Session: 123456789101112131415161718         Page 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 of 617

to be substituted in place of someone who had won, and we said, “No.”

So then Lehman and Wagner began to work on Jim Lanigan, because they also decided that the Village Independent Democrats ought to fold up its tent and leave, and indeed from their point of view what we were doing now was just simply running against every public officeholder in the bureau of Manhattan, good or bad, and many of them were Italian; and the candidates that we were running, most of them were Jewish -- so it looked like a Jewish-Italian vendetta. It wasn't intended that way. It is a fact, though, that most of the reform candidates were Jewish.

So they wanted to sort of end our life span, shorten it. What they did was: Lehman sent a letter against me to every person in the district, every voter, and Wagner came out against me and got Lanigan to attack the club, and if you want me to give you a vignette there...

Yes, I'd like that. It would be very interesting about Lanigan.

Well, what happened with Lanigan is this: in the beginning, after Lehman and Wagner called continually and tried to get us to get Farley on the slate and we had refused and they just assumed: after all, Lanigan is the leader -- how come he can't accomplish this? And, of course, that's not the way the club worked at that time or indeed works today. So Lanigan sort of removed himself