The Boss, the Bribe and the Newspaper That Couldn’t Be Bought: Boss Tweed used New York as a personal piggy bank. The Times brought him down, ushering in a new era of muckraking journalism. (Matthew Purdy, NY Times, November 13, 2026)

From The. New York Times:

By Matthew Purdy

Matthew Purdy is an editor at large for The Times and a frequent contributor to The Times Magazine.

Nov. 13, 2026

This story is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times. Read more here.

From the scrappy neighborhoods of New York arose a politician of considerable girth and charisma with an insatiable appetite for power and self-enrichment that he shamelessly sated at the public trough.

William Magear Tweed, the swaggering and grandiose Boss of Tammany Hall, 19th-century New York’s most powerful political machine, originated the now-familiar role on the American political stage: self-proclaimed champion-of-the-little-guy turned self-aggrandizing champion-of-self.

As with all transactional politicians, you got what you paid him for and the train of corruption was kept on track with more corruption — from rampant patronage to appointing friendly judges.

With New York City’s immigrant population exploding after the Civil War, the Democratic Tammany organization harnessed the power of these newcomers, turning them into citizens and then loyal voters. This electoral power allowed Tweed and his cronies to control City Hall, the police and the state capital in Albany in the late 1860s and early 1870s.

he men of Tammany were defined by a creed immortalized by their devoted foot soldier George Washington Plunkitt: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

Tweed saw opportunities everywhere. And he took them all. Far from squirreling away his slice of the public pie, he flaunted it. He adorned his shirtfront with a 10.5-carat diamond pin. His city home was lavish, his Greenwich estate sprawling. He was one of the city’s largest landowners. He had not one, but two steam-powered yachts. Not bad for a former chair and brush maker whose official job was the city commissioner of public works.

If Tweed’s wealth was showy, the mechanics of his thievery was hidden — that is, until a freak accident on a wintry night in 1871.

James Watson, Tammany’s loyal county auditor, was in his horse-drawn sleigh when an oncoming horse panicked and ran into his team. In a tangle of horses and hooves, Watson sustained a fatal stomp to the forehead.

At the time, Watson had been handling a delicate negotiation for his boss, City Comptroller Richard Connolly, whose shenanigans earned him the moniker “Slippery Dick.” A bookkeeper had surreptitiously copied Connolly’s records, which pointed to Tammany’s financial misdeeds, and had passed them in a thick envelope to a former sheriff named James O’Brien.

O’Brien was stewing over Tammany’s denying him what he saw as his share of the corruption bounty. In a bit of gentlemanly blackmail, he suggested to Tweed and others that the incriminating documents could remain secret for a price. Watson’s mission had been to strike a deal with O’Brien — to, as Tweed said later, “stop his tongue.” The errant horse hoof put an abrupt end to the negotiations. A few months later, a frustrated O’Brien showed up at The New York Times with the explosive envelope under his arm.

The July 22, 1871, edition of The New York Times rolled off the presses blaring the headline: THE SECRET ACCOUNTS.

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The July 22, 1871, edition of The New York Times, which exposed the widespread fraud.Credit...The New York Times

The Times had published smaller accounts of what it called “municipal rascality” that month. But this was the first in a succession of front pages that documented the ludicrously inflated expenditures for work on city buildings.

The exposés included $1,447,999 paid for “repairs and furniture” for city armories, including over $200,000 in a single day — or a total of about $35 million today. Another $170,729 went for chairs, which The Times said could buy “17 miles of chairs.”

he Times delivered the news of corruption with a verve and voice hardly befitting the newspaper later known as The Gray Lady.

One article noted a single month’s payout of $360,751.61 to a carpenter named G.S. Miller. It said, “as G.S. Miller is the luckiest carpenter in the world, so Andrew J. Garvey is clearly the prince of plasterers. His good fortune surpasses anything recorded in the Arabian Nights.” Garvey’s two-month haul: $945,715, or a whopping $24 million in today’s dollars.

In testimony later given to city aldermen, Garvey said he originally had an agreement to kick back 15 percent of all contracts to Tweed and his cronies, “but they gradually raised it from 15 to 40, 45, and, finally, in 1867 or 1870, it was raised to 65 percent.”

The inflated city contracts ballooned the cost of constructing the municipal courthouse on Chambers Street from its budgeted estimate of about $250,000 in 1858 to its ultimate price tag of $13 million, or over $331 million today. The building, with its soaring interior rotunda and its marble and stone edifice (some sourced from a quarry partly owned by Tweed), still stands as a monument to both 19th-century civic architecture and civic rot.

Without irony or shame — or perhaps much collective memory — the old New York County courthouse that now houses the city Board of Education is mostly just called the Tweed courthouse.

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The inflated city contracts ballooned the cost of constructing the municipal courthouse on Chambers Street, which is mostly called the Tweed courthouse today.Credit...From The New York Public Library

But at the time, the Tweed Ring could not escape the storm touched off by The Times’s exposés. Not only were the facts explosive, the publication of leaked records was unheard-of.

The material was put in the hands of a young Scottish-born reporter named John Foord. He went on to become editor of The Times and to write dispatches from Asia, but as his 1922 Times obituary said, “The Tweed exposures were Foord’s greatest news job.”

“Nothing like it had ever appeared before in an American newspaper,” Kenneth D. Ackerman wrote in his 2005 biography, “Boss Tweed.”

The exposés appeared decades before the work of muckraking journalists of the early 20th century, such as Ida Tarbell, who investigated John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, or Lincoln Steffens, author of the iconic “The Shame of the Cities.”

If investigative reporting was in its infancy, corruption at all levels of government was in full bloom in the years after the Civil War. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 satirical novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” coined the phrase to describe a deeply unequal system gilded by a shiny veneer of wealth accumulated by unscrupulous tycoons.

When The Times, then an avowed Republican newspaper in its 20th year of operation, took aim at Tweed and the Tammany organization, it stood largely on its own as other city newspapers were politically aligned with the regime or on its payroll. The Times’s coverage joined what had been a lonely crusade by the biting cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose drawings for Harper’s Weekly took full advantage of Tweed’s made-for-cartoons corpulence.

Nast portrayed Tweed as “our modern Falstaff,” as the sinister vote-counter at the ballot box, as a man with a moneybag for a head over the caption “The ‘Brains.’” Tweed and his cronies were depicted as fat cats feasting as the poor suffered, and as a literal ring of men, each pointing to the next with the caption: “Who stole the people’s money? T’WAS HIM.”Nast’s cartoons got under the boss’s skin. Tweed was famously quoted saying, “I don’t care so much what the papers write about me — my constituents can’t read; but damn it, they can see pictures.”

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This Nast cartoon gave credit to The Times’s reporting.Credit...via HathiTrust