On December 9, 1907, Governor Hughes removed Mr. Ahearn from office. In his notice of ejection, Governor Hughes said that justice to Mr. Ahearn required that attention should be called to the fact that “it is not shown, and it has not been claimed, that he has converted public money or property to his own use, or has personally profited in an unlawful manner by his official conduct.” But Governor Hughes said that he did find that the charges of maladministration, remissness and grave abuses existing under Ahearn’s administration had been proved. Mr. Ahearn was, in reality, a victim of the Tammany system. A few days later, the Manhattan Aldermen reelected him--a move that was contested by taking the case to the Court of Appeals, which in November, 1909, sustained his removal and disapproved of his reelection. Meanwhile, he had continued in office. Another conspicuous Tammany leader removed from office was Louis F. Haffen, president of the Borough of the Bronx. He had held that office since January 1, 1898, and had been last reelected in 1905. Mr. Haffen was, as we have seen, one of the regency of three controlling Tammany Hall immediately previous to Charles F. Murphy’s assumption of sole leadership. He was a Sachem of the Tammany Society. In November, 1908, twenty-two charges were presented to Governor Hughes by John Purroy Mitchel and Ernest Gallagher, Commissioners of Accounts of New York City, at the instance of Mayor McClellan.[3] The City Club and the Citizens’ Union jointly filed charges against Mr. Haffen and prosecuted them. Governor Hughes, basing his findings and action on the report of Wallace Macfarlane, his Commissioner who heard the evidence, found that the following charges had been established: That Mr. Haffen had greatly abused his discretionary power in failing to enforce more stringently the time clauses of contracts for public improvements, and that the time statements in his certificates to the Finance Department were in many cases untrue; that the public funds were wasted by loading the payrolls of his department with a large number of superfluous employees; that there was political jobbery in the building of the Bronx Borough Court House; the appointed architect was essentially a politician without professional qualifications who had hired others to do the architectural work. The granite contract for this building was awarded to the Buck’s Harbor Granite Company, represented in New York by a Bronx Tammany district leader. Among an array of further charges against Mr. Haffen that were found true was the charge that he was financially interested in the Sound View Land and Improvement Company, “and that his official action in connection with the Clason’s Point Road was induced by his desire to increase the value of his own and his associates’ holdings in this company, which had acquired a tract of forty-one acres with a frontage of 2,500 feet on the proposed road, with a view to that improvement.”