 It was led by men such as the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, the leading Presbyterian pastor and president of the New York Society for the Prevention of Crime; reform mayor William L. Strong, and his police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.Reformers passed laws in the state legislature against any emerging gambling venue.Such laws were enforced and most of the small towns and rural areas, but not in New York's larger cities, where political machines controlled the police and the courts.