CHAPTER XXIII.
The Defense Becomes Arrogant.
The prosecution’s reverses in the Appellate and the Supreme Courts were followed by startling changes of policy on the part of the defendants.
The officials of public service corporations, who by every technical device within the ingenuity of the best legal talent that could be purchased, had for months resisted trial, suddenly became clamorous for their trials to begin. Abe Ruef, who had been counted, by the public at least, as friendly to the prosecution, openly broke with the District Attorney and his associates.
President Calhoun of the United Railroads, who had been in the East, returned to San Francisco demanding trial. The San Francisco Examiner, now openly opposing the prosecution, announced this new move to be a bomb-shell thrown in the prosecution’s camp. Nevertheless, The Examiner could not entirely conceal the astonishment caused by the defense’s new policy.
“Just what has brought about this change in Calhoun’s attitude,” said the Examiner in its issue of January 28, 1908, “was not explained yesterday. Tactics of evasion, motions of obstruction, and every other artifice known to legal legerdemain to stay proceedings have heretofore been the accepted etiquette of the graft defendants, and conspicuously that of Patrick Calhoun.”
The Call, supporting the prosecution, boldly charged that the graft defendants were in treaty with Ruef.[356] And this view the District Attorney’s office was finally forced to accept.
No sooner had the decision of the Appellate Court been made public than Ruef clamored for dismissal of the extortion charge to which he had plead guilty, but which the higher court had decided in the Schmitz case did not constitute a public offense. In this Ruef was backed by Rabbis Nieto and Kaplan.
Ruef, after the Schmitz-Ruef officials had been swept out of office, had been confined in the county jail. From the day of his jail imprisonment the two Rabbis besought the District Attorney day and night[357] not to force the broken boss to remain behind the bars.[358]