Simultaneously, while reaping large revenues from his fur trade among the Indians in both the East and West, Astor was employing a different kind of fraud in using the powers of city and State government in New York in obtaining, for practically nothing, enormously valuable grants of land and other rights and privileges which added to the sum total of his growing wealth.
In this procedure he was but doing what a number of other contemporaries such as Peter Goelet, the Rhinelanders, the Lorillards, the Schermerhorns and other men who then began to found powerful landed families, were doing at the same time. The methods by which these men secured large areas of land, now worth huge sums, were unquestionably fraudulent, although the definite facts are not as wholly available as are, for instance, those which related to Fletcher's granting vast estates for bribes in the seventeenth century, or the bribery which corrupted the various New York legislatures beginning in the year 1805. Nevertheless, considering the character of the governing politicians, and the scandals that ensued from the granting and sales of New York City land a century or more ago, it is reasonably certain that corrupt means were used. The student of the times cannot escape from this conclusion, particularly as it is borne out by many confirming circumstances.
New York City, at one time, owned a very large area of land which was fraudulently granted or sold to private individuals. Considerable of this granting or selling was done during the years when the corrupt Benjamin Romaine was City Controller. Romaine was so badly involved in a series of scandals arising from the grants and corrupt sales of city land, that in 1806 the Common Council, controlled by his own party, the Tammany machine, found it necessary to remove him from the office of City Controller for malfeasance.[104] The specific charge was that he had fraudulently obtained valuable city land in the heart of the city without paying for it. Something had to be done to still public criticism, and Romaine was sacrificed. But, in fact, he was far from being the only venal official concerned in the current frauds. These frauds continued no matter which party or what set of officials were in power. Several years after Romaine was removed, John Bingham, a powerful member of the Aldermanic Committee on Finance, which passed upon and approved these various land grants, was charged by public investigators with having caused the city to sell to his brother-in-law land which he later influenced the city administration to buy back at an exorbitant price. Spurred by public criticism the Common Council demanded its reconveyance.[105] It is more than evident--it is indisputable--from the records and the public scandals, that the successive city administrations were corruptly conducted. The conservative newspaper comments alone of the period indicate this clearly, if nothing else does.