A year later, Pecora successfully campaigned for Tammany’s candidate for city comptroller, Charles Craig. On election night, Pecora sat with Craig and James Foley, a judge on New York’s Surrogate’s Court and the son-in-law of Charles Murphy. As it became clear that Craig was the winner, the talk turned to the role that Pecora should have in the new administration. Craig offered him a plum spot—chief deputy comptroller, the number-two man in the office, and Pecora turned him down flat. It was “a generous offer,” the future interrogator of Wall Street told Craig, but he couldn’t accept. “You’ve never had any banking experience,” he explained, “and the chief deputy comptroller should be a man thoroughly trained in banking and finance. I probably know less about banking and finance than you do.”28
Foley agreed that deputy comptroller didn’t make sense. Besides, he had a better idea. The perfect perch for Pecora to launch a successful legal career was assistant district attorney in Manhattan. Pecora was equally adamant with Foley; he couldn’t think of a worse public office to hold. He found the atmosphere of the criminal courtroom “repulsive” and in private practice he had avoided criminal cases. “I don’t believe that I could ever stand up before a jury of my fellow men and ask them to render a verdict that might mean the life or liberty of another person.” Pecora turned down the job, but a month later it was offered to him again. This time his friends told him that prosecutors performed “very necessary work,” work that “should be done always by persons of integrity . . . who would respect the rights of defendants.” Pecora relented, and he was sworn in as a deputy assistant district attorney on January 1, 1918, just five days shy of his thirty-sixth birthday. The man who couldn’t think of a worse job to have in government would spend the next twelve years in that office and would make a name for himself throughout the city as an honest, fair, and talented prosecutor. 29
Indeed, when it came to respecting the rights of defendants, it took Pecora only a few months to prove his friends correct. He was asked to cover a simple one-day robbery trial for a sick colleague. Malcolm Wright was a young black man accused of robbing two women as they shopped on West 125th Street. The women convincingly identified Wright as the culprit. Wright’s court-appointed attorney did little to shake their story on cross-examination, and he put just one witness on the stand, Malcolm Wright. Wright’s alibi was that at the time of the robbery he was shooting craps with two people on the roof of a tenement building several blocks away. One of those two was a friend of Wright’s, but he never testified. It wasn’t much of a defense, and it shouldn’t have been very surprising when the jury was back within the hour with a guilty verdict. It shouldn’t have been, but as the foreman read the verdict Pecora got a “queer feeling” when he saw the look of “horror” on Wright’s face.
On his desk the next morning Pecora found a scribbled note from Wright. “I swear to God I am innocent. Will you hear my whole story?” Pecora had Wright brought to his office and Wright revealed a tale of blatant police criminality. Wright had been picked up for the robbery a few days after it allegedly occurred and he protested his innocence to the detective who arrested him. “Well, maybe you’re right,” the detective told him, “but it will cost you $100 if you want me to believe it.” When Wright failed to come up with the money, he was indicted.
Pecora believed Wright and brought the two women who had accused him in for questioning. At first they stuck to their story, but they were clearly uneasy. Then, after separating the women, Pecora told one of them that Wright was facing a twenty-year sentence. “[Y]ou look like the type of woman that wouldn’t want to see anyone sentenced unjustly. Please think this over very carefully. I’m not going to ask you any questions for a few minutes. You just sit there and consult your own thoughts and then let me know if the story you’ve told, and the testimony you gave on the stand, was the truth.”
The woman began to cry, and after Pecora promised that he would seek immunity for her for any perjury charge she told him what had really happened. Wright hadn’t robbed her; she was conned out of the money by someone else. The police told her that the only way she would get it back was to finger Wright for the crime. Pecora went to the police station and there in the police blotter found the woman’s original complaint, which corroborated her story. Pecora presented this evidence to the judge and asked him to set aside the conviction and to order a new trial, at which Wright was acquitted.30
Pecora had no tolerance for police misconduct. Prosecutors often say that their job is not to obtain convictions, but to see that justice is done. Pecora actually meant it. When he had evidence that the police had beaten a suspect to obtain a confession, Pecora didn’t hesitate to testify on behalf of the suspect. It was his “solemn obligation,” and although it probably won him no friends in the police department, he vowed that he would “do it again, and again, and again” if he had to.31
As a result of his work on the Wright case, Pecora was assigned to investigate another potential wrongful prosecution, this one involving a New York poultry dealer named Joseph Cohen, who’d been convicted of hiring assassins to kill his business rival, Barnett Baff. The murder and trial had been front-page news in all the city papers, and Cohen was on death row in Sing Sing when the district attorney learned that some of the testimony at the Cohen trial might have been perjured. He set Pecora to investigate the matter. In the face of obstruction after obstruction thrown up by the attorney general’s office, which had originally tried Cohen and which seemed to be implicated in the perjured testimony, Pecora was relentless, spending almost all his time over the next two years tracking down evidence in the case. Thanks to Pecora’s efforts, Cohen was eventually released from prison. (His execution had earlier been stayed just seven minutes before he was scheduled to go to the electric chair.)
Pecora obtained a perjury conviction against one of the witnesses in the Cohen murder trial. The day after the lengthy trial ended was a Saturday, and Pecora went to his then quiet office to clean up some paperwork. There was a timid knock on his door. A small gray-haired woman dressed all in black demurely asked whether he was Mr. Pecora. When he said that he was, she responded, “I am Mrs. Joseph Cohen.” Mrs. Cohen clasped Pecora’s hands and fell at his feet. As she sobbed uncontrollably, the only words she managed to get out were, “I came to thank you for what you have done for my husband.” For the rest of his life, Pecora called it the biggest fee he ever received as a lawyer.32
In 1922, on his fourth anniversary as a prosecutor, Pecora was named chief assistant district attorney, the number-two man in the office. His boss and friend, the newly elected Joab H. Banton, had a serious heart condition and was often absent from the office. For long stretches over the next eight years, Pecora was in charge as the acting district attorney. Even when Banton was there, Time magazine wrote, Pecora’s “brains really ran that office,” and he was the go-to lawyer for handling tough trials. The one exception was murder cases, which Pecora refused to prosecute because he was fundamentally opposed to the death penalty. Tackling all those difficult cases, he certainly had his share of failures. But the difficulty of the cases made his success rate—he won convictions in about 80 percent of the roughly 1,000 cases he tried—all the more impressive.33
Pecora’s first big success as chief assistant, and his first tangle with Wall Street, came when he led the prosecution of more than a hundred bucket shops—fly-by-night stockbrokers who sold fraudulent securities to unwary investors or simply took outright bets on market movements, a practice that was illegal under New York law. Despite the success of those prosecutions Pecora was convinced that New York’s laws were ill-equipped to prevent this kind of fraud. “The only restrictive force” on those stock brokers, Pecora claimed, “was their own consciences.” So he sat down to draft reform legislation with Samuel Untermyer, a prominent New York lawyer, informal Tammany adviser, and éminence grise among Wall Street reformers. The bill they proposed was mild, requiring only state licensing and inspection of stockbrokers, but the New York Stoc
k Exchange, which jealously guarded its private regulatory prerogatives, “violently opposed” it, and it never made it out of committee.34
Pecora displayed the same idealism and reformist spirit that originally led him to the Progressive Party. Now it led him to police the corrupt and seamy underside of New York politics and big business. Early on, at least, his moralistic urges did not require him to make personally difficult political choices. Pecora indicted William Anderson, the head of New York’s Anti-Saloon League, the country’s first and, at the time, perhaps most powerful pressure group. Pecora learned that while Anderson was zealously pushing the cause of Prohibition and raising vast sums of money from the Rockefellers and other wealthy donors, he was engaged in a petty scheme to siphon off for himself fund-raising commissions earned by one of his underlings. After the prosecutor satisfied himself about the truth of the allegations, he didn’t hesitate to charge Anderson, despite Anderson’s political prominence and power. It certainly didn’t hinder Pecora in making that decision that the Anti-Saloon League was a political thorn in the side of Tammany, which vehemently advocated for Prohibition’s repeal.
The outspoken Anderson was indignant, accusing Pecora of pushing a purely partisan political agenda. He claimed the prosecutor was simply an errand boy for “an unholy triumvirate” of Tammany Hall, liquor distillers, and the Catholic Church, all of which were lining up Al Smith as an anti-Prohibition candidate for president in 1924. It wasn’t true—Tammany boss Murphy did ask Pecora about the case, but only after Anderson had already been indicted. Murphy never sought to interfere, although it can’t have escaped Pecora that a conviction would thrill the Tammany bosses. On the other hand, acquittal would be a major set-back, so if Pecora was playing a political game, it was a very risky one.
None of those subtleties mattered much to Anderson, who was a “master propagandist,” a “virtuoso,” according to H. L. Mencken, in the arts of “sophistry and bellowing.” Nearly every Sunday he preached his innocence at churches around the state and every Monday morning the New York papers were filled with his conspiracy claims. As he continued to proclaim his persecution, Anderson taunted Pecora, telling the press, “It will be a very, very cold day indeed when the District Attorney of New York County will dare put me on trial.”
That was all the motivation Pecora needed. He quickly put Anderson on trial, even requesting that the governor appoint a Republican judge to hear the case in order to mute any claims of political bias. Anderson was an attorney and a gifted public speaker, and he apparently thought that Pecora was no match for him. He insisted, against his lawyers’ advice, on taking the stand in his own defense. That decision probably cost him his freedom. In a withering day and a half of cross-examination, Pecora carefully dissected Anderson’s direct testimony, showing at every step of the way how the League’s documents and Anderson’s own prior statements contradicted his sworn testimony.
Cross-examination was Pecora’s métier. Bainbridge Colby, who was secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson and had been a member of the Progressive Party with Pecora, called the lawyer “the most brilliant cross-examiner in New York.” Pecora had a prodigious memory; he seemed to remember every word of testimony and every piece of evidence. That gift allowed him to pounce on witnesses who tried, however subtly, to change their answers. With his love of acting clearly at work, he could assume various guises while questioning a witness. Mostly he was polite, even courtly; but when called for, he could quickly and effortlessly shift from friendly and innocuously curious to belligerent and sarcastic. He would doggedly ask the same question again and again until the witness finally conceded his point, and he would not hold back when confronting the rich and powerful.
J. P. Morgan Jr. would later complain that Pecora “has the manner and manners of a prosecuting attorney who is trying to convict a horse thief.” One appreciative commentator noted that defendants “who came to face him with faint superciliousness, departed, however, chagrined, with respect for his capacity.” Anderson was more resentful then respectful—he thought Pecora should have been removed from office and disbarred for his handling of the case. It is hard to imagine that he would feel otherwise. After Pecora systematically took him apart on cross-examination, the jury quickly found the Prohibition advocate guilty, a conviction that was later upheld on appeal.35
Other politically tinged cases hit closer to home for Tammany, but Pecora pursued them anyway. In early 1929, a small but politically well-connected bank in New York, the City Trust Company, collapsed within days of the death of its founder, Francesco Ferrari. It soon became apparent that many of City Trust’s loans were fictitious, and Pecora helped lead the ensuing investigation. The inquiry quickly turned to the state superintendent of banks, Frank H. Warder. Pecora’s investigation showed that Warder had been accepting bribes from Ferarri, including one a month before the bank’s collapse, in which Warder got $20,000 for agreeing not to shut the bank down after a state inspection had uncovered its rickety finances. By the end of the year, Warder was indicted, convicted, and shipped off to prison. One doesn’t get to be superintendent of banks in New York without a good many friends in Tammany Hall, friends who were now quite upset with Ferdinand Pecora.36
In April, as the Warder investigation was ongoing, Banton announced at a massive testimonial dinner that he would not run again, and, to the cheers of the 1,600 Democrats and Republicans in the room, he anointed Pecora as his hand-picked successor. “If in the good fortune of politics and public choice it falls upon our guest of honor to take that office,” Banton told the crowd, “we will know that New York could not place it in better hands, cleaner hands.” Banton’s benediction came as little surprise; Pecora was the consensus pick to be the Democratic candidate that year. Not only did he have all the experience, the judgment, and the honesty for the job, he even had all the right demographic qualifications. Part of the political leader’s art was assembling a ticket that was sufficiently balanced to garner votes from all the disparate ethnic constituencies in New York. An Italian Protestant was a godsend; he was a balanced ticket all by himself.
A Republican Party leader told Pecora, “Ferdie, if your party has enough sense to nominate you, we will not put up a candidate against you. We might even join in the nomination.” Everything seemed to be falling into place, and Pecora, who felt the nomination was “virtually assured,” liked the symmetry of entering the “office at the lowest rung of the professional ladder” and attaining the highest one. On August 8, 1929, when the Democratic leadership was to meet to determine whom they would nominate, an Associated Press reporter walked into the district attorney’s office just as Pecora was going out to lunch. The reporter had just been at Tammany Hall and had learned that Pecora would in fact be nominated. With a now thoroughly “enhanced . . . appetite,” Pecora headed off to lunch. He was back soon to await official word, and at three thirty the telephone rang. Tammany, it turned out, did not have the sense to nominate him.37
Pecora’s brand of maverick idealism had been acceptable when Charles Murphy ran Tammany Hall. Unlike past Tammany leaders, Murphy treated the district attorney’s office as something of a special case when it came to political interference. Murphy stayed out of prosecutorial decisions, leading Pecora consistently to turn down Tammany bosses and others who sought accommodations in his prosecutions. Unfortunately for Pecora, Murphy died in 1924, and Tammany had, by 1929, reverted to its old, crooked ways. After Murphy’s death, Tammany had a weak and easygoing boss, George Olvany, who lost all control of the district leaders around Manhattan. The money to be made from protecting New York’s speakeasies was just too tempting, and the tide of graft and corruption quickly ebbed back to its previous levels. Then, in early 1929, just as Banton proposed Pecora as his replacement, New York’s mayor, Jimmy Walker, successfully pushed John Curry as Tammany’s new leader.38
Curry was old-school; he was more interested in his own financial gain and the financial gain of his underlings than in the long-term success of th
e party. Reporters who covered New York politics in the 1920s and 1930s wrote that Curry was “full of personal loyalties and hatreds” and was afflicted with what could only be described as “stubbornly bad judgment.” Curry prevailed in an election among district leaders by the narrowest of margins, just one and a half votes. When he took control, the cold-eyed boss with the square jaw and trim gray mustache could not have been clearer about shaking off whatever slim remnants there were of Murphy’s more progressive Tammany Hall. “The New Tammany is a fiction,” Curry told reporters covering his selection. “I will carry out the policies in which I grew up.”39
If those one and a half votes had gone the other way, things might have turned out differently for Pecora. Olvany had already told Pecora the nomination was his. Now that Tammany was once again fueled by graft and corruption, however, the district attorney became one of the key offices—an ambitious lawyer who sought to go after public corruption regardless of the perpetrator’s connections or party affiliation was a huge potential danger to the organization. Charles Whitman, a Republican Manhattan district attorney, put it best when he ran for the office in the early 1900s: “The only way you can throw the fear of God into Tammany Hall,” he thundered in his campaign, “is by nominating and electing a man for district attorney who will do his full duty at all times.” Curry had been among those Pecora had turned down for favors when he was chief assistant.40
The Hellhound of Wall Street Page 5
