The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

  * Italics added.

  t If there were any advances to Paul, the author could find no record of them.

  This, of course Robert will not discuss it, and there

  h fi*Mg no one else who is able to. It is r ole, therefore, for anyone

  ever to know whether or not Paul's ar. U ic—although one part of it

  seems indisputable: apart from what he could get from his mother's estate, Robert Moses, forty-one years old, had no money to speak of at all.

  .: it is possible to ascertain the truth of Pau: other charge. It

  is possible to determine whether or not it is true that Robert Moses secretly employed his behind-the-scenes influence in city government to keep his brother from getting jobs he deserved.

  Six high officials in that government—six in a position to know—say so. They are Fioreflo La Guardia's Corporation Counsel, Paul Windels; his Comptroller, Joseph D. McGoldrick: his legislative representative. Reuben A. Lazarus; the chairman of his Civil Service Commission. Paul J. Kern: commis-- ~t~z
  Paul, the liberal idealist who had always wanted to work for the public instead of for the giant utilities he felt were defrauding the public, was eager to work for a mayor who felt the same way. He certainly had the qualifications for uie work. Anxious to regulate utilities more strictly and to probe the as se s sm ent and easement concessions they had obtained from Tammany, the new mayor was having difficulty finding electrical engineers with both expertise and the willingness to antagonize the major employers in their field. Paul possessed both. Highly regarded as an engineer, he was also. McGoldrick adds, "kind of an engineer with a cause—he was very suspicious of . . . like La Guardia, who was also willing to believe that Con Ed -'-"■-' z 'i ±t :::; And there -verei I : man] engineers on the

  liberal side because there was . . . much money to be made working for the utility" Just after La Guardia's inauguration. Paul had an interview with Windels, who was at the moment looking, on the Mayor's behalf, for a Commissioner of Water Supply. Gas and Electricity. Windels was impressed. Recalls Kern: "Paul Windels called me and said. 'I want vou to show this guy to the Mayor. He seems like just what La Guardia needs.' " Kern was impressed himself. "Paul Moses came in and talked about himself, not too modestly but impressively, and he left his resume with me. His record looked good." Whether as a commissioner or in some other high-level post, Kern recommended to the Mayor that Paul be brought into the administration.

  But there was something standing in Paul's way.

  Precisely what his brother was saving to La Guardia about him is not known, although the one reference by Robert to Paul in writing in the Mayor's private files consists mainly of a paragraph that could hardly have helped raise questions in the mind of so sharp a lawyer:

  While it is nobody's business and purely a family matter. I have not seen t for a long time and I am hardly on speaking terms with him. My only

  * No official could be found who said differently.

  contact with him is in my capacity as a trustee of a fund of which he is the beneficiary. *

  But that he was saying something was obvious. "That was quite clear to me—oh, just from little things [La Guardia] dropped," Windels says. "And it also became quite clear to me that for whatever reason—whether Robert made it a condition of his continuation in the administration that his brother not be hired or whether Robert simply made La Guardia believe it would be unwise to hire him—he wasn't going to be hired." Shortly, it also became clear to Kern. Having received no reply to his first recommendation that Paul be hired, he decided to press a bit. "At one of my half-hour sessions with La Guardia," he recalls, "I took a chance and brought this up, saying, 'With the shortage of good engineers, what's wrong with this guy?' La Guardia's reply was:

  " 'Don't bother me. I can't have him around as long as Bob is here.' " The more Windels and Kern saw of Paul, the more their respect for him grew. "Remarkable mind, remarkable," Windels says. "Like the brother. Reaching out for a whole problem and pulling the whole thing in at once." Kern, who frequently ate dinner with him, found in him another quality that characterized his brother. "He was very good at sizing up people," Kern says. "When I was on the Civil Service Commission, I'd often ask him about some guy and he'd tell me he's no damn good for such-and-such a reason. And we'd hire him, and sure enough he'd turn out just that way." Windels saw to it that Paul did get some work, hiring him as an expert witness in condemnation cases involving utilities, and as a consultant to a committee studying transit unification, and later putting him in charge of a thirty-three-man staff reassessing utility properties—at the fee he asked, fifty dollars per day. "Listen," Windels says, "I checked his qualifications. He was a top engineering consultant. He was worth fifty dollars a day of anybody's money." In fact, during several years in which Paul held this last job, the utilities' assessments were raised more than $200,000,000 per year.

  But these were temporary jobs, and Paul's repeated attempts to obtain a permanent one met with rebuff. He was earning over $12,000 per year from his consulting work for the city, but the Depression was cutting deeper and deeper into the profits from the swimming pool. He needed a job—and he became very bitter over his inability to get one. He did not know, or even suspect, the real reason. (Ironically, he thought it was Windels who was keeping him from getting one.) "Listen, I wasn't asking for a handout," he would say years later. "I was recommended by the engineering societies. I knew more about this stuff than anyone else around. I was entitled to at least one of all those jobs. Windels, Lazarus—all those fellows: they were pretty shabby to me. I wanted to get something in public life, and no one would

  * The paragraph is contained in a brief note Moses wrote in the first months after La Guardia's inauguration. It is a reply to a letter about Paul that the Mayor sent to Moses. The letter is not in the files, and its contents could not be learned.

  say a word for me." After Windels resigned in 1938, he could not obtain even consulting work. At first, that did not worry him; his services had always been sought by many engineering firms. But now, for some reason he could not understand, even the firms which once sought them most eagerly were totally unwilling to even consider employing him. All through 1939 he hunted for a job in the profession in which he was an acknowledged expert—and could not find one.

  His financial difficulties were compounded because he possessed the Moses prodigality toward money. Remarried—to a divorcee with two children—he had undertaken to send them to private school and college. He had moved his new family into an expensive lower Fifth Avenue apartment. Although between 1934 and 1938 he had been earning a substantial income, he had lived to its limit, saving nothing. And he had refused to—perhaps because of his upbringing had been unable to—put financial limits on the Upper Darby recreational complex that may have been his pitiful attempt to rival Jones Beach. He kept pouring money into the Llanerch Pool—for modern locker rooms, a dance hall, another restaurant. In 1938, with finances flush, he had put a $33,000 mortgage on the property to finance the construction of an "amusement building." As his plans for the building grew larger and larger, so did its cost. In 1939, with the $33,000 spent and the building still not finished, he encumbered the property with a second mortgage. The building was still uncompleted, no receipts were yet being earned by it— and suddenly the receipts earned by the pool and restaurant were being gobbled up by interest payments. One morning, the morning on which the last dreams of Paul Moses' life turned to ashes, there arrived at his office a real estate tax bill that he had no money to pay. The banks, learning of the situation, initiated foreclosure proceedings. He was reduced to borrowing from his wife's aunt, and then from her mother, securing a $12,500 loan from the latter by giving her another mortgage. He desperately needed a good summer—instead there was a polio scare in Philadelphia; few people dared to swim in public pools. The $12,500 melted away. Presented with a $7,500 bill
from his attorney, he was unable to pay it; the attorney sued him. His wife's mother had died; in desperation, he had his wife assign the mortgage she had inherited from her to the attorney; he fell behind on federal income tax payments, and interest on them was mounting by the day—drawing tighter .nd tighter around this once gay, elegant free spirit was a net of debts too snarled to permit eseape.

  The marriage melted away with the money. Moving into a cheaper apartment was too agonizing for a man of Paul's pride to contemplate; by the end ol 1938, however, he had no ehoiee but to move; he had no monev to pay the rent. He had to move in with his in-iaws. I 1 sing every eent he could lay his hands on to try to save his pool—for a while'he moved with some of his elegant suits into a tiny, bare room behind the pool office so that he wouldn't have the expense of commuting eosts to Philadelphia—he let other bills slide. He and his wife were being dunned by the butcher, the grocer, by a department store, and even, for a hundred dollars, by a maid they had let eo.

  He lived on twenty-five dollars a week, using every other cent the pool earned to pay off its debts, and in some weeks in which a bill or a demand for taxes became too pressing, he was unable to take even the twenty-five. When he had to come to New York in 1939, the year in which his brother moved into the expensive apartment on Gracie Terrace, he slept in a Salvation Army lodging house. Pride made him conceal his poverty—so well that acquaintances who, meeting him on the street, noticed that the cuffs on his expensive suits and shirts were ragged, thought this was an affectation on the part of this man who had always cared so much about his appearance. To those who invited him to their homes for dinner, however, it was more difficult to conceal the truth. He might forget and cross his legs, and then friends such as the Propers—who were so kind to him that he would often "drop in" on them when he "happened to be in the neighborhood"—saw that there were holes in his socks and in the soles of his shoes. They saw from the way he ate dinner that he hadn't been eating many. Not only did he not have enough money to buy clothes or shoes, they realized, this man, whose brother was host daily at lavish luncheons, did not have enough to buy food. "He got thinner and thinner," Mrs. Proper says. "He was really not getting enough food. We kept him overnight a number of times. I really don't think he had a place to sleep. We offered to lend him some money. He wouldn't take any, not from us at any rate. I used to wish he had. Poor Paul."

  Genuine friends such as the Propers, moreover, saw changes in Paul that saddened them more than the changes in his appearance. For, to people who remembered his wit and gaiety, the holes that gaped most glaringly now were not the holes in his shoes but the holes in his spirit. Paul Moses, they realized, was being eaten away by a terrible bitterness. "We had him to some dinner parties, but he was very difficult to handle," Mrs. Proper says. "Bitter, frustrated possibly, opinionated. This was when this Moses side came to the fore—this brushing aside, this arrogance. He was impossible. Paul was his own worst enemy."

  At the heart of Paul Moses' bitterness was hatred for his brother.

  Its spark was what Paul felt was injustice in the administration of the $100,000 trust fund of which his brother was a trustee. Their mother had intended that Paul get from that fund an annual income of several thousand dollars per year.

  But he wasn't getting a cent.

  The fund's trustees—Robert, Edna, cousin Wilfred Openhym and a bank—had invested Paul's money in "guaranteed mortgages," a device, common before the Depression, under which a title company, for a fee, "guaranteed" principal and interest payments and undertook the responsibility of seeing to it that the owner paid his real estate taxes. But two of the three mortgages involved were caught in the crash of the real

  estate market in New York, during which thousands of owners defaulted on payments, and title companies, unable to meet them all, collapsed. In normal times, the bank, which was managing the trust fund for the trustees, would have received notification of the default in taxes and interest pavments from the title companies and would have foreclosed, saving the principal. But in the general confusion, the bank somehow did not check on the tax situation until the owners of the two properties had been in default on taxes and other city charges for more than two years. To keep from losing the entire $24,000 investment they had made in one building, the trustees, foreclosing on it, had to sell it for what they could get: $7,500. To keep from losing the $65,000 they had invested in the other, a Toft building at 168 The Bowery, they had to pay off $8,000 in taxes, and make repairs costing $7.000—which they did by putting a $15,000 second mortgage on it. During the five years in which they were paying off this mortgage, the trustees deducted the payments from what Paul would have received. There was nothing left for him. Between October 3, 1935, and August 3. 1939—almost four years—he received nothing from his trust fund. By the time the mortgage was paid off, real estate values on the Bowery had plummeted—permanently. The rents earned by the building into which most of his inheritance had been sunk barely met mortgage payments and taxes. His income from the trust was henceforth going to be barely a thousand dollars a year.

  If there was negligence involved in the disappearance of his assets, it was on the part of the bank, which had had the responsibility of managing the properties for the trust, not on the part of his brother, who had in fact lost part of his inheritance because he had invested it in guaranteed mortgages. Not even the most prudent investors had foreseen the general collapse of the title companies which had turned tens of thousands of guaranteed mortgages into all but worthless paper. Paul would probably have understood this if his brother had sat down and explained the situation to him.

  But his brother wouldn't even talk to him. Once, the few thousand dollars a year that the trust fund was supposed to have provided would have seemed like an insignificant sum to Paul Moses. Now it looked as large as a meal to fill his stomach. It might be the means—the only means—of saving his swimming pool. In an attempt to realize something from the dilapidated Bowery loft that now represented almost his entire inheritance, he thought of two ideas. The bank, he learned, was paying a rental agent about $1,000 per year to collect the rents: why, he wondered, could the bank not hire him to do the collecting instead, and pav him the thousand dollars? Or. he wondered, why could not the building be sold? He asked its largest tenant if he would be interested in buying. The man said yes, and made an offer on the spot: $40,000. Paul was sure he would go higher, and even $40,000. placed in a bank, would return him more than the few hundred dollars the building was netting him annually now. Paul telephoned his brother to present these ideas to him—and heard with astonishment a

  secretary say that his brother wouldn't talk to him. When he telephoned his brother's home, Mary gave him the same message. When he contacted his sister, Edna said she would do whatever Robert wanted. So did Openhym, who, Paul says, "seemed to feel I was some sort of criminal or something." So did the bank. Much as he needed the money involved, it wasn't its loss that hurt Paul the most. It was the attitude of his brother. At about this same time, by coincidence, he asked Edna for some pictures or mementos of their parents; she said she did not have anything to spare—not so much as a single photograph. "Oh, I never blamed Edna," Paul was to say. "Whenever something comes up, she asks Mr. Robert what he wants done and then accedes to it." Now he tried to telephone his brother to ask him for a photograph— "You'd think they'd let me have a picture, wouldn't you? You'd think they'd let me have something, the oldest one in the family and all"—and he still would not come to the phone. He had always been fond of his brother's two daughters, Jane and Barbara. Now, he realized, he was not going to see them at all. And he couldn't imagine why his brother and sister and cousin were treating him this way. For a while he thought it must be because of his marital difficulties. "What right have they to sit in moral judgment on me, an older brother?" he said. But that explanation could not account for their attitude. He simply could not imagine what was behind it.

  In January 1941, Paul received a letter that fan
ned smoldering hatred into flame, convincing him that the motive behind all his brother's actions had been the desire to wring for himself out of their mother's estate every last dollar he possibly could—even if those dollars had to come out of the pitifully few that Paul was receiving. For the letter, a copy of one from the trustees to the Surrogate's Court, informed him that Robert Moses was asking that he be paid—out of the trust fund—for his work as trustee.

  For almost four years—from October 3, 1935, to August 3, 1939— Paul Moses had received nothing from the trust fund his mother had left for him. During the remaining months of 1939, he had received $1,144.54, in 1940, $444.18. In five years, then, he had received a total of $1,588.72. The letter informed him that the fund's trustees were asking the Surrogate's Court to approve the payment to them—out of the fund—of commissions for their work as trustees at standard trustee commission rates. Each trustee was asking for $750.90. Together, therefore, they were asking for $3,003.60. At the same time, Openhym asked an additional $750 for himself as "attorney for the trustees."

  The wealthy lawyer's request enraged Paul. If it was granted, he would obtain from the trust fund Paul's mother had intended for Paul's support $1,500—just about as much as Paul had received from the fund for the previous five years. And Openhym was only a cousin. Robert and Edna were his brother and sister. They lived comfortably. He often literally did not have enough to eat. But they were attempting to obtain from his trust fund as much money as he had obtained during the previous five years. Together, in fact, the trustees were asking for almost $4,000—more than twice as much as Paul had received during those years.

  THE LOT! OF POW£J

  592

  , - - - - - . - - - - ; • " -' - -' : " '- -1 2

  ov fdL it sated, that money Paul had been given in 1933