Back in the good old days of “honest graft,” William “Boss” Tweed didn’t mess around when it came to enriching himself at the expense of New York City taxpayers. Take the Tweed Courthouse, the opulent Italianate marble edifice next to City Hall that now houses the Department of Education headquarters.
Originally budgeted at $250,000, it wound up costing the city $3.2 million in 1869 — nearly $80 million in today’s dollars. Of that, Tweed pocketed a quarter, which came to $932,858 deposited into his bank account, plus another $104,333 in the account of a printing company Tweed secretly controlled.
His Tammany Hall total take: $1,037,191. That comes to slightly more than $25.5 million today…