One hundred and fifty years before Rep. George Santos was charged with a host of financial crimes, a former New York congressman, William Magear “Boss” Tweed, sat in one of the city’s courtroom docks. Tweed was facing 55 charges of embezzlement of public funds, with each offense involving multiple counts.
When the jury found him guilty in November 1873, it was of 102 separate crimes, for which prosecutors pursued a 102-year sentence.
So many individual verdicts had to be returned that, as Kenneth D. Ackerman wrote in his biography “Boss Tweed: The Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York,” the jury foreman had to hand the clerk a written formula to break down the specific items of the indictment. The conviction only added to the scandal that had engulfed Tweed, an enormously influential power broker in 19th-century New York.
But, despite those 102 counts, Tweed would make it out of prison soon enough, only to be jailed again — and then dramatically escape.
It had all started with humble beginnings. Born on Cherry Street in today’s Lower East Side, Tweed left school at age 11 to work in his family’s furniture-making business. As a young man, he joined the Americus “Big Six” volunteer fire company, infamous for decorating its pump wagon with tiger artwork and brawling with rivals when responding to blazes.
Elected as the crew’s foreman, the rotund, towering Tweed soon was approached by the Society of St. Tammany, otherwise known as Tammany Hall, the private group and Democratic political machine that provided shelter, jobs and food to New York’s flow of immigrants.
After declining Tammany’s first request for him to run as alderman on its behalf, Tweed accepted in 1851. He had witnessed vote-buying on the streets of New York during the 1844 presidential election, and decided to put his bookkeeping skills — taught to him by his father while working in his store — to good use.
Tweed was elected alderman for the Seventh Ward in New York in 1851 and won election to the House of Representatives the next year. Though he failed in his House reelection bid, by 1856 he had been elected as school commissioner, then a member of the New York County Board of Supervisors, before he was elected to the state Senate in 1867.
Tweed’s soaring popularity was no accident: He had capitalized on the city’s immigrant communities by selling citizenship documents, issued via complicit local judges, in return for a pledge to vote for him. By 1863, he was exempting workmen, police and fire crews from Civil War conscription or paying the $300 commutation clause.