By David Dayton McKean
Four years before the Case Committee began its investigation,
Robert Ambry of Jersey City, a Republican candidate
for Congress, charged that Mayor Hague had a huge income
on which he was not paying sufficient income tax, that he had
received `one item alone of $1000 a week' and `another bulk
item of $500,000 or more that went into the Mayor's office.'
The Mayor said that Ambry was `irresponsible,' that as a
candidate for Congress `he is probably using this means to
get his name in the newspapers.... Of course I have complied with the law' (New York Times, October 29, 1924.)
James J. Burkitt, Mayor Hague's most persistent opponent,
sent a letter to President Hoover on May 6, 1929, citing
the $390,000 in cash payments the Case Committee had
shown the Mayor to have made for his Deal property, the
Duncan Apartment property, the bank stock, and so forth.
He asserted in his letter, though he gave no proof, that the
Mayor had accumulated forty million dollars, and demanded
that the Government investigate his income-tax
payments. Edward I. Edwards, defeated for re-election to
the Senate in 1928, broke with Hague and asserted that the
Mayor had acquired `great wealth.' The Treasury Department
did investigate, and a report was published in February,
1930, that he was going to have to pay $1,800,000 in
delinquent taxes, interest, and penalties. He took cognizance
of the rumors and from Palm Beach issued a statement in
which he said: `I don't know where they got their figures
from. They are ridiculous and nonsensical. They flatter
me.'
The settlement was made late in August, 1930, when Theodore
Brandle, labor and building `czar' of northern New
Jersey, paid the taxes, arrears, and penalties by his check for
$60,000. Brandle and Hague were in those days friends and
allies. They later had a bitter disagreement, a story which is
told elsewhere, and Hague deposed Brandle, calling him,
among other things, ` a labor racketeer.' When he had lost
both his position in organized labor and the fortune he had
accumulated, on July 1, 1926, Brandle filed a suit for the
$60,000 in the Supreme Court in Trenton. The Mayor had
sailed on a North Cape cruise, but John Milton issued a statement
which he said Hague had left with him in anticipation
of the suit: `The lawsuit is nothing but a shakedown. It is
prompted by my refusal to aid Brandle to reinstate himself
in the labor movement. In 1929 I had difficulty with the
Government in the adjustment of my income tax. I borrowed
the money from Brandle in his bank. But I settled
with the Government and paid Brandle back everything that
was owed.' The suit was finally settled out of court, but why
a man who was able to pay cash for $390,000 worth of real
estate and securities should have borrowed $60,000 from a
labor leader was never made clear.
In 1938, he got in trouble again with the Bureau of Internal
Revenue. According to the Newark Evening News, of February 7,
the bureau disallowed deductions of $80,000 on his
income for 1934, 1935, and 1936. According to this newspaper
account, he had to pay $10,000 additional taxes. No
penalty was assessed.
This Web version, edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003
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