New York City, November 19, 1873.

The courthouse on Chambers Street wasn't finished.

Fifteen years into construction, and the marble was still going up,

the ironwork still going in, the final bills still being padded somewhere behind a clerk's ledger.

Plaster dust settled on the shoulders of the jurors as they filed back in.

Outside, the panic of 73 was chewing through Wall Street.

Inside, William McGeer Tweed stood up to hear what twelve men had decided about him.

Two hundred and twenty counts.

Guilty on two hundred and four.

The irony was not lost on anyone in the room and it was not meant to be.

He was being convicted in the building he had looted.

A courthouse originally authorized at $250,000 had by the time Tweed stood inside it to be judged, consumed somewhere north of 12 million.

A plastering contractor named Andrew Garvey, the Prince of Plasterers, had billed roughly three million for work on those walls, much of it for repairs of his own earlier work.

The chandeliers above the courtroom had been bought from a firm Tweed owned.

The carpets under the juror's feet belonged, in a manner of speaking, to the man they were judging.

He had built his own scaffold and charged the city 15 times what it was worth.

William McGeer Tweed was born on Cherry Street in April of 1823, the son of a Scots-Irish

chairmaker in a neighborhood that would later belong to the gangs and the immigrants and the

tenement reformers.

He learned his father's trade.

He learned bookkeeping. He learned brushmaking.

And he learned most importantly that a young man in lower Manhattan could make his name faster

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