Thirty-Eight Gondolas of Granite: Another Adventure in Graft
[AUTHOR’S NOTE: The protagonist of this series of graft adventures, a friend of mine in the contracting business, makes his living not by investigating or reforming graft conditions, but by baiting graft in its own lair. In the course of this particular incident, however, the formula for most of his adventures was reversed, and what began by his baiting the grafters ended with the grafters harrying him for the sweetest kind of revenge. The result was that he not only lost all possible profits on his contract, but also had insult added to his injuries in the form of what the City of New York euphemistically terms ‘liquidated damages.’ The adventurer, who has told me countless incidents of his graft-baiting career, ranks this one close to the top — for sheer, brazen, graft-ring conduct. The events he relates here took place four years ago, but the memory of them still throws him into a frenzy of excitement. Here is his story of the graft-baiter re-baited, told as nearly as possible in his own words.]
I
THE telephone book lists me as a contractor. My office door says I’m a contractor. But one thinks of a contractor as more or less of a specialist in certain types of construction, or in certain kinds of supplies. If I have a specialty, my business record has n’t revealed it. I’m rarely in the same line two seasons going. I usually don’t want to be. Not when there are — as there always are — newer and richer fields for me to wander into. Fields irrigated by graft, and, you might say, fenced in by public indifference.
Let’s take paving blocks as an example— stupid-looking chunks of granite. I won’t say there’s romance lurking behind them. But I can testify that they have provided plenty of excitement in my business life.
A few years back, all I knew about the subject was that the City of New York was merrily buying hundreds of thousands of these blocks for street repairs, and paying $140 a thousand — or a cool fourteen cents apiece. To give you an idea of what this meant, it takes about thirty such blocks to pave a square yard, and when you added the cost of grading and a concrete base for the blocks and the labor of laying them, the taxpayer footed a bill of eight dollars for a spot the size of the lounge chair in his living room. So you see it was no stroke of genius on my part to discover that there was money to be made in paving blocks.
But while it was obvious that the City was paying a fancy price, it was not quite so obvious that the block business had been going to the same granite quarries for longer than the oldest inhabitant of City Hall cared to remember. Here was a perfect setup — just the kind of situation I like to deal with.
I found out that up to that moment the blocks used in New York streets all came down by water from quarries on the coast of Maine. Maine monopolized the business, and New York sanctified the monopoly. I began bringing in blocks from New Hampshire. And, though I had to pay the Boston and Maine Railroad thirty dollars a thousand more than the Maine men paid to ship theirs down by water, my block business was brisk. I was delivering specification granite below the New York market price, and I was n’t giving it away, either.
Naturally, I was well satisfied at the time just to fill orders, for the orders ran from 50,000 to 250,000 at a time. In fact, I was having a picnic in the sun.
So it went until one day the wise men of the City passed a new ruling. This was to the effect that only those contractors who were actually laying granite blocks for the City would henceforth be permitted to sell them to the City.
Well! If I had to lay blocks to stay in the paving picnic, I must become a road contractor.
And become one I did.
II
So it eventually came about that on the morning of December 5, 1930, when the City of New York opened bids for grading and paving a section of Marginal Street, I held the contract — at a figure just under $65,000. More specifically, my job was to pave the approach to Pier 3 — in lower Manhattan, just a block or two north of the Aquarium.
At that time, the City was building the pier and had arranged to lease it to the United Fruit Company for $189,000 a year. It was extremely important to have this piece of roadway ready on the promised date of the pier opening. The Fruit Company was waiting to use it. The City needed the income from it.
Of course, you don’t go paving streets in winter time for outdoor sport. It is rarely done in sub-freezing weather. But, with the pier job nearing completion, I was ordered to work on January 13. I knew that I had let myself in for something. Weather conditions at the quarries and in New York had to be reckoned with, for the time was short and it was bitter cold.
There were thirty-five working days allowed me, and if you have ever tried to pour concrete at twenty degrees below freezing you know there is considerable waiting to be done. That time limit would have been modest enough for warm-weather days. Moreover, from the second I started work on the job I also knew that I was rubbing officialdom’s fur the wrong way.
But to get along with my story. I had been working hard on the pier approach for about three weeks when all kinds of delays began holding me up. I lost hours daily waiting for the thermometer to rise in the morning to twenty-five degrees so that I could pour the concrete base, which meant holding scores of men idle on the job. This was a part of my risk, and I was prepared for it, but I was not prepared for the tactics of the granite inspectors’ squad that arrived on the scene and began kicking my blocks around — literally and figuratively.
As each of my carloads arrived, my routine was to notify the City inspection office, and when the gentlemen there got good and ready the granite squad would drive up in one of the City’s best limousines, chauffeur and all.
Now some city inspectors, the kind whose lives are exposed every so often in public investigations, are not always devoted to their duties — or, having done them, are glad to report favorably when their palms are properly greased. But there’s another breed of inspector — a very conscientious fellow indeed, who does exactly what his political boss tells him.
My blocks were actually ‘dressed’ (that is, surfaced) better than those from Maine, since the finer grain of New Hampshire’s granite made for smoother surfacing. But the inspectors who met my arriving gondolas of granite examined their contents with the earnestness of young scientists. They’d put a T-square or a right angle to them, and then their brows would bulge. They’d hold a mumbling conference, communicate with their office, and the next day or so would send me formal notice of rejection.
Of course, I had been pretty well hardened to the process of inspection and rejection. Anybody dealing regularly with the City experiences that sort of thing. I knew the quality of these blocks. I had made deliveries from these same quarries long before I took this paving job. But one thing worried me. It did not take me long to see that, while I was laying the blocks, the inspectors were laying for me.
III
There was a phrase in my contract which I must quote here, since the inspectors’ strategy, and the point of this adventure in graft, really hinge on it:—
‘These blocks shall be so cut that the joints between them when laid shall average not more than 3/8 of an inch.’
This meant that the City wanted its blocks to fit with reasonable closeness, so that when they were laid on a bed of sand, and filled in with asphalt, the result would be a pavement and not a miscellaneous collection of cobblestones.
There was no doubt about the intention of that clause. The big point was its interpretation, and these inspectors were skilled interpreters. They knew what they wanted.
‘These blocks gape like an open drawbridge,’ they said.
To prove their point, they would take a 3/8-inch iron rod and shove it in between two blocks placed on the ground and held by hand. The blocks, of course, were rough on the bottom (where they would normally rest in sand). Consequently the inspectors, holding court at a railroad siding on a hard pavement, could rock them back and forth at will — and rock them they did.
When I held the blocks, the magic rod would n’t slip in. When they held them, it did. They could just as easily have made the gap almost watertight.
Their tactics made it clear enough that they were carrying out the well-laid plan of somebody higher up — somebody who could pull the strings so expertly that even the puppets did not know it.
The plan was this: If my source of granite supply could be exhausted before my job was finished, my hands would be neatly tied and I should be declared in default. My payments would be held up. I should be barred from future paving for the city. Meanwhile, Pier 3 would be waiting — a little fact of which the inspectors constantly reminded me.
Thoroughly mad, I went up to the City Engineer’s office, and by lifting my voice considerably and reenforcing it with a certain amount of threatening, I got the people there to agree to send down an impartial judge.
They sent a chemist from the City’s testing laboratories. When I explained the I-hold-it-this-way and you-holdit-that-way test to the chemist, he devised a box-like arrangement with sliding sides which he pushed against the blocks. In other words, he tested the blocks individually as well as jointly, and got honest results. He passed several of the disputed carloads. For his pains, he was promptly kicked off the job.
‘What can a chemist know about granite blocks?’ wisely observed the inspectors.
‘Too much for his own good,’ I said. And we all laughed.
IV
The result of it all was that, of the thirty-eight carloads I brought in for that Marginal Street paving job, fifteen were rejected, some of them several times over.
And don’t think that the process of inspection and rejection was perfunctory. Each inspection took an hour. From each carload fifty blocks were tossed to the street. If the inspectors found seven defective out of that fifty, the whole carload was turned down.
‘Looks like this is going to hold things up at the pier a bit,’ they’d add, for good measure.
Quite often the inspectors themselves (in a show of honest purposes, perhaps) arrived at different conclusions on the first inspection, looked the blocks over again, and argued among themselves. Anything to consume time.
It was a simple matter to reject my carloads with every semblance of careful inspection. It was careful inspection. If an unprejudiced observer had been there, the only conclusion he could have drawn from what he saw would have been that a set of loyal and job-worthy inspectors were busy saving the innocent taxpayer from being robbed by a rascally road builder. At times they almost had me thinking so myself.
One day we had six carloads lined up in the freight zone between 36th and 39th Streets. The inspectors looked over the first three before lunch. Their solemnly delivered verdict was: —
Carload No. 1 Passed
Carload No. 2 Rejected
Carload No. 3 Passed
I arranged to go out to lunch with the boys, but before doing so I quietly instructed two of my laborers to transpose the blocks in front of cars No. 1 and No. 2.
At lunch I said to the inspectors, ‘You know, boys, I don’t think you were altogether fair to car No. 2. My impression is that there’s a singularly fine bunch of blocks in that car.’
‘All right,’ they said. ‘Just to show you we’re good sports, we’ll hold a reinspection of all three carloads after lunch.’
I was willing to take my chances on one rejected carload being reinspected. But all three!
Well, what could I do? It was too late now.
Their verdict on the inspection of the rearranged blocks was this:—
Carload No. 1 Passed
Carload No. 2 Rejected
Carload No. 3 Rejected
A complete reversal of their previous judgment!
I can laugh at it now, but, with a good many thousand dollars at stake, it was no laughing matter then. The inspectors knew perfectly well that my winter supply of blocks was limited, and that the quarries were well frozen over with ice and snow. One man was even sent up to New Hampshire to make sure of this.
V
By the beginning of February the really big boys in the City administration began swinging into action. They warned me — good loud warnings — about the pier opening. They sent me letter after letter, telling me that my time was virtually up.
When I complained about the inspectors and cited the obstacles they had placed in my way, I was told that these obstacles were more imaginary than real; that I should work around them; that if they were really causing delay, it was due to my sloppy methods of working.
About two days later I received an icy blast reading like this: —
My attention has been called to the delay which is taking place . . . due to the fact that the granite block which you are bringing into the city for this purpose does not even approach [italics mine] a substantial compliance with the specification. . . .
You are now destroying the essence of this contract by attempting to put into this job granite blocks . . . the worst it has ever been attempted to use in our streets. Stop offering blocks which you must know beyond any question of a doubt cannot comply with the specifications ... or I shall be of the opinion that you are executing this contract in bad faith and will be governed accordingly.
They were the same blocks, from the same quarries, with the same quarrymen dressing them to the same measurements, as those which I had shipped into the City ever since I had broken the granite ring months before I took this job.
The City Engineer himself arrived on the scene one day, accompanied by his corps of assistants, all driven in a cavalcade of shiny limousines.
They watched us for a while. Then several men got out and looked over a freshly paved, but not yet asphalted, area.
‘Never saw such bad blocks,’they muttered.
One of the officials then placed a little red flag (evidently brought for just this purpose) at the start of the newly paved area. I was ordered to rip up the blocks to that point, and to throw them away.
‘If you fellows want to see how a real contractor handles his job, take a look at the pier work over there,’they said.
We looked. And the cavalcade departed.
One of the street officials, who had either a sense of humor or a sense of pity, promptly moved the flag to the finish line of this new section. The men (all veterans of hundreds of city paving jobs) began pouring asphalt over the entire area as fast as they could.
VI
Eventually we finished the job, but the climax came afterward. I was assessed $1575 for ‘liquidated damages,’the City claiming it had been injured to that extent by my not finishing the work on time. How the city was hurt, with the pier still unfinished, was a civic mystery.
I protested with every fact at my command. I listed every grievance. One of the City’s august officials wrote me: ‘I am not at liberty to discuss the same with you.’ Which, I suppose, is one way of defining liberty. I protested repeatedly to the Board of Estimate. For every one of my protests the Board had two pretexts for not reviewing the case.
More than a year later the matter finally went before a court of law. In my suit to recover from the City the amount of liquidated damages, I was able to show that, in addition to the impediments placed in our way, the City had based its ‘damages’ on a trumped-up schedule of inspectors’ time charges.
The Court leaned over to listen.
We had been charged for sixty days’ overtime, though the department’s own records showed that we worked only half as long as that. We had been charged with the time of three inspectors for the overtime period when (as the City would itself have admitted) only one would normally be assigned to such a job. We had been billed for the time of half a dozen ‘draftsmen, transitmen, engineer’s assistants ’ — all of whose work, by the way, was completed long before the overtime period began.
The Court actually laughed, and in the end rendered a decision in our favor.
I laughed too, some days later, when I happened to be looking at my pavement again — to see how it had stood the test of time. I glanced over toward Pier 3, whose builders had been held up to me as paragons of contracting virtue. Lo and behold, Pier 3 had begun to sink. Its entire south side had settled into the water about six feet, owing to faulty caisson work. The brick walls had cracked. The steel skeleton had buckled. (It cost the City about $25,000 to right it.)
If you’re at all curious about such matters, go down to the Battery the next time you are in New York and take a look at the paving on Marginal Street, approaching Pier 3. It is still in perfect condition.