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

by Caro, Robert A

  Had he time to think about the situation, this realization might have come to him, but he had less time to think than ever. With barely six weeks before the opening of the great Massena dam, which Queen Elizabeth II and Vice President Richard M. Nixon were scheduled to attend, the dam was far from completed; the contractors had to be driven, and a thousand last-minute details had to be overseen, and, with the pages of that huge calendar on the wall over his head falling inexorably one by one, Moses was working fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day. Bill Chapin was to remember the last months before the Massena opening, with the telephone awakening him and his boss's voice rasping over it sometimes at midnight and sometimes at 5 a.m. and sometimes during the hours between, as months of unmitigated exhaustion, and Bill Chapin was fifty-five. Robert Moses was seventy. Incredibly, he showed not a sign of fatigue—he seemed as tireless at seventy as he had been at thirty. But there was little time to spare for administration of the city park system, where the Papp episode was a time-consuming irritant, for the eleven major state park expansion projects he was undertaking on Long Island, the four major expressways he was ramming through the city, the two great suspension bridges, one under way, the other in the final stages of planning—and certainly not for consideration of the best way to handle the impudent Citizens Union request.

  He may simply have felt that he could conceal most of the scorecard.

  Whether with or without his knowledge, the files would, when reporters got to see them, be stripped virtually clean of revealing material; he may have believed that it was possible for his aides to remove all of it. Moreover, reporters had investigated his operations before. In almost every case, his reputation had insured that editors had not given the reporters the time necessary to investigate in the necessary depth. In the rare cases in which reporters—such as Milton Racusin—had nonetheless uncovered some of his secrets, his influence with publishers had been sufficient to get the stories killed or toned down. He may have heard so much about investigations that he no longer worried about them. And, as would later become apparent, he had not realized the crucial change that had occurred: the tarnishing of his reputation to a point at which reporters would now be given the time to make their investigations thorough, and at which the facts they uncovered would now be examined and played by the same standards as facts revealed about other public officials, standards which placed a premium on sensationalism. For years every fact he fed the press had been grist for a mill whose end product was something sweet to him. He appears not to have realized until he saw the play of his replies to the Citizens Union that now any facts the press uncovered were going to be grist for a mill that could grind out only bitterness. And that realization came too late. He had already put himself on record publicly. He tried to draw back, stalling for two weeks while Triborough counsel Lebwohl told the reporters who telephoned every day that the records were still being "assembled." But with editorials reminding the public of his promise to make them available, he could not stall indefinitely. On May 29, 1959, Haddad and Kahn (Gleason apparently did not call that day), telephoning Lebwohl, were sullenly told to come ahead.

  "Christ, we were just dying to get to see that stuff," Haddad recalls. "And of course there was nothing there."

  After he and Kahn had arrived at the Triborough Authority's Randall's Island headquarters, Lebwohl kept them waiting "for hours" before sending a secretary to escort them into a small narrow room, walls painted institutional green, in the middle of which was a narrow conference table on which had been piled stacks of file folders. The moment when the two reporters flipped open the first one was historic; Robert Moses had been in public office for thirty-five years, and this was the first time that any reporter had gotten a look at his files. Historic but not significant. The folders were bulging with papers, but these papers turned out to be building plans, brochures, formal memoranda written for the record—in Haddad's words, "all pro forma stuff." They could find no information of significance—particularly not about the individuals in whom they were most interested: the sponsors. The next day, after being kept waiting for hours again, the two reporters asked Lebwohl where this information was, and were referred to Spargo. Haddad recalls their meeting with Triborough's general manager vividly—"that little shit sitting in that big office eating a bowl of soup" while feeding them only evasive answers. "What qualified a sponsor to become a sponsor—that was

  all we were asking," Kahn recalls. "We didn't even suspect that a sponsor might be someone who had never built something and had no money or financial backing to build anything." But they could get no answers to their questions and the files yielded none and seemed likely to yield none. "They had stripped them completely," Haddad recalls.

  "But for some reason," Kahn says, "we kept looking. It was just like police work. You write down every name you come across, and that night when you get back to the office, you check it in the clips, just in case you'll find something."

  "We were tilting at windmills," Haddad says, and the accuracy of the image seems demonstrated by their mount. The giants they were trying to pull down from their castles—Moses, Shanahan, Rosenman, Goldwater— had big black Cadillacs; so did Haddad—a Cadillac he had bought for twenty-two dollars.

  "It was ancient," the young reporter would recall. The windows rolled up and down—sometimes; generally they remained firmly in whichever position they happened to be. The Post copy girls whom Haddad squired became accustomed to getting very wet in the rain. The window problem was, however, insignificant compared to the overheating problem; recalling the Title I investigation years later, Joe Kahn recalls more vividly than the stories he wrote the difficulty in keeping the engine cool while researching them. The trip back downtown to the Post office from Randall's Island was too far for the vehicle, which "just managed to make it to Sixty-fourth Street," where there was a gas station at which they could obtain enough water to keep the engine cool as far as the Downtown Athletic Club, whose friendly doorman would run inside for water whenever he saw them coming. The overheating problem was complicated by the hood problem, which resembled the window problem: it frequently wouldn't go up. Once, carried away by enthusiasm, they tried to make it all the way back to their office without stopping for water. The car boiled over in the Battery Park underpass, and the hood stuck fast. Passing motorists gaped as the two reporters tried to cool off the car by throwing pails of water on the closed hood. Every morning they would pull up to Triborough headquarters in that sputtering car—apprehensive; "it looked like a military fortress, and they had guards all around"—and alight, looking in their shabby sports jackets like the $i40-a-week reporters they were (in deference to their surroundings, Haddad wore a tie, but this attempt at respectability was somewhat undermined by his inability to button his collars; he had bought the wrong size shirts), and walk inside, to sit waiting for hours for Lebwohl's pleasure and then be shown into the narrow little room by a flunky who made no attempt to conceal his contempt, to begin hours of plowing through meaningless documents, hoping that somewhere in those files they would find information enabling them to prove that the Moses image was a false image.

  And then one day they found it.

  It was in one of the file folders relating to a Title I project which had received almost no publicity at all: one called "Mid-Harlem." In that

  folder, apparently overlooked by whoever had stripped it, was a letter ("just this long," Kahn would recall, holding up his fingers an inch or two apart) from a man applying to be one of the sponsors, together with a note indicating that his application had been approved. The man's name was Louis I. Pokrass. Haddad seemed to recall hearing that name during his days with the Kefauver Crime Committee, but he couldn't recall in what connection. Back in the office that night, however, he pulled Pokrass' clip file— an d "as soon as I saw those clips, I said, 'Holy Christ! Joe! Look at this!' " "This" was clips on Kefauver Committee hearings in which it had been disclosed that in his previous business dealings Louis I. Pokrass had
had as secret partners underworld kingpins Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky and Joe Adonis.

  "That was the one that did it," Kahn says. "Pokrass was the guy that crumbled him. When organized crime got into the picture, that blew the lid off." Frank Costello was a name that, to the average newspaper reader, threw off reverberations as powerful in one context as Robert Moses did in another. And the story in which this Costello associate figured was as simple and dramatic as most previous slum clearance stories had been complicated and obscure. With the first Post headline on June 30, 1959, on the new revelation — costello pal got title i deal —Moses' urban renewal program was scandal in a way in which, despite three years of previous exposes, it had never been scandal before. Overlooked by Moses' file strippers among the bland minutes and reassuring brochures in the "Mid-Harlem" file folders had been another single sheet of paper—not even a full-size sheet of paper but a handwritten note—containing dynamite enough not merely to chip but to blast a substantial hole in the Moses image. The handwriting on the note was Tom Shanahan's, and what the note said was that he had been made aware of a "delicate situation" involving Pokrass—and the date on the note was several weeks before the Slum Clearance Committee had approved Pokrass' application. Gleason either came across that piece of note paper himself or was fed it by Haddad, and with the first World-Telegram headline the following day— banker had warning on costello pal —the scandal had an added, significant dimension: not only had Robert Moses' committee approved an associate of racketeers as a slum clearance sponsor, it had done so although Moses' key colleague on the committee had known he was an associate of racketeers.

  Of all the charges that might have "crumbled" the image of Robert Moses, none could have been more unfair. He had never met Pokrass; if he had ever heard his name, he did not recall it. He certainly had no idea that one of his sponsors had had underworld connections. To him, the Mid-Harlem sponsors were "Colonel Bennett's group"; it was represented by the former judge, State Attorney General, Democratic gubernatorial candidate and, as chairman of the City Planning Commission, his obedient lackey, Colonel John J. Bennett. Moses had left the investigation of the syndicate behind Bennett entirely to Shanahan—Mid-Harlem was one of the projects over which he had delegated the banker complete authority. But

  Kahn was right. By giving the Title I program underworld overtones, the Pokrass story was the one that crumbled him.

  Not only reporters but other persons hostile to the Coordinator suddenly, for the first time, began trying to find other evidences of underworld "infiltration" of Title I, and an aide in the Comptroller's office soon found one: in the payroll records filed in the office by the Washington Square Village Corporation, he told Gleason, there appeared, as a temporary night watchman, the name of Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, a former boxer who had been accused—and then acquitted—of being the "hit man" in a "contract" put out on Costello by other Mafia figures; he had, a year before, ambushed the underworld overlord in his apartment-house lobby, but had only grazed him with a pistol shot, reveal thug held title i village job, the World-Telegram blared.

  "Could any charge be more grotesque?" Moses demanded. Hardly. The Chin had not been hired by the Title I committee. He had not been hired by the sponsor to whom the committee had awarded the "Village job." He had not even been hired by the contractor to whom the sponsor had awarded the construction work on the job—not that the identity of men on the contractor's payroll would have been scrutinized by the sponsor anyway, much less by the committee. He had been hired by one of the contractor's subcontractors. "The inference is that this committee should not have permitted his employment and, having stood idly by while this atrocity went on, is guilty of association with mysterious gangsters," Moses said. "This committee has no responsibility for the help employed by contractors for sponsors and could not conceivably have . . . And in any event, as a matter of fairness and decency, is Mr. Gigante, who was acquitted of failure to take good aim at Mr. Costello, when out of jail not entitled to find work of some sort to keep him out of further mischief?" Such witty ridicule would once have turned back any charge; the reporter responsible would have been hastily reassigned. Now, he was reinforced. A whole platoon of investigative reporters rode out on the slum clearance trail.

  The trail was marked by anonymous tips and by other scattered pieces of information overlooked in Moses' files—marked clearly enough so that these reporters could see now where it was really leading. Abandoning side trips like the search for underworld connections, they stuck now on the main road that led them at last to the truly significant secret behind Title I, the secret that would destroy the heart of the Moses legend.

  Haddad led the pack, for he had the gift of seeing patterns, and he saw them in the seemingly innocuous material—minutes, memos, letters, notes—scattered before him on the narrow table in the little room. One, for example, was woven around press agents. Reading through endless reams of documents, Haddad noticed that two names kept reappearing in files relating to different projects: William J. Donoghue and Sydney S. Baron. He didn't know who Donoghue was, but Kahn, with his encyclopedic knowledge of city politics, did: a press secretary for both O'Dwyer and Impellitteri and a key Tammany insider. And everyone knew who Baron was, of course:

  Carmine De Sapio's personal publicist. Pulling up his tie as far as it would go to conceal his opened shirt collar, Haddad walked with Kahn onto the ankle-deep carpets of the silken-draperied, sliding-paneled room—adorned with just one photograph: that of a man with dark-tinted glasses—that was Sydney Baron's office, and wrung from him an admission that he had formed an "association" of Title I sponsors that paid him $1,500 a month. He swore that he had "never received a fee" from individual sponsors, but federal audits—leaked to Haddad now by Walter Fried, who had chafed so long at his inability to curb Moses—revealed that he lied. And one sponsor told the reporters; "It would be fantastic to tell you we hired Baron for any other reason than his influence." And Kahn and Haddad made clear where that influence came from, identifying Baron as "Tammany's and Carmine De Sapio's press chief." The same story was repeated with Donoghue.

  Gleason, thundering hard at Haddad's heels, had received a tip about a ninety-two-acre tract at Clason Point on Long Island Sound in the Bronx that had been selected for a slum clearance project to be called "Soundview" even though it was not a slum at all but a community of 245 neat, well-tended bungalows: the tipster said that Moses' Slum Clearance Committee had agreed to purchase the tract for a million dollars although its present owners had recently purchased it for half a million—thereby giving those owners a quick half-million-dollar profit before they even began to build the "high-rent" apartments that the committee had approved for the site. According to the tipster, the land was held in the name of a "dummy" owner, and it would be worth Gleason's while to find out who the real owner, was. The deeds on file in the Bronx County Courthouse showed the owner to be a Miss Helen Nugent, who Gleason guessed at once was a secretary in some lawyer's office.

  But whose office? Who was Miss Nugent a dummy for? Who was making the half million—and the millions more that were to come? Gleason learned that her employer was the law firm of Goldwater & Flynn. Gold-water denied that he had any financial interest in the project, maintaining he was only the attorney for the real owners. But he refused to reveal their identity, and the Telly's head (played above a picture of neat bungalows captioned "This Is a Slum?") noted that the "mystery woman's" boss was "dem bigwig" Goldwater, and under that head, Fred Cook, writing the hell out of the story, said that the Soundview "deal" represented "a clear $500,000 windfall to political insiders," and soon he and other newspapers were noting that Ed Flynn's old partner was still a power in Bronx politics under Flynn successor Charles Buckley—and that he and his son represented not only Soundview but two other controversial Title I projects.

  "Influence." "Dem Bigwig." "Tammany." "Political Insiders." De Sapio. Buckley. The Boss of Manhattan and the Boss of the Bronx were somehow involved—dee
ply involved—in a Moses program. Following the trail left by those overlooked documents in Moses' files, the hard-riding reporters had come at last upon the secret that would destroy the heart of the Moses

  legend: the fact that this man who supposedly scorned politicians had allowed the top echelon of New York's politicians to reap fortunes from his Title I program. And they led their readers to the secret—with stories that, linking Moses to politicians, were as accurate as earlier stories linking him to the underworld had been unfair. A letter to the Times showed that at least one reader was grasping the significance of these revelations. It was a letter such as had never before been printed about Robert Moses. "Robert Moses," the letter said, "is a boss like De Sapio himself."

  And of course the deeper the reporters delved, the more there began to come into focus the shadowy figure of the man who formed the key connection between Moses and the machine, and the clearer that connection became.

  Haddad had been hearing about Shanahan for years, of course. During his earlier investigations into the Building Department and Housing Authority, he had learned that, as he puts it, "the word was out that if you wanted to do any kind of work with the city you had to put your money in Federation—I mean, it was no secret. Everyone you talked to seemed to know it." And hardly had a surly Moses aide dumped the first batch of Slum Clearance Committee minutes in front of him when he noticed that the committee was taking many decisions "on report and recommendation of vice chairman." Among these decisions, he noticed, were many of those on the selection of sponsors. What, he asked Lebwohl, was the vice chairman's role in the selection process? Well, Lebwohl replied, he "qualifies" them. And what, Haddad asked, did that mean? He "uses his bank to check the financial responsibility of potential sponsors, at no cost to the committee," Lebwohl replied. "He determines who is the most qualified." And, Haddad asked, did the committee always accept Shanahan's recommendation? Usually, Lebwohl replied.