Scandals of New York (Cont'd)
After a year of skunk-flushing in New York City's political woods, Counsel Samuel Seabury of the Legislature's investigation into municipal corruption last week bayed resoundingly on the trail of a fox. Never before had the chase come so close to slick little Mayor James John ("Jimmy") Walker.
Inquisitor Seabury first gave tongue last fortnight by revealing that the Mayor had been given $26,535 worth of bonds by a broker whom he had seen only once before but for whom it was in the Mayor's power to do a potent favor. The broker's name was Joseph A. Sisto. His firm issued the securities of Parmelee Transportation Co. which owns the city's biggest taxi fleet (2,300 cars). Broker Sisto met the Mayor at Atlantic City in the summer of 1929. The following autumn he sent his gift, made "in admiration," around to the City Hall. Later he spoke to the Mayor of the need of municipal taxi regulation to curb low-rate "taxicab racketeers." The next April Mayor Walker ordered an investigation, the next year pushed through legislation creating a Board of Taxicab Control.
The Sisto revelation brought no immediate surge of public indignation against foxy Mayor Walker. The news of his bonds was juxtaposed with news of his Beer Parade, and pure chance sent also the discovery of the Lindbergh baby's corpse. Besides, the New York public had waited months for the Mayor's turn to come in an inquiry of which everyone realized the prosecution was as political as the defense. The public seemed interested not so much in what Mayor Walker had done—$26,535 seemed small potatoes indeed for a man of his parts—as in if and how he would elude punishment. After Inquisitor Seabury had further showed last week that the promoters of a bus company had bought Mayor Walker a $10,000 letter of credit, later extended by $3,000, for his junket to Europe in 1927, the chase approached its most exciting stage—Mayor Walker on the stand in his own defense.
In preparation for the Mayor's testimony this week, Inquisitor Seabury concentrated his investigation on State Senator John A. Hastings, a well-fed, acquisitive young Brocklynite who fought a losing battle all the way to the Court of Appeals to escape testifying. Seven years ago, aged 25, John A. Hastings was in the New York Senate when James J. Walker resolved to spring from that body into the New York mayoralty, "third biggest job in the U. S." Clever and obliging, Senator Hastings made himself indispensable to Senator Walker, has stayed close to him ever since. As public men must if they are going to do private business on the side, Mayor Walker retained a financial agent, one Russell T. Sherwood, who left Manhattan early in the Seabury investigation. In his absence, and in the absence of the Mayor's business records, the doings and dealings of Senator Hastings seemed the next best clues to what fun-loving Mayor Walker might have been doing for a living.