But Tammany men were not the only officials against whom charges were brought. It had long been a subject of increasing general comment that District Attorney Jerome, much noted as such a leading reformer, who had been so conspicuously active in sending petty offenders to prison, had failed to bring about the conviction of any high insurance officials and had not brought about the indictment of a single traction system manipulator. On September 8, 1907, a voluminous petition was sent by various New York business men and other citizens to Governor Hughes. This petition recited in detail the specific transactions thus complained of, made a scathing criticism of District Attorney Jerome for having failed to prosecute those responsible, and demanded that the Attorney General of New York State be forthwith directed to bring prosecution. Evidence submitted, on December 1, 1907, to the Grand Jury in General Sessions showed that Thomas F. Ryan and associates had bought in 1902 from Anthony N. Brady for $250,000 the franchise of a company called the Wall and Cortland Street Ferries Railroad Company, a corporation having a dormant franchise for a road that had never been built.[10] They had then sold this franchise to a dummy corporation, called the Metropolitan Securities Company, for $965,607.19. Part of this sum went to the syndicate’s brokers; the precise amount of funds divided among Ryan, Widener, Dolan and the estates of William C. Whitney and William L. Elkins was $692,292.82.[11] The surviving members of this group subsequently settled the transaction by making restitution of this sum soon after the facts had been made public and after charges had been made against Jerome. On the very day that Mr. Ryan and associates had bought the non-existent Wall and Cortlandt Street Ferries Railroad, they had also bought, for $1,600,000, the People’s Traction Company, owning a paper road never built, and the New York, Westchester and Connecticut Traction Company, a small railway, which a short time previously had been sold in bankruptcy proceedings for $15,000.[12] It was charged that in this transaction also, there was another grand division of funds. These particular transactions, however, were in reality insignificant compared to the disappearance of $16,000,000 from the treasury of the Third avenue Railway,[13] and vaster total transactions charged, aggregating, as we have previously noted, about $90,000,000. The fact was brought out in the investigation by the Public Service Commission that all the books of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company in which its affairs from 1891 onward to 1902 were recorded, had been sold to a purchaser who promised to destroy them.[14] Street car lines bought for a few hundred thousand dollars were, it was charged, capitalized at ten or twenty times that sum, and then followed a process by which vast amounts were charged in duplication of construction accounts.