A specter that haunted Rudy Giuliani’s first run for mayor in 1989 — the associa­tion of his then law firm, White & Case, with the notorious international drug laun­derers and terrorist boosters at BCCI — is coming back to haunt him. The reason it’s returning is that much of what the former U.S. Attorney said back then to deflect me­dia attacks about the relationship was flat­-out wrong. A Voice reexamination of the issue raises new conflict-of-interest questions both about Giuliani’s late 1988–early 1989 job talks with the firm — whose ties to the world’s most corrupt bank were far more extensive than it has publicly claimed — and his office’s hitherto unre­ported, yet simultaneous, submarining of a BCCI probe.

Giuliani maintained then that he had only asked the firm, which had hired him just a couple of months before he formally announced his candidacy that May, if it represented any clients “under investiga­tion by my office when I served as U.S. Attorney,” not about clients “under investi­gation by other prosecutors.” Concluding that the BCCI prosecutions, which then appeared to be limited to the federal indict­ments in Tampa, had “nothing to do with my office” and “no connection to my work,” Giuliani declared the issue “irrele­vant.” He was so angered by the controver­sy, however, that he stormed off a WNBC­-TV set when asked about it, and, six days after the story surfaced, took a leave of absence from the firm.

Contrary to Giuliani’s 1989 claims, how­ever, his office did receive a hand-deliv­ered, October 31, 1988, criminal referral about BCCI signed by top Federal Reserve and New York State Banking Department officials, as well as a November 8 follow-up letter listing suspected Panamanian and Colombian drug money deposits then flow­ing through BCCI’s New York office. These letters, as well as at least one November 4 meeting involving high-level Federal Re­serve, state banking, and Giuliani officials, were spurred by the findings of an emergen­cy joint examination of BCCI’s New York office conducted by both regulatory agen­cies immediately after the October 11 Tam­pa indictment of BCCI (surprising the bankers at a fake bachelor party orchestrat­ed by Customs agents made the bust a nationally televised news story). In addition to noting that the joint examination had uncovered apparent violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, the referral letter stated that “a money laundering scheme may be in prog­ress” at the New York branch — about as vivid a declaration as normally staid bank examiners are likely to make.

Giuliani’s office was also indirectly in­volved in the Tampa undercover opera­tion — indeed one of the prime launderers caught in the BCCI net, Robert “the Jewel­er” Alcaino, had been indicted by Giu­liani’s office that September. That is why the press statement issued by U.S. Customs Commissioner William Von Raab the day of the Tampa indictments listed his own and Giuliani’s press representatives as the only media contacts on the story. It is also why one of the Giuliani assistants who at­tended the November 4 meeting with the banking regulators, Steve Robinson, was handling not only the Alcaino case but that of another launderer, Colombian Pedro Charria, who also was charged with running drug money through BCCI.

Despite these many warnings about a bank already charged with $31 million in drug laundering, Giuliani’s office never got back to the bank regulators and never opened a grand jury inquiry. Several months later, a congressional investigator frustrated by Justice Department resistance to any broad-based BCCI investigation went to Manhattan District Attorney Robert Mor­genthau and convinced him to launch one. With the cooperation of the same state and federal banking officials mystified by the lack of response from Giuliani’s office, Mor­genthau indicted and convicted a host of BCCI officials in 1991 and 1992.

His case included counts that flowed from the money-laundering charges de­scribed in the ignored 1988 referral, which was sent to top Giuliani aide Bruce Baird. Contacted by the Voice, Baird, a Washington lawyer who contributed to Giuliani’s campaign as recently as August, said he doesn’t “have a clue” about what happened in response to the letter, and can’t recall receiving it. Robinson said he was not aware a referral letter had been sent and was not involved in any action the office took after the meeting with the regulators.

The 1988 bulletins about BCCI were ar­riving at Giuliani’s office just as he and his top aide Denny Young, who remained at the U.S. Attorney’s office until the end of January 1989 and joined White & Case (W&C) on February 16, were having their initial discussions about possibly joining the firm. A headhunter long friendly with Giuliani who was the unofficial go-between in these negotiations, Wendeen Eolis, first talked to Giuliani about W&C’s interest in November. The Manhattan Lawyer report­ed at the time that formal Giuliani talks with the firm began in December after a lunch involving Young and a partner there. Eolis says: “In the fall of 1988, there were lots of law firms chomping at the bit to talk partnership to Rudy, but White & Case was one of the select few Rudy and Denny chose to consider.” A source close to the discussions says the early meetings with W&C preceded by weeks their consider­ation of the only other serious bidder, Pros­kauer, Rose, Goetz and Mendelsohn.

While W&C would later claim that its role with BCCI had “never been significant,” figures obtained by the Voice reveal that the firm earned at least $4 million in the fiscal year ending September 30, 1987, from a half dozen BCCI-related clients. Two of the partners who met with Giuliani early in the negotiations and who participated in the four-member management committee vote to offer Giuliani and Young a combined million-dollar package ($780,000 for Giu­liani and $300,000 for Young, with Giu­liani taking almost twice the draw of the average partner) were directly involved in the BCCI-related business — W&C chair James Hurlock, and Eugene Goodwillie Jr. Hurlock became a major Giuliani donor, raising $19,500 while contributing $2000 to the 1989 campaign himself; Goodwillie, the principal partner in charge of the BCCI work, gave $1000; W&C lawyers gave a total of $48,000.

W&C’s 1987 client billings list $624,302 directly from BCCI and another $429,675 from the booming BCC affiliate in Colom­bia, which had two branches in Medellín, was closely tied to the drug trade and even became the multimillion-dollar depository for druglord Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez. It earned a mere $16,000 from the Republic of Panama that year, but that was a sharp dip from the 1986 total of $109,000, and was on top of the $300,000 Giuliani associates acknowledged in 1989 that W&C had earned over a period of a few years from the Panamanian national bank (BCCI and the Panama bank combined to hide $23 million of Noriega loot). The firm was so deeply involved with Ghaith Pharaon, the now fugitive Saudi tycoon and BCCI share­holder eventually indicted for illegally fronting for BCCI in the acquisition of three American banks, that in 1987 it listed $1.1 million in fees from Pharaon’s holding companies, Redec and Interredec; $643,000 from his oil company Attock; and $98,000 from the Pharaon Group.

W&C also reportedly earned substantial fees over the years involving Pharaon’s bank transactions, including two much-in­vestigated ventures: his sale of the National Bank of Georgia to Clark Clifford’s First American, and the purchase of the Califor­nia-based Independence Bank. Fueled by over $300 million in sometimes secret loans from BCCI, Pharaon spent years scouting and occasionally buying American banks as an apparent agent of BCCI, which was effectively barred by federal regulators from directly taking over one.

A few weeks after Pharaon’s principal representative here, Amer Lodhi, began co­operating with investigators in March 1989, he was told by W&C brass that Pharaon had issued an ultimatum: either it dropped Lodhi, who had recently taken a counsel position at W&C, or Pharaon would walk away from the firm. Lodhi, who was first involved with W&C as a young associate back in the ’70s, was shown the door within weeks of Giuliani’s ironic arrival.

When Clifford, the legendary Washing­ton lawyer still under indictment with Mor­genthau, appeared before a Senate commit­tee probing BCCI in October 1991, he was asked about his billings to the bank. Distin­guishing it from the mountain of fees he’d collected from the BCCI-backed First American, Clifford said his direct work for the bank was “an occasional matter because they used White & Case.” (Clifford added that BCCI also “sometimes used Sullivan & Cromwell” as well as one California and Florida firm.) “I think, as a matter of fact,” he concluded, “they used them a good deal more than they used us.”

The association was so strong that Assis­tant U.S. Attorney Thomas Zaccaro says it was W&C’s actions in the 1985 Indepen­dence deal that have become the legal hook giving federal prosecutors jurisdiction to bring a still-pending $37 million civil claim against Pharaon in New York courts. Zac­caro also says that W&C is “probably con­flicted out” of the ongoing case because of the role the firm played in the BCCI-con­nected acquisition. A Federal Reserve affidavit in the case spells out two aspects of W&C’s involvement — indicating first that W&C “drafted an investment advisory agreement” naming BCCI as Pharaon’s in­vestment adviser on the deal (a device that concealed the fact that BCCI was actually buying the bank); and second, that W&C then participated in discussions surround­ing Pharaon’s repayment of a loan that had partially financed the “Independence ac­quisition” (the $12 million Pharaon used to repay this loan came from BCCI). The Fed document does not say that W&C had any knowledge of the full scope of BCCI’s hand in this acquisition.

Since W&C represented both Pharaon and BCCI, as well as other apparent fronts for BCCI like the First American Bank of New York (FABNY), investigators have also pondered the question of whether part­ners in the firm were aware of the bank’s or Pharaon’s deceptive practices with regula­tory agencies. These questions have in­volved practices reaching back to the early ’80s when W&C, knowingly or not, helped pave the way for BCCI’s covert entry in the New York market by assisting in the sale of over 35 Bankers Trust branches to FABNY — the key to establishing the new bank as a force in this region (BCCI could only run an office, not a real branch in New York, and was thus barred by regulators from taking domestic deposits here in its own name). Bankers Trust was W&C’s larg­est and oldest client, and FABNY became a client too, paying the firm over $330,000 in fees from 1984 through 1986.

It was difficult for any observer not to notice the stark signs of BCCI’s involve­ment with FABNY since it was BCCI offi­cials, not First American, who initiated the Bankers Trust purchase, and BCCI that ran a yearly average of $10.6 million through FABNY (more than any other American bank), with 47 BCCI affiliates maintaining accounts there. FABNY was even head­quartered virtually next door to the BCCI agency on Park Avenue and took its top executives from BCCI ranks and recommendations.

No proof of any W&C misconduct in all of these dealings, however, has ever been alleged, and the firm has never even been legally targeted. When The American Law­yer reported in 1991 that Morgenthau and the Fed had subpoenaed documents related to Pharaon from W&C, a W&C spokesman said: “None of the services we have ren­dered to Dr. Pharaon have been called into question, nor do we expect them to be.” He has so far been proven correct. (As some measure of the depth of W&C involvement with FABNY, the firm billed the First American trustee $30,000 for gathering its extensive files related to Morgenthau’s sub­poena, with Hurlock and Goodwillie’s names appearing on the bill.)

But, in view of Pharaon’s still-pending New York and federal indictments, Federal Reserve orders permanently barring him from participating in the banking business in the U.S., and the continuing civil pro­ceedings that involve W&C, it is certainly possible that the firm was concerned in 1989, when it hired Giuliani, that the al­ready spreading BCCI scandal might turn in Pharaon’s direction. Since Hurlock, Goodwillie, the firm’s spokesman, and the Giuliani campaign declined to answer Voice questions about these issues, it is unclear whether any of W&C’s attraction to Giuliani might’ve been connected to con­cerns about the expanding BCCI case.

It’s also unclear if Giuliani himself knew about the 1988 BCCI referral, follow-up letter, meeting, and other discussions that involved his office. The then deputy attor­ney general at Justice in Washington, Rob­ert Mueller, did a retrospective review in August 1991, though he could not recall how his review began (“I know we had some allegation that a referral wasn’t fol­lowed through on,” he said). The Mueller review came on the heels of several events that presumably embarrassed the Justice Department into trying to come up with some explanation for how it managed to miss the biggest international bank robbery in history. The U.S. Attorney for the South­ern District of New York — under Giuliani or in the years after his departure — was hardly the only federal law enforcement agency in the Reagan/Bush era to look the other way when BCCI appeared on its ra­dar screen.

One event that may have prodded Mueller’s review was Morgenthau’s sweep­ing indictments, virtually all of which have led to convictions, on July 29, 1991, and the D.A.’s press statement at the time, which pointedly thanked the Federal Re­serve and state banking officials who’d met with Giuliani’s staff but never said a word about any cooperation from Justice. Anoth­er was the August 1, 1991, hearing of Sena­tor John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Terror­ism, Narcotics, and International Operations, when Customs chief Von Rabb and Kerry counsel Jack Blum took turns blasting the Justice stonewall on BCCI, and when Federal Reserve counsel Virgil Mat­tingly mentioned for the first time that the 1988 New York referral had been sent.

Newly assigned to oversee Justice’s BCCI investigations, Mueller may have been pushed as well by two House probes. On September 5, New York congressman Charles Schumer released a report that, af­ter several discussions with Mueller, faulted federal efforts, concluding “more could and should have been done to put BCCI out of business, sooner rather than later.” (A year later Schumer issued a much tougher re­view, saying law enforcement secrecy made it impossible to determine if the reason for what he described as pervasive governmen­tal inaction on BCCI was a lack of coordi­nation “or something more ominous, such as the possibility that criminal prosecutions may have been deflected or interfered with for illegal or nonlegitimate purposes.”)

On September 11, when Clifford testified for the first time in a much-ballyhooed public appearance, House Banking Com­mittee staff distributed a Federal Reserve chronology that spelled out the details of the 1988 referral, as well as a committee minority report that revealed that Fed offi­cials had “briefed Assistant U.S. Attorneys, FBI agents and IRS agents in the Southern District of New York concerning BCCI money laundering” in November of 1988.

In response to Mueller’s 1991 questions, the two Giuliani assistants, Robinson and Mary Lee Warren, who attended the 1988 meeting with the regulators began to put together their own explanation of what hap­pened. Both of them, to varying degrees, tried to minimize what the Fed and state officials told them. Robinson prepared a letter contending that the meeting was a getting-to-know-you session in which gener­al information was exchanged, with BCCI discussed only intermittently and without apparent purpose. “They clearly thought there were irregularities at the bank,” Rob­inson told the Voice, “but they did not suggest we open an investigation.” Un­aware of the referral letter to Baird, Robin­son could not quite figure out what the Fed wanted his office to do, though he says they did make it clear that they could not legally provide the prosecutors with detailed infor­mation on suspect BCCI accounts unless the Southern District “opened a formal in­vestigation” and “issued a grand jury subpoena for the documents.” He said maybe that was a “cryptic suggestion” Giuliani’s office should’ve taken. Insisting that the meeting and the bank were “no big deal” to him at the time, Robinson says that the whole issue just “fell off my map” after the session. He wrote the memo about it at the request of Warren, who was the narcotics chief in Giuliani’s office in 1988 but had become the head of the narcotics division in Washington, working under Mueller, by the time she called Robinson in 1991.

Warren, who is still at Justice and who also talked to Mueller, dismissed the meet­ing as a “hospitality session,” adding that the regulators “might have mentioned a bank” and that it “might have been BCCI” (though she could not recall what, if any­thing was said about any bank, she did remember that the group “ate cold cuts” and that she and Robinson had “a hard time finding” the Federal Reserve office). Angrily declaring that there “absolutely was not” any referral letter sent to Giuliani’s office, and refusing to listen to the three references to it in congressional documents, Warren also claimed to have “no recollec­tion” of the follow-up memo sent to her by the Fed four days after the meeting, which sources say listed specific bank customers who may have committed criminal violations.

While a Fed participant indicated later that the session was arranged at the request of Giuliani’s office, Warren says it “certain­ly wasn’t us who asked for it” and that the meeting “came out of the blue” — coinci­dentally, just five days after the referral letter. Robinson suggested that the meeting occurred because their Charria and Alcaino probes had resulted in subpoenas for BCCI records that the regulators were aware of, though Warren says she knew nothing at the time about either drug launderers’ use of the bank.

The only aspect of this disputed meeting that both sides agree on is that “nothing ever came of it,” as Warren puts it. Fed officials later told Morgenthau’s office they could not explain why the Southern District never followed through, but Mueller did not question the regulators, nor did he re­view their detailed notes of the meeting. Indeed, he has no recollection of ever see­ing the Fed referral letter or Robinson’s memo. “I can’t tell you I did a thorough investigation,” says Mueller, who nonethe­less says he was “satisifed” that whatever was done was appropriate. “I do recall the question coming up generally why Morgen­thau was doing such a good, aggressive job and yet there was no Southern District in­volvement. Ultimately the answer was that the case was being driven by the Federal Reserve and I don’t know why they weren’t working more closely with the Southern District.” He added that he knew none of the details of the Fed’s early efforts to enlist the Southern District in the probe, but said that he vaguely recalled that whatever was referred to Giuliani’s office “fell within the ambit of the Tampa money laundering probe” and “perhaps” wound up passed along to Florida officials. There is no evi­dence, in fact, that it ever was.

Baird’s memory lapse, Warren’s state­ment that she doesn’t know if she discussed the Fed meeting with any superiors, and Robinson’s fleeting acquaintance with the case leave no one who was associated with it who can answer questions about Giu­liani’s knowledge. Giuliani won’t get on the phone either, but it is hard to imagine that this hands-on prosecutor, with his own press officer listed as fielding questions about BCCI defendants associated with the Tampa operation, had no idea that these BCCI red flags were being waved in his direction. His simple disavowal of any knowledge about the actions of his own top investigator — revealed in last week’s Voice — seemed to be enough to silence any further assessment or exploration in the media.

Curiously, the press had no such re­sponse in 1989, continuing a drumbeat of stories about W&C clients and internal practices even when Giuliani adamantly denied any knowledge of them. Giuliani was particularly tarred with a Noriega brush in that campaign, though he insisted he had no way to know the firm represent­ed the druglord dictator prior to press revelations. However, the Voice has obtained a W&C prospectus then used to attract new lawyers that specifically said the firm repre­sented “foreign sovereigns” on an array of banking issues and listed Panama as one of 10 such clients. (Indeed the press had no such tolerance in the Liz Holtzman affair this year, hammering away at her though she swore under oath she had no idea her office had selected Fleet Bank as an under­writer, and all that countered her denial were reasonable inferences.)

With Giuliani’s extraordinary record as one of the country’s most effective federal prosecutors, he is certainly due the benefit of the doubt on issues involving his old office. But his service as U.S. attorney is all the public has to evaluate when it considers Giuliani, and, if he is running on that record, it is the press’s job to take a look at its possible underside. His office’s apparent mishandling of solid BCCI leads is fair crit­icism of him whether he did or did not know about it; he missed a golden opportu­nity to examine the so-called Bank of Crooks and Criminals that even loaned $9.5 million to the most ruthless Arab ter­rorist, Abu Nidal, who maintained a $60 million account at BCCI’s fashionable Sloane Street branch in London.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that no one knew in 1988 when Giuliani’s top staff passed on these BCCI leads that Morgenthau would manage to put the BCCI pieces together inch by inch over a period of years, ultimately bringing this corrupt colossus down. The congressional investiga­tor who came to Morgenthau — just six months after the federal referral to Giu­liani — convinced him to take on this hunt by pointing to all the allegations in his own backyard, from the Fed laundering to the possible false filings involving FABNY. Had Morgenthau not responded, the Southern District stonewall could very well have resulted in protecting BCCI from the death­blow it deserved, leaving the investigation in the hands of the Justice officials else­where who had stopped short.

Giuliani is also responsible for his choice of a law firm. His deal with W&C was widely assailed in the legal press at the time, which found its price tag inexplicable, especially for a lawyer who was hired to run for mayor by a firm that did no real munic­ipal work (The American Lawyer‘s Steve Brill said Giuliani was using the firm as “a meal ticket and a mail drop”).

It hardly looks now like this potential mayor did the requisite due diligence be­fore going there, and though no one in the media has reminded the public, he went back to the firm — despite all the hard ques­tions — when he lost. He stayed there for half a year, finally drifting away in 1990. All those W&C partners who believed so deeply in his 1989 candidacy that they dug in their pockets for dough have stopped contributing, adding to the curiosity of this temporary marriage.

As Erwin Cherovsky notes in his “Guide to New York Law Firms,” W&C “scarcely resembles the prototypically white shoe law firm which went by that name 15 years ago,” with “business connections and a gentlemen’s club atmosphere” having given way “to the hustle and bustle of a firm on the cutting edge.” Cherovsky concluded that while the firm has been on the upswing in recent years, “it still has not regained the standing it once enjoyed.” The collection of clients detailed here for the first time does little to enrich that reputation; and the vigi­lant Giuliani should’ve noticed.

David Dinkins has a four-year record as mayor to defend; it merits much of the criticism Giuliani has leveled. All Giuliani has is his legal practice — as a public and private advocate. Before we make him mayor, we are entitled to know as much as possible about that record. ■

Research: Jon Bowles, David Carnoy, and Adam Macy  

Perhaps the fairest way to judge the competence, integ­rity, and character of a government is how it responds when credible information about misconduct is brought to its attention. Any adminis­tration can suffer a scandal, because the susceptibility to temptation has been part of human na­ture since the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Any of us can be fooled or betrayed by a subordinate. Even Rudy Giuliani had to prosecute one of his own assistants who had become corrupt.

The fundamental question about the Koch administration is no longer why the mayor gave power to so many crooks, but exactly what happened years ago when whistleblowers, law enforcement investiga­tors, and private citizens first tried to warn him of questionable contracts and commissioners who smelled of graft. Nothing reveals the heart of the Koch administration better than its treatment of these prophetic individuals who discov­ered clues to criminal or unethical prac­tices, spoke out, and were punished or crushed for their idealism and honesty.

Over the past month I have interviewed a dozen people, including a former high city official who was fired while investigat­ing former transportation commissioner Anthony Ameruso; a city contract manag­er who was demoted for trying to audit a suspicious boondoggle; a woman harassed out of the taxi industry after she went on TV to call for an investigation of the Taxi and Limousine Commission chairman Jay Turoff; a cable TV businessman who went bankrupt after refusing to pay a bribe to Donald Manes; and three former prosecu­tors who were prevented from setting up a sting operation to catch Manes in 1982.

These people provided new evidence of just how serious and broad an effort was made between 1982 and 1985 to warn Mayor Koch of corruption within his ad­ministration. Together, they paint a pic­ture of a mayor and an administration willfully indifferent to vital informa­tion — almost Reaganesque in not want­ing to know.

(These are not the witnesses discov­ered by the Martin Commission, who vol­unteered significant leads in 1982 about corruption in the Parking Violations Bu­reau — and were ignored. Those highly credible whistleblowers included a police officer and James Rose, the PVB comptroller.)

Gordon Haesloop, the former city dep­uty investigations commissioner, was ordered to stop a productive investigation into transportation commissioner Am­eruso in early 1985 and then was fired a few weeks later. Department of Environ­mental Protection whistleblower Edward Nicastro, a contract manager, suffered a demotion, harassment, was almost fired, and then was reassigned to the equivalent of a gulag — a garage in Queens — by a Friedman crony after seeking permission to audit a Friedman client.

To understand more fully the political, bureaucratic, psychological, and moral context of these five stories of rejected early warnings, it is useful to first summarize some recent history. It is helpful to recall all the signals and messages that the highly popular mayor was sending at the time to his commissioners, to the political culture, to the opinion makers, and to those seeking city contracts.

• To become mayor in 1977, Koch reached an accommodation with Brook­lyn Democratic Party leader Meade Esposito. In his second book, Politics, Koch explained that part of his deal was that Esposito, whom Koch knew to be a friend of racketeers, must keep his per­sonal backing a secret. Koch wrote: “We made it clear that one thing we didn’t want him [Esposito] to do was endorse me in any public way … he agreed to pull strings very discreetly … I must say he has always been very helpful to me.”

In return for this covert institutional and financial backing, Koch gave Espo­sito hundreds of jobs for clubhouse hacks exempt from civil service merit exams. He also gave Esposito at least two com­missioners: Jay Turoff and Anthony Ameruso. The Ameruso appointment was the very first message Koch sent to all of us, even before he was sworn in. Esposito wanted Ameruso, his personal protege, who had been the mediocre highways commissioner in the Beame administra­tion, to be promoted to transportation commissioner by Koch. When an independent screening panel of transit ex­perts, including Sally Goodgold, Joel Harnett, and Theodore Kheel, recom­mended six other people and found Ameruso unqualified, Koch immediately dissolved and denounced the screening panel and named Ameruso, saying, “I be­lieve he will prove that my judgement is right.” (Ameruso is now under indict­ment for perjury by Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau.)

• In 1985, the mayor’s own Depart­ment of Investigations released a report that concluded that Staten Island bor­ough president Ralph Lamberti had vio­lated the conflict-of-interest provisions of the City Charter, and had committed five misdemeanors. The next day Koch held a press conference, endorsed Lamberti for reelection, and called him an “honest man” and “a partner.”

• Koch gave Donald Manes and Stan­ley Friedman control over hundreds of patronage jobs and let them convert low-­visibility city agencies into clubhouse fiefdoms. As a favor to Manes, Koch ap­pointed Geoffrey Lindenauer deputy commissioner of the Parking Violations Bureau in July 1980, despite Linden­auer’s lack of qualifications and sordid past as a phony sex therapist. Koch al­lowed Manes to control the bidding pro­cess for cable television in Queens — an abdication that created backroom deals and an opportunity for extortion.

• Koch gave Friedman the Citisource contract for hand-held computers that was worth $2 million to Friedman. He appointed Friedman’s law partner, Ted Teah, to the City Planning Commission; he named Friedman crony Paul Victor to the Conciliation and Appeals Board; he authorized $15 million in city contracts to groups under the control of poverty blimp Ramon Velez; and he named Fred Carfora deputy commissioner of the De­partment of Environmental Protection, in which position Carfora demoted and then tried to fire whistleblower Edward Nicastro.

Koch hired Friedman’s wife, Jackie, for a City Hall job exempt from civil service requirements and invited Friedman to be one of a dozen guests at his private swearing-in on’New Year’s Eve of 1985 — a signal of intimacy that city contractors surely noticed.

When publisher/gadfly Jim Smith questioned Koch at the City Club in Oc­tober 1984 about the legalities of Fried­man’s assetless company getting the prof­itable no-bid hand-held computer contract, Koch insulted Smith, defended Friedman, and said: “How dare you say those terrible things about him … It’s so easy to libel people.”

Ambition drove Koch to make a deal with a steep price. The political structure kept its bargain. It gave Koch a working majority on the Board of Estimate and loyalty on election day. And Koch gave the clubhouse system patronage and con­tracts. Koch got what he wanted: power, a stage, celebrity. And the rulers of the system got what they wanted: wealth and power.

For eight years, almost everyone was satisfied — the buyer, the seller, the pub­lic, the media. Just by doing their jobs, the whistleblowers were a threat to this sordid compact against the public interest.

EDWARD NICASTRO WAS THE DIREC­TOR of procurement and contract manager for the Department of En­vironmental Protection in 1984. He was everything the public, and the mayor, could want a city employee with a responsible job to be. He was a graduate of St. John’s University and the Universi­ty of Bridgeport Law School. He was an expert at modernizing and administering contracts. He had a profound sense of civic virtue, partially rooted in his desire to repay a debt of gratitude fo the city that sheltered his father from Sicily.

Nicastro had been given the highest possible job ratings by his supervisors, and about 30 employees worked under his supervision. His staff had saved the city hundreds of thousands of dollars when it discovered padded bills and underweighted deliveries from asphalt contractors. He was also a true believer in Ed Koch as an honest, independent mayor; Nicastro’s wife had been a full-time worker in Koch’s victorious 1977 campaign for mayor, and she knew Koch personally.

Early in 1984, Nicastro became suspi­cious of waste and bid-rigging in the con­struction of City Water Tunnel Number Three, being built between Manhattan and Queens, which, has now become the focus of a major investigation by U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani. All Nicastro knew in 1984 was that there were mil­lions of dollars in cost overruns, apparent collusion in the bidding by two consor­tiums, and that no independent audits were being conducted, because his office was being excluded from the review pro­cess. He could see that there was no ac­countability for the bids and contracts on the biggest project ever done by the DEP.

Motivated more by a conscientious concern for cost-effective management than by any dramatic thoughts of a con­spiracy, Nicastro politely expressed his concerns to his two immediate superiors in March 1984. They were deputy com­missioners Jeffrey Sommer and Fred Carfora. He told them his office should be analyzing the water tunnel bidding procedures and billing practices and that the exemption of such contracts from re­view was a direct violation of city rules. He warned Sommer and Carfora that the absence of accountability could lead to corruption.

Carfora assured Nicastro that he would get his oversight authority by the end of the fiscal year, in June 1984. When this did not occur as promised, Nicastro car­ried his warnings to the Department of Investigations in October 1984, when Patrick McGinley was commissioner.

“DOI was polite, but they never did anything,” Nicastro says now. “Four or five months after I went to them, I called them up to find what was happening with the investigation. That’s when they told me the the case had already been closed.”

Nicastro was aware that Sommer and Carfora were both clubhouse appointees loyal to Bronx Democratic boss Stanley Friedman. He knew Sommer had worked for Friedman when Friedman was deputy mayor, and he had heard that Carfora’s mother had been a Bronx district leader, and that Carfora had gotten his job through the party organization. And as someone experienced in politics himself, Nicastro was aware of Friedman’s power to control jobs and contracts in the Koch administration.

What he did not know until much later was that Friedman was also the lawyer who was being paid a six-figure fee to represent a consortium of companions with 90 per cent of the contracts to build Water Tunnel Number Three. And that one of Friedman’s clients he had wanted to audit had already paid almost $5 mil­lion in fines for bid-rigging outside of New York.

Nicastro is a self-described “tough Si­cilian,” and he did not back off from his position that the water tunnel needed to be audited, since it already had $31 mil­lion in cost overruns, and was 20 years behind schedule.

That’s when the attempt to crush Ni­castro began. His job performance ratings mysteriously began to decline from “out­standing” to “marginal.” In October 1984, deputy commissioner Carfora tried to fire him, falsely claiming that Nicastro had submitted fraudulent time sheets. At that point, Nicastro told the DOI he was being  fired because he was a “whistleblower,” and Carfora put his request to fire Nicas­tro on hold. In November, Carfora trans­ferred Nicastro to the agency’s gulag — a garage in Maspeth, in a dead-end job as purchasing agent in which he didn’t begin to utilize his skills.

On November 15, 1985, Nicastro sent a registered letter to Koch, with a copy to deputy mayor Stanley Brezenoff, explain­ing in detail what was being done to him, and repeating his “concern about DEP’s contract procedures, which violate City Charter rules as well as controller’s directives.”

Nicastro’s letter to Koch reminded him: “Your Mayoral Memorandum of May 2, 1984, clearly states that all retal­iatory actions [against whistleblowers] are to be investigated.”

On November 22, Nicastro received a reply from Dean Silverberg, then deputy counsel to the mayor, saying: “I have forwarded your materials to the Depart­ment of Investigations for their review of your concerns.”

Nicastro was now in the realm of Kaf­ka, where faceless bureaucrats toyed with his future. On December 2, 1985, he was informed that his salary was being re­duced by $1000 retroactively to the previ­ous August. At the same time, other man­agers in DEP were getting $4000 raises. Nicastro was told that this punishment had been authorized by Joe DeVincenzo, the mayoral assistant officially in charge of “salaries and job classifications” but unofficially the patronage liaison to the Democratic county leaders, including Friedman.

Nicastro was in despair working in the Maspeth garage for less money, and con­stantly trying to explain to his coworkers that he was right and his bosses were wrong.

He went through a trauma that scars many whistleblowers forever. David Durk and Frank Serpico went through the same kind of experience when they were trying to expose police corruption in the late 1960s and no one was listening. In retrospect, people like Durk, Serpico, and Nicastro might look like steadfast heroes. But they pay a large psychic price in fear, anger, and depression before they are ab­solved by history. And sometimes by a movie.

During 1985, Nicastro was drinking a lot and coming home after his two young children went to sleep. There were severe strains on his marriage.

“I was very unhappy and I felt like my life was coming apart,” he recalls now. “I became a different person. I was in a rage all the time. I thought I was being fol­lowed and I worried about my family’s safety.”

On December 2, 1985 — the day his sal­ary was cut — Nicastro’s wife, Alice Horo­witz, feeling that all other options were exhausted, wrote a personal letter to Koch. It began:

“Back in 1977 during your first mayor­al campaign, if you recall, I was your advance person. I advanced you all over the entire city and became a dedicated follower of yours; I believed in your policies.”

Alice Horowitz-Nicastro’s letter then went on to inform the mayor of her hus­band’s fate as a whistleblower: his de­grading demotion for trying to save the public money and alert his supervisors to potential fraud and bid-rigging. The let­ter ended with a personal appeal to the man she admired and had helped elect:

“Ed, is this the way a man is rewarded for his honesty and dedication? My hus­band loves working for the city. In his years with the Department of Environ­mental Protection he has saved the city hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, because of his honesty.

“This constant harassment has not only taken a monetary toll on him, but a mental and physical toll on him and the rest of us, including my children, who are too young to understand why their daddy is always so angry.

“Please, Ed, please help me. It has tak­en me a very long time to write this letter. I really hoped it would not get to this, but the survival of my family de­pends on it.

“Thank you for your precious time.”

On December 17, 1985, Alice Horowitz­-Nicastro got an impersonal, one-para­graph letter back from Dean Silverberg. It said:

“Your December 2nd letter has been referred to me. I anticipate that your husband will be contacted shortly by the Department of Investigation.”

On March 24, 1986 — 10 days after the suicide of Donald Manes, with a new moral climate in the media, and in the city — Edward Nicastro’s story was told in Newsday by reporter Leonard Levitt. The article was accompanied by a lengthy, well-documented exposé of the cost overruns and collusive bidding prac­tices on Water Tunnel Number Three.

In July 1986, after a thorough review by a new investigations commissioner­ — Kenneth Conboy — Carfora was demoted for unlawfully harassing and trying to fire Nicastro, and making false charges against him. His salary was cut from $71,000 to $60,000. Carfora resigned rather than accept this mild sanction.

Today Edward Nicastro has a dull job in DEP that has nothing to do with his proven career expertise: monitoring con­tracts, a skill the Koch administration would seem to need.

GORDON HAESLOOP WENT TO WORK for the city Department of Inves­tigations in 1979 as general coun­sel. From May 1981 until the spring of 1985 he was the depart­ment’s deputy commisioner. Like most able investigators, he has a stubborn, in­dependent temperament. He supervised five or six staff attorneys and several detectives. He had been in charge of the undercover project that led to the convic­tion of Brooklyn city councilman Louis Olmedo.

In February 1985, Haesloop was con­ducting a multifaceted investigation of transportation commissioner Anthony Ameruso. DOI had a sworn deposition from a Transportation Department em­ployee, given in September 1984, charg­ing that Ameruso had taken “envelopes stuffed with cash” and that he had per­formed “special [parking] favors for Ma­fia restaurants.” A city contractor had complained to DOI that Ameruso was harassing his armored car company and showing favoritism in awarding parking meter collection contracts to a competi­tor, which had no gun permits or insur­ance and had organized crime ties. There were also several allegations that Amer­uso was secretly living outside the city, in violation of Section 3 of the Public Offi­cers Law, even though he had given City Hall a Brooklyn phone number at which to reach him in case of emergencies.

Moreover, by the winter of 1985, Haes­loop was convinced that PVB was mis­managed and probably corrupt, and since PVB was part of Ameruso’s responsibility as transportation commissioner, he sus­pected that Ameruso might become part of the PVB inquiry as well. One reason Haesloop felt something was rotten at PVB was quite personal. He had received a dunning letter from Bernard Sandow’s collection agency, demanding $2000 for parking tickets he had paid a long time before.

So, approximately in February 1985, Haesloop assigned DOI detectives to begin a surveillance of Ameruso, primarily to develop evidence of his violation of the residency law. Haesloop recalled:

“Such types of surveillance usually last for about two weeks. With Ameruso, after three or four days of tailing him, we es­tablished that he lived on Roslyn, Long Island. Each morning his son would drive him along the service road to the city line at Queens. At that point Ameruso would get into his waiting city car, and his city driver would take him to work. This fact by itself could have warranted his being fired by the mayor.”

Haesloop continued:

“Next I wanted to install a pen register on Ameruso’s Brooklyn phone — a device that does not require a court order or a search warrant — that would track phone calls and prove if he had a Call Forward­ing device on the Brooklyn number to his Long Island home. Pen registers were a routine investigative tool in the office. We had installed about 15 of them — some in noncriminal investigations — over five years … [DOI senior staff attorney] Su­san Ross and I together told Commis­sioner McGinley that Ameruso was vio­lating the residency rule and that I wanted to install the pen register. But McGinley ordered me not to use it and ordered me to terminate the surveillance. He never gave me a reason. McGinley fired me about four weeks later.”

(McGinley has denied he was told Ameruso was living outside the city, but Susan Ross has verified that McGinley was informed of that fact. A third former DOI official has also confirmed Haes­loop’s recollections.)

When I asked Haesloop why he didn’t go directly to the mayor when the investi­gation was halted, he replied:

“There was a general perception in city government that Ameruso was favored and protected at City Hall. On top of that, I felt that Koch fired deputies who went to him to complain about their  bosses …

“In June 1985, after I was fired and just before I left the office, I did speak to McGinley. I asked him to tell the mayor that something fundamental was wrong with PVB and the Department of Trans­portation, and that Ameruso was a po­tential embarrassment to the mayor. McGinley didn’t say if he would commu­nicate that message for me …

“The separate PVB investigation was in my mind. I couldn’t understand how the mayor, even at that point, wasn’t doing more to hold Ameruso accountable for all the embarrassing problems at PVB. The city was losing millions of dol­lars on the percentages the collection agencies were keeping on their con­tracts — 40 per cent on some. The place was badly mismanaged. I just sensed that Ameruso was protected, and I would be perceived as disloyal.”

I asked Haesloop, who is now in pri­vate practice, if he had been upset about being dismissed by McGinley.

“No, I was happy to go. I was fed up arresting some poor inspector for taking $100 just before he became eligible for his pension. I felt demoralized that I could only go after the small fish. I was frus­trated I couldn’t investigate a full com­missioner like Ameruso. If I couldn’t pur­sue an Ameruso case, then I didn’t want to work there anymore.”

The mayor’s durable faith in Ameruso was indeed extraordinary. Even when Ameruso resigned in January 1986, after the PVB corruption was becoming known, Koch said at Ameruso’s farewell press conference: “He’s impeccable. I rec­ommend him without reservation.”

BARBARA MEYERS GREW UP IN THE East New York section of Brook­lyn and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1959. During the 1960s, she was a nurse and a self-described “hippie antiwar marcher.” By 1975, after working in the shipping industry for a few years, she was contemplating a career change and decid­ed to drive a taxi while doing her thinking.

Meyers found she enjoyed driving a cab. “I loved the variety of experience, the sense of freedom, the interaction with other people, the sense of adventure,” she says. By 1976, she had borrowed money, purchased two taxi medallions for $23,000 each, and started running the Silver Eagle Cab Company. Gradually, Meyers became a reformer within the taxi industry, a vocal defender of her rights, and a critic of the taxi commission.

On April 7, 1982, Barbara Meyers par­ticipated in a taping of the Eyewitness News Conference on ABC-TV, with re­porter Milton Lewis and Richard Smith, who had authored a report for the mayor on the taxi industry. The show was to be aired on Sunday, April 10, 1982.

During the taping, Meyers charged that the taxi commission was “corrupt,” and that the giving out of 100 free taxi medallions for a diesel fuel experiment was “a fraud.” (The number of medal­lions had been frozen at 11,700 since the 1930s.) She also criticized Mayor Koch and Taxi and Limousine Commission chairman Jay Throff in harsh terms.

“I did it because I needed help,” Mey­ers says now. “I was looking for the pow­er of the press to help me clean up the industry. I didn’t have the specific evi­dence to prove a criminal case, but I knew something was rotten, and I knew where to look … I remember when I said the word ‘corruption,’ the moderator [Lewis] interrupted me and asked if I realized what I was saying. I told him I did.”

The day after the taping — two days before the show went on the air — Barbara Meyers was called by Ronald Russo, deputy commissioner of the Department of Investigations.

“He approached me in a very hostile way,” Meyers says. He tried to intimidate me and make me feel like I was the prob­lem. He said that what I said about Tur­off at the taping was inflamatory. He said I’d better come down to his office, and if I didn’t that he would subpoena me. I felt like I was the criminal and Throff was the whistleblower.”

On April 14, 1982, four days after her criticism of Turoff was on television, Meyers was the victim of Taxi and Lim­ousine Commission harassment.

“Three TLC inspectors stopped my cab, ripped the medallion off my hood, and gave me three tickets for no reason,” Meyers told me. “I won my appeal against the tickets, but I lost a few days of work. I felt it was an obvious reprisal. I also started to get threatening phone calls at home saying I knew what happens to rats.”

On May 6, 1982, Meyers testified for two hours under oath to the Department of Investigations, with a stenographer present. She made a clear case for further investigation of the way the 100 medal­lions were given to a few favored fleets on the basis of the fraudulent diesel experiment.

She said: “There are 100 medallions in the street earning enormous amounts of money, amounting to millions, in a very favored way for the operator of those medallions … I want to know why, why not me? I would be happy to participate in an experiment of that nature … How were they chosen? What arrangements?”

(What Meyers didn’t know at that point was that the 100 medallions were awarded to the Research Cab Corpora­tion, and other companies owned by Donald Sherman and represented by Stanley Friedman as a lawyer-lobbyist.)

Meyers risked her career by going on television and giving a deposition to the Department of Investigations. As a re­ward, her attorney received a letter from investigations commissioner McGinley, dated August 2, 1982, scolding Meyers. The letter said:

“Ms. Meyers presents herself to the public as a highly responsible taxi-owner operator … In view of this, I consider her deliberate and public use of terms like ‘corruption’ and ‘corrupt’ to have been unhelpful to say the least.”

McGinley now claims he did not write this letter, that it was written for him by his former first deputy commissioner, Ronald Russo. But Russo told me:

“McGinley is not telling the truth. I did not write that letter. I left the Depart­ment of Investigations on July 9, 1982. I opened my private practice on July 12, 1982. I was not there in August. McGinley is looking for scapegoats.” Russo refused to comment on the record about his conversation with Meyers.

On April 10, 1986, the State Investiga­tions Commission (SIC) held a public hearing on corruption at the TLC. It was four years to the day that Barbara Mey­ers had gone on ABC television urging the world to notice the diesel-medallion hoax. The hearing began with SIC chair­man David Trager making a formal statement:

“Our investigation has led us to the firm conclusion that the diesel test pro­gram was, from its inception, a fraud designed to provide medallions worth more than $3.7 million per year to Re­search Cab … Former TLC chairman Jay Turoff played a central role in exe­cuting this scheme … He acted to con­ceal, steal, or destroy records of the TLC relating to medallions issued to Research Cab. He personally directed that 123 me­dallions — 23 more than authorized — be issued to Research Cab.”

During the April 10 hearing, Robert Mackasek, the inspector general for the TLC, testified. He admitted that after Meyers made her original charges on tele­vision, his entire investigation consisted of asking his boss, Jay Turoff, if they were true. Turoff had said the charges were rubbish. Mackasek also conceded that Turoff helped arrange for him to received a $71,000 loan from the HYFIN credit union — a loan cosigned by Turoff.

Finally, Mackasek admitted that he had gone to Stanley Friedman’s law of­fices, and tipped Friedman that his cli­ent — Research Cab — was under investi­gation by the SIC. Mackasek testified that Turoff — who set up the meeting­ — and Research Cab Corporation president Donald Sherman were also present when he told Friedman everything he knew of the investigation.

One of the last questions the State Investigations Commission asked Macka­sek was whether he was active in politics. He said that in 1985, when he was in private practice, Turoff had called him, and in response he had raised money for Koch from taxi industry companies, and lined up cabs to transport pro-Koch vot­ers to the polls on election day.

Unwittingly, Barbara Meyers had chal­lenged the nexus of power in New York City in 1982. She was shining a light into the eye of the tiger. Jay Turoff owed his job to Meade Esposito. Turoff was per­forming significant money-making favors for Stanley Friedman’s clients. And Tur­off was raising substantial sums of cam­paign money for the mayor from the in­dustry he was supposed to be regulating.

Turoff’s trial on felony bribery and fraud charges begins February 17 in fed­eral court.

Barbara Meyers is now out of the taxi business. She has written a book for children on how to deal with the death of a pet, and runs a car service that trans­ports pets that are sick.

IN THE LAST FEW MONTHS, THREE Queens power brokers have been in­dicted on charges involving manipula­tion of the cable television franchise in Queens: administrative judge Fran­cis Smith, realtor John Zaccaro, and po­litical consultant Mike Nussbaum. All three were charged with acting in concert with Donald Manes to extort bribes from bidders seeking to wire Queens for cable. In addition, U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani is now in the final stages of his investiga­tion into the Bronx cable TV franchise, where the targets of the grand jury in­clude Stanley Friedman, Ramon Velez, Frank Lugovinia, and Tod Tuah.

Queens businessman Al Simon had been trying to warn the proper authori­ties since at least 1981 that the way the city was awarding cable TV franchises was a process designed to be corrupt, because it was secretive, immune to mer­it, and controlled by Manes in Queens and Stanley Friedman in the Bronx. But the mayor insisted the system was “fair and open,” and nobody paid much notice to Al Simon, even when his company, Ortho-Vision, went bankrupt in 1983. He was treated as just another civic crank.

Al Simon, now 54, grew up in Wil­liamsburg, dropped out of high school, went into the army, and then attended the NYU School of Commerce at night for six years.

He became a kind of cable television visionary, and first applied to the city for a cable franchise back in 1972. In 1977, Simon’s company submitted a bid for the Queens franchise, but lost out to the Knickerbocker Communications Corpo­ration, a subsidiary of Time Inc. with power broker lawyers, publicists, and consultants. Simon filed a taxpayer’s suit that alleged Knickerbocker’s franchise was illegal because the contract differed materially from its petition for the con­tract. Simon won his lawsuit, and the franchise was withdrawn.

In 1981, the fight was on to wire Queens. Cable was a hot, futuristic indus­try, with everyone thinking gigantic prof­its were inevitable. Simon, viewed as an outsider and maverick entrepreneur, was competing against corporate giants like Warner-Amex, which was paying power­broker lawyer Sid Davidoff more than $150,000 in legal fees. Simon wrote up proposals, went to community planning boards, and convinced several of them to pass resolutions supporting his native Queens company. But Davidoff was Don­ald Manes’s best friend. He could walk into Boro Hall and act like he was co­-borough president. The corporate chair­man of Warner’s was Steve Ross, another friend of the borough president’s.

In October 1981, Simon says he was visited by Mike Nussbaum, a political consultant who had managed most of Donald Manes’s campaigns and was one of the four or five people closest to Ma­nes. Nussbaum reportedly asked Simon for a $250,000 cash bribe. He said he was relaying a message from Manes through Manes’s deputy, Richard Rubin. He as­sured Simon that if the money was paid, he would get a portion of the Queens market.

“I told him no,” Simon says. “I thought I could win it on my own, on the merits. I never realized that when I wouldn’t pay off, they would freeze me out completely, and force me out of business.

“I was naïve. I never believed Koch would let Manes control the whole deci­sion. There were two years of public hearings, hundreds of meetings, docu­ments, minutes, records, and I never thought Manes by himself could wipe me out because I wouldn’t commit a crime. But Koch let it happen that way.”

(Simon finally told the bribe story to a Queens grand jury last year and Nuss­baum is now under indictment.)

In 1982, with the bidding process still going on, and Simon still thinking he would get fair treatment in an open pro­cess, he was asked to fill out a questionnaire by the city’s Department of Investi­gations. In a cover letter accompanying his completed questionnaire, Simon wrote a subtle request for a serious inves­tigation into the bidding process:

“It is interesting to note,” he wrote to commissioner Stanley Lupkin, “that the mandate from the Board of Estimate is limited to a background review of the applicants, and does not request a review of the process by which these applicants were targeted. Especially in light of a number of unanswered questions regard­ing the results to date.”

Simon never received a reply to his letter, which was dated February 12, 1982.

When asked why he didn’t report the Nussbaum-Manes extortion attempt at that point, Simon says: “I was afraid. I was also naïve. I thought I could get the franchise on my own. I lived in Queens. I had been in the cable television business since 1963. A couple of planning boards had voted for me. I had the necessary financial resources. I kept thinking I would get something on the merits … ”

In 1983, the Board of Estimate, at the direction of Manes, divided the Queens market, with Warner-Amex getting all the best middle-class and and upper-mid­dle-class neighborhoods as part of its prize franchise. And Al Simon’s company went broke. He gave interviews pointing out the conflict of interest between Ma­nes and Davidoff, but few stories were written.

On October 8, 1984, Simon filed a law­suit against Manes, Warner-Amex, and the rest of the Board of Estimate. Al Simon’s legal papers were a cry of, “Stop, Thief.” They said:

“The office of borough president [Ma­nes] was an active participant along with defendant [city franchise director] Mor­ris Tarshis in perpetuating on the public the fraud that the cable franchise selec­tion and negotiation process was based on the merits … Tarshis and the bor­ough president’s office knew that the po­litical process was more important than all the paper and all the promises and all the public hearings. Both acted to pre­serve the political process and to subvert the public hearing and the airing of the contracts. They wanted to reassert politi­cal control over the granting of lucrative franchises in the City of New York …

“Public hearings were held on the irrel­evant proposals, but the contract itself was kept from the local community boards … Defendants Tarshis and the borough president were determined that the only meaningful negotiation process should be the one they personally con­ducted. The office of borough president selected the cable companies that were targeted for negotiations. The decision was rubber-stamped by the mayor, comp­troller, and City Council president.”

When the lawyers at the city corpora­tion counsel’s office, and the lawyers at City Hall, read the blunt claim of civic fraud in Simon’s brief, they did not start an investigation and they did not contact Al Simon. They went into court and op­posed Simon’s lawsuit. Simon wants to reopen the bidding in Queens, and the Koch administration, despite three in­dictments, is opposing that effort in liti­gation now pending before the Appellate Division, First Department.

Steve Kramer, who is representing the city against Simon’s suit, says: “Simon is a disgruntled bidder. This was a com­pletely open process.”

But Al Simon remembers the extortion attempt: “Nussbaum wouldn’t talk in my office. So we walked around the block of my office in Astoria, down Thirty-Sev­enth Avenue and up 32nd Street. Nuss­baum said Donald wanted $250,000 up front. I would have to have it in an at­taché case, or there might be a Swiss bank account involved. He said the mon­ey would guarantee me the franchise. He said the message was coming from Ri­chie, who was speaking for Donald.”

IN MARCH 1982, HERB RYAN WAS A member of the city’s Taxi and Limou­sine Commission. He had been an aide to Donald Manes and president of Manes’s home political club, named after Adlai Stevenson. He had been appointed to the taxi commission on Ma­nes’s recommendation.

On March 12, 1982, Ryan took a bribe from the legendary undercover detective Eddie Gruskin, who was posing as a crooked car service dealer. The payoff was made in a parked car, and was audiotaped and videotaped by law-enforcement agents. During the transaction with Gruskin, Ryan said: “I want to introduce you to Donald. I want you to get to know Manes because he is running for mayor.”

(At that point Koch was running for governor with Manes’s backing and was the favorite to defeat Mario Cuomo in the primary. If Koch had won, Manes would have run for mayor.)

On March 20, 1982, Ryan took a sec­ond bribe from Gruskin in a meeting that was also recorded. Ryan was a small fish caught in a wide net. The prosecutors wanted the higher-ups.

In late March there was a meeting be­tween United States attorney Edward  Korman (now a federal judge); Stanley Lupkin, the city’s commissioner of inves­tigations; and Tom Puccio, then the chief of the organized crime strike force. All three agreed that Ryan might lead them to Manes in a brief period. Law enforce­ment agencies only had suspicions about Manes at the time, although evidence in­troduced at Stanley Friedman’s trial in New Haven showed that Manes had been extorting bribes since at least 1979 and was a thoroughly corrupt public official in 1982.

Korman, Lupkin, and Puccio agreed that Ryan should either be reappointed by the mayor or kept in a holdover posi­tion for a brief period so that the under­cover agent could get a face-to-face meet­ing with Ryan’s mentor, Donald Manes.

Lupkin presented this unanimous rec­ommendation by three law enforcement officials to Mayor Koch in early April. He informed the mayor that Manes had been named on the undercover tape. But the mayor terminated the investigation by refusing to allow Ryan to remain in a holdover position, in which he already had been serving since January 31. Koch insisted that Ryan be arrested at once.  (In April 1982, Koch was running for governor against Mario Cuomo and Ma­nes was supporting Koch even though Cuomo was a native son of Queens.)

In February 1986, as the Manes scandal was unraveling, NBC-TV reporter John Miller played on the air a portion of the undercover videotape of Ryan taking the bribe and boasting of his ties to Ma­nes. The next day Lupkin, now a lawyer in private practice, told reporters he was “disappointed” that Koch had refused to permit the sting to proceed. He said he had argued with the major that Ryan should be kept in place.

At first, Koch responded by claiming to reporters that no one had ever told him that Manes’s name had come up, or that Manes was in any way considered a po­tential target of the investigation. The next day he improved his recollection and conceded that he had been informed by Lupkin that Manes’s name had been used by Ryan on the tape.

Herb Ryan never cooperated with prosecutors. He was arrested, pleaded guilty, and served four months of a lenient, six­-month sentence, imposed on him by U.S. district judge Mark Costintino.

After Ryan got out of prison, he re­mained close to Manes. Manes’s phone logs, placed in evidence in New Haven, showed that Ryan left 57 phone messages for Manes during 1984 and 1985.

If Ed Koch had really wanted to know if the immense trust he placed in Donald Manes was justified, he would not have aborted the Herb Ryan sting, and he would not have overruled three law enforcement professionals.

ED KOCH IS THE MAN WHO ACTED naive out of cynicism. He is the man who chose to gaze into a mirror instead of out the window. He is the man who didn’t want to know. ■

Everybody knows all about Tom Wolfe.

Once there was THE Tom Wolfe, and suddenly there was the other TOM WOLFE.

Everybody was reading Esquire and the Herald Tribune’s magazine, New York, to see what Tom Wolfe was up to. People who didn’t really care about custom-built sports cars or stock car racers had to hear what Tom Wolfe was saying about them … one never merely reads Tom Wolfe’s descriptions, one hears, smells, touches them.

Addison and Steele pointed out a long time ago that readers have a gentle foible, they like to know what authors look like. Look like? Today’s readers demand and have acquired the right to know, possess, devour, destroy writers. Everybody wanted to know where Tom Wolfe had sprung from, this brilliantly talented, seemingly ubiquitous, altogether mysteriously third-person journalist. They found out, at least superficially, because Tom Wolfe may shake down just to be the hometown favorite, but when the home-town is New York City, he becomes the most superficially-newsweekly-written-about man of the hour, minute, issue. He came from Virginia. He was not related to the other Wolfe. He got his PhD in American Social and Intellectual History from Yale. He spent a few obscure years as a newspaper reporter in Washington and Latin America. He wrote “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” for Esquire, and all hell broke loose. There he was — The Man, the hottest property in town.

Everybody saw his picture and knew that he looks like an Oscar Wildean concept of Huckleberry Finn, that he wears custom-tailored kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline clothes — yellow suits, white silk-tweed suits, and one glorious mother of an orange suit. Everybody doesn’t know that somewhere in the West 40s is a tie-store owner who doesn’t care what or how Tom Wolfe writes, but appreciates him because he comes in once in a while to pick out something from the Second World War stock. “Er, Tom, when you … that is … what do you … you must … I mean, when you have to run out to pick up a cigar or something … ” “No, I don’t own any casual clothes.”

Everybody knows that Tom Wolfe gave Form to Meaningful Trivia. Somewhere there was a girl whose name was being mentioned in all the gossip and society columns, a girl with no talent, a girl who existed only to be mentioned, and everybody, every other writer in the city, knew she was there, but Tom Wolfe gave Shape and Meaning to Baby Jane (referred to in the Times as Mrs. Leonard) Holzer. He described her as “gorgeous in the most outrageous way,” with hair rising up from her head in a “huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane.” Now the dailies run tacky ads for cheap stores featuring sketches of tall androgynous girls in tight slacks with hair rising up from their head in a huge hairy corona. That’s Baby Jane … and Tom Wolfe’s put her There.

Writing just a few pieces in which he used pure newspaperman-description enhanced by stylistic brilliance, Tom Wolfe made a viable thing out of a sensibility crushed to death later when Susan Sontag sat on it. But Tom Wolfe could do more than describe a here-today-gone-tomorrow. Tom Wolfe could put on his Utterly Outrageous Uptown Clothes and walk into the lower East Side, and instead of being beaten up as an outside dandy (Wolfe’s a big, sturdy man in excellent condition, with mean-looking hands that could kill you), walked out with a great story.

And then came the rumors. A war. Tom Wolfe, heavens forbid, was writing an article about the New Yorker. Holy hell. What nerve. That ballsy bastard, did nothing frighten him? The prospect didn’t make the New Yorker happy. Matter of fact, they got kind of menopause-irritable about it. Hysterical’s the precise word. The New Yorker sent an undercover girl to the Trib to pick up back issues of Wolfe’s articles. Back at the Institution, Lillian Ross was rolling out her old cannon. They’d blow that boy to smithereens. Voila. The opening shot at Fort Sumter. Lillian Ross had PARODIED Tom Wolfe, and if that didn’t stop those damned kids over at the Tribune, nothing would. Tom enjoyed the parody very much (he’s enjoyed at least 11 by now). Everybody didn’t know that though. People on the streets were holding their breath. Would Tom Wolfe send over his typewriter wrapped in a white flag? Would he apologize for his youthful foolishness? Nope. Word got around. Tom Wolfe had just sent his manuscript down to the printer. Nothing would stop the Trib and Tom now except maybe if the New Yorker rounded up all the back issues of their magazine from cocktail tables all over Westchester and dropped them on top of the Trib building, reducing it to an ashtray.

Was there nothing that the Trib and Tom Wolfe wouldn’t do? Instead of being quiet about the Big Offensive, they advertised it. Ran full-page ads tweaking the New Yorker. Telling the New Yorker exactly what the New Yorker was saying about the Trib.

Not Deep Enough

The Big Sunday came. Everybody read the first installment of the two-part series. Oh dear, it didn’t quite make it. All the people who have been waiting 10, 20 years to see the Job Done On The New Yorker That It Deserves were almost in tears. Oh God, they had expected Something Big and it didn’t come off. He hadn’t gone quite deep enough. He hadn’t spent quite enough time on it. His style, so marvelously suited for sounds, sights, smells, textures, for Living Things, wasn’t quite appropriate. There was no sound to get across except a quiet FLOP, no smell except DECAY. He had encountered the age-old problem, possibly incapable of solution, of making a dull subject interesting.

But it didn’t really matter. The attacks against him were delicious. The entire New Yorker stable and their outside apologists came on like bulls. He had smoked out J.D. Salinger. J.D. Salinger sent down word that he was not happy with Tom Wolfe. Nat Hentoff said he would no longer write for New York. There! let the Herald Tribune’s New York live with that. Muriel Spark said that she was a “professional” observer of people, and when she looked at Tom Wolfe she was irritated. Ved Medha said that Walter Lippmann was kind of upset too. Vicious, he was vicious, everyone said. Scurrilous, unclean, un-American, a thoroughly bad boy. Christ, all the poor bastard had done was to write a sometimes-brilliant (the white socks part was without peer in incisiveness), sometimes-inadequate piece that didn’t come off. Some people said he was a Nihilist, no values at all; others said he was a Chinese Red, taking orders straight from Peking; a few thought he might be working for the CIA; one Baptist minister must have stood up somewhere in the South the next Sunday and said that Tom Wolfe was a good Christian who took orders only from God.

Hottest Property

Everybody knows Tom Wolfe is still the hottest property in town. They also know that someone will come up and bump him off. But if they have any brains at all, they should also realize that Tom Wolfe is 34 years old, extremely talented, and capable of development. Horses don’t die after they win their first big race.

Meanwhile, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is holding a publication party for Tom Wolfe on June 29 to celebrate a collection called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. It’s being held at the Gallery of Modern Art, and everybody expects something to Happen.

Nothing will.

The party itself will be nice, pleasant, well-mannered, reflecting the decency, graciousness, and Victorian good taste of the guest of honor.

Every daily and newsmag columnist will go back to the office and write a report on the party in Tom Wolfe’s style, because writers enjoy writing like Tom. It’s young and it’s free and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Everybody will feel comfortable again, because they’ll think that once more they know all about Tom Wolfe.

What’s not true. What everybody does not know is that Tom Wolfe once pitched semi-pro ball in Roanoke, and his best pitch was a … but no, I won’t tell you. I’ve already scooped every columnist in town.

I’m eight years old. My mother and I come out of our apartment onto the second­-floor landing. Mrs. Drucker is standing in the open doorway of the apartment next door, smoking a cigarette. My mother locks the door and says to her, “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Drucker jerks her head backward toward her own apart­ment. “He wants to lay me. I told him he’s gotta take a shower before he can touch me.” I know that “he” is her hus­band. “He” is always the husband. “Why? He’s so dirty?” my mother says. “He feels dirty to me,” Mrs. Drucker says. “Drucker, you’re a whore,” my mothers says. Mrs. Drucker shrugs her shoulder. “I can’t ride the subway,” she says. In the Bronx, ride the subway was a euphemism for going to work.

I lived in that tenement between the ages of six and 21. There were 20 apartments, four to a floor, and all I remember is a building full of women. I hardly re­member the men at all. They were every­where, of course — husbands, fathers, brothers — but I remember only the women. And I re­member them all crude like Mrs. Drucker or fierce like my mother. They never spoke as though they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I — the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image — I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.

My mother and I are out walking. I ask if she remembers the women in that building in the Bronx. “Of course,” she replies. I tell her I’ve always thought sexual rage was what made them so crazy. “Absolutely,” she says without breaking her stride. “Remember Drucker? She used to say if she didn’t smoke a cigarette while she was having intercourse with her husband she’d throw herself out the window. And Zimmerman, on the other side of us? They married her off to him when she was 16, she hated his guts, she used to say if he’d get killed on the job it would be a mitzvah.” My mother stops walking. Her voice drops in awe of her own memory; “He actually used to take her by physical force,” she says. “Would pick her up in the middle of the living room floor and carry her off to the bed.” She stares into the middle distance for a moment. Then she says to me: “The European men. They were animals. Just plain animals.” She starts walking again. “Once Zimmerman locked him out of the house. He rang our bell. He could hardly look at me. He asked if he could use our fire escape window. I didn’t speak one word to him. He walked through the house and climbed out the window.” My mother laughs. “That fire escape window, it did some business! Remember Cessa upstairs? Oh no, you couldn’t remember her, she only lived there one year after we moved in, then the Russians were in that apartment. Cessa and I were friendly. It’s so strange, when I come to think of it. We hardly knew each other, any of us, sometimes we didn’t talk to each other at all. But we lived on top of one another, were in and out of each other’s houses. Every­body knew everything in no time at all. A few months in the building and the women were, well, intimate.

“This Cessa. She was a beautiful young woman, mar­ried only a few years. She didn’t love her husband. She didn’t hate him, either. He was a nice man, actually. What can I tell you, she didn’t love him, she used to go out every day, I think she had a lover somewhere. Anyway, she had long black hair down to her ass. One day she cut it off. She wanted to be modern. Her husband didn’t say anything to her but her father came into the house, took one look and gave her a slap across the face she saw her grandmother from the next world. Then he instructed her husband to lock her in the house for a month. She used to come down the fire escape into my window and out of my door. Every afternoon for a month. One day she comes back and we’re having coffee in the kitchen. I say to her, ‘Cessa, tell your father this is America, Cessa, America. You’re a free woman.’ She looks at me and she says to me, ‘What do you mean tell my father this is America? He was born in Brooklyn.’ ”

My relationship with my mother is not good, and as our lives accumulate it often seems to wors­en. We are locked into a narrow channel of acquaintance, intense and binding. For years at a time there is an exhaustion, a kind of soften­ing, between us. Then the rage comes up again, hot and clear, erotic in its power to compel attention. These days it is bad between us. My mother’s way of “dealing” with the bad times is to accuse me loudly and publicly of the truth. Whenever she sees me she says, “You hate me. I know you hate me.” I’ll be visiting her and she’ll say to anyone who happens to be in the room — a neighbor, a friend, my brother, one of my nieces — “She hates me. What she has against me I don’t know, but she hates me.” She is equally capable of stopping a stranger on the street when we’re out walking and saying, “This is my daughter. She hates me.” Then she’ll turn to me and plead, “What did I do to you you should hate me so?” I never answer. I know she’s burning and I’m glad to let her burn. Why not? I’m burning, too.

But we walk the streets of New York together endless­ly. We both live in lower Manhattan now, our apart­ments a mile apart, and we visit best by walking. My mother is an urban peasant and I am my mother’s daughter. The city is our natural element. We each have daily adventures with bus drivers, bag ladies, ticket takers, and street crazies. Walking brings out the best in us. I am 45 now and my mother is 77. Her body is strong and healthy. She traverses the island easily with me. We don’t love each other on these walks, often we are raging at each other, but we walk anyway.

The apartment was a five-room flat, with all the rooms opening out onto each other. The kitchen window faced an alley in back of the building. There were no trees or bushes or grasses of any kind in the alley — only concrete, wire fencing, and wooden poles. Yet I remember the alley as a place of clear light and sweet air, suffused, somehow, with a perpetual smell of summery green.

The alley caught the morning sun (our kitchen was radiant before noon), and it was a shared ritual among the women that laundry was done early on a washboard in the sink and hung out to dry in the sun. Crisscrossing the alley, from first floor to fifth, were perhaps 50 clotheslines strung out on tall wooden poles planted in the concrete ground. Each apartment had its own line stretching out among 10 others on the pole. The wash from each line often interfered with the free flap of the wash on the line above or below, and the sight of a woman yanking hard at a clothesline, trying to shake her wash free from an indiscriminate tangle of sheets and trousers, was common. While she was pulling at the line she might also be calling, “Berth-a-a. Berth-a-a. Ya home, Bertha?” Friends were scattered throughout the buildings on the alley, and called to each other all during the day to make various arrangements (“What time ya taking Harvey to the doctor?” Or, “Got sugar in the house? I’ll send Marilyn over.” Or, “Meetcha on the corner in ten minutes”). So much stir and animation! The clear air, the unshadowed light, the women calling to each other, the sounds of their voices mixed with the smell of clothes drying in the sun, all that texture and color swaying in open space. I leaned out the kitchen window with a sense of expectancy I can still taste in my mouth, and that taste is colored a tender and brilliant green.

For me, the excitement in the apartment was located in the kitchen and the life outside its window. It was a true excitement: it grew out of contradiction. Here in the kitchen I did my homework and kept my mother company, watched her prepare and execute her day. Here, I learned she had the skill and vitality to do her work well but that she disliked it, and set no store by it. She taught me nothing. I never learned how to cook, clean, or iron clothes. She was a boringly competent cook, a furiously fast housecleaner, a demonic washerwoman.

Still, she and I occupied the kitchen fully. Although my mother never seemed to be listening to what went on in the alley, she missed nothing. She heard every voice, every motion of the clothesline, every flap of the sheets, registered each call and communication. We laughed together over this one’s broken English, that one’s loud­mouthed indiscretion, a screech here, a fabulous curse there. Her running commentary on the life outside the window was my first taste of the fruits of intelligence: she knew how to convert gossip into knowledge. She would hear a voice go up one octave and observe: “She had a fight with her husband this morning.” Or it would go down an octave and “Her kid’s sick.” Or she’d catch a fast exchange and diagnose a cooling friendship. This skill of hers excited me. Life seemed fuller, richer, more interesting when she was making sense of the human activity in the alley. I felt a live connection, then, be­tween us and the world outside the window.

The kitchen, the window, the alley. It was the atmo­sphere in which she was rooted, the background against which she stood outlined. Here she was smart, funny, and energetic, could exercise authority and have impact. But she felt contempt for her environment. “Women, yech!” she’d say. “Clotheslines and gossip,” she’d say. She knew there was another world — the world — and sometimes she thought she wanted that world. Bad. She’d stop dead in the middle of a task, staring for long minutes at a time at the sink, the floor, the stove. But where? how? what?

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over “the emptiness of a woman’s life,” as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analyzed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley. Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion?

We’re walking up Fifth Avenue. It’s a bad day for me. I’m feeling fat and lonely, trapped in my lousy life. I know I should be home working, and that I’m here playing the dutiful daughter only to avoid the desk. The anxiety is so great I’m walking with a stomach ache. My mother, as always, knows she can do nothing for me, but my unhappiness makes her nervous. She is talking, talking at tedious, obfuscating length, about a cousin of mine who is con­sidering divorce.

As we near the library, an Eastern religionist (shaved head, translucent skin, a bag of bones wrapped in faded pink gauze) darts at us, a copy of his leader’s writing extended in his hand. My mother keeps talking while the creature in gauze flaps around us, his spiel a steady buzz in the air, competing for my attention. At last, she feels interrupted. She turns to him. “What is it?” she says. “What do you want from me? Tell me.” He tells her. She hears him out. Then she straightens her shoulders, draws herself up to her full five feet two inches, and announces: “Young man, I am a Jew and a socialist. I think that’s more than enough for one lifetime, don’t you?” The pink-gowned boy-man is charmed, and for a moment bemused. “My parents are Jews,” he confides, “but they certainly aren’t socialists.” My mother stares at him, shakes her head, grasps my arm firmly in her fingers, and marches me off up the avenue.

“Can you believe this?” she says. “A nice Jewish boy shaves his head and babbles in the street. A world full of crazies. Divorce everywhere, and if not divorce this. What a generation you all are!”

“Don’t start, Ma,” I say. “I don’t want to hear that bullshit again.”

“Bullshit here, bullshit there,” she says, “it’s still true. Whatever else we did, we didn’t fall apart in the streets like you’re all doing. We had order, quiet, dignity. Fam­ilies stayed together, and people lived decent lives.”

“That’s a crock. They didn’t lead decent lives, they lived hidden lives. You’re not going to tell me people were happier then, are you?”

“No,” she capitulates instantly. “I’m not saying that.”

“Well, what are you saying?”

She frowns and stops talking. Searches around in her head to find out what she is saying. Ah, she’s got it. Triumphant, accusing, she says, “The unhappiness is so alive today.”

Her words startle and gratify me. I feel pleasure when she says a true or a clever thing. I come close to loving her. “That’s the first step, Ma,” I say softly. “The unhappiness has to be made alive before anything can happen.”

She stops in front of the library. She doesn’t want to hear what I’m saying, but she’s excited by the exchange. Her faded brown eyes, dark and brilliant in my child­hood, brighten as the meaning of her words and mine penetrates her thought. Her cheeks flush and her pud­ding soft face hardens wonderfully with new definition. She looks beautiful to me. I know from experience she will remember this afternoon as a deeply pleasurable one. I also know she will not be able to tell anyone why it has been pleasurable. She enjoys thinking, only she doesn’t know it. She has never known it.

A year after my mother told Mrs. Drucker she was a whore, the Druckers moved out of the building and Nettie Levine moved into their apartment. I have no memory of the Druckers moving out or of Nettie moving in. People and all their belongings seemed to evaporate out of an apartment, and others simply to take their place. How early I absorbed the circumstantial nature of most attachments. After all, what difference did it really make if we called the next-­door neighbor Roseman or Drucker or Zimmerman? It mattered only that there was a next-door neighbor. Nettie, however, would make a difference.

I was running down the stairs after school, rushing to get out on the street, when we collided in the darkened hallway. The brown paper bags in her arms went flying in all directions. We each said “Oh!” and stepped back, I against the staircase railing, she against the paint-blis­tered wall. I bent blushing to help her retrieve the bags scattered across the landing and saw that she had bright red hair piled high on her head in a pompadour and streaming down her back and over her shoulders. Her features were narrow and pointed (the eyes almond­-shaped, the mouth and nose thin and sharp), and her shoulders were wide but she was slim. She reminded me of pictures of Greta Garbo. My heart began to pound. I had never before seen a beautiful woman.

“Don’t worry about the packages,” she said to me. “Go out and play. The sun is shining. You mustn’t waste it here in the dark. Go, go.” Her English was accented, like the English of the other women in the building, but her voice was soft, almost musical, and her words took me by surprise. My mother had never urged me not to lose pleasure, even if it was only the pleasure of the sunny street. I ran down the staircase, excited. I knew she was the new neighbor.

Everything about Nettie proved to be impossible. She was a gentile married to a Jew like no Jew we had ever known. Her husband was a Merchant Marine, away at sea most of the time. (“Impossible,” my mother had said, “what Jew would work voluntarily on a ship?”) Alone and apparently free to live wherever she chose, Nettie had chosen to live among working-class Jews who offered her neither goods nor charity. A woman whose sexy good looks brought her darting glances of envy and curiosity, she seemed to value inordinately the life of every respectable dowd. She praised my mother lavishly for her housewifely skills — her ability to make small wages go far, always have the house smelling nice and the children content to be at home — as though these skills were a treasure, some precious dowry that had been denied her, and symbolized a life from which she had been shut out. My mother — secretly as amazed as everyone else by Nettie’s allure — would look thoughtful­ly at her when she tried (often vaguely, incoherently) to speak of the differences between them, and would say to her, “But you’re a wife now. You’ll learn these things. It’s nothing. There’s nothing to learn.” Nettie’s face would then flush painfully, and she’d shake her head. My mother didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain.

Rick Levine returned to New York two months after Nettie had moved into the building. She was wildly proud of her tall, dark, bearded seaman — showing him off in the street to the teenagers she had made friends with, dragging him in to meet us, making him go to the grocery store with her. An illumination settled on her skin. Her green almond eyes were speckled with light. A new grace touched her movements: the way she walked, moved her hands, smoothed back her hair. There was suddenly about her an aristocracy of physical being. Her beauty deepened. She was untouchable.

I saw the change in her, and was magnetized. I would wake up in the morning and wonder if I was going to run into her in the hall that day. If I didn’t I’d find an excuse to ring her bell. It wasn’t that I wanted to see her with Rick: his was a sullen beauty, glum and lumpish, and there was nothing happening between them that inter­ested me. It was her I wanted to see, only her. And I wanted to touch her. My hand was always threatening to shoot away from my body out toward her face, her arm, her side. I yearned toward her. She radiated a kind of promise I couldn’t stay away from, I wanted … I want­ed … I didn’t know what I wanted.

But the elation was short-lived: hers and mine. One morning, a week after Rick’s return, my mother ran into Nettie as they were both leaving the house. Nettie turned away from her.

“What’s wrong?” my mother demanded. “Turn around. Let me see your face.” Nettie turned toward her slowly. A tremendous blue-black splotch surrounded her half-closed right eye.

“Oh my God,” my mother breathed reverently.

“He didn’t mean it,” Nettie pleaded. “It was a mis­take. He wanted to go to the bar to see his friends. I wouldn’t let him. It took a long time before he hit me.”

After that she looked again as she had before he came home. Two weeks later Rick Levine was gone again. He swore to his clinging wife that this would be his last trip. When he came home in April, he said, he would find a good job in the city and they would at long last settle down. She believed that he meant it this time, and finally she let him pull her arms from around his neck. Six weeks after he had sailed, she discovered she was pregnant. Late in the third month of his absence, she received a telegram informing her that Rick had been shot to death during a quarrel in a bar in port some­where on the Baltic Sea. His body was being shipped back to New York, and the insurance was in question.

Nettie became intertwined in the dailiness of our life so quickly it was hard for me to remember what our days had been like before she lived next door. She’d slip in for coffee late in the morning, then again in the afternoon, and seemed to have supper with us three nights a week. Soon I felt free to walk into her house at any hour, and my brother was being consulted daily about Rick’s insurance.

“It’s a pity on her,” my mother kept saying. “A widow. Pregnant, poor, abandoned.”

Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled. The compact was made without a word between them. We got beautiful Nettie in the kitchen every day, and Nettie got my mother’s protection in the building. When Mrs. Zimmerman rang our bell to inquire snidely after the shiksa my mother cut her off sharply, telling her she was busy and had no time to talk nonsense. After that no one in the building gossiped about Nettie in front of any of us.

My mother’s loyalty, once engaged, was unswerving. Loyalty, however, did not prevent her from judging Nettie, it only made her voice her reservations in a manner more indirect than the one to which she was accustomed. She would sit in the kitchen with her sister, my aunt Sarah, who lived four blocks away, discussing the men who had begun to appear, one after another, at Nettie’s door in the weeks following Rick’s death. These men were his shipmates, coming to offer condolences. There was, my mother said archly, something strange about the way these men visited. And Nettie herself acted strangely with them. Perhaps that was what was most troubling: the odd mannerisms Nettie seemed to adopt in the presence of the men. My mother and my aunt exchanged “glances.”

“What do you mean?” I would ask loudly. “What’s wrong with the way she acts? There’s nothing wrong with the way she acts. Why are you talking like this?” They would become silent then, both of them, neither answering me nor talking again that day about Nettie, at least not while I was in the room.

One Saturday morning I walked into Nettie’s house without knocking (her door was always closed but never locked). Her little kitchen table was propped against the wall beside the front door — her foyer was smaller than ours, you fell into the kitchen — and people seated at the table were quickly “caught” by anyone who entered without warning. That morning I saw a tall thin man with straw-colored hair sitting at the kitchen table. Opposite him sat Nettie, her head bent toward the cotton print tablecloth I loved (we had shiny boring oilcloth on our table). Her arm was stretched out, her hand lying quietly on the table. The man’s hand, large and with great bony knuckles on it, covered hers. He was gazing at her bent head. I came flying through the door, a bundle of nine-year-old intrusive motion. She jumped in her seat, and her head came up swiftly. In her eyes was an expression I would see many times in the years ahead but was seeing that day for the first time, and although I didn’t have the language to name it, I had the sentience to feel jarred by it. She was calculating the impression this scene was making on me.

It rained earlier in the day and now at one in the afternoon, for a minute and a half, New York is washed clean. The streets glitter in the pale spring sunlight. Cars radiate dust-free happiness. Storefront windows sparkle mindlessly. Even people look made anew.

We’re walking down Eighth Avenue into the Village. At the corner of Eighth and Greenwich is a White Tower hamburger joint where a group of derelicts in permanent residence entertains visiting out-of-towners from 14th Street, Chelsea, even the Bowery. This after­noon the party on this corner, often raucous, is definite­ly on the gloomy side, untouched by weather renewal. As we pass the restaurant doors, however, one gentleman detaches from the group, takes two or three uncertain steps, and bars our way. He stands, swaying, before us. He is black, somewhere between 25 and 60. His face is cut and swollen, the eyelids three-quarters shut. His shoes are two sizes too large, the feet inside them bare. So is his chest, visible beneath a grimy tweed coat that swings open whenever he moves. This creature con­fronts us, puts out his hand palm up, and speaks.

“Can you ladies let me have a thousand dollars for a martini?” he inquires.

My mother looks directly into his face. “I know we’re in an inflation,” she says, “but a thousand dollars for a martini?”

His mouth drops. It’s the first time in God knows how long that a mark has acknowledged his existence. “You’re beautiful,” he burbles at her. “Beautiful.”

“Look on him,” she says to me in Yiddish. “Just look on him.”

He turns his bleary eyelids in my direction. “Whad­she-say?” he demands.

“She said you’re breaking her heart,” I tell him.

“She-say-that?” His eyes nearly open. “She-say-that?”

I nod. He whirls at her. “Take me home and make love to me,” he croons, and right there in the street, in the middle of the day, he begins to bay at the moon. “I need you,” he howls at my mother and doubles over, his fist in his stomach. “I need you.”

She nods at him. “I need too,” she says dryly. “Fortu­nately or unfortunately, it is not you I need.” And she propels me around the now motionless derelict. Para­lyzed by recognition, he will no longer bar our progress down the street.

We cross Abingdon Square. The gentrified West Vil­lage closes around us, makes us not peaceful but quiet. We walk through block after block of antique stores, gourmet shops, boutiques, not speaking. But for how long can my mother and I not speak?

“So I’m reading the biography you gave me,” she says. I look at her, puzzled, and then I remember. “Oh!” I smile in wide delight. “Are you enjoying it?”

“Listen,” she begins. The smile drops off my face and my stomach contracts. That “listen” means she is about to trash the book I gave her to read. She is going to say, “What. What’s here? What’s here that I don’t already know? I lived through it. I know it all. What can this writer tell me that I don’t already know? Nothing. To you it’s interesting, but to me? How can this be interest­ing to me?” On and on she’ll go, the way she does when she thinks she doesn’t understand something and she’s scared.

The book I had given her to read was a biography of Josephine Herbst, a ’30s writer, a stubborn willful raging woman grabbing at politics and love and writing, in there punching until the last minute. “Listen,” my mother says now in the patronizing tone she thinks conciliatory. “Maybe this is interesting to you, but not to me. I lived through all this. I know it all. What can I learn from this? Nothing. To you it’s inter­esting. Not to me.” Invariably, when she speaks so, my head fills with blood and before the sentences have stopped pouring from her mouth, I am lashing out at her. “You’re an ignoramus, you know nothing, only a know-nothing talks the way you do.” On and on I’ll go, thoroughly ruining the afternoon.

However, in the past year an odd circumstance has begun to obtain. On occasion, my head fails to fill with blood. I become irritated but remain calm. Not falling into a rage, I do not make a holocaust of the afternoon. Today, it appears, one of those moments is upon us. I turn to my mother, throw my left arm around her still solid back, place my right hand on her upper arm, and say, “Ma, if this book is not interesting to you, that’s fine. You can say that.” She looks coyly at me, eyes large, head half-turned; now she’s interested. “But don’t say it has nothing to teach you. That there’s nothing here. That’s unworthy of you, and of the book, and of me. You demean us all when you say that.” Listen to me. Such wisdom. And all of it gained 10 minutes ago.

Silence. Long silence. We walk another block. Silence. She’s looking off into that middle distance. I take my lead from her, matching my steps to hers. I do not speak, do not press her. Another silent block. “That Josephine Herbst,” my mother says. “She certainly car­ried on, didn’t she?”

Relieved and happy, I hug her. “She didn’t know what she was doing either, Ma, but yes, she carried on.” “I’m jealous,” my mother blurts at me. “I’m jealous she lived her life I didn’t live mine.”

Mama and Nettie quarreled, and I entered City College. In feeling memory these events carry equal weight: Both inaugurated open conflict, both drove a wedge between me and the un­knowing self, both were experienced as subver­sive and war-like in character. Certainly the conflict between Nettie and my mother seemed a strategic plan to surround and conquer. Incoherent as the war was, shot through with rage and deceit, its aims apparently confused and always denied, it never lost sight of the enemy: the intelligent heart of the girl who if not  bonded to one would be lost to both. City College, as well, seemed no less concerned with laying siege to the ignorant mind if not the intelligent heart. Benign in in­tent, only a passport to the promised land, City of course was the real invader. It did more violence to the emotions than either Mama or Nettie could have dreamed possible, divided me from them both, provoked and nourished an un­shared life inside the head that became a piece of treason. I lived among my people but I was no longer one of them.

I think this was true for most of us at City College. We still used the subways, still returned to the neighborhood each night, talked to our high school friends, and went to sleep in our own beds. But secretly we had begun to live in a world inside our heads where we read talked thought in a way that separated us from our parents. We had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed thought. This made us subversives in our own homes.

As thousands before me have said: “For us it was City College or nothing.” I enjoyed the solidarity those words in­voked but rejected the implied depriva­tion. At City College I sat talking in a basement cafeteria until 10 or 11 at night with half a dozen others who also never wanted to go home to Brooklyn or the Bronx, and here in the cafeteria my edu­cation took root. Here I learned that Faulkner was America, Dickens was poli­tics, Marx was sex, Jane Austen the idea of culture, that I came from a ghetto and D.H. Lawrence was a visionary. Here my love of literature named itself, and amazement over the life of the mind blos­somed. I discovered that people were transformed by ideas, and that intellectu­al conversation was immensely erotic.

We never stopped talking. Perhaps be­cause we did very little else (restricted by sexual fear and working-class economics, we didn’t go to the theater and we didn’t make love), but certainly we talked so much because most of us had been read­ing in bottled-up silence from the age of six on and City College was our great release. It was not from the faculty that City drew its reputation for intellectual goodness, it was from its students, it was from us. Not that we were intellectually distinguished, we weren’t, but our hungry energy vitalized the place. The idea of intellectual life burned in us. While we pursued ideas we felt known, to ourselves and each other. The world made sense, there was ground beneath the feet, a place in the universe to stand. City Col­lege made conscious in me inner cohesion as a first value.

I think my mother was very quickly of two minds about me and City, although she had wanted me to go to school, no question about that, had been energized by the determination that I do so. “Where is it written that a working-class widow’s daughter should go to college?” one of my uncles said to her, drinking coffee at our kitchen table on a Saturday morning in my senior year in high school.

“Here it is written,” she replied, tap­ping the table hard with her middle fin­ger. “Right here it is written. The girl goes to college.”

“But why? What do you think will come of it?”

“I don’t know. I only know she’s clever, she deserves an education, and she’s go­ing to get one. This is America. The girls are not cows in the field only waiting for a bull to mate with.” I stared at her. Where had that come from?

The moment was filled with conflict and bravado. She felt the words she spoke but she did not mean them. She didn’t even know what she meant by an education. When she discovered that upon graduation I wasn’t a teacher, she acted as though she’d been swindled. In her mind a girl child went in one door marked college and came out another marked teacher.

“You mean you’re not a teacher?” she said to me, eyes widening as her two strong hands held my diploma down on the kitchen table.

“No,” I said.

“What have you been doing there all these years?” she asked quietly.

“Reading novels,” I replied.

She marveled silently at my chutzpah.

But it wasn’t really a matter of what I could or could not do with the degree. We were people who knew how to stay alive, she never doubted I would find a way. No, what drove her, and divided us, was me thinking. She hadn’t understood that going to school meant I would start thinking: coherently and out loud. She was taken by violent surprise. My sentences got longer within a month of those first classes. Longer, more complicated, formed by words whose meaning she did not always know. I had never before spo­ken a word she didn’t know. Or made a sentence whose logic she couldn’t follow. Or attempted an opinion that grew out of an abstraction. It made her crazy. Her face began to take on a look of animal cunning when I started a sentence that could not possibly be concluded before three clauses hit the air. Cunning sparked anger, anger flamed into rage. “What are you talking about?” she would shout at me. “What are you talking about? Speak English, please! We all understand En­glish in this house. Speak it!”

Her response stunned me. I didn’t get it. Wasn’t she pleased that I could say something she didn’t understand? Wasn’t that what it was all about? I was the advance guard. I was going to take her into the new world. All she had to do was adore what I was becoming, and here she was refusing. I’d speak my new sentences, and she would turn on me as though I’d performed a vile act right there at the kitchen table.

She, of course, was as confused as I. She didn’t know why she was angry, and if she’d been told she was angry she would have denied it, would have found a way to persuade both herself and any interested listener that she was proud I was in school, only why did I have to be such a show-off? Was that what going to college was all about?

I was 17, she was 50. I had not yet come into my own as a qualifying bellig­erent but I was a respectable contender and she, naturally, was at the top of her game. The lines were drawn, and we did not fail one another. Each of us rose repeatedly to the bait the other one tossed out. Our storms shook the apart­ment: paint blistered on the wall, lino­leum cracked on the floor, glass shivered in the window frame. We barely kept our hands off one another, and more than once we approached disaster.

One Saturday afternoon she was lying on the couch. I was reading in a nearby chair. Idly she asked: “What are you reading?” Idly I replied: “A comparative history of the idea of love over the last 300 years.” She looked at me for a mo­ment. “That’s ridiculous,” she said slow­ly. “Love is love. It’s the same every­where, all the time. What’s to compare?” “That’s absolutely not true,” I shot back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s only an idea, Ma. That’s all love is. Just an idea. You think it’s a function of the mysterious immutable be­ing, but it’s not! There is, in fact, no such thing as the mysterious immutable be­ing … ” Her legs were off the couch so fast I didn’t see them go down. She made fists of her hands, closed her eyes tight, and howled, “I’ll kill yew-w-w! Snake in my bosom, I’ll kill you. How dare you talk to me that way?” And then she was com­ing at me. She was small and chunky. So was I. But I had 30 years on her. I was out of the chair faster than her arm could make contact and running, running through the apartment, racing for the bathroom, the only room with a lock on it. The top half of the bathroom door was a panel of frosted glass. She arrived just as I turned the lock, and couldn’t put the brakes on. She drove her fist through the glass, reaching for me. Blood, screams, shattered glass on both sides of the door. I thought that afternoon: One of us is going to die of this attachment. ■

This article is an excerpt from Fierce Attachments, a memoir by Vivian Gornick that will be published later this month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 

The scene was set for the traditional, permanent-government arrangement. Donny Trump, the 34-year-old millionaire developer weaned on Brooklyn Democrat­ic politics, was once again going after a spectacular tax break. This time he was applying to the city’s Housing Preserva­tion and Development Commissioner Tony Gliedman, another product of the Brooklyn machine, for a $50 million write­off on his $155 million luxury con­dominium, Trump Tower, now being built on the old Bonwit Teller site at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street.

The lawyer listed on Trump’s applica­tion was Sandy Lindenbaum, son of the late Bunny Lindenbaum, a combo that symbolizes Brooklyn political influence. The other Trump lawyer pressing Glied­man for a favorable decision, calling 10 times in one day, was Bronx Democratic boss Stanley Friedman, law partner of Roy Cohn and protege of Brooklyn kingpin Meade Esposito. The roly-poly, affable Gliedman, who is not only a Brooklyn reg­ular but a member of Esposito’s Thomas Jefferson Club in Canarsie, looked like the government connection for this array of Trump clout. Behind Gliedman, after all, was our pliable mayor, Ed Koch, the former reformer who now thinks “boss” is a term of endearment.

Despite this recipe for legal graft, Gliedman ruled last week that Donny did not qualify for this tax bonanza. Before Gliedman rejected the Trump application, he checked with Koch and the mayor re­portedly told him he’d support whatever the commissioner decided. Gliedman ruled that Trump failed to show, as the law requires, that the old Bonwit site was “un­derutilized” and “functionally obsolete,” thus disqualifying it for the 100 per cent tax break available under section 421A of the state Real Property Tax Law. Almost immediately, Trump was in Manhattan Supreme Court challenging the decision. Just as quickly, the city’s pristine position began to tarnish.

In a case involving this much political influence, the selection of a judge is espe­cially critical. The judge chosen, at least in part thanks to the city, was Frank Blangiardo, a Manhattan civil court judge temporarily assigned to Supreme Court, who was listed in Jack Newfield’s 10 worst judges (Voice, September 26, 1974). Lis­ten to Newfield’s gentle description:

“Antipoverty lawyers say Judge Blangiardo is biased in favor of landlords … Judges say he is their most political colleague.

“Blangiardo’s whole career is based on political connections. His father was a power in Tammany, and reportedly was a partner with Assemblyman Louis De­Salvio in a liquor store. Blangiardo himself was a protege of Carmine DeSapio.”

Newfield cites a number of Blangi­ardo’s mishandled cases, including a mis­trial that the judge declared on behalf of alleged mafia leader Jimmy Napoli, after Blangiardo “maneuvered the court calen­dar so he would have jurisdiction over the trial.” This time it appears that someone else did the maneuvering.

The city helped deliver the case to Blangiardo in three ways:

(1) Edith Spivak, a supervising at­torney of legendary skill and honesty at the city’s corporation counsel, was first told of Trump’s appeal late Friday. She and her boss, Allen Schwartz, decided to retain an outside counsel, Rochelle Corson, a former assistant in the office who han­dled prior litigation involving this pro­gram.

Spivak says that they decided to try to prevent the signing of any order that would put them in court immediately, since Gliedman had just made his decision and they needed more time to analyze it. “But the order was signed before we could get over to the court,” Spivak says. Had they made it to court and successfully opposed the order, the case might have wound up before a different judge.

(2) Judge Norman Ryp made the order returnable the next day in Special Term Part I, the section of the court that re­ceives all such motions. Judges are rotated on a weekly basis in this part and Blangiardo had begun his week of service that Monday.

Had Gliedman made a decision during the two preceding weeks, and had Trump proceeded immediately into court, the judge in Part I would have been Arthur Blyn or Thomas Sinclair, and no questions would have been raised.

Gliedman was ready to decide the case at least 10 days earlier and did not. Betsy Foote, Gliedman’s executive assistant who was put in charge of the 421A program a few weeks ago, says that Gliedman had informed Trump that he was leaning against the exemption. Trump asked Gliedman not to make a decision then offering to supply new information sup­porting the application. Gliedman agreed.

For three weeks preceding his decision, Gliedman or his press office kept telling me that the decision would be announced in a day or two. He made up his mind at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, March 20, after the courts had closed for the week. Trump had been well briefed on the contents of Glied­man’s two-page rejection letter and he’d already retained a third law firm — Marshal, Bratter — which had prepared a court challenge. The firm sent Gliedman a draft of the legal papers by 7 p.m. that Friday night.

Trump wanted to go into court im­mediately because any protracted threat to his tax break might have a material effect on continuing financing, tenanting, and construction of his project. In addi­tion, the city’s finance department is sup­posed to receive a list of approved exemp­tions no later than March 15, in order for Trump to receive the benefits this tax year. The department is somewhat flexible about that deadline, but it cannot wait much longer. The scheduling of Glied­man’s decision permitted Friedman and Trump to bring the case directly to Blangiardo without losing any time.

(3) Last Tuesday the city’s outside counsel, Rochelle Corson, appeared before Blangiardo. She asked that the case be adjourned for three weeks.

Trump’s attorneys leapt to their feet. They said they had an agreement with Gliedman that no adjournment would be sought. They handed Blangiardo a three-­page affidavit from Stanley Friedman. Blangiardo has sat on the municipal court and civil court benches, awaiting a Su­preme Court appointment, since 1959, when Carmine DeSapio first made him a judge. Friedman’s affidavit was a message from a county leader with the power to one day elevate him. Blangiardo flipped through the pages, his eyebrows arching ever upward. He called his clerk to his side.

The pertinent part of the affidavit was Friedman’s claim that he asked Gliedman to “avoid delays and adjournments in view of the urgency of this matter” and that Gliedman “graciously told me that the matter will be handled by the Law Depart­ment, but he would communicate this to whoever would be handling it, and he pledged cooperation in bringing this issue to a conclusion at once, with no further delays or adjournments.”

Spivak says that neither she nor Corson has ever been told whether or not such a pledge was made. In court — when the Friedman affidavit was presented — Cor­son did not attempt to verify this alleged no-adjournment agreement. She quietly accepted Blangiardo’s decision not to ad­journ the case, if it had been adjourned, the case would’ve come up again on the Part I calendar before Ed Greenfield, a supreme court judge known for his scholar­ly independence.

Instead of adjourning it and turning it over to another judge, Blangiardo gave the city until April 9 to answer, and said final papers were to be submitted to him.

Gliedman told me that he never made a no-adjournment pledge to Friedman, but neither he nor the city has contradicted the Friedman affidavit. Gliedman explains that he did tell Friedman that the city could win the case by “repeatedly” ad­journing it: “I agreed we wouldn’t do that. I agreed we wanted a decision on the mer­its.”

•••••

All these facts really demonstrate is that the city’s indifference to the court calendar may jeopardize $50 million in future taxes. Spivak said she “hadn’t con­sidered” trying to “get the case before a different judge.” The city’s view that judge selection doesn’t matter places it at the mercy of its opponents in highly politic­ized cases like this one. If only the clubhouse litigants against the city play the judges-hopping game, the odds are weighted against the public interest.

Gliedman may have given in to Friedman and Trump on some of the details of timing to compensate for his unwillingness to give in on the exemption itself. An angry Trump had to take the scheduling crumbs that were offered and is now counting on Blangiardo, who may or may not prove to be the ally Trump and Friedman ap­parently hope for. “I’m determined to win,” vows Gliedman, who now seems to have a full if belated appreciation of the significance of which judge handles the case. “We’ll win on appeal, if we have to.”

Gliedman, and indirectly Koch, merit praise for their courageous and correct de­cision to deny Trump his tax haven for oil sheiks. The top condo in Trump Towers sells for $3,150,000 and has five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, two dressing rooms, two powder rooms, a maid’s room, skylit garden/playroom, sitting room, living room, dining room, study, kitchen, pantry, two interior stairs, foyer, and private elevator. There is no possible rationale for the taxpayers in a city that closes hospitals to underwrite casbahs. It is disgraceful that the Democratic Party leader for the poorest borough in the city is using his political influence to secure this exemp­tion, in contempt of his own constituents

But the Trump application merely highlight the disastrous consequences of the 421A program. More than a year ago, the first draft of a yet-to-be-completed City Planning Commission study of mid­town development labeled the 421A pro­gram of “dubious” benefit to the city, though it is one of the costliest of all the tax-giveaway programs. The study urged the city to back a bill in the state legislature excluding the program from midtown. Gliedman and Koch have certainly seen copies of this initial draft and a subsequent one, released in July, maintaining precisey the same position. The city is still not even considering the introduction of such a bill. Had they and the legislature acted on these preliminary but axiomatic recom­mendations already, the Trump application would have been a dead letter.

In July, City Planning Commissioner Herb Sturz promised to release the com­pleted study by December but it is still in mothballs. Its authors, however, assure me that its conclusions on 421A have no changed at all. With a growing galaxy of Trump-like towers planned for midtown, real taxpayers cannot afford the city’s con­tinued-legislative laxity.

“Solidarity,” that tired labor union catchword, took on real meaning for me on Monday afternoon, at the moment President Nixon announced that he was sending troops to New York. I stood with about 500 postal workers in front of the General Post Office across from Penn Station, listening on transistor radios to the President’s pious rhetoric. There was about half a minute’s hush while each worker seemed to ponder all that awesome power of the United States government and its mighty army — all seeming to focus on him alone, or on his family, or on a pension only a year or two away. But then there was a great roar of “no” to the president as 500 men felt the strength of sticking with the union.

Solidarity but not community, for these men are politically as diverse as the society at large. A small minority wearing American flag pins and “Support Our Boys” buttons tried to destroy newspapers and leaflets being distributed by members of the Workers League, Progressive Labor, and the International Socialists. “We don’t need help from reds,” they said. But most were tolerant of the leftists, and accepted and read the leaflets, some of which were notable for their irrelevance. At least one postman, however, came to the conclusion that “to the people who run this country we are the same as the Vietnamese.”

Everyone agreed that without the blacks and the young whites there would have been no strike, not because of the politics of these elements but because of their fearlessness. “They just aren’t going to take the shit we came to accept as normal,” an older worker explained. Militancy rather than radicalism was the keynote.

The postal workers judged that the troops were being sent to inspire fear rather than move the mails, and that the fear might do the job for the government, especially outside the city, where solidarity is weaker. Workers claimed that postal sorting schemes take weeks to learn and that any resumption of normal mailing by the public would result in colossal foul-ups by untrained soldier-scabs. Almost all the postmen are veterans. One humorously presented this as a typical scene: “Private Schmuck: ‘Sir, where does zip code 07548 go?’ Sergeant Putz: ‘Why the hell you asking me, I’m a non-commissioned officer.’ ”

Whether the postmen are correctly estimating the complexity of their jobs, a postal outsider cannot evaluate. With few weeks on the job and with the aid of supervisors, some of whom are unsympathetic to the ordinary clerks and carriers, the army might actually be able to deliver the mail — provided they are not physically interfered with by striking  postmen. Those I spoke with were overwhelmingly against the use of any kind of violence, but the arrogance of the Nixon administration has been so successful at angering the government’s most conservative and loyal workers that it just might provoke more desperate acts. Compare your mailman to a cop, a garbage man, or a cab driver. He is definitely the least surly of our public servants. Imagine the pent-up rage. One of the most repeated complaints I heard from strikers was about the “patronizing attitude” of the government toward them.

If they don’t interfere with the troops, they can try something even more shattering to the American status quo — organizing a general strike. A friend of mine with experience in both Europe and America laid out the revolutionary dream scenario: postmen, wearing the hats from their uniforms and with their union pins prominent, go in car pools to workers at the Ford assembly plant in northern New Jersey, to factories all over the metropolitan area, to subway, rail, and truck depots, and to every worker who will listen and say: “This struggle is yours as well as ours. Troops used against us may be used against you. Put down your tools and join us on strike.”

The workers all go out and a shaken government accepts their demands (or faces overthrow). It doesn’t happen often in Europe, but it has happened enough times to produce consciousness of labor as a great slumbering giant not to be casually awakened.

But in America, this is very much a dream only, my friend admits. Power is expected to reside in politicians and corporations who belch “constitutionality” and “legality.” (Was the New York Times ever so bitter about the illegality of the war as about the illegality of this strike?)

One thing is certain: if there ever is a general strike, it will be called by workers, not by their leaders. James H. Rademacher, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, says he will ask George Meany to call a nation-wide strike if the government offers nothing by Friday. But Meany will be about as willing to do this as Rademacher was to lead his own men out. And there have been few statements of support from union leadership in the city or in the country. This strike is as much against the union leadership as against the government employer.

Moe Biller, Manhattan and Bronx Postal Union president, who had fled through a kitchen at a meeting last Thursday, flashed the V sign to his men at the General Post Office. He looked frightened. If he is forced to pay $10,000 a day in fines or sent to jail, he will be the first victim on the altar of Nixon proposed postal re-organization (to which the President has tied postal pay raises).

All of us who use the mails will to a lesser extent follow. Nixon wants to create a “public authority” to run the Post Office. As with all public authorities — like our own Port Authority and and Transit Authority — this is a way of diminishing public accountability in the name of fiscal solvency. We can look forward to a postal authority run for the benefit of big mailers like Time Inc., Readers Digest, Sears Roebuck, and Chase Manhattan. They already receive preferential rates subsidized by our taxes and our six-cent stamps. With a self-sustaining authority, we would be subsidizing them with 10-cent stamps.

What’s wrong with the post office is its bureaucracy, low pay, and inequitable rates, not its status as a government agency. The private telephone company isn’t managing service so well. It keeps its profits up, however, by charging twice as much for service as anywhere else on earth. In most countries, telephone profits go into the postal service.

Nixon’s Postal Authority is supposed to put postal service on a pay-as-you-go basis, like the New York subways. I might see this principle as more reasonable if it were applied across the board to all government services. We could have a pay-as-you-go army, air force, CIA, and FBI. When these agencies failed to show profits, services would be cut back. Forces in Laos or Thailand, for example, could be brought home for being in the red by the same procedure the Transit Authority used in closing the profitless Myrtle Avenue line in Brooklyn last autumn. And the bill for Vietnam could be footed by those who like the war.

I would choose to sustain my brave and friendly mailman. ■

I used to see him around town in the days when covering New York politics was still gaudy fun. “Hi … Donald Ma­nes,” he would say, offering a thick hand, an uncertain smile. He told you his name each time he met you, as if he could not bear the hurt of your failure to remember him. Fifteen years ago, Manes was a lumpy slab of a man who looked incarcer­ated in a suit. His handshake was damp. His left eye was larger than the right and glittered brightly. When I saw him, he was usually with Matty Troy or Meade Esposito, a favored acolyte in the compa­ny of bishops. He always looked hungry.

Manes also tried too hard to affect a personal style. Inspired, I suppose, by Meade and Matty, he attempted to be­come still another edition of the happy hack, who professes ignorance of the grand political abstractions but knows everything about judgeships and con­tracts. The trouble with Manes was that you could always see the mask. From the moment he started coming around, there was something odd about Donald Manes. The man and the mask never fully came together.

I would see the mask most often in Jimmy’s on West 52nd Street. In the company of other pols and newspaper­men, Manes and I would argue and drink, but we never became friends. He would tell jokes you had already heard. He would complain about — or defend — John Lindsay or Abe Beame. Occasionally, he would try to say outrageous things, to veer from the orthodox, but when pressed, he always backed away. Nothing seemed to him worth confrontation, and he would adjust his ideas, his style, even his mood, to suit the company he kept. Perhaps that’s why friendship with him was so difficult; you didn’t know which Donald Manes to befriend.

But there was another thing about Ma­nes in those days. Too often, he carried a look in his eyes (even the glittering one) that said: Please don’t hurt me. That look was almost too vulnerable for the hard, judgmental politics of the time. It certainly demanded more pity than most of us possessed.

“You want politics to do too much, to make this a better world” he said to me once. “F’chrissakes, I’m satisfied if poli­tics gets the garbage picked up.”

He was right, of course; in the ’60s and early ’70s, I wasn’t alone in expecting politics to do a lot of things that probably could not be done by anyone. To men like Manes, idealism was for saints and amateurs.

“I do this for a living,” he said once, with some heat. “This is my life, not my hobby!”

That attitude was at the heart of the system that later destroyed him and will almost certainly survive him. Today, in spite of the final blood and horror of the man’s life, there are hundreds of political New Yorkers traveling the same road as Donald Manes. These people enter poli­tics for one basic reason: to make money.

Along the way, they make many con­tacts but few friends. They kiss an amaz­ing amount of ass. They develop an ex­traordinary capacity for self-abasement (sometimes called loyalty). Usually, they rise slowly through the organization. Sometimes they even get to be county leader. Or borough president. Or both. And then at last the dough begins to flow.

Even in the early ’70s, Manes knew what he wanted — and what he’d have to do to get it. When Matty Troy got jammed up with the law, Manes was ready, made his move, and grabbed his piece of power. In at least one borough of New York, he’d kissed his last ass.

I saw him less often after that, but when I did, he still seemed uneasy; power hadn’t really settled whatever was seeth­ing in the back of his eyes. Sometimes in the summer, I’d run into him on Main Street in Westhampton Beach, where we both had houses. He was always friendly, in a practiced way, and we would chat about politics. But he was never relaxed. The colorful mask was drained and slipping, but he hadn’t yet devised a new one to replace it. The burly body was plump­er, softer, yet he seemed drawn, almost gaunt. And in a town of summer tans, he had an unshakable indoor look. It was as if when he was a boy (long before his father killed himself) Donnie Manes had spent too many lonely hours at home making up with industry what he lacked in talent.

In some respects, he was becoming a cartoon of the man whose business is politics and who uses money to keep score. The public Donnie Manes ap­peared on talk shows, posed with Ed Koch, talked about moving from his base in Queens to run for higher office. But up close, there was a chilly aura of loneliness and loss around the man that touched me. I would say, “Let’s get together sometime,” and he’d say, “Yeah, let’s do that,” and of course we never did.

There was, as we’ve now all learned, more than one hidden agenda in his life. In the months ahead, we’ll hear many details of that part of the Manes story, as various rats and thieves who once called themselves his friends will shout a mighty perjured chorus of “Donnie made me do it.”

But there’s also a dark Balzacian novel buried somewhere in this man’s life. His story was made terrible and final when he reached into that kitchen drawer, his wife upstairs, his daughter nearby, and found that 14-inch Ekco Flint knife with its eight-and-three-quarters-inch blade.

But we will never have that story. The prosecutors will give us, as always, some of the facts and almost none of the truth. His wife, Marlene, must know much of the deeper truth, and so must his children and possibly even his psychiatrist. But it’s likely that much of this story will remain elusive; neither journalism nor grand juries are perfect instruments for such investigations.

I suppose that’s why, after January 10, I kept imagining Donnie Manes lying awake in the Queens night with his fam­ily asleep in the darkened house. In that solitude, in the city he had helped rule and in which he was now mocked, did Donald Manes whisper for help that wasn’t there? Did the old wounded anger boil and churn across the decades? What could his success have ever meant if his own father wasn’t there to see it? And why did the old man do it? Why did he kill himself? When the news came that Manes had at last accomplished what he had failed at in January, when it was clear that he had followed the dreadful example of his father, I was sure I heard child’s voice calling from the horror, say­ing Look what you made me do.

And I remembered a summer after­noon a few years ago, when a fierce gray summer storm came suddenly upon Westhampton Beach. People scattered, hurrying into shops, slamming the doors of their cars, emptying the streets. I was gazing out at the sheets of driving rain when I saw Donnie Manes coming slowly from the direction of the library. He was completely alone. He stopped near the corner and stood there by himself, the rain pelting him, hammering at him, the harsh hard punishing rain.

Meade Esposito, the powerful Democratic Party leader of Brooklyn, is currently under active investigation by four separate law enforcement agencies — special anti-corruption prosecutor Maurice Nadjari, the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force, the IRS, and the SEC.

The SEC probe involves fraud and manipulation of a stock called Frigitemp. Two of Esposito’s closest friends — Bernard Deutsch and Joe Marando — have already been indicted in the case and an SEC complaint mentions Esposito’s personal lawyer, George Meisner. Meisner is also a Brooklyn district leader. And Deutsch was honorary chairman or a dinner that honored Esposito on January 7, 1970.

In addition to these four active investigations. Esposito was questioned by two grand juries last year, and an earlier IRS audit was terminated under suspicious cir­cumstances. At that time, several IRS agents complained of a cover­up.

The earlier IRS audit of Esposito’s finances was so inadequate and incomplete that the late U.S. Attorney Robert Morse, and Dennis Dillon, chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force, refused to sign the final report, ac­cording to documents on file in Washington.

The original IRS audit of Esposito’s finances was closed out late in 1972.

Esposito had several secret meetings with former Attorney General John Mitchell during the autumn of 1972. These meetings were never listed on any of Mit­chell’s official office logs, and were at first denied by Esposito. However, after Nelson Rockefeller disclosed he arranged the first of the meetings, Esposito then admit­ted he did in fact meet secretly at least twice with the Republican Attorney General. Esposito says the subject of those meetings with the now indicted Mitchell is “private.”

The meetings with Mitchell not only coincided with the IRS audit, but also with the inexplicable vote of Brooklyn congressman and Esposito protege Frank Brasco against investigating the Watergate scandal while the 1972 Presidential campaign was still in progress.

On October 3, 1972, the House Banking and Currency committee voted in executive session against giving its chairman, Wright Pat­man, subpoena power to launch a full-scale Watergate inquiry.

Brasco was the only Northern urban Democrat to vote with the Republicans successfully and block the investigation. Brasco is the politician personally closest to Esposito in the whole city. Esposito got Brasco his nomination for Congress in 1966. Esposito had a no-show $500-a-month job on Brasco’s congressional payroll during 1967 and 1968. And Brasco’s cousin, also named Frank, is Esposito’s personal chauffeur. Brasco would do anything Esposito asked him to do.

Moreover, John Dean has told the staff of the Select Senate Watergate committee that there were several long and anxious White House meetings on how to prevent the banking committee inquiry. According to Dean, at one of those meetings, Mitchell said he could “take care of one of the Democrats from New York” on the committee. Brasco was the only New York Democrat to vote against the Watergate inquiry.

About a month after Brasco’s vote, the IRS audit of Esposito was halted over the objections of Morse and Allan.

According to a source in IRS, before the Esposito audit was terminated, three agents went secretly to U.S. Attorney Morse to say there was a cover-up in progress, and that they were not being permitted to conduct a thorough professional investigation of Esposito.

The IRS agents said they were ordered by their supervisors not to interview and investigate judges, or to explore the financial records or the Brooklyn Democratic county organization, or to analyze the books of Grand Brokerage, the in­surance agency Esposito owns with Stanley Steingut.

Sources in IRS say that the area of judicial investigation was crucial because there had been allegations that Esposito had accep­ted undeclared cash in the sale of judgeships.

The current IRS investigation of Esposito’s finances began six weeks ago, and is expected to take at least nine months to complete. It is being conducted by a special team of agents and accountants that had nothing to do with the suspicious 1972 audit.

If Mitchell did, in fact, stop the inquiry into Esposito, it was probably not the first time the for­mer Attorney General manipulated justice. There is also considerable evidence that Mitchell improperly interfered with the ITT, Dairy Cooperative, Robert Vesco, and Robert Abplanalp investigations, and played politics with the par­dons granted Jimmy Hoffa and Mafia boss Angelo “Gyp” De Carlo.

Congressman Brasco, meanwhile, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring to accept $27,500 in il­legal cash pay-offs from a truck leasing company owned by Mafia capo John Masiello.

One of Esposito’s 1972 grand jury appearances also involved a Mafia capo — Paul Vario.

It turns out that Esposito’s name was “all over” the famous tapes made in the bugged junkyard trailer the Mafia used in Canarsie during 1972. The junkyard tapes led to the conviction of 40 Mafia mem­bers and 21 policemen.

Esposito’s name was used frequently in the trailer by Vario, who has since been indicted six times by Brooklyn D. A. Gene Gold as a result of the trailer bug. Vario was recorded saying things like “Ask Meade a bout that,” and “Meade’s a good guy.”

Esposito’s appearance before the Brooklyn grand jury was carefully arranged so that the press never found out about it. The county leader admitted under oath that he knew Vario “very well” for more than 15 years, and that he had first met Vario (who has a record of 27 arrests and a conviction for rape) while he was “in the bail bonds business.”

Esposito, however, said he could­n’t possibly imagine why Vario would so freely drop his name in private conversations with other mobsters.

***

Meade Esposito is by far the single most powerful Democratic county leader in the state. The Brooklyn Democratic organization has produced, and can claim loyalty and patronage from Mayor Abe Beame, City Council Majority Leader Tom Cuite, State Comptrol­ler Arthur Levitt, Assembly Minority Leader Stanley Steingut, more than 40 Supreme Court Justices, Surrogate Nathan Sobel and Borough President Sam Leone.

Esposito controls more than 1000 jobs. He’s made more than 25 Brooklyn judges, and approves the appointment of every law secretary in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Through Tom Cuite, Esposito in­fluences the committee assignments and chairmanships or the City Council. Through his close friendship with Nelson Rockefeller, Esposito was able to secure a favorable re-appor­tionment of the state legislature in 1972. Dozens of appointments to the Beame administration have to be “cleared with” Esposito. People think he can influence tax asses­sments, liquor licenses, zoning decisions, government contract and judicial decisions.

Every candidate for state-wide of­fice next year will seek Esposito’s private, if not public, support. Ted Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern have all publicly praised Esposito as a great party leader. The New York Times, in a nattering magazine cover story in December 1972, described Esposito as “a new breed of party leader,” and compared his power to that of Mayor Daley or Chicago.

***

Esposito was born in Ocean Hill 64 years ago. He quit Manual Trades High School at the age of 14 to become an office boy in an in­surance company owned by old­-time Brooklyn Democratic boss James Powers.

In 1947 Esposito went into the bail bonds business with Ronnie Carr. (Carr is now a law assistant to Brooklyn Surrogate Nathan Sobel even though he is not a lawyer.)

Esposito admits that many of his bail bond clients were mobsters, in­cluding Joe Colombo, Jimmy Napoli, and Apples McIntosh.

In 1958 Esposito ran as an in­surgent for district leader in Canarsie and lost by 200 votes. In 1960, he was elected with the public endorsement of Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman. Esposito named his home club after Thomas Jefferson. And he quickly arranged for his campaign manager — Mike Kern — to become a judge.

In 1960 Esposito suddenly became assistant vice-president of the Kings Lafayette Bank, despite no apparent experience as a banker. His friends say Esposito knew he could never become county leader while a bondsman: the bank title gave him the respec­tability needed to acquire party power.

At the time Esposito was hired by the bank as an executive, the single biggest depositor in the bank ($2 million) was the ILA, which many law enforcement agencies believe is Mafia-dominated. It is suspected that the ILA used its in­fluence to get Esposito the job.

In 1970. U. S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau said that while Esposito was vice-president of the bank, he arranged for ILA leader Anthony Scotto’s family to obtain a $250,000 unsecured loan. Morgenthau further stated, “This loan went to buy a country club in New Jersey that became a prime meeting place for members of organized crime.”

Esposito claims he severed all his ties to the Kings Lafayette Bank in 1970. But an investigator for Special Prosecutor Nadjari told me this week: “Esposito’s relation­ship to the bank still exists. Only now it is more disguised, more cir­cumspect, and more sinister.”

Over the last year, five Mafiosi have been convicted of receiving il­legal loans from the Kings Lafayette Bank.

Esposito is also a vice-president and part owner with Stanley Steingut of Grand Brokerage, an insurance company now located at 70 Broadway. Law enforcement agencies are now trying to discover if Grand Brokerage has sold in­surance policies to politicians who became judges, or received other favors from Esposito.

Grand Brokerage, mysteriously, refuses to provide any information about its finances to Dun and Brad­street. A normal insurance com­pany would depend on a good rating from Dun and Bradstreet for customers and credit. Grand is run on politics, not merit or business acumen. Esposito has of­ten told friends: “I don’t need graft. I got premiums.”

Esposito also was quoted by Tim Lee of the New York Post as saying: “There’s no sense kidding myself — the people wouldn’t be bringing their insurance business to me if I wasn’t county leader.”

Investigators are also looking into the finances of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, Brooklyn regulars estimate that the organization raised more than $400,000 last year — $140,000 of it at one dinner at the Waldorf — and there has been no public accounting of those funds. As the result of a loophole in the state’s election law, party organizations do not have to report these receipts and expen­ditures even to the IRS, or to city and state tax authorities.

The county organization does provide expenses, a limousine, and a chauffeur for Esposito.

Also, Esposito admits that Brooklyn Supreme Court candidates are asked to contribute at least $10,000 to the party campaign fund although with multi-party endor­sement no significant campaign is conducted. Frank Vaccaro, who received a Supreme Court judgeship from Esposito last year, says his district leader was told by Esposito that a $10,000 contribution “would be an appropriate amount.”

***

Esposito’s immense power even awes some of the men who are now diligently investigating him. This is how one federal investigator talked this week:

“I think we will eventually make a case against Esposito, but I’m afraid of what happens after that. I know he was able to protect himself all these years. He’s more than lucky. I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that John Mitchell protected him. That’s got to be the reason the original IRS audit was covered up. I know how many friends Esposito has, from the lowest hood up to the Rockefellers.

“It worries me. After we get the evidence, then we need a prosecutor to impanel a grand jury and actually sign an indictment. Then we need an honest jury, and honest judge to try the case and give him a sentence. Then we need five appellate judges who can’t be fixed to affirm the conviction.

“I know how much the judges and appellate judges hate Nadjari, for example. I know how many judges, and appellate judges, are friends of Esposito.

“Back during the 1960s, when Joe Hoey was the U. S. Attorney and when Aaron Koota was the D. A., no politicians were ever in­vestigated in Brooklyn. The borough was wide open

“But now, after Watergate, and Agnew and the Knapp Commis­sion, things are changing. At least now we can get permission to go after an important politician, at least now we have a chance.

“But I’m still scared. We’ll work our ass off for the next six months to make a case. We’ll  work 18 hours a day. But I admit it. I’m afraid of what happens after that. This guy Meade has more power than the Pope.”

***

The current law enforcement probes into the Brooklyn Democracy should be viewed, and understood in the larger context of the recent wave of indictments for political corruption in Brooklyn, and in the historic connection bet­ween the Brooklyn Democratic Party and organized crime.

During the last six months, cor­ruption indictments have been voted by grand juries against seven prominent Brooklyn Democratic political figures.

Brooklyn Congressman Ben Podell was indicted on charges or conspiracy, bribery, and perjury after a two-year investigation by the Department of Justice and the PRI. The 10-count indictment alleged that Congressman Podell had accepted $41,350 in bribes in exchange for using his influence to obtain a route to the Bahamas for Florida Atlantic Airlines.

Brooklyn Congressman Frank Brasco was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiring to receive a $27,500 bribe for helping a Mafia truck leasing company win government contracts. This investigation was carried by Mike Shaw, chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force.

Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Dominic Rinaldi was indicted on three counts of perjury by Special State Prosecutor Maurice Nadjari.

Brooklyn Civil Court Judge Ross Di Lorenzo was indicted for per­jury in a case involving organized crime.

William Steinman, a long-time Brooklyn political figure, who is administrative assistant to State Comptroller Arthur Levitt, was in­dicted for attempted bribery, con­spiracy, and grand larceny. The in­dictment alleges that Steinman tried to fix a criminal case in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

Brooklyn Assemblyman Calvin Williams was indicted for bribery by Brooklyn D. A. Eugene Gold.

Brooklyn City Marshal Irving Sable was indicted for grand lar­ceny by extortion, also by Gold’s office.

Also, Norman Levy, former president of the City Tax Commis­sion and chairman of the John V. Lindsay Association of Brooklyn, was convicted two weeks ago, of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and tampering with public records. Levy Faces a sentence of up to nine years in prison for his role in a system of fixing about 2000 parking tickets for Brooklyn politicians.

In addition, four Brooklyn judges are now under investigation by Special Prosecutor Nadjari’s of­fice.

Nadjari’s staff of 65 investigators and 24 lawyers currently has more investigations active in Brooklyn than in any other borough.

***

Municipal corruption seems historically endemic to specific places — Chicago, Miami, New Jer­sey, and Brooklyn.

In his wonderful book. “The Great Bridge,” David McCullough describes the graft of the “Brooklyn Ring” while the Brooklyn Bridge was under con­struction after the Civil War. Millions were stolen by Boss Hugh McLaughlin, “a former waterfront gang leader”; William Kingsley, “Brooklyn’s most prosperous con­tractor”; and Henry Murphy, founder of the “Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat.”

Almost a century later, the Kefauver Committee’s televised crime hearings exposed the sophisticated connection between the Brooklyn Democratic Party and organized crime. The Third In­terim Report of the Kefauver com­mittee, released in May 1951 said:

“Mobster Joe Adonis’s influence upon the Kings County Democratic organization may go far to explain why neither he, nor a major subordinate like Anthony Anastasia, was ever subjected to prosecution or punishment …

“William O’Dwyer (D. A. of Brooklyn from 1941 to 1945) failed to take effective action against the top echelons of the gambling, nar­cotics, waterfront, murder, or bookmaking rackets. His defense of public officials who were derelict in their duties, and his failure to follow-up concrete evidence of organized crime, particularly in the case of Murder, Inc., and the waterfront, have contributed to the growth of organized crime, racketeering, and gangsterism in New York City.”

In recent years, the publicly available cumulative evidence of the influence of organized crime on Brooklyn politics should trouble any thoughtful citizen.

Two Brooklyn Democrats have been indicted in connection with attempts to use their public trust in behalf of the Mafia — Congressman Frank Brasco, and Civil Court Judge Ross Di Lorenzo.

A careful analysis of judicial decisions in Brooklyn suggests at least a pattern of favoritism toward organized crime.

The staff of the Joint Legislative Committee on Crime has studied the disposition of 147 felony cases in Brooklyn Supreme Court involving Mafia defendants between 1960 and 1970. Sixty-three per cent of all the organized crime defen­dants won dismissals in Brooklyn. This compares with a 15 per cent dismissal rate for all other types of defendants. Only five per cent of the mobsters indicted actually went to prison. The 63 per cent dismissal rate in Brooklyn com­pares with less than 40 per cent in the four other boroughs for mob­sters.

In the last two years, one Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice — Joseph Corso — threw out indictments against five different Mafia defendants, and all five of his dismissals were later reversed on appeal by the Appellate Division.

Last year, the State Commission of Investigation twice called in Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice John Monteleone to explain, under oath, why he dismissed an indict­ment against an alleged Mafioso named Frank Cangiano. Mon­teleone’s dismissal was later unanimously reversed by a higher court.

Judge Monteleone is now under intensive scrutiny by the staff of Special Prosecutor Nadjari. Monteleone was elevated to the State Supreme Court by Meade Esposito in 1970.

Aaron Koota was District Attor­ney of Brooklyn from 1964 to 1968, and is now a Supreme Court Justice.

In July of this year Gerald Mar­tin Zalmanowitz testified in public before Senator Henry Jackson’s Permanent Sub-committee on In­vestigations. Zalmanowitz, who grew up in Brooklyn, is a federal informer whose testimony helped convict Mafia boss Angelo De Carlo in New Jersey in 1970.

Zalmanowitz testified that two cases — one involving Joe Colom­bo — were “fixed” in the D. A.’s office while Koota was D. A. of Brooklyn. One case was fixed for $5,000 and the other with a free Buick from a dealership Colombo covertly owned.

Local 1814 of the ILA, and its president Anthony Scotto, are im­portant pillars of the Brooklyn Democracy. The union provides money, printing presses, and man­-power in every election. The ILA ‘s support was clearly the difference in John Rooney’s narrow primary victory over Allard Lowenstein in 1972.

The Justice Department, as a result of information from two informants, officially lists Anthony Scotto as a captain in the Carlo Gambino family.

Scotto seems an especially am­biguous figure. He is married to the daughter of Anthony Anastasia, and no one gets to be the leader of Local 1814 at age 26 if he is not somehow connected to wise guys. But Scotto has no criminal record and is a college graduate.

But some Mafia experts are not fully convinced of Scotto’s real role. One respected journalist, who has covered the mob for 15 years, put it this way:

“Anthony is half a wise guy. He’s wired to them, but he would never shoot anybody, or do anything violent. The waterfront is control­led by the mob. He exists in that environment. I think he wants to get out of the mob world before he gets hurt. The really bad mob guys think he’s gone legit with Lindsay. They don’t trust Scotto. Anthony just exists in some twilight zone between two worlds.”

Scotto was first named as a Gambino captain in 1966 during testimony in executive session before Congressman John Rooney’s subcommittee. Rooney, who has been supported by Scotto’s union in every election since 1946, refused to make the FBI listing public.

But in 1969, the Senate committee of John McClellan released Scotto’s name. Scotto was listed as a Gambino captain on the basis of information provided by two infor­mants, one of whom was Joe Valachi. There is no wiretap cor­roboration.

The Brooklyn waterfront mean­while, without ambiguity, remains a center for smuggling, loan­sharking, extortion, union racketeering, pilferage, contraband cigarettes, and bookmaking.

On Monday night, December 10, Michael Cosme was in the Shorefront Democratic Club, 320 Brighton Beach Avenue. Cosme was a bookmaker and a member of the Joe Colombo family. Two men wearing ski masks walked into the clubhouse, stood Cosme against the wall, and killed him with automatic pistols. Police found $4700 in cash and sports betting slips in Cosme’s coat pocket.

The Shorefront Democratic Club has a charter from the Kings County Democratic Party, and Cosme apparently used the clubhouse as his bookmaking office.

The introduction of private immigration bills for aliens is one way politicians can do favors for organized crime. In 1972, the Immigration and Naturalization Service prepared an analysis of these private bills.

The INS study named Brooklyn Congressman Frank Brasco as one of three Representatives who in­troduced private bills for aliens “close to organized crime.”

A further analysis disclosed that Brasco introduced a dozen bills for clients of one Brooklyn lawyer — Thomas Lentini — who was convicted of immigration fraud. Lentini was also chairman of a Brasco fund-raising dinner at Vic­toria House in Brooklyn in 1967.

The Kings Lafayette Bank (17 branches and $23 million in total capital funds) seems an important institution to both the Kings County Democrats and organized crime.

Meade Esposito was an officer of the bank for 10 years, and is believed by law enforcement to still have a covert connection to the bank.

John Lynch for years has been chairman of the Brooklyn Democratic county committee. For more than 30 years the Brooklyn Democratic organization has banked its own funds at Kings Lafayette. John Lynch is also honorary board chairman of the bank.

State Comptroller Arthur Levitt, a member of the Brooklyn organization’s Madison Club, has deposited large sums of interest-­free state deposits in the Kings Lafayette Bank. During 1973, an average balance of $1.6 million in interest-free public money was placed in the bank by Levitt, which is more than was deposited in banks of equivalent size and capital. The bank also received more than $5 million in time deposits from Levitt.

Last year, directors of the Kings Lafayette Bank purchased two tables for $2000 to the annual dinner of the Kings County Democrats.

At the same time, the bank has had significant contact with organized crime.

Over the last year, five alleged mob members and associates have been convicted of receiving false and illegal loans from Kings Lafayette: Natale Marcone, Caesar Vitale, Ilarie Pisani, Joseph De Cicco, and Barry Mancher. Five others have been indicted and are awaiting trial. A bank branch manager, Louis Mellini, was indic­ted for bribery and loan-sharking, but he later agreed to cooperate with law enforcement agencies.

In 1970, after lengthy hearings, the bi-state Waterfront Commission denied a stevedoring license to the CC Lumber Company because Anthony Scotto had used improper in­fluence to get an unsecured $250,000 loan for the company from the King’s Lafayette Bank.

Scotto’s union had $2 million in pension fund deposits in Kings Lafayette at the time. The CC Lumber Company is owned by relatives of Scotto.

The State Court of Appeals, in upholding the Waterfront Commis­sion decision in December 1972, concluded in a majority opinion:

“There was sufficient evidence for the Waterfront Commission to find that Anthony Scotto breached his fiduciary obligation as a union officer under Section 723 of the State Labor Law.”

The Kings Lafayette Bank is cur­rently under investigation by the staff of Senator Jackson’s Per­manent Investigations Subcommit­tee as a possible money wash for securities stolen by organized crime.

An investigator for the Jackson committee told me this week: “Kings Lafayette is what you might call a family bank.”

There are at least four reasons for the disproportionate amount of political venality and cynicism in Brooklyn.

One is that Brooklyn is a one-party borough, and the organization Democrats have been uninterrupted in power since Boss McLaughlin started getting rich from the Brooklyn Bridge project in 1867.

Second is the historic roots the Mafia has in Brooklyn, especially on the docks, and in neighborhoods like Canarsie and Red Hook. Three organized crime families — Gambino, Colombo, and Gallo — are based in Brooklyn, and five more derive some income from various rackets in the borough. Joe Hynes of the Brooklyn D. A.’s office estimates that 2500 members of organized crime families now work and live in Brooklyn.

Third the dubious quality of the Brooklyn judiciary is a direct consequence of the control the political structure maintains over the courts and the Brooklyn Bar Association. Until law and justice become separated from patronage and politics, the Brooklyn judiciary will remain a fertile ground for Special Prosecutors and muckrakers.

And last, there is so much corruption in Brooklyn because there is almost no scrutiny of that borough by the media. Brooklyn has 2.6 million residents dispersed over 80 miles. It is the fourth largest city in the nation. But since the demise of the Eagle, Brooklyn has been without a daily newspaper. The Times, the Post, and the local television news shows continue to report on Manhattan with much more curiosity than on bigger, badder Brooklyn. The Times covers Bangladesh better than it covers Brooklyn.

The future, as always, is inscrutable.

The appropriate remedies, as usual, appear obvious.

Investigation, exposure, analysis, endurance, idealism, and leader­ship will, hopefully, inspire citizen participation in the democratic process.

Meade Esposito, Stanley Steingut, John Rooney, Frank Brasco, Bert Podell, Dominic Rinaldi, Tom Culte, and James Mangano will all be up for re-election in 1974.

If the prosecutors don’t catch them, perhaps the people will. ♦

Comedian Lenny Bruce and Howard Solomon, manager of the Cafe Au Go Go, 152 Bleecker Street, where Bruce is heading the bill, were arrested and taken to Sixth Precinct headquarters on Charles Street last Friday night. They were booked on charges of giving an “indecent performance.” On arriving at the police station, Solomon was served with a summons from the License Department.

The arrests were made at about 10 p.m. as Bruce was preparing to go on for his only show of the night. When he failed to appear most of the audience asked for their money back and left. Comedian Irwin Corey, who was in the audience, went on in Bruce’s place.

Bruce and Solomon spent the night in jail and were released after arraignment the next day. Solomon was released in the rec­ognizance of his lawyer. Bruce, who has been arrested on obscenity charges in several cities and has one conviction on ap­peal in Chicago, had to post $1000 bail.

The two were told that the police had taped two of Bruce’s shows, his second show last Wednesday night (which actually began at 12:01 a.m. Thursday) and his first show last Thursday night. They were also told that the tapes had been played for a grand jury, which found that there was sufficient on which to charge them.

Solomon says the police told him that the original complaint about Bruce’s performances had come from the License Department. Acting License Commissioner William Barlow refused to comment on this. Instead he issued the following statement: “In view of the fact that a hearing is scheduled before this office on Thursday, there will be no comment on any phase until a determination has been made. We do not want to prejudice the case in any way by making any comment.”

Solomon had originally planned to operate the Cafe Au Go Go as a cabaret (which would permit dancing as well as entertainment) without liquor. He told The Voice that the License Department had indicated that he would receive a cabaret license and that he had proceeded with the renovation of the basement premises on the assumption that the license would be granted. He said his application had been filed last May, and that in December the License Department told him it would only grant him a coffee house license, which does not permit dancing.

Bernard O’Connell, then License Commissioner, refused the license on the grounds that if dancing were permitted and no liquor were served, minors could be admitted and that they would go there to dance and then hang around until all hours of the night. Solomon told The Voice, however, that he had made it clear to the License Commissioner that he would “Abide by the letter of the law” governing cabarets and would not allow minors into his cafe unless they were accompanied by adults. He finally opened Cafe Au Go Go as a coffee house on February 7.

Vanguard Okay?

Solomon also pointed out that Bruce had appeared at the Village Vanguard last January and February and that he had given one-night performances to sell-out audiences at the Village Theatre, Second Avenue and Sixth Street, on Thanksgiving Night and the night of March 28. Neither of these establishments received complaints from either the police or the License Department.

Bruce and Solomon will be tried on April 23 in Criminal Court. Ironically, Bruce’s arrest will serve to extend his run at Cafe Au Go Go, which was originally scheduled for one week and would have ended Sunday night. Since he has to be in town for his trial on the 23rd, he will go on performing at the Au Go Go until that date.

An Emergency Committee Againt Harassment of Lenny Bruce was formed over the weekend as a result of the arrest. The committee is circulating petitions addressed to Mayor Wagner. The petitions charge “that ‘obscenity’ has become a cudgel against free speech and only encourages intimidation of performers and their public.”