San Francisco graft trials facts for kids
The San Francisco graft trials were a series of attempts from 1905 to 1908 to prosecute members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, San Francisco Mayor Eugene Schmitz, attorney Abe Ruef, who were receiving bribes, and business owners who were paying the bribes. Political boss and attorney Ruef was at the center of the corruption, acting as attorney to Mayor Eugene Schmitz. He approved all contracts and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payment from business owners, keeping a portion for himself and distributing the remainder to the Mayor and members of the Board of Supervisors.
Former mayor James Phelan along with banker Rudolph Spreckels and editor Fremont Older of the San Francisco Bulletin asked United States District Attorney Francis Heney, fresh from a successful stint as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General's office in prosecuting the Oregon land fraud scandal, to help put an end to the corruption. Heney charged Ruef and Schmitz with numerous counts of bribery and brought them to trial. Heney rejected a juror because he was an ex-con and publicly accused Ruef of trying to plant him on the jury. During the trial, the rejected juror shot Heney in the face, but Heney survived. The juror was found dead in jail the next morning, and many suspected Ruef and his allies of complicity in his death. Some members of the public thought that Sheriff William Biggy was negligent, and when he fell off a boat late one night and drowned, some thought he may have been murdered.
Ruef's trial was eventually brought to a successful close by Assistant District Attorney Hiram Johnson and after several appeals Ruef served four years in San Quentin Prison. While there he wrote a series of tell-all columns for Older's Bulletin newspaper implicating a number of companies, executives, and public officials. Mayor Schmitz was found guilty, jailed, and then released and retried, but did not serve any time. All of the business owners and supervisors implicated received immunity for their testimony about Ruef's and Schmitz's complicity and were not arrested or charged. When new District Attorney Fisker, a former athlete, was elected, he stopped the investigations and all further prosecutions.
In 1912, Older began to have second thoughts about Ruef's conviction. He asked Ruef to write his memoirs, which were published in the San Francisco Bulletin in installments almost daily over months, finishing at the point where the graft investigation began. On August 23, 1915, having served a little more than four and a half of his fourteen-year sentence, he was released. He was the only person in the entire investigation who went to prison. He was not allowed to return to his legal practice. "Before he went to prison he had been worth over a million dollars, when he died he was bankrupt."
