George Washington Plunkitt

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) was an American politician, a long-serving district leader of Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine that dominated New York City politics. Born in poverty in Manhattan, he became a butcher's apprentice and then a contractor, and over his career held offices as assemblyman, state senator, alderman and police magistrate. In 1905 the journalist William L. Riordon published his candid talks, delivered from a bootblack stand at the county courthouse, as Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, in which Plunkitt defended what he called honest graft and attacked civil service reform. The book made him a lasting symbol of machine politics.