A machine exists to produce money for the people who operate it, yes, but what a machine does in fact is even simpler: it wins elections, and it wins them repeatedly, by whatever means. By definition, then, a machine is a creature of democracy, arising only where universal franchise and electoral competition meet and particularly where rapid urbanization couples with rising need and a systemic failure to meet the need-where social change threatens a descent into chaos and collapse.* This was the challenge that the American machines met and conquered at the end of the nineteenth century, and it can be argued that machine governance, under the masterful guidance of the boss, forged the modern American city.

* Like so many American exports, machines have taken root wherever conditions were ripe worldwide, in southern Italy after World War II, in post-colonial Africa and India, and among the cities of the Asian tigers. Today, Senegal, Kenya, Zambia, and Ghana function under machines linking remote villagers and newly urbanized peasants to corrupt government bosses.

Facing a gigantically fragmented field of ethnicities and parochial interests, the bosses saw with no little prescience that eighteenth-century charters written for the village and the town could no longer juggle the conflicts of a metropolis. Only by what one Tweed biographer called the "big pay-off"-mass corruption-could he mollify all parties to draw them to a common effort. Democracy, in short, demanded graft. And so there was built a shadow government, extra-legal but functional, and that was the key: pragmatic, opportunistic, flexible, the bosses got things done. Even Lincoln Steffens in his moral fervor recognized the complexity of the solution to the problem of the city that the bosses represented. Martin Lomasney of Boston was perhaps the most eloquent in explaining bossism to the young re-porter: "There's got to be in every ward some-body that any bloke can come to-no matter what he's done-and get help. Help, you under-stand; none of your law and justice, but help." The bosses, with their wards and clubhouses, saloon meetings and torchlight parades and street parties, humanized politics; they gave the under-dog a chance at survival. (Explicit losers in a Protestant world, the Irish turned to the machine; the Italians, traveling the same shadow road, turned to the mob. Thus were the two peoples stirred into the melting pot.*) Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that the machines were the first example in history of sustained governance of a city "by men of the people," though perhaps one could find antecedents in the reign of the Gracchi in Rome or the Commune in Paris. Models of upward mobility, the bosses created a welfare state before there was such a thing, before government was equipped, or cared, to deal with the ills of the typhus ward and the suicide ward, with its epidemics of crime, alcoholism, hopelessness. Unlike the bureaucrats who replaced him, the boss answered need with no questions, no "damn fool investigations," as Tom Pendergast explained. "No, by God, we fill his belly and warm his back and vote him our way."

* In Kansas City, the dying words of mafia boss Johnny Lazia spoke volumes. "Tell Tom Pendergast," he whispered, "I love him."

The boss's ultimate goal, however, was order, not progress, so he was violently anti-labor, crushing radicalism wherever it appeared, and never sought to institutionalize his services. And yet, paradoxically, the boss embraced a kind of progressivism, if only because bettering the city bought him votes, kept him in power, and filled his pockets. Brokering huge franchises and monopolies, he improved roads, sewers, lighting, built libraries and parks and museums and hospitals, extended subways and trolleys and docks. Tammany at its height produced the Brooklyn Bridge and the Museum of Natural History.

But the secret labor of the machine, as one historian wrote, was "to watch over and manage the disappearance of real power from public view," the end of which was a kind of soft despotism. Controlling the courts, the police, the legislature, the ballot box, and the nominating conventions, and abetted in all this by the wealthiest elites, machine bosses drove the people into the agora merely to receive the imprimatur that continued rule required. Love and fear were the goads, not the ideal of self-government. "The American citizen does not understand self- or representative government, and does not demand it," wrote Steffens in an open letter to Czar Nicholas II. "The American people are asking for `good government.' All they mean by this is clean streets, well lighted and honestly policed by a police force which, if it must blackmail vice and protect crime, shall do so quietly." Steffens assured the czar that even under the bother of the franchise and a constitution, Russia's autocracy might continue unmolested.

By 1984, at the age of twenty-three, O'Hara had made bitter enemies of just about every one of his mentors in the Brooklyn reform movement. Naturally, they had handed out patronage, stacked legislative committees, created "no-show" and "seldom-show" jobs (as the New York Times observed). The reform machine under Brennan followed the same ethos as every machine: loyalty was sainthood; betrayal, apostasy. This was an Irish ethos. O'Hara's defection was also an Irish habit, the periodic rebellion against the crown that usually ended badly for the rebel. O'Hara wanted "purity," a cleansing of the municipal ground, the same "self-government" Steffens sought but didn't know how to deliver. And purity was a state achieved only by never getting elected.

Still, O'Hara the maverick set out to reform the reformers. In 1990 he finally passed the New York bar; it was his sixth try. He'd paid for CUNY law school by driving taxis on the night shift; he kept a poster from the movie Taxi Driver on his wall. In the 1990s he ran for office against Brennan or Brennan's cronies six times in almost as many years, for state assembly and for city council. In 1992, at age thirty-one, he lost against Brennan's handpicked candidate by just a few hundred votes. He was emboldened. He became known across Brooklyn as "the gadfly," the "perennial candidate." The Times called him a "political brawler." The Brennanites never tired of painting O'Hara as a criminal for this enthusiasm. Brennan denounced him to the public as a "psychopath," and legends arose that O'Hara's may-hem was not limited to electoral challenge. The allegations were always unproven, and there was never a police report or complaint or investigation, but the legends, repeated enough, stuck, and among the Brennanites they became a kind of contagious delusion. There was the vision of a crazed O'Hara swinging a bat in front of a Brennan crony's house; there was O'Hara dressed in a clown suit terrorizing Jim Brennan's neighbors. O'Hara could be crude and growling and arrogant-a friend once called him "King of the Ballbusters"-and when he thought you disagreed with him he pushed and cajoled and poked you on the shoulder and asked, "Whattaya, got two sticks rubbing together for a brain? Of course I'm right!" His mouth once landed him in a wheelchair in the emergency room. But his ball-busting, it seemed to me, was simple Brooklyn frankness, not pathology. Indeed, the lack of artifice reminded me most of the old Tammany bosses.

In any case, his public record spoke louder than the rumors of blood. The Citizens Union, New York's oldest good-government group, concluded that O'Hara was "a man of considerable charm" and "an outstanding civic activist in his home district." In 1992 the Times endorsed him for state assembly among five contenders, praising his "feel for the district." Joyce Purnick, who wrote the endorsement, told me the editorial board "felt O'Hara would shake things up a bit in Albany."

His campaign headquarters was over a cop bar where the drunks, off-duty, discharged their pistols into the ceiling for kicks. He ran his campaigns on pennies, raising money "on the streets," trawling the lower reaches of Broadway, among the law firms of the financial district. He did well with old-timers, though, who grew up poor in Brooklyn and had made a name for themselves and moved out to mansions on Long Island-"old Jewish guys, old hustlers, they had it tough, they got where they were 'cause they had balls." An executive once gave O'Hara $1,500 after he'd el-bowed his way into the office, sat down, and told him his vision of state government. "Blow it up. Burn it to the ground," O'Hara said. "Real reform means the system as it stands has to be annihilated, because right now it's failing by design. Millions of dollars are wasted every time the legislature fails to pass the budget. And that's the only thing it does consistently.* What I'd like to do is get a popular referendum to abolish the legislature and start over. You never see politicians getting laid off. I say lay 'em all off!"

* This is true. Fiscal year 2004 marked the twentieth consecutive session in which the New York state legislature failed its budgetary duty, making it the nation's most delinquent body of lawmakers, even as it employs more lackeys and introduces more unfinished legislation than any other state legislature.

"Okay, you seem like you're into it," the executive said, wishing he hadn't let O'Hara in. But he gave him the money.