money a “beneficence”—without putting up a nickel of his own.
With a shrug of his shoulders, Walker admitted that Paul Block, a newspaper publisher and wealthy investor, gave him $246,692.76, minus income-tax payments, between February 10, 1927, and August 5, 1929. This sum represented his share of profits from a secret joint brokerage account labeled “Paul Block and J. J. WALKER.”
At a later point, to conceal Jimmy Walker’s ownership of the account, his name was dropped and Paul Block substituted the name of his brother, Max Block.
Why was Block so charitable? Evidence dug up by Seabury’s staff revealed that the publisher-investor was heavily interested in a company seeking to sell tiles to contractors building city subways.
New Yorkers chuckled when they heard Paul Block’s fantastic story of the reason why he had been so generous to Jimmy Walker. Even the Tammany members of the committee, who shouted themselves hoarse with objections while the mayor squirmed under the cross-examination, settled back with smiles of mild amusement when the newspaper publisher related what led him to “try to make a little money for Jimmy.”
&nb
sp; Almost shyly, Block said he was a little reluctant to discuss the reason for his kindness. He was afraid it might sound “silly” and “semi-sentimental,” but Judge Seabury coaxed him into telling.
Modestly, Block said that his ten-year-old son, Billy, who was fond of Uncle Jimmy Walker, gave him the idea. It seemed that the bright young lad was solicitous about the mayor’s ability to support his wife and himself on the $25,000 a year the city paid him.
The subject came up while Billy and his father were walking up and down in front of their spacious home on Fifth Avenue and seventy-fourth Street, overlooking Central Park’s model-sailboat pond, while waiting for the mayor to come and take them for a ride.
“Naturally,” said Block, “our minds were on the mayor. Billy wondered aloud, ‘How much salary does the mayor get?’ I told him it was $25,000, which was his salary at that time. ‘Does the city give him a home?’ ‘No, they don’t,’ I said. He asked me, ‘Does it give him an automobile?’ I said, ‘Yes, but not one for Mrs. Walker.’
“ ‘Can he live on what he gets?’ Billy asked, and I told him, ‘Well, I suppose he can, but it probably is a difficult problem.’ And so, Judge, I want you to believe me that it entered my mind then and there that I was going to try and make a little money for him.”
Once Upon a Time in New York Page 17