De Sapio, Carmine Gerard

(b. 10 December 1908 in New York City; d. 27 July 2004 in New York City), political leader and last major boss of Tammany Hall, the New York County Democratic organization.

De Sapio was the first of two sons born to Gerard De Sapio, who owned a horse trucking business and later operated a bungalow community near Rockaway Beach, Queens, and Marinetta De Sapio. De Sapio’s parents were Sicilian immigrants who prospered in Manhattan, New York City. Born on Varick Street in Greenwich Village, De Sapio loved his neighborhood, living in the same apartment for fifty years. De Sapio, who often loaded freight for his father, attended St. Alphonsus parochial school, Fordham Preparatory School, and briefly Ford-ham College. As a teenager he contacted iritis, a rheumatic condition that inflames the eyes and often requires hospitalization. He was forced to wear dark glasses constantly, and the mysterious and vaguely sinister look they provided became his trademark.

In his teens De Sapio became a runner at Daniel Finn’s Huron Club, the bastion of Tammany’s Irish strength in Greenwich Village. At the time, Finn was the leader of the First Assembly District. De Sapio distributed ice, coal, and turkeys, and gradually rose to become Finn’s lieutenant; he once stated “we had leadership, respect, discipline. There was such a thing as party loyalty.” Loyalty was a cardinal virtue to De Sapio—his marriage to Terese Natale, whom he wed in 1937, endured over sixty years; the couple had one child.

Party service gained De Sapio a patronage job as secretary to a judge, but in 1937 ambition led him to organize the Tamawa Club to challenge Finn’s inept leadership of the First Assembly District West. All district leaders sat on the executive committee of Tammany Hall, awarded patronage jobs, and helped determine party nominees, so De Sapio’s triumph in 1939, when he defeated Finn for the leadership post by fifty-one votes, represented a political coming of age for Italian Americans. But his victory was rejected by the Irish boss Christy Sullivan, and two years later his candidacy was fraudulently counted out by Finn’s supporters. Not until 1943, after six years of insurgency, did De Sapio become district leader. Finn’s Huron Club closed, and Tamawa became the new center of Greenwich Village politics.

Tammany was in disarray when De Sapio joined its executive committee. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had withheld all patronage for a decade, and the organization had lost its meeting hall to foreclosure. To survive, Tammany formed unsavory alliances with such criminals as Thomas “Three-Finger” Lucchese and Frank Costello. Although De Sapio’s influence increased rapidly, analysts disagree regarding mob influence in his decisions. He was the “senior” Italian district leader, but there is no evidence of his personal involvement in corruption. Appearing before the Kefauver Committee in 1951, Costello admitted he knew De Sapio but claimed they never talked politics. For his part, De Sapio vehemently asserted that “Costello is not a power in Tammany Hall.... He does not dictate nominations.” Investigators failed to document organized crime’s influence in any appointments.

De Sapio’s surface smoothness and distinguished personal bearing masked incisive political intelligence. Named to the Board of Elections in 1946, he became one of four Tammany leaders who established county policy. In July 1949 he retired those colleagues and became the youngest leader in the history of Tammany Hall. His first coup was to nominate Robert Wagner for Manhattan borough president, thus launching a major political career. Most significantly, Costello passively accepted De Sapio’s purging of political hacks and mobsters from the organization. De Sapio also engineered a working alliance with Ed Flynn, leader of the Bronx, to gain federal patronage. Total control of Manhattan was achieved when he ended the career of the radical congressman Vito Marcantonio in 1950. De Sapio then moved against the incumbent mayor Vincent Impellitteri, a leader disdained even by Democrats.

The mayoral election of 1953 confirmed “The Bishop’s” power. De Sapio, who had been given the moniker because he was stern, distinguished, yet soft-hearted, anointed Wagner as his candidate in the primary, carried all sixteen Manhattan districts for him, and eliminated any remaining Lucchese supporters in the campaign. Wagner was elected in November, along with Hulan Jack, the first African American borough president. By 1954 De Sapio’s Tammany incorporated both blacks and Puerto Ricans as district leaders. De Sapio entered state politics when he convinced Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., to withdraw from the gubernatorial race against his candidate, W. Aver-ell Harriman. He gained the hatred of Eleanor Roosevelt when her son failed to be elected attorney general.

In 1955 De Sapio became New York secretary of state under Harriman and also served on the Democratic National Committee. He worked sixteen-hour days, was notoriously hands-on regarding details, and installed Tammany allies in the Bronx, in Queens, and on Staten Island. Tammany’s liberal program endorsed permanent personal voter registration, voting rights for eighteen-year-olds, rent control, increased spending for education, and the Fair Employment Practices Act. De Sapio selected Manhattan’s first black and female judges. He told Life magazine that to gain popular acceptance for his candidates, he would always offer “reputable officials who will give good government.” The presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson declared, “I would welcome the support of Carmine De Sapio and Tammany Hall.” The Atlantic, Fortune, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post devoted articles to Tammany’s boss while Time awarded him a cover, seeing in him the “worldly and weighted mien of a Medici.” In a lecture at Harvard University, De Sapio boasted of being boss, “I am proud of the tradition.”

Hailed as the “miracle man” who resurrected Tammany, De Sapio, who often did business in the rear of cabs and rented hotel rooms, never overcame the charge of bossism. In 1957 a taxi driver, after delivering him to the Biltmore, found an envelope filled with cash. De Sapio denied ownership, and the incident proved no impediment to the reelection of Wagner. Tammany continued to support mayoral initiatives in housing, union recognition, and naming independent commissioners. But at the Democratic nomination convention of 1958 De Sapio’s political touch failed. Reform Democrats led by Herbert Lehman refused to support his senatorial candidate and attributed the subsequent party defeat to “bossism.” In 1959 the Village Independent Democrats, taking advantage of electoral reforms instituted by De Sapio, almost displaced him as district leader. De Sapio’s support of John Kennedy in 1960 could not halt reformer attacks since both Lehman and Eleanor Roosevelt supported Stevenson.

By 1961 De Sapio himself had become the issue, and Wagner joined reformers to fight the man who had nurtured his career. He called on De Sapio to “step aside,” refused him all patronage, and crushed his alternate slate in the primary. Even more unexpected was De Sapio’s defeat in the Village, where a more cosmopolitan population selected James Lanigan as district leader. Edward Costikyan, who replaced De Sapio as county leader, wrote that “everybody felt bad” when De Sapio was ousted, but he was wrong. Mrs. Roosevelt told the reporter Murray Kempton that she always intended to get De Sapio, “and get him I did.”

De Sapio attributed his defeat to Tammany’s past sins, not to his own record. He likened his position to “a lively corpse, down but not out,” but his two attempts to regain district leadership were defeated by Edward Koch. After 1961 his party “went down the hill and we haven’t come up since”; he blamed a failure of party loyalty for the later election of three Republican mayors. As a private citizen De Sapio was convicted in 1969 of attempting to bribe a public official, a charge he denied. He served more than half of his two-year sentence.

De Sapio reconfigured the old Tammany machine to meet modern expectations, and the irony of his accomplishment was that he created the political mechanisms that ousted him. For De Sapio, a man of liberal instincts and real kindness who believed in consultation, the title of boss proved his undoing. He died at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village and was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

A major biography of De Sapio is Warren Moscow, The Last of the Big-Time Bosses: The Life and Times of Carmine De Sapio and the Decline and Fall of Tammany Hall (1971). Chapters on De Sapio are in Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, Tigers of Tammany: Nine Men Who Ran New York (1967), and Oliver E. Allen, The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall (1993). An obituary is in the New York Times (28 July 2004).

George J. Lankevich