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

by Caro, Robert A

  But the city did not see that picture.

  In part, it did not see that picture because of Moses.

  With the Master Plan unit's relocation report completed, Orton's chief aide, Henry Cohen, and Hortense Gabel, two liberals with a taste for political stratagem, began to plot ways to get the report before the public. They drafted a resolution requesting the Planning Commission to study "the relocation problem created by . . . public improvements"—"ordering us," in Orton's words, "to do what we had already been doing." Introduced, in March 1953, by Isaacs in the City Council and Wagner and Halley in the Board of Estimate, it was adopted with little discussion; it was not the kind of measure

  to which a politician could easily object in an election year and Moses did not get excited about studies that would take months, if not years, to complete—if indeed, thanks to his monopoly of available statistics, it could ever be completed at all. It may even have been his plan to see that the Commission deferred taking any action on the request until it was forgotten. But when the study was mentioned at the next commission meeting, Orton blandly said—while Stuart Constable, jolted out of the ostentatiously nonchalant slouch he habitually affected in imitation of U RM," bounced abruptly upright in his chair—that it was already completed and ready for adoption.

  Cohen and Mrs. Gabel were convinced that a study bearing the official imprimatur of the City Planning Commission would receive prominent play in the press. Moses may have feared so, too. For six months, every attempt by Orton or his two allies on the commission, Bloustein and Livingston, to make the study official was defeated, 4-3, by Moses and his three allies, engineer Robert G. McCullough (of the Cross-Bronx Expressway), Queens real estate operator Charles Sturla and chairman Bennett (who was, of course, secretly organizing one profitable Title I syndicate himself). A series of 4-3 votes even defeated every attempt to place the study on the commission's calendar for formal consideration.

  And while Moses was stalling the study, he was rewriting it. Some key statements were removed entirely. Others were modified subtly—just enough to change their meaning. "In some cases," the study had read, "the tenants were obliged to find their own new quarters." Now the study read: "In some cases, the tenants voluntarily found new quarters." Others were modified less subtly. New, false statistics were inserted; one set "showed" that the living conditions of an overwhelming majority of relocated tenants had been improved by relocation. And in the "Introduction" and "Recommendations" chapters of the report, the chapters from which Moses knew the press generally selects its material, the whole tenor of the document was changed. Relocation procedures in the past, it now said, had been "a noteworthy achievement for which credit is due." And "the outlook for the next four years ... to be brighter than in the past." Those who had been in charge in the past should be left in charge in the future. The major recommendation of the report was a smoke screen added by Moses to draw attention away from the tenant relocation that was its ostensible subject—a proposal to finance public housing by a two-dollar-per-year tax on every telephone in the city. When, after sixteen major civic organizations joined in demanding the report's release and after the Post had been telling its readers for weeks about the report moses suppresses and the Times and Herald Tribune had finally begun to report the conflict on the commission (and after Impellitteri's defeat by Wagner had made it obvious that the report could not be bottled up indefinitely), the commission in December 1953—more than nine months after it had been written—adopted a "Tenant Relocation Report," it was not the report as originally presented but the report as rewritten by Moses, although so furious were Orton, Bloustein and Livingston that Bennett found it politic to allow them to append a minority report including most of the original points.

  The smoke screen on the Women's City Club report was thrown up by Samuel I. Rosenman, Moses' lawyer, who was also, for $250,000, Man-hattantown's, and who now proved that he was worth the money, putting at the service of his "developer" client not only his immense prestige that made his name a byword for integrity in New York but also the talent for words that had made him a valued speech writer for two Presidents. Rosen-man's statement defending Manhattantown, Inc., possessed rhythm, punch —everything but truth. "The Women's City Club report, based upon an erroneous premise, does not reflect the situation as it existed at the time of the survey. It also does not reflect the situation as it exists today. . . . Relocation has not progressed at as rapid a rate as we had hoped. Although it has been slow, it has been successful. We consider it successful, because without imposing unnecessary hardships on tenants, a larger number of slum, substandard and insanitary buildings have been cleared and have been demolished. Within the near future, new, safe, sanitary buildings will rise on the land thus cleared." And if it did not possess truth, it was so intricately woven a tissue of half-truths and misleading statistics that sorting out fact from fiction would be an almost impossible chore for anyone without firsthand knowledge of the situation.

  A reporter trying to find out the facts would now have to choose between two conflicting sets. He could not know that one of the sets—the one bearing the imprimatur of an adviser to Presidents and president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York—was false.

  And reporters were not trying to find out the facts. Their publishers and the editors who carried out the publishers' wishes made sure of that. If one reason the city did not get to see the true picture of what was going on on the Title I sites was Moses' strategy, another—more important—reason was that the press was not trying to see behind that strategy.

  Mrs. Gabel feels that the draft relocation report she helped write— the draft that ended up as the Planning Commission's minority report—was a significant document in the history of urban renewal in New York City because it was "the first major relocation expose," "the first public report, the first official report by any governmental agency, that even hinted obliquely that Moses wasn't God." But Mrs. Gabel was wrong. The facts presented in the minority report—and their implications for the future of the city—were as significant as she felt. But the report's impact on the city was not. It was an expose without exposure. The public at large hardly knew about it—because it was hardly told about it. Although reporters, told by Orton that Moses' telephone-tax proposal was a strictly diversionary tactic, had his statement confirmed by Bennett's confession, when they questioned him closely, that "details . . . had not yet been worked out" (they never would be, either), the Times, Herald Tribune and Daily News all led with this proposal. The Times did not even bother to mention the relocation controversy until the seventh paragraph, and then quoted, at greater length than it devoted to any other quote in the report, a "reply" to the minority report inserted in the report by

  Emanuel and Bella Moses

  Robert Moses in front of his boyhood home on Dwight Street in New Haven

  Yale Senior Council, 1909- Far left, Robert Moses.

  Bui ViVI fit ' JR.

  y«/^ Swimming Team, 1907-1908. Robert Moses, top row center.

  1934

  Circa 1936

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  he candidate with his wife

  iary and his daughter Jane, 1934.

  With Mary, 19j6

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  1948

  The Power Broker

  © ARNOLD NEWMAN

  1963

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  i960

  With Mary II, circa 1969

  On the St. Lawrence, 1958

  In his Randall's Island office, with the Tri-borough toll plaza in the background, 1960's.

  Moses that implied—falsely—that the real purpose behind their report was to move "about 20 percent of the entire City population"; and said, "No wonder the radicals would like to get hold of tenant relocation." (The first that "the radicals" knew of Moses' "reply" was when they read about it in the newspapers the next day. Bennett, they charged, had locked up all the commissioners' copies of the r
eport so that they couldn't get to see it—and hence couldn't answer it.) Of the city's daily newspapers, only the Post devoted any substantial space to the relocation facts so laboriously uncovered. The reformers had provided the city's press with facts that disproved the statements by Moses and other city officials from the Mayor on down that the press had been printing for months. If the city's press was unable—or unwilling—to obtain for itself ammunition to shoot holes in the curtain of secrecy surrounding the relocation of tenants on the vast Title I sites, it no longer had to do so. The ammunition had been stacked up, ready for its use, by others. But the press did not use it. The fate of poor people had never been news in New York City; it still was not news. Housing had always been a field whose complications discouraged the press from delving beneath its surface; thanks to Moses' strategy, moreover, the official report, the report the press was almost obligated to carry, now said that there was nothing wrong, or even worth discussing, with the relocation program—there seemed no reason to delve beneath the surface. The suspicions of the press, which would normally have been aroused by the rumors of "deals" and involvement by high-level politicians in a program calling for a vast write-down by the taxpayers, were lulled by the fact that this program was being run by apolitical Robert Moses; his legend draped over Title I a comforting, concealing cloak. The relocation report was never, except in passing, to be referred to in print again. Title I coverage continued to be predominantly a reprinting of Moses' statements and of "facts" from his brochures. As for city policy, just one week after the report's release, Hortense Gabel appeared before the Board of Estimate as a representative of seventeen civic groups protesting Moses' plans for his Washington Square Southeast Title I project. She appealed to the Board not to approve the project until it had at least studied the report. "Sheer, unadulterated bunk," Moses said. The Board approved the project.

  On October 1, 1954, an event occurred that should, by all normal standards of newsworthiness, have been eminently newsworthy.

  For months, investigators of the Banking and Currency Committee of the United States Senate had been looking into Manhattantown's books and, despite the frantic juggling which those books had undergone, had been able to come up with a detailed picture of the "reliable bidder's" financial operations—and on October 1, in a public hearing held in New York, it placed that picture on public exhibition.

  The hearing was marked by remarkable lapses of memory on the part of Manhattantown's ostensible founder, Samuel Caspert, a Democratic clubhouse figure to whom Moses had seen fit to hand over, on behalf of the City of New York, 338 apartment houses and tenements housing thousands

  of human beings. Under questioning by committee general counsel William Simon, Caspert was unable to recall even whether there had ever been a written document—any kind of prospectus, formal or informal— telling prospective stockholders the financial details of the project in which they were investing. And whenever it seemed that Simon had Caspert firmly on the hook at last, there were deft interventions to get him off—by his counsel, Judge Samuel I. Rosenman—interventions that were made easier by the deference with which Simon treated this prestigious public figure. But despite the evasions, denials and interventions, by the time Senator Prescott Bush, a Republican from Connecticut, gaveled the hearing to a close late in the afternoon, it was a matter of public record—because it was a record of an official Senate committee hearing, privileged public record, so that any newspaper could print it without worrying about the possibility of libel damages—that more than two years before, the Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee had handed over to Caspert and Company six square blocks of Manhattan real estate, worth $15,000,000, for $1,000,000. It was a matter of public record that as of October 1954, the month of the hearing, Caspert and Company were required to have all 338 buildings demolished—but that about 280 buildings were still standing, their tenants still paying rents. It was a matter of public record that not one brick had been laid for any new buildings—and that not one piece of financing for new construction had been obtained. It was a matter of public record that, in the more than two years since Moses' committee had turned over the slum clearance project to his "reliable bidder," that bidder's major activity had been not to clear those slums but to milk them. And so were the replies of Simon and Senator Bush—made near the end of the hearing, when the transcript indicates that they had come to the conclusion that Rosenman had pushed them around enough—when, after Simon had hinted that perhaps that was all Caspert and Company had ever intended to do, that the developers of the slum clearance project were trying to clear those slums as slowly as possible so as to continue making money from them as long as possible, Rosenman denied there was "any intention not to go ahead with this project":

  Mr. Simon. . . . the contract required that the new buildings be completed in four years [and more than two years] have gone by, and only one-sixth of the demolition has been done, and none of the new construction has been done, which is a fact that speaks for itself.

  Senator Bush. The thing the committee is curious about, Judge, is whether the attractiveness of the operation that these people have been engaged in hasn't perhaps delayed the construction of these buildings, which is what the Federal Government is interested in.

  And although Rosenman replied to those statements by protesting that "there is no such attractiveness ... it is far from attractive," the truth of the judge's protests was also a matter of public record, a record based on Simon's questions, the evasions of Caspert and his partners—and the stark facts entered into that record by committee investigators. That record showed that the profits made off the hapless human beings in the buildings still

  standing on the Manhattantown site were so huge that Manhattantown's thirteen stockholders had been able to receive from the company—in addition to regular "partners' drawings"—special payments made under a variety of devices apparently designed to conceal the "attractiveness" from investigators: one partner, for example, receiving through a "construction company" that had no office of its own and only two employees, himself and his secretary, $42,000 (although no construction had been done), and through a "management company" another $38,000; another partner, for example, receiving $26,000 in "legal fees"; another partner receiving $48,000 for accounting and auditing work; a group of partners receiving profits of $153,-000 paid to a dummy "management firm" they had set up—as Simon put it, "different people got cut in for a piece of different things but when it was all over everybody got a ride on one of the horses." And the record also showed that the profits the partners had already reaped, large as they were, were small compared to the profits the partners were planning to reap in the future. One partner, a close friend of Moses' ally, Bronx Boss Charlie Buckley, was in line for $375,000 for architectural services. So huge were Manhattantown's profits that they had been spread around—among stockholders' fathers, stockholders' sons, stockholders' daughters, as well as stockholders' uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews and assorted in-laws. And spread around liberally. The brother of the stockholder who had received $42,000 for "construction" and $38,000 for "management" himself received $30,000 as Manhattantown's "comptroller." In one transaction—just one of many spread on the record by the committee to demonstrate how money was siphoned off from the parent corporation into the pockets of its partners and their relatives—Caspert had skimmed off for himself and his family $115,000 in less than a year. He set up a separate corporation headed by his son-in-law. Manhattantown sold the son-in-law's corporation all the gas stoves and refrigerators in the tenements for $33,000—and then rented them right back from the corporation, paying it in effect for the privilege of using what had been its own appliances. And Manhattantown paid so well—paid rental fees so high— that in less than a year the son-in-law's corporation earned, after all expenses, $115,326.37. At the end of the year, Manhattantown bought back the stoves and refrigerators for the same amount it had sold them: $33,000. Financially, Manhattantown had wound up right where it had started—b
ut the son-in-law's firm had pocketed $115,326.37. By the end of the hearing, it was a matter of public record not only that in more than two years the slum clearance project had cleared hardly any slums, not only that no progress was being made in providing the new housing that the project was designed to provide—but that everyone involved in the project was getting rich.

  Here, by any customary newspaper definition, was SCANDAL. A major city administration program in which, it was now revealed, a $15,-000,000 slum had been turned over, for a mere fraction of its worth, to promoters who were milking it of hundreds of thousands of dollars, profits documented, down to the dollar, by federal probers—here was scandal of the first magnitude in a town in which allegations of twenty-dollar bribes to a few building inspectors were found worthy of big black headlines. More-

  over, juicy as had been the revelations of the Senate hearing, the hearing held the promise of far juicier revelations to be uncovered. There was the clear scent of far bigger scandal in the air. Manhattantown was one Title I project; there were ten others then under way in the city—one of them, in fact, also run by Samuel Caspert and friends. To reap that harvest of headlines, newspapers would normally have sent into the fertile fields of Title I their best gleaners, their ace investigative reporters.

  By customary practice, moreover, New York's papers would have brought into the picture an element the Senate hearing had not—the name of the city official responsible for the turning over of the slum to the promoters: the chairman of New York's Slum Clearance Committee. Rosen-man let slip the name of that official only once—in the hearing's fifth and last hour—when he could not avoid using it in identifying for the record a report addressed to that official. In all the sixty-six pages of the hearing transcript that is the only time his name appears. In referring to the authorities responsible for turning over the slum to Manhattantown, it was always "the city." The city's press would customarily not have been so vague. They would have identified the official, printed his name in big, black headlines, used his photograph, questioned him, examined his answers to their questions with printed suspicion. By the time a normal press investigation of Title I had been completed, his name would have appeared in a hundred headlines, his picture would have stared from a hundred front pages, the public would have been reminded a hundred times that he was the man responsible for Title I, in the public mind his name would have been ineradicably linked with its failures, its abuses—and with "SCANDAL" the noun which had spelled the doom of so many officials' careers.