The judge ruled the Greenpoint Refinery (above) was not a corporation but a partnership between Edward and “Big” Jim Fisk. As a partner Edward could not steal money owed to the refinery, since he would have been stealing from himself. And if Edward had just left it there, he might have stayed a winner. But being Edward, it was in his nature to carry things too far. That was one of the things that made Josie fall in love with him. Except Josies' other attraction to Edward was his money, and thanks to Big Jim cutting the profits from the refinery, Edward was now broke.
Why Josie (above) had given the letters to Edward passes beyond common sense. In any case, Edward's lawyers argued that the letters might provide evidence of Erie railroad stock fraud, and might be needed in some future criminal trial, and so should not be released.
In truth, the only crime the letters were proof of was blackmail, which Edward and Josie were attempting to commit against Jim Fisk. And now, Big Jim's lawyers argued, they were using the courts to carry out this crime. So a judge ordered the letters be read by an arbiter, to determine just what they proved, if anything.
The arbiter came to the conclusion that the love letters were maudlin, melodramatic, meretricious and – surprisingly – mundane, and contained no evidence of stock fraud. Given that the letters had only prurient value, the judge issued a restraining order preventing anyone, including the newspapers, from publishing them as long as the various slander cases continued. And with that their value as blackmail material against “Big” Jim, evaporated. After all, as James Gordon Bennet, Jr., publisher of the New York Herald, used to say, “The purpose of a newspaper is not to instruct but to startle.”
It was at about this point that Edward’s wife took their daughter and fled to Paris. And "Big" Jim's wife, and her female lover, living in far off Boston, did the same. Clearly the married women in this case were smarter than their husbands, because they thus escaped being tainted with what that blue-nosed blue-blooded lawyer George Templeton Strong described as this “special stinkpot”.
All of New York was snickering about the tri-cornered stench. The newspapers kept fanning the stink, even without the letters, and day after day they mocked the participants’ peccadilloes. Now, “Big” Jim had long ago chosen to ignore the opinions of others, and Josie never had even the pretense of valuing virtue or reputation.
So the only member of the triumphant with any sense of public pride left, and with a super abundance of that, and thus the only individual wounded by the continued public mocking, was Edward Stokes (above). And he had been the one who had pushed the letters into court.
And then, on 6 January, 1872, Edward took the stand in Josie’s case. Even under friendly direct examination, the spectators could not suppress a giggle when Edward insisted he and Josie were “just friends”. When court broke for lunch at 1:00 p.m. Edward stormed out, infuriated. He was willing to be thought a liar, and a cad. But he was deeply offended at being laughed at.
Having lost the letters as a weapon, Edward was forced to settle his lawsuit. “Big Jim" allowed him to keep the $27,500 he had filched from the refinery, plus $10,000 compensation for the weekend he had spent in jail, and $5,000 for his legal fees. Edward exchanged all of that for his half of the refinery.
Edward was now freed from his immediate financial difficulty. Of course he was also now $38,000 in debt to five different attorneys, for all his lawsuits against “Big:” Jim Fisk (above). And Edward had yet to win a single one. So he urged Josie to push ahead with her lawsuit against “Big” Jim. Not that he could have stopped her.
In her lawsuit Josie was claiming that during their multi-year affair, James Fisk had invested $25,000 for her, and now she wanted it back. With interest. “Big” Jim’s lawyers argued that the money had never been hers, just a wooing point, and that Josie’s entire life had been one scam after another. On the witness stand Jose began with another lie. “I will be twenty-four years of age on the 11th of December next.” She was actually 28.
It was perfectly predictable that under cross examination, Josie's sordid past would be used to impeach her. She was asked if, in California “a pistol was pointed in your presence at a man's head?” Reluctantly Josie replied, “There was a circumstance of that kind happened.” “Was it a man by the name of D. W. Perley…Was (the gun) pointed at him by (Josie's stepfather)? (And) did (Perley) sign a check before he went out?” All of this, Josie was forced to admit, was the truth. The jury, and the press, knew a badger game when they heard one described to them.
During over three hours on the stand, Josie was also forced to admit that Fisk had bought her the house on 23rd Street, from the knocker on Josie's front door to the curtains in the parlor and the commode in the bedroom. She was even forced to admit that she had handed over her love letters from Fisk because Edward thought they “would benefit him in the case…pending between him and Mr. Fisk.” All of this was predictable, as her lawyer must have predicted. But Josie had insisted on proceeding. Thus she was three times stupid; she was in love, she was in love with Edward, and she was greedy.
He lunched at Delmonico’s on the corner of South Hill and 14th Street, and it was there that he learned from "a friend" that he and Josie had just been indicted for blackmailing “Big” Jim Fisk. It was the last straw.
- 30 -
