![]() Prominent Wall Street lawyers orchestrated, facilitated, or closed their eyes to these illicit payments, including a Columbia law school classmate of Manton who was disbarred for his actions, and Thomas Chadbourne, founder of the venerable Chadbourne Parke law firm and one of the most influential lawyers of the era. Among the many litigants who stuffed Manton’s pockets were the nation’s largest cigarette manufacturer, its second largest maker of electric razors, the head of the Warner Brothers movie studio, and the biggest baby chick hatchery on the East Coast. In such a culture, there was no shortage of private actors willing to feed the judge’s greed, even at the highest echelons of the business and legal elite. Manton’s machinations in some ways merely reflected the Tammany Hall credo of “honest graft,” in George Washington Plunkitt’s famous phrase: the idea that public servants were expected and entitled to profit off their positions. On one occasion a litigant financed the cost of a transatlantic voyage for Manton’s summer vacation. Sometimes the benefits flowed to Manton’s family members, as when an insurance broker hired by receivers appointed by Manton agreed to funnel kickbacks to the judge’s sister and niece. Sometimes the bribe money was paid in cash, which Manton stuck in a safe he kept in his chambers in the federal courthouse. He even enlisted the help of another federal judge to deliver promised judicial benefits in some cases. Manton deployed a network of fixers, bagmen, and front men who helped to identify sources of bribes, negotiate the terms, and conceal the proceeds inside a maze of opaque financial arrangements. His prosecutor fittingly dubbed him a “merchant of justice,” who systematically abused his judicial office for private gain on a scale unmatched by any federal judge before or since.Īll sorts of legal controversies proved grist for Manton’s corruption mill: high-stakes patent infringement battles between business rivals, internecine corporate disputes between stockholders and corporate officers, a constitutional challenge mounted by railroad interests to New York’s longstanding nickel subway fare, federal criminal prosecutions. In all, Manton raked in some $17 million (in today’s dollars) from his schemes. Invariably, he would then write the decision for the court finding in favor of the party that fattened his bank account. In literally dozens of cases, Manton solicited payments and “loans” (many never repaid) from litigants, or the lawyers representing them, in cases in the Second Circuit. Less visibly, Manton operated a side business with a more unwholesome objective: cashing in on his status and power as a judge. On top of all this, he managed a small business empire out of his chambers, with extensive real estate holdings and interests in a variety of operating companies. Unusually active for a judge in partisan politics, he is said to have played a key role in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential nomination at the 1932 Democratic convention. He was a leading proponent of international peace organizations such as the World Court. Knighted by the Pope in 1924, he ranked as one of the top Catholic laymen in the United States. A Columbia law graduate and the recipient of honorary degrees from five other universities, Manton came within a whisker of being appointed to the Supreme Court himself.Īs if his day job weren’t enough, the prodigiously energetic jurist engaged in an impressive array of extrajudicial activities. And it earned Manton, the court’s senior judge beginning in 1927, the informal title of “the tenth-ranking judge in the United States,” below only the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. ![]() This meant that the Second Circuit decided a disproportionate share of the country’s most consequential lawsuits. Even more so than today, New York then was the beating heart of the country’s commercial, financial, cultural, religious, and political life. ![]() Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. From 1918 to 1939, Manton served on the U.S. Though largely forgotten today, it serves as an enduring reminder that judges, too, are human. Supreme Court Justices accepting gifts from private parties, a sordid and shocking case of judicial corruption–the worst in our nation’s history–unspooled in a downtown courtroom in Depression-era Manhattan. Long before recent news reports about current U.S. History teaches us this is not always so. We tend to think of our judges as black-robed monastics cloistered in their temples of justice, hermetically sealed off from worldly temptations.
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