Boss Shepherd’s unabashed use of his self-proclaimed “law of necessity” during his reign as the District’s kingpin insured a steady diet of confrontational politics. Of course, the Boss usually won. Stories about Shepherd’s fights with those who stood in his way are legion, but perhaps his most celebrated confrontation was with John W. Garrett, the powerful president of the
When cartoonist Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly laid pen to paper in the spring of 1874, it no longer was poised to savagely ridicule William Marcy “Boss” Tweed. Three years earlier, after a long reign as the crooked kingpin of New York’s Tammany Ring, Tweed had been convicted of larceny and forgery and put behind bars. Nast’s cartoons had