: "I never thought I'd live to see the tiger get skinned," Jimmy Walker remarked. The sale was symbolic not only of the loss of power by Tammany but of the rise in power of the city's labor unions: the purchaser was the children's dress unit of the ILGWU.
The price was highest in Moses' fields.
Ever since the post-Civil War years in which the Tweed Ring, authorizing municipal building on a scale that gave New York its own Reconstruction Era, took fixed percentages—5 percent for the Mayor, 20 percent for the Comptroller, 25 percent for William Marcy Tweed, who, with his choice of any post, chose the public works commissionership—of the padding in contractors' padded bills, public works had been the main ingredient in the rich swill of graft on which Tammany battened.
Now the techniques were different: subtler, smoother. Charlie Murphy had taught his sachems that it was stupid to take cash, too easy for some prying reporter or rebel district attorney to trace it, too easy to prove that it had been taken in exchange for a favor, too easy to subpoena a contractor's books and haul the contractor's timid little bookkeeper before a grand jury and frighten him into telling what the items listed as "cash disbursements" really represented. By precept, if not by preachment (for Silent Charlie had not received his nickname for nothing), for example, by having his Board of Aldermen hold up street-closing permits for the construction of Pennsylvania Station until the railroad awarded the excavation contract to a firm in which he had a hidden financial interest, he showed Tammany that there were safer ways of making money from public works. By 1905, Sachem George Washington Plunkitt, who, as a state senator, had ridden at the head of the "Black Horse Cavalry," was sitting, resplendent in handle-bar mustache and gleaming stovepipe hat, on Graziano's bootblack stand in the old courthouse off Foley Square at noon hours expansively explaining how cavalry were obsolete and how he was coining millions out of the "coincidences" surrounding "big improvements," coincidences which he called, in a phrase he may also have coined, "honest graft." (Silent Charlie, who, if he didn't invent "honest graft," refined it to meet the needs of a modern political organization, coined no phrases; he had not received his nickname for nothing.)
Murphy and Plunkitt were uneducated men; they had never been to law school. If they had, they would have found the making of "honest graft" safer and easier still. Al Smith, as always, phrased it best. Strolling through a law-school library one day, the Governor noticed a student poring intently over his books. "There," he said with a smile, "is a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee." By the Twenties, most honest graft was being worked through "fees," mostly through legal fees (more politicians belong to the legal than any other profession), but also through the real estate brokers' fees called "commissions," the insurance brokers' fees called "premiums" and the public relations fees called "retainers." Jimmy Walker's crew, overconfident and careless, forgot Murphy's precepts, but Samuel Sea-bury, finding the cash in their tin boxes, drummed the teachings of the master into Tammany again strongly enough so that the braves would never forget them again. In the post-La Guardia era, there was no more "Tin Box" Brigade. It was the Retainer Regiment now. Corrupt public officials who were lawyers would support or oppose a bill according to the wishes of a business
firm, and later the firm would retain the official in his private capacity as an attorney, paying him a fee for "services"—legal services, of course—"rendered." Corrupt public officials who were insurance brokers would be allowed to write a firm's policies, and thereby to obtain the premiums attached. In the interaction of politics and public works, cash was now the medium of exchange only on the lowest levels. Now if some investigator found that a contractor's books included a $10,000 payment to a city councilman, next to the payment would be the notation "legal fee," and who could prove that the services the councilman had rendered to earn the fee were anything other than legal, that the councilman's vote in favor of a bill the firm also happened to favor was anything but coincidence? The presence of a councilman's name in a contractor's books would, moreover, be unusual, an indication that either the contractor or the councilman was still ignorant of the higher refinements of honest graft, one of which was to have the contractor pay the fee not to the councilman but to another law firm, which would then, taking out a small handling charge for itself, pass it along.
The profit in public works in New York had long been huge; with the postwar building boom, it reached new dimensions. "It's a king's ransom in a city this size," Reuben Lazarus said. And if there was subtlety now in the making of this profit, the making was still, for the machine, the motive. The greed was only refined, not eliminated. The Tiger, starved for so long, was more voracious than ever. Every large-scale public work, it sometimes seemed, had to have its arrangements, its payoffs, its deals—its "coincidences." Until the coincidences were arranged, there would be no public work. If Board of Estimate or City Council approval was required, that approval would not be forthcoming. If implementation of announced policy by a city agency was necessary, that implementation would be endlessly delayed. The great Mayor was dying—almost penniless—in a little house in Riverdale; in the City Hall he left behind him, everything had a price. And to Get Things Done in the city, one had to pay it.
Once Robert Moses would have scorned to pay it. Once he had scorned to pay it, refusing for four bitter years to make even the minor compromise over patronage that might have made possible passage of at least some of his proposed civil service reform measures; later, while attempting to realize his Long Island park plan, refusing for more bitter years—refusing even though he saw the possibility that his refusal would doom his great dream forever— to make deals with the Nassau County Republican machine that alone could give him the right to create Jones Beach.
But that Robert Moses no longer existed. The Robert Moses who had taken his place paid the price. And he paid it in full.
He had the money to pay it.
He had the money partly because his control of the City Housing Authority gave him control over close to a billion and a quarter dollars in federal and state funds dispensed through that agency, partly because his control of the State Department of Public Works gave him control over
another billion and a quarter dollars in federal and state funds dispensed through that agency, and partly because his control of the Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee gave him control of a billion dollars more dispensed through that agency—a total, during the first fifteen years after World War II, of close to three and a half billion dollars which he dispensed in the city on behalf of federal and state agencies largely beyond the control of the city's government.
But mainly he had the money to pay it because of his control of an agency that was largely beyond the control of any government, federal, state or city: the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.
With the war, and gasoline and tire rationing ended and automobiles pouring off the assembly lines again, the volume of automobile traffic in New York soared.
In 1941, the Triborough Bridge had carried 11,000,000 vehicles. In 1946, it carried 13,000,000; in 1947, 16,000,000; in 1948, 19,000,000; in 1949, 23,000,000; in 1950, 27,000,000; in 1951, 32,000,000—in i960, fifteen years after the war ended, it was carrying 46,000,000 vehicles per year. And that was just one bridge. Traffic on all Triborough Authority toll facilities had been 43,000,000 in 1941; it was 112,000,000 in 1951 and 154,000,000 in i960. The Authority's annual income had been $8,000,000 in 1941; in 1951, with the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel's thirty-flve-cent-per-car charge swelling the toll receipts, the Authority's annual income was $26,000,-000; in i960, it was $37,000,000 (in 1962 with the Throgs Neck Bridge open and operating, it would be $43,000,000; in 1967, with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge open and operating at fifty cents per car, it would be $75,000,000, almost ten times higher than it had been before the war). These receipts were, of course, capitalized through the issuance of revenue bonds. The income he received from bond sales, combined with other Authority income, meant that Robert Moses had a
vailable to spend on public works within New York City during the first fifteen years after World War II, more than three quarters of a billion dollars additional.
Part of the significance of that figure emerges when it is combined with the federal and state money Robert Moses spent on public works within the city during those fifteen years, and the total is then compared with what the financially strapped city itself spent. During that period, agencies controlled by Moses and largely independent of any supervision by the city's government spent on public works within the city close to four and a half billion dollars. The city's government—Mayor, Board of Estimate, City Council—was able during that period to spend, through all its separate departments, a total of less than three and three quarter billion dollars. Robert Moses spent on public works within the City of New York more— far more—than the city spent.
But a greater part of the significance of Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority revenue—vast in itself—was the secrecy in which its spending could be cloaked.
Federal and state expenditures were public records, subject to public disclosure. But because Triborough was a public authority—unlike the City
Housing Authority, a genuine public authority—its expenditures were not.
Therefore it was safer to take money from Moses than from the city. A politician or public official could accept a legal fee or an insurance premium from Triborough with assurance that no reporter or reformer would ever be able to discover that he had done so. The State or City Comptroller could, in theory, make the discovery; the legislation creating Triborough authorized in-depth audits of its books by these two officials. But there was no precedent for such an audit; none had ever been undertaken. And there were reasons both practical and political to doubt that one ever would. One was the very size of Triborough: auditing the Authority would require a huge staff working for a long time (one estimate was fifty accountants working for a year) and no Comptroller had that kind of manpower to spare, so the job would require a sizable appropriation from either Board of Estimate or State Legislature, a highly unlikely eventuality since any Comptroller seeking to pry open Tri-borough's books would be asking for the money to do so from the very men whose names were in those books. (The Comptroller's party designation was irrelevant; because members of both parties were in those books, his audit would inevitably embarrass members of his own party.)
The secrecy cloaking Triborough's largesse also protected its recipients because the secrecy protected the man who proffered that largesse.
Since 1924, newspapers had, practically unanimously, been describing Robert Moses as a man above politics and deals, a man whose name it would be ridiculous to mention in the same article with any hint of "payoff" or "scandal." After the war, the New York Post, with publisher Dorothy Schiff taking a more active interest in her paper, began to question not only Moses' ends but his means, asked to inspect Triborough's records—and, when Moses refused to open them, took him to court.
But the courts upheld Moses' refusal, and without those records, the Post could not document its suspicions about the flaws in the Moses image. And for a solid decade after the war, despite the wishes of an occasional reporter or editor, no other newspaper attempted seriously to dig behind that image.
Moses' personal reputation was reinforced by that of the institution with which, increasingly, it became blended. After as before the war, the public was being informed by Moses and by the press—in a single six-year period, 1946 through 1951, there were more than 1,400 editorials in metropolitan-area newspapers on this theme—that public authorities were not only "prudent," "practical," "businesslike" and "efficient" but "nonpolitical," "outside of politics" and therefore "honest." "Authorities are free from political considerations," the Times said. "They are free from the dead hand of partisanship and bureaucracy," the Herald Tribune said.
Moses' reputation and that of the institution he did so much to bring to maturity was the final guarantee that the secrecy of its books would remain inviolate. A politician considering accepting a Triborough fee could be assured that should some neophyte legislator ever attempt to open Triborough's books, Moses would assail the attempt as an attempt by a politician to interfere with an agency whose independence he didn't like and to get his
hands on some of its funds—that the press would back up that argument, and that the public would be conditioned by years of praise for Moses and for public authorities to accept it. Politicians could be sure that no public official solicitous of his political future would lay that future on the line in a fight with a living legend.* No one could disprove Moses' reputation without first opening Triborough's books, and no one could open Triborough's books without first disproving Moses' reputation. Any public official thinking about accepting a Triborough retainer could feel certain that his own reputation would be safe in the shadow of Moses'. Robert Moses had $750,000,000 of Authority money to spend. In the ultimate analysis, it was the public's money. But Robert Moses was not accountable to the public. He was not accountable to anyone. He had $750,000,000 to give away. And no one would ever know to whom he gave it. And this made politicians and public officials—at least those politicians and public officials interested in retainers—all the more anxious to make sure that he gave some of it to them.
Such politicians and public officials noted another fact about Moses' money which, in their eyes, made it even more attractive than the city's: Moses could give it to whomever he wished.
Expenditure of most federal and state money (slum clearance money was a notable exception) may have been largely free from city control, but it was subject to control by federal and state bureaucrats. Expenditures for highways and low-income public housing, for example, were subject to requirements for competitive bidding and to rigid standards, minimum and maximum, on the work involved, and to constant auditing to insure that those requirements were met. To a certain extent, it was possible to circumvent those requirements—and to the extent it was possible Moses did circumvent them—but the extent was extremely limited; the bureaucrats in Washington, in particular, were grimly stubborn about sticking to the letter of the laws they were charged with administering, and the threat of audits to discover violations of federal regulations was a constant inhibiting factor to potential violators. But over the spending of Triborough money Moses enjoyed absolute discretion.
Edward N. Costikyan was a keenly observant reform Democrat who suddenly found himself able to observe the machine as no other reformer had ever observed it: as its leader. New York's political convulsions of the 1960's catapulted him—to his own amazement and that of Tammany Hall—into the Hall's chairmanship and kept him there for more than two years. And Costikyan, upon descending from his unique vantage point, was to report: "The magnet which attracts corrupters ... the natural locus of corruption is always where the discretionary power resides." In New York
* Only a Comptroller who held his duty above his career would conduct the first audit of Triborough—and that Comptroller, Arthur Levitt, would not come along, in either city or state, for almost twenty years. When he did and, unable to secure the necessary appropriations from the Legislature, in 1966 scraped together a skeleton crew of his regular staffers to make at least a limited study, the first in the history of Triborough, of the Authority's books, the findings would, if publicized as widely as the Moses legend, have disproved that legend. But the findings were hardly publicized at all.
City, in the postwar era, the discretionary power resided principally in Robert Moses, and like filings to a magnet—or, more precisely, like flies to a sugar bowl—the corrupters, the men who possessed influence over the city's political or governmental apparatus and who were willing to sell that influence for money, were attracted to Moses, and to the seemingly bottomless sugar bowl for which he possessed the only spoon. And Moses did not send them away disappointed. "Free from political considerations"? Political considerations were in fact the basis—often the only basis—on which Moses spooned out his millio
ns. With the power to distribute those millions according to any criteria he chose, during the entire postwar era he chose mainly a single criterion: how much influence an individual had, and how willing that individual was to use that influence on his behalf.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 109
