At this time there was discernible the beginnings of a growing feeling that reform officials, while prosecuting gamblers and comparatively petty offenders of all stripes, somehow were singularly ineffective in bringing about the prosecution of corporation magnates charged with looting on a large scale. This feeling had not crystallized as yet, but it was felt in some quarters. Some of District Attorney Jerome’s former supporters were impressed by the fact that despite his campaign promises, he had not caused the indictment or other prosecution of the men who had looted the Metropolitan Street Railway Company. James W. Osborne, a noted attorney, had declared in open court in 1903, that the “insiders” had, by means of duplicating of construction accounts, manipulation and in other ways, stolen $30,000,000. Mr. Amory declared and specified that an additional $60,000,000 had, by various processes of devious manipulation, gone to enrich the “insiders”--a total of $90,000,000. On April 25, 1903, Mr. Osborne gave out this statement: “We have produced evidence before Magistrate Barlow which shows a crime has been committed, and now it is up to the District Attorney to say whether he will avail himself of that evidence and proceed against those who have committed the crime. We have charged in open court that $30,000,000 has been stolen, and that [statement] never has been disproved by the Metropolitan Company or its counsel. I told Mr. Nicoll, counsel for Mr. Vreeland [president of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company] openly he would not be able to disprove my charges.” Mr. Amory openly declared that Mr. Jerome’s investigation of the matter in 1903 was not undertaken in good faith. “It was,” he wrote, “a deliberate whitewash. I have documentary evidence to prove it.” Mr. Amory charged that of the twenty-seven distinct written charges filed with Mr. Jerome against the Metropolitan management, Mr. Jerome’s accountant reported on only seven, and these latter were of minor importance, involving chiefly technicalities of accounts and not serious crimes. Yet Mr. Jerome, was Mr. Amory’s indignant comment, represented that the accountant’s report was “very clear and full and takes up every charge” and that Mr. Jerome had reported that “the specific charges so far as they involve criminal wrong-doing are entirely without foundation.”[10] While thus declaring that he could find nothing on which to base prosecution of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company magnates, District Attorney Jerome showed by other acts, it was complained, that petty criminals would be prosecuted to the limit of the law. He was charged with discriminating between rich and powerful business offenders, on the one side, and on the other, poor and relatively uninfluential violators of the law.