The federal indictment Thursday of New York Mayor Eric Adams on conspiracy, bribery, and wire-fraud offenses marked a rare instance of criminal charges being filed against the sitting mayor of a major city, and for some in the Boston area brought back memories of events nearly eight decades earlier.
James Michael Curley, the notorious “rascal king” who served as Boston mayor, Massachusetts governor, and US representative for the state, also served terms behind bars in the Charles Street Jail while a Boston alderman in 1904 and in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Conn., in 1947 — during his fourth non-consecutive term as mayor — after he was convicted at age 72 of conspiracy and nine counts of mail fraud.
Adams, a former captain in the New York Police Department, faces federal charges in a five-count indictment that describes a decade-long trail of crimes.
Curley was elected to his fourth term as mayor in 1945, at the height of his fraud trial, and took office 11 days before his conviction on allegations of war profiteering. He had served briefly as the president of the Engineers Group Inc., an enterprise that offered to mediate between federal officials and manufacturers seeking war contracts but was set up by a Washington, D.C., confidence man named James G. Fuller, who was later convicted alongside Curley on 14 counts of mail fraud and conspiracy.
In a Boston Globe interview published June 8, 1947, after the US Supreme Court had refused to review Curley’s conviction, effectively sending him to prison, the mayor said he had been singled out for “vengeful persecution” because he had offended the late president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he vowed to “run the city from a cell in Washington.”
“I will not resign the office of mayor of Boston. I will not make a deal with the courts or with anyone in Washington, although that suggestion has come down to me through political channels,” Curley told the Globe. “If the people of the city of Boston stand behind me as they have always in the past, I will run the city from a cell in Washington, and I will depend upon the people see to it that my office is not taken away from me in my absence.”
Curley was able to continue wielding influence over the city while locked up more than 150 miles away, engineering the installation of City Clerk John B. Hynes, who was initially a Curley loyalist, as acting mayor over City Council President John B. Kelly through an emergency bill pushed through the Legislature. The measure also allowed Curley to continue collecting his $20,000 salary while in prison.
The Globe reported that “it was generally understood that [Governor Robert F.] Bradford wanted a bill only sufficiently strong to oust Kelly as Acting Mayor and keep the job open for Curley whenever he would be able to resume office.”
Curley served five months before his six-month sentence was commuted by President Harry S. Truman. Upon his return to office in November 1947, Curley declared at the end of his first day back, “I have accomplished more in one day than has been done in the five months of my absence,” the Globe reported.
The boast offended Hynes, who went on to defeat Curley in the 1949 mayoral race and in 1951 and 1955 rematches, ending Curley’s long and colorful political career. Hynes later said he wouldn’t have run if Curley had only shown him a little appreciation.
Material from the Boston Globe archives and the Associated Press was used in this report. Jeremiah Manion of the Globe staff contributed.
Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com. Follow him @jeremycfox.
