Morality Play
A Percentage of the Take.
by Walter Goodman.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 222 pp. $6.95.
The Marcus case broke in December 1967, with headlines announcing that James Marcus, Mayor Lindsay’s Commissioner of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity, had resigned under fire. Marcus was soon thereafter indicted for accepting a bribe in connection with the award of a contract to clean out Jerome Reservoir in the Bronx. Few people knew who Marcus was, while probably even fewer were familiar with the names of the other principals which followed his into the papers: Henry Fried, president, inter alia, of the contracting company which had taken the reservoir job and given the bribe; Antonio “Tony Ducks” Corallo, allegedly an important underworld figure; Daniel Motto, a shady labor-union official; and Herbert Itkin, a mysterious, complex, and withal unappetizing lawyer who appeared to have masterminded the whole affair, but who later, in the curious ways of justice, was the only one of the four to escape prison.
None of these people mattered much to the public. What mattered was that the administration of John V. Lindsay, so long described by the newspapers as Mr. Clean, the super-WASP, Yale-blue incorruptible, had suddenly brewed a gorgeously inappropriate Italian-Jewish Tammany-type scandal at the exalted commissionership level of local government. The scandal, furthermore, involved a routine bit of business: a kickback on the award of a contract for less than a million dollars at a time when the city government was probably awarding half a billion dollars in contracts each year. How did it happen? How often did it happen? How could it have happened under Lindsay? If it happened to him, how could anyone expect it not to happen to everyone else?
These questions lost their importance for Lindsay before anyone had succeeded in answering them. Their disappearance was helped by the emergence of another scandal involving not only these same principals, but Carmine De Sapio as well. This—an apparent attempt to extort bribes from poor old Consolidated Edison—reminded everyone of what the world used to be like when it was young and Democratic. Shortly afterward, a sanitation strike took the headlines, and the Marcus case was practically forgotten by everyone except its principals and the writer Walter Goodman. Goodman combed the records of the two trials—the Water Supply trial and the De Sapio-Consolidated Edison conspiracy trial—together with anything else he found worth combing. It seems unlikely that anyone will ever be able to say anything so pertinent about the Marcus case as has Goodman. He combines a patient attention to the record with a taste for quotation from the political philosophers, and an ironic interest in the personalities of the several Marcus plotters.
Unfortunately, the materials themselves are limited, to put it mildly, in their reliability. The court records are a jumble of lies, possible lies, near-lies, and self-serving explanations fancied up with irrelevant details. We are never certain that we know who really conceived the plot to exact a bribe from Henry Fried in return for a contract which he probably would have been awarded anyway in the normal course of business. We never know what Marcus did to make Fried willing to pay him. Nor what role the sinister “Tony Ducks” played in inducing Fried to pay the bribe. We cannot be sure who kept what part of the money. Nor of Fried’s return for his outlay. Goodman steers us capably in these shoal waters, but only the principals themselves really know them, and they say little that any serious person would believe. Thus, Goodman’s report resembles the account of a racing commentator who tells us all about the jockeys and the horses in the walking ring, but whose view of the actual race is blocked by a hill in the infield.
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The background detail is fascinating: we marvel at the convoluted intaglio that reveals/conceals It-kin’s several identities; the hollow precision of Henry Fried’s testimony; the shapeless terror that clings to the figure of “Tony Ducks” Corallo; Marcus’s tremors, produced by the puff of social ambition on a psyche as light as a dried leaf. Yet our fascination never becomes real interest. The people involved never capture our concern. Their downfalls never become tragedy; their criminality never seems menacing to us.
Although the book jacket tells us that we are to hear about a classic case of municipal corruption, the Marcus matter is anything but that. Classically, graft consists of a payment made by a private party to a government official to induce the official to condone misbehavior; to give a contract to the unqualified; to accept shoddy goods or unneeded services; to permit excessive profits on negotiated contracts. None of these occurred on the reservoir job. Fried’s firm was, Goodman tells us, the best qualified in the city to do the job. So far as we are told the job was done well, nor was the compensation, so far as we know, excessive. What then made Fried agree to pay the bribe? Perhaps we should assume that in the Department it was customary to pay an illicit “finder’s fee” on negotiated “emergency” contracts in order to buy “reasonable” supervision. It’s a nice theory, but if this was a routine matter, what made Itkin and Marcus bring in Motto and Corallo to act as go-betweens and share the gravy? Were they in fact the crucial figures in the plot, convincing Fried to make his payment by threat? Then we would not have a case of bribery, but of extortion; did the world ever produce a less probable extortion victim than Henry Fried, a multimillionaire contractor with vast political connections? Or perhaps he simply agreed to pay the bribe as an investment in future activity, a good-will gesture. The answer remains a puzzlement.
The related Consolidated Edison case has a clearer meaning. Goodman tells us that after Marcus and Itkin concluded the reservoir matter, only to find that their partners Motto and Corallo had kept most of the take, Itkin met De Sapio and the two cooked up a better plan. They would all get rich on Consolidated Edison. Marcus was to withhold quite legitimate permit approvals needed by the power company until its desperate officials would throw contracts to Fried, out of the proceeds of which he would pay Marcus and Itkin. Since Consolidated Edison never fell for the scheme—its highest officials blowing the whistle as soon as they got wind of it—the matter remained simply a charge of conspiracy on which De Sapio was ultimately convicted. (Incidentally, if any of the people in the Chicago Seven case who complained about the principle of prosecution for “conspiracy” rallied to support Carmine De Sapio under these similar circumstances, their consistency has not come to my attention.) Marcus tried to hold up Consolidated Edison in connection with the approval of a new higher-voltage transmission line on the existing right-of-way which the company had acquired over the city’s aqueduct in Westchester County. Here arose a neat problem which Goodman asks us to think about.
Since the Consolidated Edison proposal for this new high-tension line was entirely reasonable and necessary, and since the Mayor himself had urged Marcus to help the utility company, this singular Commissioner was hard put to find a reason for delaying his consent. Finally, he hit on the notion of referring the matter to the Bureau of Franchises. That municipal body, with the best will in the world, decided that the annual payment for a new franchise would have to be many times greater than the old annual payment. Consolidated Edison rejected the Bureau’s demand, and the resulting argument was still raging unsettled when Goodman wrote his book two years later. The power line has not yet been built, thanks to this “legitimate” argument. Everyone knows what has happened to costs—and to the New York City power supply in the meantime.
Goodman points out that if Marcus had quietly been given his bribe three years ago, the matter would never have arisen in the Bureau of Franchises. Taking Goodman’s instructions to weigh the ironies involved, I am delighted for the opportunity to vent my belief that graft provides a means of reaching a decision and precipitating action in the midst of a morass of regulation and law which, if taken literally, would stop governments as totally as following the rule book stops railroads. There are, of course, other bases on which to make decisions in the face of conflicting and endless regulations, but many of them (denial of due process, for example) are as unpopular as graft in the courts.
So long as legislators win applause by passing new laws to regulate and control human behavior, the need to ignore their work in certain circumstances will grow. Graft provides a basis for selecting the circumstances. It offers a payment to a government official for accepting the risk of breaking the law.
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I am aware of the extent to which graft distorts and ultimately, I suppose, destroys the unwritten compact of representative government, but in the apportionment of blame for its existence let us not forget the ambitious lawmakers who never consider the difficulties that follow the enforcement of their work; or the editorialists who cherish high purpose but never calculate its cost. In bringing these matters to our attention, and causing us to think of them after we have finished reading, Walter Goodman has fashioned a succinct and entertaining morality play. Its ethical values are rooted in Aristotle’s view of popular government; Damon Runyon wrote the dialogue.
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