Pinstripe Patronage by Martin Tolchin & Susan J Tolchin

Author:Martin Tolchin & Susan J Tolchin [Tolchin, Martin & Tolchin, Susan J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317254188
Google: qj9ACwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28409714
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

To no one’s surprise, Tingling’s pledge did not sit well with Manhattan’s political leaders. As a result, Tingling lost the Democratic primary and was defeated by Nora Anderson, chief clerk of the Manhattan Surrogate’s Court. Anderson was familiar with the court’s tradition of patronage and was trusted by party leaders to continue its practices. A month after her election, but before she was sworn in, Anderson was indicted on charges that she had concealed the source of $250,000 worth of contributions to her campaign. The state’s Court of Appeals ordered that she not be sworn in until she was absolved of the charges.57

What the Tingling/Anderson controversy means is that courthouse patronage is alive and well and remains the most concealed form of political patronage. When a judicial patronage controversy arises, it usually focuses on judgeships, although because public apathy usually prevails in that area as well, controversies are few and far between. But similar to the public’s inattention to judicial candidates, few people care about which lawyers get refereeships, guardianships, and receiverships; and fewer still know what they are. Guardianships can divert considerable sums from an estate; after all, “it’s a dead man’s estate, who’s to kick up a fuss?” wrote Murray Teigh Bloom, an expert on probate practices.58

Once again, New York emerged both as the capital of courthouse patronage and as the target of reform efforts. This kind of patronage also differs from state to state, although some states relegate these tasks to civil servants. In Georgia, for example, surrogate patronage is handled by a salaried public employee called an “ordinary,” who also handles traffic violations—an indication of the relative unimportance of the surrogate function in Georgia. But probate patronage still flourishes in the richer industrial states of New Jersey, New York, Texas, Ohio, and Illinois, where estates tend to be larger than they are in Georgia. New York remains the mother lode because multimillionaires occasionally die intestate—without a will or instructions as to who should be the executor of their estates.59 At that point, estates often fall victim to the vagaries of machine politics. A dispute over the $1.2 billion estate of tobacco heiress Doris Duke ended up in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, where many lawyers vied over what one attorney called the “world series of litigation.”60 Some politicians argue that Surrogate judges can even do some good; for example, when Judge Renee R. Roth of New York reduced the sum that hotel magnate Leona Helmsley left to her dog—a white Maltese named Trouble—from $10 million to $2 million—with the remainder going to the Helmsley charitable foundation.

Known as the “widows and orphans court,” the Surrogate Court has been the bane of reform-minded politicians even way back to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who called the court “the most expensive undertaking establishment in the world.” He added that the Surrogate’s Court of New York County did more to keep the notorious Tammany Hall political machine in business than anything else, including his own attempt to deprive the Democratic Party of city jobs, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s denial of federal jobs to political hacks.

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