Quite as extraordinary as the attempted assassination of Gallagher was the indifference with which the outrage was received by the press that was supporting the graft defense.[379] The Chronicle condemned the outrage, but took occasion to denounce Gallagher.[380] The weekly press, however, treated the affair as something of a joke on the confessed bribe-taker.[381]
In the face of the ridicule of the graft-defense press, the dynamiting of witnesses, and the continent-wide hunt for the dynamiters, the Ruef trial went steadily on.
One incident of the beginning of the trial, because of the event that grew out of it, eventually proved even more important than the trial itself.
During the examination of jurors, an ex-convict, one Morris Haas, was discovered to have been sworn to try the case. Heney exposed him and he was excused from service.[382] The incident, compared with the other tremendous happenings of the time, was of small importance, but it was destined to lead to the greatest outrage of all the history of the prosecution, the shooting down of Assistant District Attorney Heney in open court. But for the time, Haas passed out of the graft cases and was forgotten.
The Ruef trial was not unlike the Ford trials. The courtroom was packed with detectives, agents and thugs employed by the various graft defendants.[383] There was the same hesitancy on the part of witnesses. At one stage of the proceedings Ach, Ruef’s chief of counsel, sneered that the State was having trouble with its own witness.
“Yes,” replied Heney, “The People have no witness—no volunteer witnesses. We merely produce them.”
When J. E. Green, president of the Parkside Company, who had authorized the payments to Ruef, refused to testify on the ground that he might incriminate himself, it looked as though the case was going against the prosecution. But Heney met this objection. He promptly moved the dismissal of the fourteen indictments pending against Green.[384] Ach objected, but the motion was granted. Green was left free to testify.
Green testified how he had sent his attorney,[385] Judge Walter C. Cope, to Ruef to find out what Ruef was after. Ruef wanted $50,000 to put the franchise through. Green testified that Ruef finally agreed to take $30,000, and was actually paid $15,000 on account.
G. H. Umbsen testified to having received $30,000 from the Parkside Company for Ruef and had paid Ruef $15,000, the balance being held until the deal should be consummated. In addition to this, the sorry manner[386] in which the company’s books had been juggled to cover up the transaction was shown by witnesses connected with the Parkside Company.
Ruef’s intimation through his attorney that the money had been paid as a fee was offset by testimony that the books had been juggled to cover up the payment to Ruef because Ruef was the political boss of the city, and it was believed that it would do the company no good if the fact of his employment were known.