US newsObituaryCarmine De Sapio
The last boss of New York's Tammany Hall Democratic machineCarmine De Sapio, who has died aged 95, was the last boss of Tammany Hall, the powerful Democratic party machine which had controlled politics in New York for the eight decades to 1934. He presided over a brief renaissance of Tammany's power in the 1950s, but within a decade he lost control of the state to Republicans, and his own Democratic district committee seat to reformers, before being convicted of bribery.
Tammany Hall was incorporated in 1789 as a social club, the Tammany Society, named after Tamanend, the Delaware chief who gave Pennsylvania to William Penn. Its secret ceremonies were supposedly based on Native American rituals, but it quickly acquired political clout, particularly after it backed Andrew Jackson for president (1829-37).
In 1854, its leader, Fernando Wood, was elected mayor. Wood's ascension allowed William "Boss" Tweed to take de facto control of city politics, and in 1867 he put up the present Tammany Hall building, on East 14th Street. Tweed died in prison on corruption charges in 1878, but Tammany's control endured in New York city until reformer Fiorello LaGuardia won the mayoralty from Jimmy Walker in 1934.
De Sapio grew up in Tammany's shadow. The son of an Italian immigrant haulier, he gravitated to the Huron Club, a bar which served as the Tammany headquarters in Greenwich Village. He ran errands, ensured gifts like Thanksgiving turkeys were distributed properly, and that the beneficiaries of Tammany's largesse turned out to vote for the right candidates.
Yet when De Sapio won the Village district leadership in 1939, Irish-dominated Tammany leaders rejected him. He lost a fraudulent election in 1941, but in 1943 finally won overwhelmingly. By 1949, he was the youngest, and first Italian-American, Tammany boss.
His acceptance and quick rise may have owed something to gangster Frank Costello. Wiretaps by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan in 1943 revealed that Costello arranged for Thomas Aurelio to buy a judgeship from De Sapio's predecessor, Hugo Rogers. Amazingly, Aurelio survived the scandal, and Hogan later became a De Sapio ally. De Sapio, of course, always denied close links with Costello.
He worked tirelessly, and for the most part quietly, living so modestly in an apartment overlooking Washington Square that he was nicknamed "the Bishop". Although dressed in an immaculately conservative business style, the dark glasses he was forced to wear, because he suffered from iritis, meant he could not avoid looking like a gangster.
De Sapio managed Tammany's traditional money-making industries, though allegedly lowering the price of judgeships. City contracts continued to flow to Tammany's own company, Broadway Maintenance, and were duly skimmed. But De Sapio's management style was inclusive, recognising New York's changing ethnic base. He brought blacks and Puerto Ricans into the Democratic machine, and did not fall victim to blind ethnic loyalty again.
De Sapio's first coup was engineering the election of Robert F Wagner as mayor in 1953, defeating the incumbent Vincent Impellitteri. The next year, he got investment banker and diplomat Averill Harriman elected governor. To do this, he persuaded Franklin Roosevelt, Jr, son of the former president, to withdraw from the primary, and run for attorney general instead. As governor, Roosevelt senior had never been a friend of Tammany. Harriman was elected, but Roosevelt junior lost the lesser post, largely because De Sapio withheld his votes in the city. Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's widow, vowed revenge.
By getting allies into the presidencies of New York's boroughs (including Hulan Jack, Manhattan's first black borough president), De Sapio further consolidated his power. He personally held half a dozen offices, including secretary of state to Governor Harriman. By August 1955, he graced the cover of Time magazine, compared favourably to a Medici in Renaissance Italy.
Time might better have looked to the Borgias. De Sapio's downfall was about to begin. In 1957, he took a cab to his Democratic national committee office at the Biltmore Hotel, leaving behind an envelope stuffed with $11,200 in hundred dollar bills. When the cabbie tried to return the money publicly, De Sapio, to public amusement, denied it was his.
In 1958, he forced the party to accept Hogan as its candidate for the Senate. Liberal Republican Kenneth Keating won the seat, and Nelson Rockefeller ousted Harriman as governor. The losses opened the door for powerful Democratic reformers, led by Eleanor Roosevelt and former senator Herbert Lehman, to campaign against De Sapio's alleged corruption and autocratic leadership.
Even Wagner turned against him, winning re-election in 1961 by defeating De Sapio's candidate, city controller Arthur Leavitt. By then, De Sapio had lost his own council seat to James Lanigan; he lost the Village leadership to future mayor Ed Koch in 1963, and lost again in 1965. His enemies were helped by the Village's changing constituency; immigrants were being forced out, replaced by middle-class voters more inclined to reform politics.
Out of power, he became a target. In 1969, he was convicted of conspiracy to bribe former water commissioner James Marcus, and extort kickback-laden contracts from the city utility company, Consolidated Edison, beginning a two-year prison sentence in 1971.
He lived a quiet retirement in his Washington Square apartment with his wife Theresa, who died in 1998, watching the Democrats, and his enemy Ed Koch, lose control of New York city. His daughter Geraldine survives him.
ยท Carmine Gerard De Sapio, political boss, born December 8 1908; died New York City July 27 2004
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