San Francisco graft trials

The "Big Four" graft prosecutors (left to right): Francis J. Heney, William J. Burns, Fremont Older, and Rudolph Spreckels.

The San Francisco graft trials were a series of attempts from 1905 to 1908 to prosecute public officials in the city of San Francisco, California, for graft and other political corruption. Among those implicated were Mayor Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, and various members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, all of whom had taken bribes from business owners. Ruef was at the center of the corruption; while acting as Schmitz's attorney, he approved all city contracts and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payment from business owners, keeping a portion for himself and distributing the remainder to the Mayor and Supervisors.

Former mayor James Phelan, along with banker Rudolph Spreckels and editor Fremont Older of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, asked United States District Attorney Francis Heney, fresh from a successful stint as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General's office in prosecuting the Oregon land fraud scandal, to help put an end to the corruption. Heney charged Ruef and Schmitz with numerous counts of bribery and brought them to trial. Heney rejected a juror because he was an ex-con and publicly accused Ruef of trying to plant him on the jury. During the trial, the rejected juror shot Heney in the face, but Heney survived. The juror was found dead in jail the next morning, and many suspected Ruef and his allies of complicity in his death. Some members of the public thought that Sheriff William Biggy was negligent, and when he fell off a boat late one night and drowned, some thought it may have been suicide, but others thought he may have been murdered.

Ruef's trial was eventually brought to a successful close by Special Assistant District Attorney (and future California Governor and U.S. Senator) Hiram Johnson, and after several appeals, Ruef served four years in San Quentin Prison. While there, he wrote a series of tell-all columns for Older's Bulletin newspaper implicating a number of companies, executives, and public officials. Mayor Schmitz was found guilty, jailed, and then released and retried, but did not serve any time. All of the business owners and supervisors implicated received immunity for their testimony about Ruef's and Schmitz's complicity and were not arrested or charged. When a new District Attorney, Charles Fickert, was elected, he stopped the investigations and all further prosecutions.