Shire-Reeve's Money

STATES & CITIES

Belted, muskrat-capped troopers kept the crowds moving in front of the door to the Executive Chamber in New York State's Capitol at Albany last week. Inside the large plum-carpeted room, Tammany Legislators from New York City sat in glum silence. Behind a great table, in the capacity of New York's Chief Magistrate, sat crippled, smiling Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before him stood a great barrel of a man with a soup-bowl haircut and cutaway, who looked like a slightly modernized political cartoon by the late Thomas Nast. He was Thomas M. ("Big Tom") Farley.*

Prosecutor Samuel Seabury of the Legislative inquiry into New York City scandals had charged that Big Tom Farley, since becoming Sheriff of New York County two years ago, had withheld $15,000 in interest on litigant funds left in his trust, had surrounded himself with incompetents and, most important of all, was unable to account for a personal fortune of $357,000. Governor Roosevelt was trying to sift these matters and to decide whether he should remove Sheriff Farley from office. High above the heads of the Tammany deathwatch, whose votes might mean the Governor's nomination and election to the Presidency this summer and next autumn, hung a portrait of Grover Cleveland, a New York Governor who bucked Tammany, went to the White House on the slogan: "Public Office is a Public Trust."*

Was Sheriff Farley entitled to the interest on litigants' funds? The Sheriff's counsel thought so, deviously led the Governor back to the days of Merrie England when "the Shire-Reeve was an important officer of the King." Since the Shire-Reeve was acting for the King, it was maintained, he was not a trustee but a debtor. The implication was that Shire-Reeve Farley was responsible for returning to the litigant only the original principal. This solution, said counsel, had satisfied all New York County Sheriffs in the past, including Alfred Emanuel Smith.

Prosecutor Seabury, wearied by what he considered time-killing legal casuistry, thought otherwise. "They may talk from now until doomsday," said he, "about schools of thought and kingly sovereignty, but they cannot show you any single statute or any plausible reason that lets a sheriff put the interest that accrues upon somebody else's property in his own pocket. This man did it.. This man admits he did it." No one denied it.

Governor Roosevelt proceeded to question Shire-Reeve Farley himself. The Tammany district leader's voice had a wheedle to it that reporters had not heard when he blustered before the Legislative inquiry four months ago, meeting questions as to his financial resources with the reply that his money came from "a wonderful tin box." The Governor asked about his allegedly incompetent assistants.

Up stood the Sheriff, to sing the praises of his henchmen. His secretary, who testified that his duties were "nothing in particular," was "a good all-round man." His undersheriff, who banked a mysterious $662,000, and his deputy sheriff, whose political club harbored gamblers, were represented as paragons of officialdom.

Governor--What experience had [Deputy Sheriff Jacob] Rosenberg? What is his duty?

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.

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