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Sheriff—His duty is in the garnishee department, in going out and taking care of the numerous and large amount of garnishees that we have in our office for the purpose of collection. And it is a very busy department and it is one that no one likes to work in because there is too much work attached to it. ...
Next day Governor Roosevelt wrestled with Sheriff Farley's large bank balance, which was the crux of the whole matter since it would have been impossible to save so much money out of his salary. When the questioning resulted in a tangle of illiterate tautology, the Governor wearily concluded:
"You see, Sheriff, my trouble is this: Every time we run down one of these individual items we find either that it has been deducted already in making up the total of $357,000 or else it has been added to the total known assets . . . and it still leaves a discrepancy of somewhere around $250,000 during these years, 1925 to October 8, 1931. ... I want you to help me out."
All the help Sheriff Farley was able to offer was the assertion that he had been a wage earner since he was 13, had never taken "a dishonest dollar," had saved, was a frugal householder and that he was "always signing notes" for people or making loans—to whom he could not recall.
In his closing plea for the befuddled Sheriff's removal, Prosecutor Seabury cannily chose a national angle. Aiming straight at the heart of Governor Roosevelt's Presidential aspirations, said he: "People all over this nation from one end to the other, men and women, want to improve conditions in local government. . . . And one way to make them better is to take a man who is shown to be a grafter or a man who cannot explain his swollen funds and have him removed from office."
Governor Roosevelt took the matter under advisement. Sheriff Farley goes to trial Feb. 26 for grand larceny for misappropriating the funds of his office. The lumbering peace officer returned to Manhattan to await trial, was hospitalized for a bad burn on his arm contracted when he fell up against a radiator in his home.
*Not to be confused with State Democratic Chairman James A. Farley, Governor Roosevelt's campaign manager. *Not his precise words, but those boiled out of a celebrated Cleveland utterance, reiterated and often revised, by famed Political Reporter William C. Hudson.