George G. Barnard, Albert J. Cardozo and John H. McCunn
William M. “Boss” Tweed (1823-1878) was a spectacularly corrupt public official who played an outsized role in the politics of Gilded Age New York and personally enriched himself by stealing tens of millions of public dollars. The tentacles of Tweed’s corrupt regime reached into the New York State courts. In 1872, two judges, George G. Barnard and John J. McCunn , were removed from the bench by the New York Court for the Trial of Impeachments. A third judge, Albert J. Cardozo, resigned from office before he could be convicted. While serving on the bench, all three judges had engaged in extensive illegalities designed to advance and protect the interests of the Tweed regime and for their own personal gain.
The Tweed Ring judges not only provided legal protection for Boss Tweed and his cronies but were instrumental in sustaining Tammany Hall’s political power by padding the Democratic Party’s voter rolls with newly naturalized citizens. “The courts, at [Tweed’s] behest, were keeping the naturalization mills grinding at tenfold capacity, not even asking to see the men they naturalized,” while “election judges could tally votes so rapidly that the aggregate of Democrat votes cast soon exceeded the total registration.”[1] Judge John McCunn once naturalized 2,109 petitioners in a single day, three per minute, with “as much celerity as is displayed in converting swine into pork at a Cincinnati packing house.”[2] In 1866, an election year, “Cardozo naturalized up to 800 people a day, McCunn naturalized over 2000 on one day alone, and Barnard worked most of October from 6 p.m. to midnight rapidly initialing unread naturalization papers that created over 10,000 new citizens.”[3] The Tweed Ring judges also released or gave lenient sentences to defendants connected with Tammany Hall.[4]
[1] James Sullivan, History of New York State 1523-1927 Vol. 5, Lewis Hist. Pub. Co., 1927, at 1759.
[2] Edward G. Burrows & Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford Univ. Press, 1999, at 927.
[3] Robert C. Kennedy, Making an Example of Two Naughty Boys, The Learning Network, New York Times, available at www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0525.html.
[4] James Larder and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD: A City and its Police, Henry Holt & Co., 2000, at 96-97.