THE SUFFOLK COUNTY SCANDALS INVESTIGATIONS

William F. F. Young

Description

THE SUFFOLK COUNTY SCANDALS INVESTIGATIONS - a Reminiscence is the story of a notable use of the criminal process as a weapon in political warfare, based upon the accounts of the New York Times and the Huntington, N.Y. weekly, The Long Islander, and the recollection of the author. It begins with the relation of how Thomas E. Dewey, in his last term as the Republican Governor of New York, came to bring about for Averell Harriman, his Democratic successor, the creation of the ideal public office for waging political war via the criminal process, that of Commissioner of Investigation. It memorializes conduct of Republican officeholders who deserved the prosecutorial attention they received, and cases of Republican officeholders who did not. It records some interesting conduct, positions taken by and comments of judicial, prosecutorial and political figures, as well as portions of some relevant judicial opinions. Chronicling the events which led to the Republican Party's loss in 1959 of decades of political control of Suffolk County, it features a township zoning hearing and the political consequences of what could have been not unreasonably viewed as its predetermined outcome; the contribution of the formidable Republican town leader, John Hulsen, to the ultimate success of the Democrats' efforts; and, the story of the manipulation of the process of the sale by the county of land for unpaid real property taxes for the benefit of land speculators and a Deputy County Treasurer, and the creativeness of the Commissioner of Investigation in his statements for the press concerning the skullduggery.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Misconduct
• Corruption

Informations

• Publié par: Outskirts Press
• Date de parution: 13 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781977217349
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE SUFFOLK COUNTY SCANDALS INVESTIGATIONS A Reminiscence All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2019 Warren Liburt V3.0
The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.
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ISBN: 978-1-9772-1734-9
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
Ellen and Joseph
Also by William F. F. Young
Thomas E. Dewey, et al.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 1
From its western end, Long Island extends eastward about 120 miles from Long Island City, which is just barely separated from the island of Manhattan by the East River. Kings County and Queens County, the two most westerly of the four counties situate on Long Island, are two of the five counties constituting the City of New York. Kings County is the New York City borough of Brooklyn; Queens, the borough of Queens. Kings County forms the southwestern end of Long Island, and is bordered on the north and east by Queens County, the easterly line of which is the westerly line of Nassau County. Travelling eastward through some fifteen miles of Nassau County brings one to the westerly line of Suffolk County.
The 922 square miles of Suffolk County, the second largest county in the state of New York, are distributed among ten towns. At the western end of the county, bordered on the north by Long Island Sound, is the Town of Huntington, below which, running to the south shore and the Atlantic Ocean, is the Town of Babylon. To the east of Huntington on the north shore is the Town of Smithtown; and below Smithtown is the Town of Islip, which extends to the south shore. To the east of Smithtown and Islip is the Town of Brookhaven, the largest township in the state, which runs from shore to shore, and which is larger than the whole of Nassau County. East of Brookhaven are the Town of Riverhead (the hamlet of Riverhead is the county seat), bordered on the north by Long Island Sound, and on the south by the Town of Southhampton, which is bordered on the south by the Atlantic Ocean. From the easternmost juncture of the towns of Riverhead and Southampton, the county splits into what are referred to as the North and South Forks. East of Riverhead on the North Fork is the Town of Southold, which extends to Orient Point, at the northeasterly tip of Long Island. East of Southampton is the Town of East Hampton, which extends to Montauk Point. Early and mid-19th century whalers sailed to the ends of the earth from Sag Harbor, situate in both the towns of Southampton and East Hampton. Also in East Hampton is Amagansett, which, in the small hours of June 12, 1942, was the site of the only landing of foreign forces in the United State since the War of 1812, when four operatives of the German Secret Service, transported by submarine, disembarked there. The tenth town is Shelter Island, an islet lying between the North and South Forks, bounded by Shelter Island Sound and Gardiners Bay.
It wasn’t until just before the turn of the twentieth century that the counties of New York, Bronx, Richmond, Queens and Kings were consolidated by the state legislature to form New York City. As part of that process, the three easternmost towns of Queens County were lopped off to form Nassau County.
Suffolk County goes back to Colonial times. The county was originally known as the East Riding of the Province of Yorkshire. The Province of Yorkshire was the name for all of what was to become the State of New York, a patent for all of which Charles II had granted to his brother, the Duke of York, in May of 1664. In September of that year, Peter Stuyvesant finally surrendered Manhattan Island, the symbol of the Dutch in New York, to the Duke. When the East Riding became a county in 1683 by order of the first New York Colonial Legislature, the whole county accounted for less than 2,000 people.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were less than 80,000 residents of Suffolk County. In 1910, with a population of 96,000, it was still essentially rural when the Pennsylvania Railroad put into operation its tunnels under the East River, thus enabling its Long Island Railroad to carry its passengers in and out of Manhattan. Until this underwater connection was effected, Long Island-Manhattan travellers had to take the ferry back and forth across the East River between Long Island City and Manhattan. The new direct link with New York City made possible the Long Island commuter.
By 1920, the county’s population had risen to 110,000. By 1930, the number of commuters other than the wealthy and well-to-do had become significant, and the county’s population had risen to 161,000. Its beaches on the Atlantic Ocean on its south shore, and on Long Island Sound on its north shore had made Suffolk County attractive as a summer sanctuary for a fairly wide financial range of non-residents as far back as the late 1800’s. More recently, the county had become a magnet for the wealthy. In between the Nassau-Suffolk line on the West, and Orient Point and Montauk Point on the East, both shores had countless expensive homes and some truly magnificent estates.
In the Town of Huntington, there was the 1,355-acre Lloyd’s Harbor manor of Marshall Field III, which included, in addition to the 57-room main house, numerous smaller residential structures, polo grounds, a fresh water lake, a game preserve, and twenty-five miles of its own roads. Also in Huntington was the forty-three acre summer establishment of William K. Vanderbilt II at Centerport, which, in addition to a mansion featuring columns from the ruins of Carthage, included a museum memorializing Commodore Vanderbilt’s world travels. At the eastern end of the county, there was a long-established concentration of the extremely well-to-do in the Hamptons. The shores of Suffolk County, like the Manhattan economic oases of Park and Fifth Avenues and Central Park West, had a significant number of people whose notably comfortable way of life was not affected by the Depression.
In the late 1930’s, the windows in the schools throughout the county were still the huge kind that required a long pole with a hook at one end to unlock or latch them where the sashes met, or to pull down the bottom sash if it was open all the way. High street curbs were still in the process of being lowered. In Huntington, the doctors, who had been charging two dollars for house calls as well as for office visits, had just recently decided the traffic might bear three dollars for house calls. Many of the doctors throughout the county, particularly those in the eastern towns, were still taking their fees in farm produce, and those who were renting sometimes paid part of their rent with it. Some of them could not have survived if it had not been for the patients they treated at the expense of the county’s welfare department. As for the lawyers, even though their number was small, a good many of them were barely getting by.
By 1940, there were 197,000 people living in Suffolk County. Most of its population was in its five western towns; and many of the wage earners in the western towns were commuters. There was still little manufacturing or other industrial activity of any consequence. The commerce was still mainly that of the local small businessman; and there were still a lot of farmers working a lot of farmland. Even in the most westerly part of the county, which is to say that part of the county closest to Nassau County--and, by extension, the part of it nearest New York City--one could drive through large areas in which what one saw mostly were potatoes and cabbages; and as one drove eastward toward the county seat and then past it onto the North Fork, that would seem to be about all one could see.

Throughout the United States during the Depression, there had been very little money in circulation, the birth rate had been low, and there had been very little home construction. During the Second World War, although there were significant housing shortages around the country consequent to the wartime dislocations of civilian life, there still was no homebuilding going on, because just about all the materials one needed in order to construct a house were declared to be war-essential.
Following the end of the war in 1945, an upswing in the marriage and birth rates compounded the problem; and there was a monumental housing shortage across the country. When the nationwide demand for housing was coupled with the enactment of the mortgage-loan entitlement part of the G.I. Bill of Rights and a significant expansion of the Federal Housing Administration mortgage guarantee program, a vast market for new homes came into being, resulting in an historic broadening of the country’s home-owning base.
In New York City, there simply were not enough habitable apartments for people of limited means. The advent of the G.I. mortgage and the increased availability of the FHA mortgage made it possible for young couples who could afford only moderate apartment rentals to own their own homes. (In Nassau and Suffolk Counties, in those days of 4% 30-year GI mortgages and school-district taxes that had not yet begun to mushroom, the new homeowners’ monthly payments to the bank, which included the monthly portion of their tax and house insurance bills, as well as their principal and interest payments, could wind up