Mayor Eric Adams says he plans to write a memoir about the corruption scandal currently engulfing his administration. “All this is going in my book,” he told reporters at City Hall a few days ago. “This is going to be one of the chapters that you’re all going to reflect on.” Let’s hope so. Adams is facing charges of fraud, bribery, and soliciting foreign campaign donations—and that just seems to be for starters. Prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn have ongoing investigations into Adams and his tight circle of friends and advisers. More indictments and revelations of misconduct appear inevitable. He should get writing now.
If the Mayor is looking for literary inspiration, someone still legally allowed to make contact with him might slip him a copy of “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall”—a slim, curious book published in 1905 that still explains a lot about New York City politics and human behavior, generally. The book is a collection of twenty-one “very plain talks on very practical politics” supposedly delivered by George Washington Plunkitt, a Hell’s Kitchen “ward boss” at the turn of the twentieth century. Plunkitt was a loyal defender of Tammany, the corrupt political machine that dominated the city for a century. The son of penniless Irish immigrants, he argued that making money in politics wasn’t just O.K., it was downright patriotic. “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” he said, discussing the fortune he made during his long career. He is perhaps the most eloquent philosopher of corruption America ever produced.
In recent weeks, hearing Adams and his allies begin to mount a defense of his conduct, I thought of Plunkitt. “This is the airline-upgrade corruption case,” Alex Spiro, the Mayor’s celebrity defense attorney, told reporters the other day. Yes, the Mayor had accepted seat upgrades from an airline affiliated with the Turkish government. But so what? “That’s what airlines do,” Spiro said. “They do it every day. They do it for V.I.P.s. They do it for congresspeople.” Plunkitt didn’t know what airlines were, but he would have nodded all the same. “Nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft,” he said. “There’s all the difference in the world between the two.” He claimed that while he and his Tammany colleagues made money from inside information, arranging city contracts, and collecting multiple public salaries at once, they never went in for “dishonest” graft, like blackmailing saloonkeepers, “workin’ in” with gamblers, or pilfering the city treasury. “The books are always all right,” Plunkitt said. “Everything is all right.”
Adams is also saying that everything is all right. Between the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, the District Attorney in Manhattan, and the city’s Department of Investigation, there appear to be at least a half-dozen active investigations into the Mayor, the Mayor’s chief adviser, his ex-first deputy mayor, his ex-deputy mayor of public safety, his ex-police commissioner, his ex-schools chancellor, and an untold other number of city officials. A bar owner in Coney Island has come forward and alleged that an official from the Mayor’s office and the brother of the former police commissioner tried to rope him into a protection racket. (The brother’s lawyers have said he denies any wrongdoing.) Two former Fire Department officials have been indicted in a fee-for-service scheme involving fast-tracked safety inspections. (One has pleaded guilty, the other has pleaded not guilty.) City investigators reportedly found more than a hundred thousand dollars in unaccounted-for cash at the sheriff’s office in Long Island City. A former City Hall liaison to Muslim communities has been charged with witness tampering, allegedly in connection with donations made to Adams by an executive at a construction company. Adams has yet to say he sees a problem in any of this. “Just look at the numbers,” he said at a press conference last week, referring to a recent drop in crime on the subways and other statistics. “You are seeing this city move forward.”
The author of “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” was not Plunkitt himself but a reporter named William L. Riordon, who covered Tammany Hall for the New York Evening Post, a paper edited by E. L. Godkin, a prominent reformer and sworn enemy of Tammany Hall. Despite his editor’s public animosity toward the machine, Riordon had won the trust and even affection of the Tammany bosses, by being genuinely interested in what they had to say. In a preface, Riordon claimed to have jotted down the twenty-one sermons that comprise the book over several years, as Plunkitt delivered them while sitting on his regular “rostrum”—the bootblack stand in the Manhattan County Courthouse, where Plunkitt often had business, and where Riordon often looked in on him. As he got his shoes shined, Plunkitt would hold forth on his favorite topics: the necessity and utility of corruption, the glory of Tammany and its bosses, the wimpiness of reformers and reform efforts, and the perils of alcohol. He was an enthusiastic racist, though he saved his worst vitriol for people from Brooklyn. “Even a Jap or a Chinaman can become a New Yorker, but a Brooklynite never can,” he said.
Plunkitt was part of a generation of Tammany leaders who came up in the wake of the Boss Tweed scandal. Tweed and his ring had embezzled millions of dollars from the city budget, lived large, and came down hard after enemies leaked evidence of their wrongdoing to the Times. In the aftermath,Tammany leaders played down their ambitions and put on demure faces in public. “Look at the great leaders of Tammany Hall!” Plunkitt said, proudly. “No regular drinkers among them.” Though he himself was something of a dandy—he wore a top hat and gloves and sported a thick walrus mustache—he warned younger politicians not to indulge the temptations of fancy clothes. “Puttin’ on style don’t pay in politics,” he said. “The people won’t stand for it.” Adams, running for office, made gestures at his own ascetic habits, passing himself off as a vegan. (Once in office, he was reported to order fish at restaurants.) He ignored Plunkitt’s warning about fine suits entirely, declaring that what the city really needed was a mayor with “swagger.”
When the people of New York City voted to put Tammany in office, Plunkitt argued, they knew exactly what they were doing. “We didn’t put up any false pretenses. We didn’t go in for humbug civil service and all that rot,” he said. “We stood as we have always stood, for rewardin’ the men that won the victory. They call that the spoils system.” Plunkitt had made a study of Tammany’s opponents, particularly the good-government reformers he called Mugwumps, and he thought he knew why they so often failed: reformers refused to acknowledge that politics was a trade like any other, and that it had to be learned from the ground up and couldn’t be jumped into from the world of big business, philanthropy, or, worst of all, academia. “If you have been to college, so much the worse for you. You’ll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to human nature,” he said. “Shakspere was all right in his way, but he didn’t know anything about Fifteenth District politics.”
Adams, like Plunkitt, abhors squishy reformers with fancy credentials trying to make a go of it in elected politics—he gleefully ran and won against some in 2021, dismissing their concerns about corruption and saying that what the city really needed was a firm hand and some law and order. Like the old bosses of Tammany Hall, Adams claimed to understand and represent the working people of the city, in his case meaning Black and brown voters in the outer boroughs. Plunkitt insisted that having Tammany control a large number of city jobs, to reward loyalty and generate income, was a good thing, because that’s how you got working people interested in politics to begin with. “You can’t keep an organization together without patronage,” he said.
Early in his term, Adams tried to give his brother, Bernard Adams, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job as director of “mayoral security.” The Mayor’s partner, Tracey Collins, was given a big promotion at the Department of Education. Lisa White, described in the Post as a “longtime pal” of Adams’s, went from collecting a thirty-thousand-dollar annual pension as a retired 911 dispatcher to making two hundred and forty-one thousand dollars as deputy commissioner for employee relations at the N.Y.P.D. Another old cop pal, Timothy Pearson, was appointed to a loosely defined role that let him nose around the city’s vast public-contracting apparatus. Very little effort was made to conceal these arrangements. Collins’s public schedule at the Department of Education was left seventy-five-per-cent empty. A lawsuit filed against Pearson by a former subordinate claims that, among his colleagues, Pearson earned the nickname Crumbs, because when discussing contracts given out in response to the city’s migrant crisis, he asked, “Where are my crumbs?” In September, Pearson had his phone and papers seized by investigators, and he resigned a few weeks later. Through a lawyer, he has denied “all allegations of misconduct.”
Plunkitt believed that Tammany’s reign over New York would last forever. In a four-decade political career that began in the years after the Civil War, when he was in his early twenties, Plunkitt had served as a state senator, Assembly member, police magistrate, county supervisor, alderman, deputy commissioner of street cleaning, and more—sometimes holding as many as four of these positions at once. (“Drawin’ so many salaries is rather fatiguin’,” he said.) But left unsaid in “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” is that, when the book appeared, his own power was already waning. Despite the wisdom and the fortune that he’d accumulated, the voters of the West Side had grown tired of Plunkitt. In 1905, he lost a race to return to the State Senate, and never held public office again. Scholars now believe that Riordon embellished or even invented many of the sermons he attributed to Plunkitt, in an attempt to juice sales. Still, the book helped define the twentieth century’s public image of the big-city political boss—what he stood for, what he did, and how he talked.
When Plunkitt died, in 1924, The Nation called for copies of “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” to be handed out to “every student of politics, to every organizer of new parties and movements, to every first voter.” By that time, the book was already out of print. Another strange quality of Plunkittian human nature is how quickly political wisdom can be discarded, unlearned, and forgotten. Few in New York today remember Plunkitt, though in many ways he still stalks the city’s halls of power. Adams, too, likes to wear many hats at once. In the spring, he hopes to govern, run for reëlection, and stand trial all at the same time. ♦
