A movement to secure Heney’s dismissal from the District Attorney’s office, on the ground that he had accepted a fee in addition to his salary as Assistant District Attorney, to act as prosecutor was started. But the allegation was not sustained and another failure was scored by the defense.
See Transcript on Appeal The People of the State of California vs. Eugene E. Schmitz, pp. 500 and 557.
Ruef stated that he appeared as attorney for the French Restaurant Keepers’ Association. But those who paid him the money for his efforts in this instance testified at the trial of The People vs. Eugene E. Schmitz that they held membership in no such organization, nor had they heard of it. In May, 1907, Ruef stated to Heney that he had closed the bargain with the French-restaurant keepers to represent them on JANUARY 6, 1905. He insisted that he had at first flatly refused to represent them; that he had had no intention whatever of so doing until the San Francisco Bulletin denounced him for having had the licenses held up and challenged him to take the cases and to attempt to defend himself upon the theory that the money so obtained by him was received as an attorney’s fee.
Heney examined the Bulletin files and found that the first time the Bulletin had mentioned the French-restaurant hold-up as an attempt on the part of Ruef to extort money from the restaurant proprietors was in the last edition of The Bulletin for JANUARY 7. 1905. (See Heney’s affidavit in the case of The People vs. Patrick Calhoun, et als., No. 823, pp. 141 to 143, inclusive.)
These Ruef-provided rules directed that no liquors be served in supper bedrooms on the first and second floors of the establishments, and required the French restaurants to take out hotel licenses and to keep registers the same as hotels. What the keepers of the places thought of the regulations came out at the Schmitz trial. Joe Malfanti of Delmonico’s, for example, testified: “They (the Ruef rules) made no change in the running of my business—not a single change. I had a hotel license for years before and I always had a register, so there was no change in my place whatever.”