Note 441 — Chapter XXVI · The Calhoun Trial.

Calhoun, after the disagreement of the jury that tried him, issued a statement to the press in which he bitterly denounced those who were responsible for the prosecution, and hinted at retaliation. He continued to insist that Heney was a corrupt official: “There lies in the courtroom,” said Calhoun, “forty checks made by Mr. Rudolph Spreckels to Mr. Francis J. Heney since his alleged appointment as Assistant District Attorney. Those checks were deposited in the American National Bank to his private account. They aggregate $23,800. The first of them amounted to $4,900. They are the price of his infamy. He can not escape the fact that he is a corrupt public official by the contention that he has been engaged in a holy crusade. He can not defend the acceptance of money from a private citizen for the express purpose of enabling him to devote himself exclusively to the so-called Graft Prosecution without committing the crime of accepting a bribe. I here make the formal and specific charge that Francis J. Heney stands side by side with James L. Gallagher as a corrupt public official. I charge him with having accepted bribes and I also charge Rudolph Spreckels and James D. Phelan with having given him the bribes; and if we can get a fair District Attorney in the city of San Francisco I propose at the proper time and in the proper way to submit formal charges against Heney for having received bribes and Spreckels and Phelan for having paid them.”

Of Calhoun’s threat of prosecution, The Call in its issue of June 22, 1909, said:

“In that soiled and motley retinue of strikers and heelers, jury fixers and gaspipe men that the head of the United Railroads has gathered about him were many who made it a business to proclaim that when the indictments came to the test of fact in court the disposition of that $200,000 would be explained as a perfectly innocent matter in the simplest possible manner. How these promises have been fulfilled we know. The mystery of that $200,000 remains as dark as ever. Not even the stockholders of the company are invited into the confidence of its president. It is not now the question, Where did he get it? but What did he do with it?

“As long as that question remains unanswered by or for Calhoun and as long as he refuses to undergo cross examination and the ordinary legal tests of proof, just so long will the whole American public believe him guilty of bribery. As for his threat of some sort of vague legal proceedings against the prosecutors, that will merely provoke a laugh, as men do laugh at a cheap and obvious bluff.”