Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/87

 having got all they could out of Erie for the benefit of their own bankrupt road, withdrew. All litigation was stopped and injunctions revoked. Bills were rushed through the legislature favorable to both Vanderbilt and Erie. Drew resigned from the road; Vanderbilt relinquished his ambition for control, and the property was turned over to Gould and Fisk. Drew may have thought that by this time the poor old road was a squeezed lemon, but if so he was mistaken, for Gould and Sage found that the property had not yet been worked for all that was in it. What their administration cost the road is very plainly set forth in the testimony given before the Hepburn Committee of 1879, by J. W. Guppy, assistant general superintendent under Gould, and for many years connected with the road into whose service he first entered as a telegraph operator. When Gould was ousted from the control in March, 1872, the total stock was $86,536,910, the funded debt $26,395,000 and the floating debt $2,517,301, a total of $115,449,211, an increase during the time of Gould's identification with the road of $64,383,268. Yet Mr. Guppy testified that not a dollar of this vast sum was represented by any additions to the road.

At the time that the Gould-Fisk ring was sucking the life-blood of Erie, the Tweed-Sweeny ring was plundering the city of New York. The two were really one. From Mr. Gould's testimony just quoted and from other facts here presented, it will be seen how closely allied they were. Tweed was