The Boss, the Bribe and the Newspaper That Couldn’t Be Bought

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Boss Tweed used New York as a personal piggy bank. The Times brought him down, ushering in a new era of muckraking journalism.

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.

Credit...Matt Dorfman

By Matthew Purdy

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

Nov. 13, 2026Updated 7:06 a.m. ET

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.

The 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.

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