Lincoln Steffens was a young reporter for the Commercial Advertiser during the late 1890’s, and he always remembered it as a grand time for a New York City newspaperman: “There was the Cuban war, the Boer war, and best of all—Tammany was back in power.” Tammany Hall, “which has voters but no friends,” had just had its hold on City Hall briefly shaken by a reform administration; now, “hungry and irritated,” it was back in business, “providing us with a world of public enemies to hate and unconcealed schemes to expose.” And no public enemy should have been more hate-worthy than William S. Devery; certainly no Tammany man hatched more transparent schemes. Bulky, blatant, and insatiable, Big Bill Devery was a sort of human parade float advertising civic corruption. But Steffens and his fellow reporters discovered that they could not overcome a steady fondness for the man; in his way, he was perfect: “as a character, as a work of art, he was a masterpiece.”

Devery was born in New York in the mid-1850’s. “I carried my father’s dinner pail,” he said, “when he was laying the bricks of Tammany Hall.” As he grew to the formidable proportions that gave him his nickname, he worked as a bartender on the Bowery and then paid the going bribe to become a policeman in 1878. He was quiet enough while he learned the ropes; he rarely got called up on charges, and then only ones of the magnitude of “conversation while on duty.” He made sergeant in 1884 and seven years later moved into a profitable captaincy in the First Precinct. By this time he was seasoned enough to wangle one of the fattest police jobs in the city, running the Eldridge Street Station in a notorious red-light district. “They tell me there’s a lot of graf tin’ goin’ on in this precinct,” he is said to have told his men during his inaugural address. “They tell me you fellers are the fiercest ever on graft. Now—” he pounded his fist on the desk ”—that’s goin’ to stop! If there’s any graftin’ to be done, I’ll do it. Leave it to me!” He ran things in a straightforward way: “Captain wants this game closed up until after election time his aides would say. “If the Tammany Hall ticket is elected, we willprotect you for anything from a poker game to a whorehouse.” Devery began to get rich.

In 1898, having stolidly ridden out a few reform squalls, he became chief of police. He conducted his business every night leaning on a large fireplug in front of an Eighth Avenue saloon known as the Pump. There, from nine until about two in the morning, pimps, policemen, and gamblers could be sure of getting his ear. And so could the poor of the neighborhood, to whom every good Tammany man perforce made himself available for a few dollars’ loan, intervention with a threatening landlord, or