Big Tim Sullivan was the lord of New York City’s Bowery and Lower East Side.
At the turn of the twentieth century, he controlled jobs, extortion rackets, prostitution rings and gambling operations while owning legitimate interests in real estate, theaters, nickelodeons, racetracks and athletic clubs.
Big Tim had grown up in these neighborhoods and had started out shining shoes and selling newspapers as an eight-year-old.
By his mid-twenties, he owned interests in several saloons.
Tammany Hall, the political machine which then controlled the city, put him in charge of their political operation in the Lower East Side.
And Big Tim excelled at this job.
In the summertime, Big Tim treated his constituents to free food, drinks and gambling aboard all-day steamboat excursions to Queens or New Jersey.
In the winter months, he handed out food, clothing and coal.
And on Christmas Day, Big Tim served dinner to 5,000 indigents.
All the city papers covered the story:
“‘Big Tim’ himself threw open the doors at 11 A.M. and in an instant every place alongside the long tables was filled...
Sullivan...had to shake hands with everybody in the room.
Every man had something to say.
One was to tell him it was his fifteenth Christmas dinner at Big Tim’s expense,
another said he had walked all the way from Stamford...
Among them were the one-legged, the one-armed,
the man whom drink had brought to ruin, professional beggars,
and the really unfortunate whose only reason for not having work is that they can’t get it.” — New York Times, Dec. 26, 1910.
Each year, on his mother’s birthday, Big Tim handed out thousands of pairs of new shoes and woolen socks.
It fulfilled a promise he had made to her when, as a young boy, he had to walk to school in shoes too small to accommodate his toes.
But first and foremost, Big Tim was a politician, and everyone understood his generosity was a two-way street.
On election day, his people were expected to vote the way they were instructed.
Several times.
Big Tim explains:
"When you've voted'em with their whiskers on you take'em to a barber and scrap off the chin-fringe.
Then you vote'em again with side lilacs and a mustache.
Then to a barber again, off comes the sides and you vote'em a third time with the mustache.
If that ain't enough, and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote'em plain face.
That makes every one of 'em good for four votes."
This ballot stuffing kept Big Tim in office, in the Albany state house as well as in Congress, for almost thirty years.
But the end came hard for Big Tim.
Illicit romances led to syphilis, and he lost his health and his mind.
Then, one night after being adjudged mentally incompetent, he escaped from his brother’s house.
Within hours, he was found dead alongside railroad tracks in the Bronx.
The engineer of the train which had struck him said he was already dead.
And speculation raged that Big Tim had been bumped off.
[He had his enemies.]
But Big Tim’s people turned out for him one more time.
More than 25,000 showed up at his funeral.
Americans have always had a soft spot in their hearts for a lovable scoundrel, and Big Tim was truly that.
It’s the cruel ones we dislike.
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I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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