[2] Hyde, on November 29, 1912, was convicted in court on a charge of accepting a bribe, as a public officer, in consideration for depositing public money in certain banks. He was sentenced to two years in State’s prison. But the verdict was later reversed by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, and he was released from all criminal charges.
[3] The Committee commented: “The investigation shows clearly the extreme difficulty of securing exact information which will disclose the methods by which powerful financial interests seek to control legislative action in matters coming before legislative bodies.
“The crime of bribery is one of the most difficult of all crimes to uncover. All the resources of ingenuity are used to conceal it, and only in exceedingly rare instances are either of the parties to the crime willing to come forward and disclose the facts.”
CHAPTER XXXV
“CHIEF” MURPHY’S LEADERSHIP—FURTHER DETAILS
1912-1913
Mayor Gaynor was by no means pliable to Tammany purposes; he both asserted and exercised his independence of “Chief” Murphy. But although great powers were centralized in his office, there were nevertheless numbers of Tammany men in the various departments, bureaus and courts. Of the 85,000 regular employees of New York City in 1912 (including 10,118 policemen and 4,346 firemen), many were Tammany men, the larger number of them occupying subordinate positions. The entire city payroll at this time aggregated about $89,000,000—an average outlay of $7,500,000 a month for salaries and wages alone. The city budget for 1913 was $190,411,000.
Despite the appointment of successive Police Commissioners—there had been eight within eleven years—to remedy matters in the Police Department, the state of affairs in that department was still a fruitful cause of scandal. This continuing scandal was brought to a vivid climax by a murder the deliberate audacity of which horrified and aroused the people of the city.
On April 15, 1912, Police Lieutenant Charles Becker went, at the head of his “raiding squad,” to the gambling house of Herman Rosenthal on West Forty-fifth street. On July 11, 1912, Rosenthal went to the West Side Police Court to protest against the “oppression” of the police in stationing a uniformed man constantly on duty in his house. Shortly thereafter, Rosenthal made an affidavit, which was published in the New York World on July 14, 1912, swearing that Police Lieutenant Becker had been his partner in the operation of the gambling house and had made the raid for certain personal purposes hereafter explained.
If at this time a Tammany district attorney had been in office, the results might not have been fatal to Rosenthal. But the district attorney, Charles S. Whitman, was an official noted for his excellent record. It was well realized that when he agreed to listen to Rosenthal’s charges against Becker, he could not be “reached” by any “influence” or intimidated by any threat. The alternative on the part of somebody vitally interested was to slay Rosenthal on the principle that “dead men tell no tales,” and thus prevent important disclosures being made to the district attorney.