In considering this immunity arrangement with the bribed Supervisors, the fact should not be overlooked that during the five months which had passed since the opening of the graft prosecution, Spreckels and Heney had been meeting officials of the public service corporations involved practically every day at luncheon. But the corporation officials would give no assistance in exposing the corruption which was undermining the community.[166]
CHAPTER XIII.
Confessions of the Supervisors.
The resignation of Supervisor Duffey to take charge of the municipal department of public works, and of Supervisor Wilson[167] to take the office of State Railroad Commissioner, left sixteen members of the elected Schmitz-Ruef Board of Supervisors at the time of the exposures of the graft prosecution. The sixteen, after the surrender at their last secret caucus, made full confession of their participation in the gains of the organized betrayal of the city.
Supervisor Wilson added his confession to the sixteen. Thus, of the eighteen Union Labor party Supervisors elected in 1905, four years after the organization of that party, seventeen[168] confessed to taking money from large combinations of capital, the very interests which the party had been brought into being to oppose. The public service corporations, confronting a party organized primarily to control municipal government to the end that equitable conditions in San Francisco might be guaranteed those who labor, by the simple process of support before election and bribery after election, secured as strong a hold upon the community as their most complete success at the polls could have given.
These large interests, approaching the new order with bribe-money, found politicians operating in the name of organized labor, ostensibly to promote the best interests of labor, to be not at all formidable. And when the exposure came, and the bribe-giving corporation magnates were placed on their defense, their most potent allies in the campaign which they carried on to keep out of the penitentiary, were found in the entrenched leaders of the Union-Labor party.
The Supervisors’ confessions corroborated the statements previously made by Lonergan, Walsh and Boxton.
The bribery transactions to which the seventeen Supervisors confessed, came naturally under two heads:
The first class included the briberies carried on through Ruef, who dealt directly with those who furnished the bribe money. Ruef employed Gallagher as agent to deal with the Supervisors. Thus Gallagher did not come in contact with those who furnished the money, while the Supervisors were removed still further from connection with them. Ruef, on his part, in passing the money, did not come into immediate contact with the Supervisors except in Gallagher’s case. It was bribery reduced to a fine art. In this group of transactions were included the bribery of the Supervisors to grant to the United Railroads its trolley permit; to the Home Telephone Company, its franchise; to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, an 85-cent gas rate; to the prize fight combine, monopoly of the pugilistic contests in San Francisco. In this class, too, is properly included the Parkside Transit Company, which had, at the time the exposure came, paid Ruef $15,000 to secure a street railroad franchise, with a promise of $15,000 more when the franchise had been actually granted. The Supervisors received nothing in this transaction, but they had been told by Ruef’s agent, Gallagher, there would be, first $750 each for them in the Parkside matter. Later on they were told the sum would be $1000 each.