Having taken his man,[152] the elisor was at a loss to know what to do with him. To put him in the city prison was to turn him over to the police; to put him in the county jail was to turn him over to the Sheriff. The Chief of Police was even then under indictment with Ruef, a co-defendant; the Sheriff had been disqualified. The only alternative was for Biggy himself to hold Ruef until the court could act. Biggy accordingly secured suitable quarters at the Hotel St. Francis, and there held Ruef a prisoner until the following Monday, when he was taken before Judge Dunne.
Judge Dunne refused to admit Ruef to bail, remanded him to Elisor Biggy’s custody, and continued his trial until the following morning, Tuesday, March 12.
Ruef immediately made application to the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, asking to be released from the custody of Elisor Biggy and placed in charge of the Sheriff. But here again Ruef was defeated. Elisor Biggy continued his keeper for many months following.
Ruef, after his appeal to the Federal Supreme Court, had exhausted every legal device known to himself and his attorneys to escape trial in the extortion case pending before Judge Dunne.[153] His last recourse gone, Ruef found himself brought face to face with trial before a jury. On March 13 the selecting of jurors to try Ruef began in Judge Dunne’s court.
But events of far greater moment than petty extortion had the attention of San Francisco. Even as Ruef was in hiding, Detective Burns and his assistants had trapped three members of the Board of Supervisors in bribery. This opened up the most fruitful field of the graft prosecution, and immediately the extortion cases became of comparative unimportance. The trapping of the three Supervisors led to confessions from fourteen others, which involved not only Ruef in enormous bribery transactions, but also prominent members of the bar, and leaders in the social, financial and industrial life of California.
CHAPTER XII.
Trapping of the Supervisors.
Months before the Oliver Grand Jury was convened, it was common gossip in San Francisco that the members of the Board of Supervisors were taking money from the public service corporations.[154] Belief of this had got beyond the stage of mere newspaper accusation. It had become the firmly-settled conviction of the law-abiding element of the community. For this reason, as the months wore away in technical wrangling in the “French Restaurant” extortion cases, the public became impatient that time and energy should be expended in comparatively unimportant matters, while big graft went unprobed.
Partisans of the administration took advantage of this sentiment to belittle the prosecution.