RUDY VERITAS

J'ACCUSE - Part VIII

All during the summer and fall of 2002 I started to grow more alone.  Some of my friends continued to reach out to me, but most took a walk.  That was the expression I would use to describe this, "took a walk."  Most of the friends who continued to reach out to me I pushed away.  One close friend from the Mayor's Office wrote me several sweet letters and I did not respond to a one.  Hard to explain why.  There are some experiences in life that unless you go through them yourself, you can never fully comprehend.  I imagine cancer or a debilitating illness would be one, the loss of a child by a parent would be another.  You can empathize or try to relate but you will never become fully imbued with the emotion and terror of the thing.  That is what a full fledged federal prosecution coupled with a libelous smear campaign in the press was for me.  It was something I could try and convey but you simply could not 'get' the nightmare unless you lived it personally or with me day in and day out.  I pushed most of my friends away because of the terrific amount of shame I felt about all this.  I wasn't just a deeply closeted homosexual who was outed by the Village Voice, I was now labeled a pedophile (pervert and sicko were the words the NY Post most often used/uses).

The rest of my friends I ignored because I just didn't want them getting involved in this.  I had no desire to make more people go through this with me.  I mean emotionally, not legally.  Most people I had known - personally and professionally - began to ignore me.  I lived near and worked out at the same gym with Jeff Blau, President of The Related Companies (see post: Home, Sweet, Home).  We had done a lot of business together and I had been very good to Related.  Now when he saw me at the gym or on our block he would walk away briskly or cross the street'.  I just simply couldn't understand that type of behavior.  But as time went on I came to blame no one for taking a walk.  People react to these types of things differently.  Although I had proven that I could never behave that way, I just couldn't blame others.

{I say 'proven' because back in 1991 a former Giuliani staffer from the 89 campaign was sentenced to federal prison.  He and I had become close friends.  His crimes were committed while working as Director of Advance for Elizabeth Dole when she was Labor Secretary in 1990.  His name was Mike Kaiser and he had a long history with Bob and Elizabeth Dole.  It was Mike who had arranged for her to do a Rudy fundraiser in 89.  Anyway, he was indicted for stealing Mrs. Dole's credit cards and taking off to Europe.  He had been living far, far above his means for years.  He had a penchant for antiques in his Capitol Hill townhouse.  There were other embezzlement charges to go along with the credit cards. 

Like me he had shut down and withdrew.  I followed his case and became aware through a mutual friend that he had been sentenced to a prison camp in the desert near Los Angeles.  I was planning a vacation to LA to visit friends and decided I should visit him.  I mentioned this to my friend Mindy Franklin, Randy Levine's wife.  She was extremely opposed to me going to visit Mike.  She too had been close friends with him during the 89 campaign.  The three of us had spent a lot of time together.  She mentioned my intentions to Denny Young.  Mindy relayed that Denny said if I were to visit Mike, I would be threw with the them (Rudy, Denny, et al.).  I then told Mindy something that would become prophetic.  I said, "He's all alone.  His family wants nothing to do with him, he has no friends.  If I were ever in prison, all alone, I'd sure as hell want someone to come visit me."

And so I called the Bureau of Prisons and inquired what the procedures were to visit someone.  I then wrote Mike and asked him to put me on his visitor list. I drove deep into the desert and like a mirage there appeared Camp Boron.  I believe it has subsequently been closed for some reason.  My father had told me to bring lots and lots of quarters (for the vending machines).  We had a good visit and he told me very quietly of how the US Attorney had taken a dislike to him.  They had arranged that he be placed at Lorton outside DC.  Bad, bad things happened to him there that I will not repeat here.  He was housed at max. facilities while he made his way to the West Coast and more bad things took place.  It was all very sad from every perspective, needless to say.}

The one person I had become closer to during this time was Mo Rocca.  You might know his name from the Daily Show or other TV appearances.  Mo and I had been introduced in 1999 by one of my oldest friends who happened to be his agent.  Mo having an interest in government and politics, learned from his agent what I did and asked her if she wouldn't mind asking me if I could arrange a tour for him of Gracie Mansion.  The administrator of GM was a friend so I arranged a private tour for him.  He wrote me back a nice thank you note and we became friends.  

Mo and I started to spend more and more time together.  I didn't have any openly gay friends so it was nice to finally have one. Mo and I socialized before my troubles, but we started to spend more and more time together after they began.  Mo is an interesting fellow.  He has a lot of varied interests and is incredibly bright, personable and funny.  

Mo had an abiding dislike of Jon Stewart, his boss, and especially of the show's executive producer, Madeline Smithberg.  He felt that Stewart unfairly slighted him in favor of Stephen Colbert, a Stewart favorite.  Mo thought Colbert a preening, no talent and resented the attention he got from Stewart.  Mo eventually left the show just as it was becoming a national phenomenon.  It was probably the worst career decision he could have possibly made (kind of a Shelley Long, David Caruso career choice).  Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell, John Oliver, Ed Helms, Demitri Martin etc. would go on to great success from that show.

Ironic side note.  During our friendship, Mo had mentioned to me at one point that he considered the lowest appellation an entertainer could have was "TV Personality."  I was reminded of this while in prison and listening to NPR's current events quiz show, Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me .  Mo had always been introduced as Daily Show contributor and then author.  On this day - and every appearance that followed - Peter Sagal introduced him as "TV personality Mo Rocca."  I cringed for him.

Mo started to do morning pop-culture analysis for VH-1, CNN and then The Today Show.  I helped him with material for many of those appearances.  I have a small knack for finding old movie quotes or scenes that analogize or contrast current happenings.  Mo loved using classic movie allusions.  He would tell me stories of Katie Couric.  She took a big shine to him and eventually convinced him to fire his agent - my friend - and hire hers.  Mo liked Katie but was also scared of her.  She apparently treated poor Matt Lauer terribly.  Mo told me story after story of how she would announce to Lauer shortly before a big interview that he was to conduct, that she would be doing it instead.  According to Mo,  Lauer always took these slights and never said a word, like a cuckolded husband.

Mo also knew lots of people in the entertainment industry, especially gay industry types.  He knew the producer for a very popular Fox News show (still on-air) who told him that its anchor (still on-air) was gay and a coke addict.  Another cable star on CNN was not only gay -which most people already know - but is into some real serious S&M.  Mo had an amazing knack for meeting someone and finding out that they were gay and befriending them.  He did that at an benefit dinner with a famed New York Times reporter.  I was in awe, not only of his gaydar, but his ability to bring the topic to the fore with someone he had just met.  He was disarming that way. He had a voracious sexual appetite too.  He lived across the street from a bar in the Village where he would go most nights and manage to pick someone up and bring them back home.  He certainly didn't seem the type, but he was awfully successful at it.  

The worst part for me during this time was the waiting.  When you are being investigated your life comes to a complete standstill.  Your fate is completely out of your hands during this period so you just keep waiting for the shoes to drop.  I was a nervous wreck.  My depression deepened and thoughts of suicide preoccupied me regularly.  I had no will and asked my father to find me an estates attorney who would draft one for me.  He did and I met with them to lay out my assets.  I didn't have very much but I had my apartment which had increased in value four fold since I had purchased it six years earlier.  I had mentioned suicide to Jerry on a number of occasions and he informed me that should a defendant kill himself before the case reached a jury the indictment would be dismissed (this would later become a national issue when Ken Lay dropped dead).  This was of interest to me since I didn't want my assets seized by the government after my death.  But at this point there was no indictment, just an on-going investigation by the U.S. Attorney.

There also appeared during this time hateful internet postings and blogs devoted to my supposed venality while at HDC.  Tom Robbins had reported that my secretary used petty cash to pay for breakfast for me.  It was made to sound like this was a daily occurrence.  In fact, over 3 1/2 years this happened maybe 15-20 times and it was just a bagel in each instance.  Someone told me there was a mocking website where you could supposedly contribute towards the cost of my bagels.  It was even more ridiculous because HDC had a long standing policy - long before I arrived - that any employee who worked through lunch could order-out on the corporation.  HDC was filled with take-out menus from local places where we had accounts.  The bills each month were high but it was an HDC culture issue - just like the 100% 403(b) match - that contributed towards us paying average salaries but attracting top-flight talent.  I had revamped the corporation from top to bottom but tried to remain mindful of what made HDC such an attractive place to work.  

Fall turned to Winter and came the New Year 2003 without any resolution to all this.  It was still unknown to us how many images Debbie Landis was claiming had been in my possession beyond the one she said they had found on a disk.  She would never say and just kept claiming that they were still looking.  All the while the grand jury continued to meet and evidence was apparently being presented.  I continued to stay at home most of the time with Seabe.  No joke about being man's best friend.  He certainly was mine. 

Early in 2003 the forensic psychiatrist in my case, Mark Mills, asked me to pay him a visit in D.C.  Coincidentally, I received a call from Frank Luntz asking how I was doing.  I mentioned I was going to D.C. and he asked that I stop by his house for a visit.

Frank is a quirky, funny, loyal and extremely intelligent guy.  We had become friends during Rudy's campaign.  Frank doesn't have close friends and during those years I would have to say I was one of his closest.  Whenever he was in NYC we would meet for lunch or dinner.  Frank never gives you notice of his appearances.  He'll just call and say, "I'm here, what are you doing right now?"  I would also visit him at his home or office in D.C. regularly.  I flew down for instance for his so-called retirement party (he was retiring from polling for political candidates) that was held in a reception room in Congress.  I had a long, very engaging talk with Tom Delay that night.  Only Luntz could manage to get Tom Delay and Tom Daschle at the same party.  As a surprise I had stopped off beforehand at Sarge's Deli on Second Avenue to pick up his favorite food, noodle kugel, and brought it with me to D.C.

Most people don't know for instance that Frank's Jewish.  He also abstains totally from alcohol but we could never figure out if he was an alcoholic.  He would always dodge the question when asked.  The other two great mysteries about Frank were if he wore a toupee (we debated it constantly) and whether or not he was gay.  Frank never had a girlfriend and no one had ever heard of one in his past. 

In 2007, following Luntz's prediction in the New York Times that Rudy would receive 60% of the vote, Rudy wanted him fired.  It was up to Ray to calm Rudy down but also to calm Luntz who completely freaked out, realizing his error and not wanting to be sacked.

There is also a sad, dark side to him that the public is unaware of.  Frank would go through episodic bouts of deep depression.  They were related, I believe, to a lack of self worth and serious father issues.  When these episodes would come he would disappear for days, sometimes weeks.  It was up to his staff to cover for him.

The great thing about Giuliani people is their loyalty and heart.  Frank has a lot of professional friends and clients, but during these episodes it was only the Giuliani people who would gather round and find him help.  Ray would usually be the point person on this.  I don't think it's widely known but on at least one - and I think more - occasion Frank had to go away for treatment.  I believe Ray arranged it.  I never asked Ray directly when I found out at the time and he didn't volunteer.  At Frank's bad times Ray and Rudy would talk about what needed to be done and Ray would usually reach out to Luntz to set things right.  Giuliani people are never given the proper credit for being extremely thoughtful and compassionate at moments like that.  That was the old Rudy whom he all respected.

Sadly, for me, that get together at Frank's house in Virginia would be the last time I would see or hear from him, other than on TV.

At some point early in the new year, Mo called and asked if I wanted a computer.  He was upgrading to the latest Mac and was giving away his old one.  I had been without a computer since Jerry needlessly acquiesced to the prosecution request that I should consent not to have one at home any longer.  I had been without one for about 11 months and I was very bored siting at home all day.  So I brought Mo's computer home and reactivated my Time Warner internet service. 

The U.S. Attorney's Office would claim it was this internet service reinstatement that caused them to "rush" to indict me more than a year after they began investigating.  They would use words like 'urgent' and 'deeply troubling' to describe their need to move "swiftly."  So at 6 AM on St Patrick's Day 2003 the lobby intercom rang.  The person on the other end said in a loud, seemingly drunken voice, "Happy St. Patrick's Day, Russell."  I hung up and wasn't really quite sure whether to go back to sleep.  On the one hand, Jerry and I knew this day was imminent.  On the other, I didn't think it would be on St. Patrick's Day.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the doorbell rang and I was being arrested by investigators from the U.S. Attorney's Office and DOI.  As I knew this was coming I had made arrangements with a neighbor to take care of Seabe.  I told her I would inform the doorman and he would ring her.

My favorite story as it relates to what idiots DOI investigators are comes from that morning's arrest.  First, you have to understand that DOI has absolutely no legal standing in any of this.  When my apartment was searched a year earlier they were there in numbers but couldn't touch a thing since a Federal search warrant gives them zero jurisdiction.  But they hung around all day acting smug doing nothing productive.  Every court appearance I would ever have, there were not US Customs officials from my case, nor U.S. Attorney investigators.  They were all working; their presence wasn't required for motions and arguments.  But sure enough the first two rows were filled with DOI staff.  Every single court appearance there they were as opposed to actually working on City business.  As I have said before, absolutely the most useless and inept City officials are DOI personnel.  

But I digress.  As I was getting dressed, in my bedroom hovering were a Fed agent and the "lead" DOI investigator, a guy named Brian Foley (You'll most likely recall him as the lowlife who posted a threatening comment on the first day of this blog).  At one point he starts yelling at me regarding how I was getting dressed.  He screamed that I was stalling.  Since a young age, when I donned a suit with dress shoes I would put on my socks and shoes before my shirt, suit and tie.  Why?  It's what my father did.  He told me in the army this was how they had instructed him to get dressed (the idea being in an emergency you would have your footwear on first in order to leave the barracks quickly).  Obviously, whether you put your footwear on first or last, it still takes the same amount of time, only the order is changed.  Well this guy was so stupid that he couldn't grasp that.  So I started screaming back.  Finally, the Fed guy who couldn't believe what an idiot this DOI guy was, said, "Lets everybody calm down." 

After I got dressed I kissed Seabe goodbye.  He was very confused and naturally wanted to come.  Seabe is a gorgeous yellow lab and was unusually attached to me.  He did not like being away from me, ever.  I was always afraid during law enforcement's presence that Seabe's boisterous nature could get him hurt (You may recall the young married couple who had their two yellow labs shot and killed a few years ago during a raid of their home by a Sheriff in Maryland.  After storming the house to arrest the owner and killing the two labs it occurred to them that they had the wrong house).  When I knew the search warrant was coming I had sent him away to stay with friends.

The Fed guy at this point explains to me that he's going to do me a favor.  He's going to cuff me from the front instead of the back.  This was breaking procedure and he wanted me to know this so that I should be grateful.  It's so unbelievably idiotic that they were arresting me in the first place as opposed to self surrendering.  Now I was supposed to be grateful that he was handcuffing me.  This lead investigator from the U.S. Attorney's Office, whose name I forget, and I would meet again one more time.  But while I wasn't contemptuous of him the way I was of DOI lackeys, this guy was always just a little too slick for my taste.  Like most Feds I have met before, and since, he thought he was cleverer, suaver and better dressed than he actually was.  I don't know why but they all suffer from these same delusions, but they all do. 

I was lead out of the building just as the night and morning doormen were changing shifts.  They gave me very sympathetic looks and I told them to ring my neighbor to look after Seabe.  The porter volunteered to get Seabe and walk him right away.  As I sat in the back of that car heading to Federal Court, I thought to myself, "OK - at least this is now ending, so it can begin."

{Next installment - How a Gotti Kept Me in Jail, Arraignment and How Many Times Could Jerry Shargel be Wrong?}

OLD MUSINGS III

Primary Day in NYC

9/14    Tomorrow is Primary Day here in New York City.  This year there has been much heat but very little fire.  Newspapers have commented on the fact that the candidates for citywide office are tired, old retreads, no new blood.

There is much truth to this but those of you enrolled as Democrats have to play the hand you've been dealt tomorrow.  So may I, as an enrollee of the other major party, offer some advice on how to choose your nominees. It seems to me that this year, more than any other, there is a major guiding principle that should lead all voters, not just Democrats, in choosing their candidates.  I am not one for single issue politics.  A candidate for office, especially for higher office and those seeking reelection, should be judged on the totality of their record, not just one vote or one position on an issue.  But this year is very different.

We live in a representative democracy. This is not ancient Greece.  We cannot all stand in the public square and raise our hands to decide every issue.  That is why we have representatives who act in our best interests and on our behalf.  They should reflect the will of the people that elected them but I have respect for the courageous man who bucks the tide when the moment demands it. 

What we cannot respect and never abide is the elected official who acts purely out of self interest or for the special interest when the public clearly demands otherwise.  That is especially true when no compelling reason exists to defy the public will.  In New York City in 2009 that issue is term limits.  Be for or against the issue itself, I can see arguments for both sides, but you cannot accept that after two public referendums where the issue was decided clearly and decisively, a public official who for no explainable reason other than to perpetuate him/herself in office, blatantly defies the expressed public will.  It is intolerable and unacceptable.  It is a mockery of and an affront to our form of government.   Made worse - and nakedly exposed - by the fact that term limits were not repealed, only extended to allow the current office holders to remain incumbents.  It might be one thing had they openly repealed the law on the grounds that it is awful policy leading to a dysfunctional government, as many critics have charged.  But no.  They only extended it to allow Mayor-for-Life Mike and his accomplices to hang around a little longer.

You have this year running for citywide office a number of candidates who voted for or supported the successful effort to extend term limits.  As none of the candidates for Public Advocate or Comptroller has caught the public's imagination and there appears to be no huge divide on their issue stances, you should let there vote/support on term limits guide you.

I will make two endorsements in tomorrow's primary.

For Comptroller, you should seriously consider David Weprin.  He was a champion against the extension of term limits; he has been an effective and independent Chair of the Council's Finance Committee and, like civil service exams where you get 5 points for residency or being a veteran, I give him 5 points for being from a distinguished and honorable political family that has served NYS and NYC well.

For the vestigial office of Public Advocate I will shock those who have known me over the years and strongly urge you to support Norman Siegel.  Why?  Well a few reasons.  Yes it is a totally needless office that exists, as I have said, because of a quirk in the charter reform process back in the 1980's.  But it's here to stay for now and has been lately decimated by the Mayor and City Council.  With a shrunken budget and staff you are going to need someone who has experience working within those confines.  As Mayor-for-Life Mike looks to be headed towards another term, you need some check, however feeble the office, against his power.  The City Council has become a joke when it comes to providing any meaningful restraint against him.  Norman Siegel has been the leader, literally and figuratively, in the fight to turn back the Council's term limits power grab.  Mr. Siegel has said repeatedly in his campaign that he views the office as a voice for the unrepresented and that his opponents view it merely as a stepping stone.  He's right.  He actually wants to do something, if possible, with that office, whereas they want to be someone from that office.  It makes a difference.  I do not believe that he can be bought off by Mayor-for-Life Mike like his opponents, yes, including Mark Green.  I have probably agreed with almost no stand that Norman Siegel has taken over the years, especially in the Giuliani years, but I think he's probably what that office needs at this moment in time.

The other factor that should weigh in your decision tomorrow is the Working Families Party.  They are becoming a corrupting and corrosive influence in New York State politics.  You should seriously consider not voting for any candidate who has been cross-endorsed by the Working Families Party.  I fully acknowledge that come the General Election I will have to eat those words for the office of Mayor, but that will be the unique exception and I will explain why when the time comes.

As for why you should care what I think on any of this, let me just say this.  I have more experience and knowledge regarding NYC politics and government than 99% of those who read this blog.  I began my political activity in 1972, at the age of eight,  working on the campaign of Rep. William Fitts Ryan against Rep. Bella Abzug.  Weeks later working on the widow Ryan's campaign after a successful Rep. Ryan died after the primary but before the General Election.  I never stopped after that working on campaigns and following the players.  I may have worked on campaigns before the age of eight, but I don't remember.  Maybe that longevity and my insight on how city government works from the inside is worth a little something to you.  But as with any issue, you decide.

Not Gonna Happen in 2010

9/9    Remember Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night?  She and Clark Gable are trying to hitch a ride.  Macho Gable is striking out using his thumb.  Then Miss. Colbert tells him to step aside, lifts up her skirt to expose some leg and a car screeches to a halt to pick them up.  I'm reminded of that scene witnessing Rudy Giuliani of late.  He appeared on Meet the Press this weekend to show some leg and stop the presses.

His performance on the show and lately in general have caused me to conclude that he is not running.  In fact, as sure as I can be without actually knowing his inner thoughts, I am convinced of it.  What an aging, out of office politician of Rudy's stature fears most is becoming irrelevant, the phone stops ringing.  The only way to reverse that is to get back in the arena.  All arguments for getting into the race.  But he's not.

When political reporters, observers and pundits look at a Giuliani candidacy next year they ask themselves two questions: 1. can he win and 2. what happens to him if he doesn't.  What is causing Rudy Giuliani sleepless nights is neither of those questions, actually quite the opposite.  What he fears most is not losing but winning.  Not because he fears governing or leadership.  No, I believe some reincarnation, however modest, of old Rudy would reemerge to manage the state and he is certainly very confident of his abilities.  Modesty is not a Giuliani trait.  What terrifies him is the bi-weekly paycheck from Tom DiNapoli.  You see unlike other millionaire/billionaire candidates (Kohl, Corzine, Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger, Bredesen etc.) who have made their pile and can govern while maintaining the deluxe lifestyle, Rudy cannot.  Rudy is something of a modern Sherman McCoy, Tom Wolfe's main character in Bonfire of the Vanities.  Sherman made millions a year but could just barely keep his head above water due to his expenses.  It was Wolfe's genius as a writer that you actually empathized with Sherman's money woes.  That is Rudy - minus the sympathy.  He makes millions a year.  But he also shells out millions a year.

A win next year would cause him to severe his ties to all Giuliani Partners and Bracewell and Giuliani streams of revenue.  No more paid speeches at 100Gs a pop either.  He would actually have to live on $179,000 a year.  Granted, he would work out ahead of time some large payout from both the law firm and consulting firm to tide him over, but neither is raking in the bucks now that they once did.  The payout will not be tens of millions, just millions.  Is there some reason to believe that a former Governor Giuliani will be worth millions and millions in the private sector like he was after 9/11?  The answer is no.  His political career would be at an end.  His attractiveness to the right wing yahoos from Texas and Oklahoma that he so assiduously courts would once again be tempered by the sure to be moderate record of a Gov. Giuliani.  It is a simple political fact that a Dick Cheney wannabe Rudy could not govern this state.  A Rudy Giuliani from 93, 97 or even 89 could.  The Limbaughs, Hannitys, Coulters, Savages and Levins would not like that. Fred Dicker would postpone his mused retirement to chronicle the ethical accommodations of a Giuliani term in Albany, not to mention the clamor for release of his clients, past and present.  No more tiaras for Judith or G5s to travel.  Have you ever ridden the state plane?  It sucks.  Yes, a law firm would snap him up in a minute post service, but not for the $$$ he once commanded. 

No, what's at stake here is a yen to serve, matter and make a difference or be Jay Gatsby.  FDR was faced with a similar choice after his polio struck.  Mama wanted him to return to Hyde park and live the easy life of a country squire.  He instead chose the difficult and painful - yet fulfilling - life in the arena.  Of course FDR didn't have money concerns.

I have come to the conclusion that like the Duke and Wallis Simpson what matters to the Giulianis is the adulation and cafe society, no heavy lifting involved.  There are a number of factors and indicators besides the ones just stated that lead me to say this: I will go out on a limb here and say that there will be no Giuliani candidacy.  He is just appearing on these shows and giving these interviews because for the moment he matters again.  And what political figure of Rudy's stature doesn't need to be needed.  In his case, so long as it doesn't cost anything.

ABOVE THE FRAY

8/31    Like some of you, I listened to the Public Advocate debate this weekend.  Hearing the debate and seeing Mark Green run again for his old office reminded me of a famous Saturday Night Live sketch.  It was 1988, shortly before the New Hampshire primary.  The SNL sketch was a debate between the Republican contenders.  It was most memorable as the first time Dan Ackroyd did his Bob Dole impression nationally and Al Franken tried out his Pat Robertson.  Nora Dunn, playing Rep. Pat Schroeder, was the moderator.  The last question to the candidates was, "you're all bright, articulate spokesmen for your party.  But only one of you can be the nominee.  Would you accept the number two spot on the ticket?"  Each candidate in order mocked the position and derisively scorned the notion of serving as Vice President.  Bob Dole added, "the only person I can think spineless enough to want the job would be my good friend George Bush."

Then she came to Bush, who said he wouldn't rule it out.  "I'd make a damn good vice president.  I've been there, I've done it - for eight years  - and I could do it or eight more."  Now that to me was one of the funniest bits in a sketch that was already hilarious.  It's commonly accepted in American politics - or used to be - that nobody really wants to be Vice President.  Mondale, Gore and Cheney have changed that view somewhat but conventional wisdom still held in 1988.  And here was Bush, having done the number two job for eight long years, saying he'd do it again for eight more. And what's more he admits it in a presidential debate.

Now here you have Mark Green saying essentially the same thing.  Isn't his whole candidacy premised on the Bush/Carvey line, "I've been there, I've don't it - for eight years - and I could do it for eight more."  Except he's not running to return to the majesty and power of the Vice Presidency of the United States.  He wants to reclaim a job that only exists because the powers that be (county bosses) who amended the City Charter after it was ruled unconstitutional agreed to save a job for Andrew Stein.  That is the sole reason that position exists.

I think Mark Green's candidacy is pitiable.  He has become the living embodiment of the caricature that Dana Cavey tried to turn George Bush into 21 years ago.  The difference of course being that George Bush never wanted to be V.P. a second time.  That would have been mockable.  Mark Green does want to be Public Advocate again.  And that's just sad.

I Want to Be a Part of B.A.

8/27    Argentina has never been known as a bastion of democracy and freedom.  Images that come to the fore are more likely military coups and the financial crisis of the 90's than freedom of the press.  But this past week something extraordinary happened there.  We, the United States, like to think of ourselves as the example for the world in democratic rule.  GW bush wanted to export it like Coca-Cola or blue jeans.  Sadly, if we were a model he surely tarnished our brand for generations.  The cause of freedom and the libertarian ideal got a big shot in the arm this week not from Washington, D.C. but from Buenos Aires of all places.

The Supreme Court of Argentina handed down a decision that many of us can't imagine happening here in our lifetime.  The justices did not decriminalize marijuana for personal use, they legalized it.  The distinction is extremely important.  Decriminalization amounts to holding your nose and permitting behavior you believe criminal or immoral but societally tolerable.  What the court said was that this was a matter of personal freedom.  The use of marijuana was a decision for adults to make without interference from the state.  Those of us who believe that drug laws in this country are not only ineffective and harmful but contrary to the American principle of personal responsibility can only look upon the court's ruling with wonder and envy.  I don't use drugs, haven't in nearly twenty years, but should I choose to that decision should be mine alone, not the governments.

Argentina has now legalized drug use in small quantities.  Mexico quietly decriminalized personal possession of most drugs.  Brazil will shortly legalize personal drug use.  The drug war is lost and never should have been fought.  In the coming decade, country after country from Sweden to Portugal will lead the way.  How long will the U.S. hold out?

As for Argentine democracy, however much it might make many chortle, Democrats can only look down Argnetine way with lust at a nation that freely elected first the husband and then the wife (Nestor & Cristina Kirchner) as its President.  That is something the Democratic Party and the U.S. itself could not achieve in 2008.

ON MY MIND

8/26   1. Rudy Giuliani's favorite movie, as everyone knows, is 'The Godfather.'  Apparently he sought to act out a scene from that film this past week.  Usually Rudy is Don Corleone.  But this time he was playing the Tom Hagen part.  I am guessing that Tony Carbonetti and Peter Powers were unavailable or have decided to step back from chores like these. 

Rudy ventured out to Wolz Studios - in this case Nassau County - in order to see Joe Mondello and obtain his signature on a piece of paper.  Fans of the movie will recall Tom Hagen went to see Mr. Wolz in order to get the producer to sign Johnny Fontane to his new picture.  Fans will also recall the unnamed bandleader who wouldn't let Johnny out of his contract and was assured that "either his brains or signature would be on that piece of paper" - the famous, "offer he couldn't refuse."

Well Rudy left Joe Mondello's office and shortly thereafter his signature was affixed to a press release announcing his intention to step down as Chairman of the State GOP.  One has to wonder what offer did Rudy make Joe that he could not refuse.  There have been no reports of decapitated equine down state so that can't be it.  So what was it and what does it mean?  Rudy clearly wants the state party lined-up for something.  Governor in 2010?  I am not a betting man, but if I were I am not prepared yet to see him doing this. 

Second acts in politics are hard, third acts nearly impossible.  Richard Nixon most famously lost - narrowly - a presidential election and then went on to an ill conceived race for Governor of California. He doggedly worked the next six years to reestablish himself within the party and in the voters' minds as the "New Nixon" of 68.  Rudy Giuliani is not Richard Nixon; he lacks his discipline and focus, not to mention his analytical ability on domestic and global affairs.  A losing race in 2010 would finish him off for good. 

I think Rudy, like many, isn't convinced Andrew Cuomo has the guts to do this.  No one has ever lost money betting on the cowardice of the Cuomos and people just don't see Andrew stepping up to the plate and killing the king.  That is Rudy's reluctance and that is what he is waiting to see.  But in the meantime Rudy is acting as Don and Consilgiere all-in-one.  His circle is shrinking instead of expanding.  That is what fated his downfall in 2008.  Unlike RN he doesn't seem capable of learning from his mistakes.

2.    Ted Kennedy.  Naturally, there was almost nothing I saw eye to eye on with the late Senator.  But I respected him as a legislator.  I worked in the Senate and saw him up close.  Both the good and the bad.  He was what everyone is saying today - a hard worker who could form coalitions on issues he was passionate about.  He was a fighter for what he believed in and a dogged, tenacious opponent of that which he opposed.  The bad was his personal behavior as was constantly talked about on the Hill.  He and Chris Dodd banging and sharing waitresses at La Colline over and over again.  Not pretty.

My favorite Ted Kennedy moment happened years before I went to work in the Senate.  I was 16 years old working as a page at the 1980 Democratic Convention in New York.  As now, I was a Republican - if then only in spirit.  But there looked never to be a Republican Convention being held in NYC and working any national convention seemed thrilling.  I hated Jimmy Carter.  I was glad Ted Kennedy challenged him even if he couldn't enunciate his reasons for wanting the job to Roger Mudd.  I was working the convention floor the night of his speech.  Just as I would be the night Jimmy Carter mangled Hubert Humphrey's name and Ted Kennedy deprived him of the 'arms held high' victory/unity symbol.

I was raised in a household that carried the Kennedy torch; JFK and RFK were true heroes to both my parents and instilled in them their love of politics.   I didn't share the crowd's passion that night but only an idiot could fail not to be moved by the moment.  It was electric.  I was standing right beneath the podium when Ted Kennedy said, "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."  It wasn't my hope or dream but the place erupted and wept.  It was certainly one of the most memorable moments of my young life. 

3.    I of course have no personal knowledge of Bernie Madoff's health or lack thereof.  But I am an expert in the ways of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons.  I suspected all along, the minute I heard he was being sent to Butner, that he was ill.  A few facts:  The BOP has a 500 mile rule.  You will be incarcerated within 500 miles of the Court in which you were sentenced.  There are three exceptions that the BOP makes to that rule: 1. You have family in another part of the country.  In that case the BOP will consider another region; 2. They are punishing you.  The BOP routinely punishes inmates; either inmates who don't follow the rules or just inmates the BOP considers troublesome (suing the BOP too much, appealing your conviction, filing grievances against the staff)by sending them far away from their families; or 3. There is no space in a prison of your security level within 500 miles of your court.  

Now Butner is 481 miles from Bernie Madoff's home.  Just under the limit.  But there were closer facilities to which he could have been sent.  Why there?  Because the prison he is in is feet away from  the BOP's "premier" medical facility.  In fact, it's their cancer center, FMC Butner.  I was there for 20 months.  I suspected that was the reason he was assigned there.  Furthermore, knowing the BOP as I do, I can tell you with absolute certainty that their statement yesterday denying it is almost unprecedented.  The BOP makes a point of not countering press speculation.  I knew many high profile inmates who asked the BOP to issue a statement denying something and the response was always the same, "that's what your lawyer is for."  Equally suspicious, was the BOP's attack on the Post.  Even if the Post story were inaccurate, it wasn't a malicious story regarding the BOP - the Post wasn't claiming Madoff was being denied treatment.  But the BOP launched into an outright attack against the Post.  Why?  I suspect they don't want to appear in any way to be providing him favorable treatment.  Sending him to the prison next door to their cancer center would make it far, far easier for him to be moved there permanently than if he were in another prison nowhere near North Carolina.  As for Madoff's attorney, Ira Sorkin, he had no comment.  The Post story sounds about right to me.

4.    Race.  We have reached the nadir of our political lives when Dave Dinkins and Al Sharpton are giving Gov. Paterson soothing advice on race and polling.  In essence telling him to chill out.  The NY Times yesterday wrote a very kindly piece - as they always have - about David Dinkins and race.  They rewrote history by claiming he rarely mentioned it as Mayor.  It seems the Times is still trying to overturn the 93 result.  David Dinkins was never stupid enough to do what Dave Paterson did and claim outright that his poll numbers were as a result of racism.  But anyone who attended or watched his press conferences saw him over and over again ask these rhetorical questions of the press leading to only one answer - in his mind - racism.  After leaving office he spent the next eight years on NY 1 as a guest asking these same questions over and over, never able to come to terms that he was a failed leader and that in 89 he was an unproven party hack which accounted for the narrow race after the primary (not to mention the fraudulent letter and stock deal).  He did it again in the Times story which ironically was claiming that he almost never did it.  In today's paper there is a story about Al Sharpton advising Paterson on how to modulate comments on race.   It's truly Alice in Wonderland.  You need Dave Paterson out of office just so that Sharpton and Dinkins are not the voice of reason on the subject of race. That's apparently what we've come to.

5.    Is it just me or has the press failed to take notice of a pattern of lying from Mayor-for-Life Mike.  The incident the other day about transit pay raises; did anyone believe Mike when he totally disputed Roger Toussaint's account of their phone conversation?  I don't think so.  Mayor-for-Like Mike has a truly despicable habit of lying when he's been caught in something, even something innocent.  That is a very troubling predilection in a Mayor.  Recently, in a Vanity Fair  story about the Madoff sons, Bloomberg totally denied writing one of them a letter of recommendation to a country club.  The reporter had the letter, it was undeniable, and yet Mayor-for-Life Mike denied it.  So he wrote one of the kids a letter, who cares?  Why would someone deny something like that?  In my own case, he denied having met me, although we had met, dined and chatted on numerous occasions.  It was a ridiculous thing to deny, but he did. 

More troublesome - and I have been mentioning it on this site since the day I launched it - is how completely out of touch our billionaire Mayor is with common folk.  The exchange the other day on his radio show regarding the pay for execs at big pharma is a prime example.  First, why would someone assume that execs at those companies don't make heavy bucks?  Second, why did he instinctively defend them?  Third, when he discovered he was wrong, his admission - which sought to show some outrage at their compensation - sounded more like he was impressed.  "Oh, the guy makes $27 million, that's better," it seemed like he was saying from his tone.  He can't relate to 99.9% of New Yorkers and worse, never makes the slightest effort to show that he can.  He thinks schmoes making $50k are just that, schmoes.  He truly believes that there has to be something wrong with someone who isn't making at least $30 mill.  They must be lazy or stupid, he assumes.  His utter disdain for most of the city is evident in his poll numbers.  There can be no other explanation why someone with a 60% approval rating is at 47% in the polls.  People don't like him because they know he is openly contemptuous of them.

6.    The NY Times ran an editorial yesterday bemoaning the plight of juvenile offenders at NY State prison facilities.  The Justice Dept has issued a scathing report on conditions in those prisons.  Two years ago, everyone's favorite prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, also released a report on the abuse in Chicago prisons; the physical abuse and lack of medical treatment.  I shook my head then and shake it now.

When Patrick Fitzgerald released that report nearly every single charge he made was true, and worse, in federal prisons.  The BOP is monitored by no one.  The BOP and US Attorney's Office are housed within the US Dept of Justice.  No sister agency is going to investigate the other.  Where was the US Attorney investigation into abuses at federal prisons?  You, the reader, assume they don't happen because you never read about them.  You never read about them because no one has jurisdiction to investigate.  No state official can investigate a federal prison in that state; no D.A., state attorney general, sheriff, or state crime bureau.  There is no federal oversight of the BOP other than by that agency's inspector general and everyone knows that office in the BOP is a joke.  So while the NY Times rants and raves about state prison conditions someone should be asking these US Attorneys why they never look within their own jurisdiction?  Inmate abuse, withholding of medical treatment through neglect, malice or incompetence is rife throughout the BOP.  Violation of prisoner rights is the norm in the BOP not the exception.  I will be detailing stories later in J'ACCUSE, especially of the medical horrors.  Just ask yourself the last time you heard or read about a federal prison under investigation and ask yourself why you haven't.  I assure you it is not because they are abuse free.

8/10    Please see the new post, THE GIULIANI - MADOFF CONNECTION.

8/12    Please see the new post, J'ACCUSE - Part VII

YOU HUG IT, YOU OWN IT

8/11    Colin Powell famously said of the Iraq invasion and the American occupation to follow, "You broke it, you own it."  Much the same could be said of President Obama's inept handling, not of the economy - which is most definitely mishandled - but of the public's perception surrounding those responsible for its sorry state.  In Gen. Powell's example there was no way of invading and occupying a country and not being seen as laying claim to the action.  But Obama didn't create this mess, he inherited it.  So why is he creating no daylight between himself and the bad numbers?

Those old enough to remember or have studied FDR, know that he spent nearly his entire 12 years in office blaming Herbert Hoover for everything.  FDR had a visceral hatred of the man and his policies.  At the first sign that the economy was retreating - and it did for much of the 30's - he would start talking about the 20's and Hoover.  Mostly it was politics but some of it had a basis in fact.

The Great Communicator had eight years in the White House and from Jan 20, 1981 until the day he left, he blamed Jimmy Carter: his philosophy, management, ideology, for all of the nation's ills.  And in the main he was correct.  Ronald Reagan didn't accept ownership of the recession he inherited ever!  He accepted credit for the recovery that he initiated and engineered.  It was always Jimmy Carter's disaster. Reagan and his aides never let you forget it.  I lived in DC for the last few years of the Reagan Administration.  The failed policies of Jimmy Carter was still the mantra even 8 years later.  It worked.  Carter was a pariah even within his own party for a decade.  He couldn't attend the Democratic National Conventions for years.  Ronald Reagan did that.  Barack Obama seems to have learned the wrong lessons in those fancy schools he attended.  His attack dog advisors have given him nothing but losing advice.  

On or about his 60th day in office he started trumpeting how the economy was turning around.  Once he did that he owned it.  You hold a baby's dirty diapers at arms length and hold your nose, you don't embrace the mess.  The "not bad" bad jobs numbers that came out last week are a perfect example.  Yes, its possible to twist and squint so that they looked less than awful.  But why would you?  We're in a horrific recession.  George Bush, his policies, his management, his detached, ineffectual leadership caused it.  Why would anyone else take responsibility for it?  Those of you who admire Obama for "stepping up to the plate" or "putting the past behind him" may be satisfied with your hero being in office for a very short time. There's nothing admirable about letting George W. Bush off the hook.  Certainly not to the millions who believed Obama was their savior.    `

It is insulting intellectually for Obama and Biden to tell the American people that this stimulus package has done anything - good or bad - yet.  With only 20% of the funds having made their way into the economy and only a few months having passed no sensible person could be made to believe that Obama's policies have made any difference.  And yet we all know the economy, at least the employment numbers and the perception - if not actual growth, will get worse through this year and the beginning of 2010.  So why identify yourself with these awful numbers, why spin them when they're not yours yet to spin? 

The Obama Administration should have only started accepting this economy as its own sometime in the early Spring of 2010, the serious start of the midterm elections. At that point time would have ended the recession, as it does with most of them, or his policies, as he claims, would have produced results.  If neither were true it really wouldn't matter by then because there would be nothing to do about it except blame George Bush for destroying the economy.   But those options have been removed.  The president for better or worse owns this mess he's hugged it to his and Larry Summers' bosom.  Like so much of what he's done already: Guantanamo, torture, wiretaps, constitutional accountability and gay rights, it's another in a disturbing string of perplexing Obama letdowns.

Memory Woes

8/6    Great wealth breeds great arrogance.  In the continuing saga of who asked for $1.5 million for two Jewish service organizations, Mayor-for Life Mike says yet again, it's a faulty memory (NYT Blog).  He now says we should keep paper records because people can't be expected to remember these things.  Oh, really?  A $60 billion enterprise keeping records, wow that is some great management innovation from him.  Only one problem, records were always kept by the Mayor's Office of Contracts (MOC).  It was only under this administration that they seemed to have stopped doing so. The question is why.  Why didn't MOC have a record of these particular requests? And what were they doing approving the funds without one, if as they say none exists/existed?  There is so obviously more here than meets they eye.  The Councilmember involved has no known reason to lie and moreover, only the paperwork for these two organizations are non-existent out of the dozens of requests documented by MOC for Councilmember Felder.  This episode is the very definition of a conspiracy.  That's clear.  What is unclear is why and by whom.  Amazing to me still that in this age of runaway prosecutions for nearly everything, this can't attract the eye of any prosecutor or investigative agency.  I wonder why.

Nicht Ein Wort

8/5    It used to be said that people liked billionaire candidates for public office because they weren't corruptible.  They wouldn't steal your money, the theory went,  because they have so much of their own.  That still remains true.  But what now seems apparent is that they needn't line their own pockets for them to be politically corrupt.  Mayor-for-Life Mike has been engaging in some pretty impressive political corruption of his own to the tune of nearly $1,500,000.  Now as is his habit, he's lying about it.  I will not attempt to explain the minutiae of the scandal, the New York Times can explain it much better than I can (NYT story).   

Essentially Bloomberg wanted to augment his own personal charitable giving to two Jewish groups with City money without any scrutiny or fingerprints.  So he and his staff violated long-standing city rules as well as the rules of his own Mayor's Office of Contracts (MOC).  Monies, such as they disbursed, require that either a Borough President or a City Councilmember be listed as the requester of funds.  No such office made the request for those funds.  The Mayor or his staff assigned to those disbursements the name of a City Councilmember.  That Councilmember, Simcha Felder, vehemently denies ever requesting the money.  Moreover, the Mayor's Jewish liaison left city government to become a lobbyist for one of the two groups shortly after the funds were disbursed.  Does this thing smell or what?

I was head of Inter-Governmental Affairs in the Mayor's Office for 2 1/2 years.  This cover-up of an appropriation and violation of MOC rules is unprecedented.  The Mayor and his staff are playing this off as a simple disagreement in remembering events -  "Felder says he didn't and we say he did, end of story."  This he said/he said explanation is fine were it not for the fact that laws have been broken and about $1.5 million dollars was improperly and secretly dispersed.  Why was it done?  Why was Felder's name used and not another elected official?  What ties existed before between Bloomberg staff and these organizations?  In our day, MOC checked with officials to verify they requested the money.  Why was that not done here?  I could go on.  I ask these questions to make the point that clearly this needs to be investigated.  But by whom?  The joke in all this is that there is, in theory, the perfect agency to do the work.  But, not surprisingly, they have been deadly silent.  As my mother would say, "Nicht Ein Wort."  Not one word. 

The NYC Dept of Investigation has a checkered and mostly ignoble history.  It is common knowledge that no serious investigation of a senior member of a Mayoral administration has ever taken place by DOI.  Whether it was Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani or Bloomberg, any investigation that you want kept away from serious law enforcement is sent to DOI.  It is the place where tough scrutiny goes to die.  Sure, they'll investigate building inspectors and contractors for corruption but an administration official of high rank?  Never.  The irony in all this is that the current scandal is tailor made for a supposed administration watchdog like DOI.  Someone is clearly lying.  This is not a difference of memory.  Who better than they to find out who.  They absolutely do not need the mayor's invitation to begin an inquiry.  The Commissioner of DOI, Rose Hearn, made a big point upon taking office of throwing barbs at the Giuliani Administration's management of DOI and promised unbiased and ruthless investigations.  

Of course that was a joke.  She may not have fully understood that back in 2002.  It's possible she didn't know the Keystone Cops that comprise most of DOI.  Or that from Day One Mayor-for-Life Mike was never going to let her run wild through his backyard.  But here we are.  Cover-ups, paybacks, lies within City governement, who knows what else.  And DOI sits whistling, starring at the ceiling, trying to avert its gaze from the curious onlookers waiting to see what they'll do.  It's a rather mute point since if the pressure becomes strong enough and Mayor-for-Life Mike does send this DOI's way it will be with the full understanding of where this can go and how far.  But it would be nice, for once, to see Rose Hearn at least pretend to live up to those tough words of January 2002. 

The Utter Nerve

8/4    Imagine for a moment a Mayor of New York City running for reelection telling the voters that in his next term he would lobby his Dept of Transportation commissioner to pave more streets.  Or he would beseech his Sanitation commissioner to plow roads faster during blizzards.  You would have a citizenry scratching its head at the total disconnect of the man.  And yet Mayor-for-Life Mike has said essentially that.  He proposes in his next term to 'lobby' the MTA to do various things incorporated in a new campaign document his staff dreamed up.  Faithful readers of this site know I have railed over and over again that Mayor-for-Life Mike has cynically avoided accepting any responsibility for the abysmal management of the MTA.  He has pretended for 8 years that the MTA is some amorphous being over which he has no power.  Rather than the truth which is that he has three crucial appointments to the board that can and have shaped policy in previous administrations.  Now, not content with that fiction, he seeks to perpetuate it.  I had expected him to say, "In my next term I will make the MTA eliminate fares on cross-town buses.  If they don't, I will hold up business till they do."  He can if he so chose (I will write at greater length closer to the election how this is done if the will is there). Basically do an about face in an election year.  

But instead he has said the same thing over and over.  He'll lobby the MTA, like he would lobby Albany for a piece of legislation.  But of course, that is another fiction.  He is so utterly despised in the State Senate and by much of the Assembly that he dare not step foot past Kingston.  He can't get anything done in Albany.  He can't get anything done at the MTA.  He can't get anything done at the Port Authority.  D.C. felt free to snub him and the P.D. by denying the greatest terrorist target in America extra police funding.  Can you imagine them doing that to Giuliani?  And the MTA knowing his record and lack of fangs responded to his pledges by saying, "they would study them."  In case you haven't spent time amidst giant bureaucracies, that means, "Fuck Off!"

There was a report yesterday listing the worst airports in America.  Guess who has the top three?  Yup, the Port Authority of NY & NJ (PA): JFK, LaGuardia and Newark.  You may recall some time ago I blasted Mayor-for-Life Mike for blowing the literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Rudy handed him to take back JFK & LaGuardia once their leases expired.  Rudy had laid out the groundwork, the leases were expiring in a short time.  All Rudy's successor had to do was set-up a new authority to accept them and begin the transition.  The financial markets were no longer going to lend to an entity whose very existence was in question.  Rudy had them.  But no.  Mayor-for-Life Mike, seeking as always less responsibility not more and as one of his very first acts as Mayor, extended the leases for marginally better terms.  Thereby dooming the local, domestic, and international traveling public to a miserable flying experience for generations. It was the greatest gift the PA had received since its inception.

Some enterprising reporter - or Bill Thompson's opp research team - should go back and check what Bloomberg had said about the PA when he handed them the airports for another 50 years.  I am sure it would contrast sharply with his current view that "Perhaps, the PA doesn't represent the interests of NYC."  Ya think?  A TV commercial on this would be a no-brainer.  NYers hate the airports more than anyone.  Rightfully so.  Is this a man whose judgment and honesty you can trust on crucial matters?

I am desperate to ask - how stupid exactly does he think we are?  But the answer is we're pretty stupid.  He was reelected with absolutely no rationale.  He pulled a coup d'etat by hijacking the City Charter in order to perpetuate himself in office.  And yet he has a 60% + approval rating.  It is telling however, that if these polls are to be believed - and I am not sure they are - that with $20 million already spent versus a nearly non-existent opponent, he is losing ground.  The only explanation I can see after studying polls for over 30 years is that people genuinely dislike him.  Why else would someone with a 60+% approval rating have below 50% against a nobody opponent.  Clearly nearly a decade of open contempt for his constituents, their problems and their lives, is coming home to roost.   I have always found him to be intensely dislikable; that was one reason I chose to leave rather than serve under him and run HDC.  I urge Bill Thompson's staff to read my Mark Green post.  Howard Wolfson is one mean motherfucker.  If these polls are accurate and Thompson gains traction, Bloomberg's City Hall will be looking very closely at the Comptroller's Intel detail to see what they might know about their charge and what the Bloomberg campaign can leak.

During the transition in 2001 Vinny LaPadula told me that Bloomberg had told him that he had every intention of continuing to run the day to day operations of Bloomberg, Inc.  Testimony from the various sexual harassment suits at Bloomberg pretty much confirms that.  Profits for the company and himself have increased exponentially over the last eight years.  He's the richest man in the city.  The city however hasn't fared so well.  Our budget has doubled, our debt is skyrocketing and will consume us in the out years, pension costs due to giveaway labor contracts will become crippling, crime is rising, the subways are slower and dirtier, everything is more expensive.  But luckily we can't smoke, eat trans-fats or drive through much of Manhattan.   His value as mayor has been exactly what he commands, $1 a year.

Why exactly 47% of the city still would vote for him is a mystery to me but maybe we're waking up.  Trans fats, smoking, urban beaches at the crossroads of the world and calorie counting may be cited as an impressive set of accomplishments for a Surgeon General.  It is laughable as an 8 year record for a Mayor of New York City seeking voter reaffirmation. 

To Be or Not To Be

8/3    We've reached some point in NYS politics when even the New York Post is getting fed up with Rudy.  The Post, long a Giuliani promoter, had an editorial over the weekend regarding the 2010 Governor's race and essentially telling him to (insert scatological aphorism here).  They reminded him that his delay in 2000 to enter the US Senate race against Hillary Clinton left an already weak Rick Lazio even more hapless by stymieing his fundraising and support.  Thereby costing him any real chance of victory.

What precipitated this admonishment was a Crain's breakfast last week in which Rudy said that things would have to be pretty bad in the State for him to consider running.  He joked - his trademark these days - that he only runs when things are at their worst.  The moderator, Greg David, even commented that Rudy didn't seem prepared to run.  It wasn't clear to the former Mayor if David meant organizationally or by his vague answers to the questions.

So what is Mr. Giuliani trying to tell us?  I can guarantee that he doesn't know so there is no way we can.  But we do know a few things.  First, what he really wants is to run for president again.  He truly believes that four more years of Bush-Cheney policies would have righted the ship with him at the helm.  Unfortunately, no one - save one delegate - believed that in 2008 and fewer will buy it in 2012.  I would bet a lot of money on a second Obama term; less for political reasons than for historical ones.  But even if 2012 turns out to be a good year for Republicans they will not be turning to the past.  I can assure you that the nominee of my party will be someone whose name did not appear on a presidential ballot in 2008.  That's right, Mitt Romney will not be the nominee.

But a stateless Rudy Giuliani needs a home.  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue appears blocked for now.  Gracie Mansion has a lifetime occupant who refuses to leave.  That leaves 138 Eagle Street, better known as the Executive Mansion.  So Rudy looks over the dusty drapes and carpets and muses aloud, "I might consider it, if the offer were right."  The offer apparently is that we have to beg and plead for him to save us.  Rudy is Moses, you see, and we the Israelites turn to him in our time of fiscal and legislative bondage.  Rudy sees himself leading us out of the dark Albany corridors and into a prosperous land flowing with budget surpluses and tough appelate judges.

But the question I have been asking for almost a year still remains unanswered; which Rudy would be running in 2010?  Is it the far-right, Cheney admiring, giggling, torture apologist of 2008?  Perhaps it's the unsteady, philosophically unsure and organizationally challenged candidate of 1989.  Or maybe it's the open, inclusive, independent, confident, sometimes polarizing but always serious leader of 1993.  Of these three Rudy personas which would you choose?  Not only the man you would vote for but the one you'd want to project to the voters in a time of crisis.  The answer of course is C.  But inexplicably Rudy and his advisors over at Giuliani Partners believe A is the winner.  There is no explaining it so there can be no explanation.  The full Randy Levine conversion of Giuliani from an independent maverick into a Tom Coburn clone is complete. 

More disturbing than how he would run is how he would govern.  Again, we do not know because we don't know which Rudy currently inhabits the body.  1993 Rudy would restore New York State to fiscal and political sanity.  1989 Rudy would do a competent job, with slip-ups along the way.  And 2008 Giuliani would have us in a full scale political civil war within 6 months.  That is how stark the differences would be.

Personally, I do not want to beg anyone to take the reigns of leadership.  Part of being a great leader is having a burning need to do the job.  Giuliani made it clear at the Crain's breakfast that no such fire exists yet.   I do not know what to make of all this.  But I do know that he is quickly becoming a tragically flawed figure of Shakespearean dimension.  My advice to him at this point would be to leave the Hamlet act to the Cuomos.  They have it perfected .

7/30    I have taken yesterday's post recounting my time with Charlie Millard entitled, The Zarb, and created a separate post.  I have also added some new analysis and an addendum.  Please see the new post - THE ZARB.

So the sentence is in and it's 150 years.  First, let me say that I cannot understand why Bernie Madoff did not commit suicide before he plead in March.  I can only assume he had no full understanding of how horrible life would be in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.  I am sure he now regrets not having done so.  I don't say that because I have any blood lust about this whole matter.  But a man entering his twilight years does not want to spend all of them in a federal prison.  His life will be hell from now until the day he dies.  Satisfaction to his victims, I am sure, but bewildering to me as to why he would want to endure that.  The cruelty shown him by BOP personnel and the lack of decent medical care, just as he really starts to need it, will blow his mind.    I can only assume he bought into this notion of 'country club prisons.'  No such thing exists in the BOP and because of his sentence he will have to go to a USP (United States Penitentiary - Maximum Security Federal Prison).  Ira Sorkin did him no favors by not painting as brutal a picture as possible.  He'll probably wind up at Lewisburg in Pennsylvania.  I knew many people who did time there.  While it is not the worst of the worst, it ain't no fun for a 71 year old man who had maids and butlers.  I befriended an elderly man who had done time there.  He regalled me with stories of his one-time bunk mate - Alger Hiss.

I respect Denny Chin as a jurist and I do not believe he gave into the braying crowd.  I will say I am sorry that he did not admonish these greedy investors who put total blind faith in Maddof and now shriek and cry of their miserable lives.  He conned them, no question.  But he also gave them plenty of clues that he was conning them; they just chose to ignore them.  I read an article this weekend that said on the firm's statements sent out to investors, it would routinely refer to some of their assets being invested in a Vanguard fund that had been discontinued years earlier.  Do investors have no personal responsibility?   Especially investors of this caliber.  I think a psychiatrist would say that the white hot intensity of their hatred has as much to do with their inability to come to terms with their own culpability in all this as it does with Madoff's. 

On another judicial front let me applaud the Supreme Court's ruling in the New Haven firefighter case.  The one piece missing in the reporting on this story from the liberal media is that the City of New Haven spent hundred of thousands of dollars with an outside consultant specifically to design the test  so that black firefighters would score well - and they still didn't!  How fixed did this process need to be?  Their argument about lawsuits was specious from the start exactly because they had taken the precaution of having the text designed so that black firemen would score higher.  Other than outright quotas there was nothing more the City could have done.  But they were cowardly in the aftermath.  Instead of sticking by the results after all their efforts they decided merit had absolutely no place in this, even a merit-based test that was partially fixed.  Ruth Gingburg can keep her sympathy for the white firemen.  The court partially redeemed itself today from its weak decision of last week on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

I am sorry they did not decide the McCain-Feingold case, however.  I have no hatred of Hillary Clinton.  She is merely a vehicle in this case.  McCain-Feingold is terrible law.  Whenever and whatever the Court can do to erode it is fine with me.  I hope when they rehear arguments in September that the right decision will result from it. 

6/25    The rehabilitation has begun.  Rudy Giuliani sought to remind us yesterday that he is a citizen not of Texas or North Carolina but rather New York.  He wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times calling for a state constitutional convention - "Putting New York Back Together."  

There's very little doubt that New York State needs some constitutional changes.  Anyone reading a newspaper these days can pretty well see that.  We have a vacancy for Lt. Governor, with no mechanism for selecting or confirming one.  Our budget is constantly late and estimates are invariably wrong or shoe horned to fit the Assembly Speaker's spending priorities.  These were two of the issues raised by Rudy.  The others were judicial pay increases, term limits, campaign finance reform, supermajorities for tax increases and redistricting reform.  Most of these are laudatory and if he were an academic writing in the Manhattan Institute's journal I'd say 'interesting.' 

But he's not an academic, he's Rudy Giuliani.  And what we expect - or should - from Mayor Giuliani is leadership.  A constitutional convention would take years - probably two or three - to commence.  Unlike his stated expectation, it would be seated and staffed with the exact same people who are playing 'hide the key' in Albany right now; trust me they would have it no other way.  California and Connecticut have both rejected such conventions in the last few years.  Each had its own parochial reasons for rejecting the idea but the common one was that neither saw how it was possible to create a body of citizens that would not wind up being controlled by the same people who've created the mess the convention was chartered to fix.  No one has yet come up with an answer for that.

But putting aside the mechanics and the rather bland 7 point plan the Mayor proposes, what would he do now?  Sure, it's fine to say 3 years from now a convention would be a nice thing, but what would he do today were he in a position of leadership?  He's silent on that point.

I notice two things coming out of the Mayor's Op-Ed.  One most striking feature is what he did not call for - public referendum.  The other is how little attention he received for this first foray back.   The two go hand-in-hand.  His proposals were bland, rote and unoriginal.  Hence, the lack of coverage.

True conservatives - not of the Dick Cheney strain - believe in public referendum.  It is no panacea - especially when the voter's will is ignored as with term limits in NYC -  but in a state as politically and governmentally dysfunctional as New York; where our leaders no longer lead, the public has a right to express itself and change the direction of the state.  Usually that is done at election time by selecting candidates.  But it is not working here anymore.  With the status quo in Albany seemingly impervious to change, does anyone see hope for reform through the normal channels?  

Conservatives such as Rudy fear the public will unchecked.  This is not without reason: the public can behave as crazy as our legislators.  But it is deep rooted in a fundamental mistrust of citizens, much as we see in Iran.  Just enough democracy is ok, too much is dangerous; so the thinking goes.  I have always rejected that.  The old conservatives - what I like to call the Western Cons (Goldwater & Reagan) - always supported public referenda on the local level, so it is notable that Rudy left it out.

If this piece in the Times yesterday was his start at rehabilitating himself, it's too little and too late.  He needs to do what I have told him to do for months: Explain, and if need be, apologize for his positions of 2007 & 2008.  Return to Mayor Giuliani and leave behind too clever by half candidate Giuliani.  Only until he does that can he begin to reform and regain our trust.

6/22    As President Obama signs the most significant smoking legislation since the 1960's; giving the FDA unprecedented oversight over tobacco, I thought you might be interested in the last time the new FDA Commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, was involved in significant smoking legislation.  It occurred in 1995 and Rudy Giuliani was Mayor.  New Post:   Where There's Smoke...

6/23    On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the much anticipated case, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder.  The case was widely seen as a verdict on the future of a key provision, Section 5, of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The case involved the pre-clearance provision of the Act.  Named states, cities and counties must seek clearance from the Justice Department before making any substantive changes to their voting procedures or jurisdictions.  Most had thought, many had hoped, that the justices would throw out that provision maybe even invalidate the whole Act.  Unfortunately, they gave the plaintiff what they wanted but left everything else intact.

The Supreme Court will often not decide a matter that it has not been asked to decide but rather settle the narrow issues if possible.   That is what it did here.  They said Northwest Utility could opt out but said no more than that.  It is clear that there were at least three possibly four votes to throw out Section 5: Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia.   So why not decide the broader issue?  My guess is that they didn't have Justice Kennedy on board and they preferred a small win as opposed to a large defeat.

Chief Justice Roberts made it clear, once again, that the country has changed dramatically in the last 40 years and he is seeing no real need for these types of measures.

As all politics is local, I will bring this back to NYC.  Many of you not from NY would be shocked to learn that three of the five counties that make up New York City (Manhattan, Brooklyn & The Bronx) are covered by the pre-clearance section.  People tend to think these statutes apply to the deep south only.  But the named entities are spread throughout the country.  Recently, the Mayor and City Council overturned our term limits law here.  Two separate voter referendum had enacted and then confirmed, by substantial majorities, the voters determination to impose term limits on our local elected officials.  Those referendum made no provision whatever for an elected body to overturn the voter's decision. 

And yet, our term limited Mayor and City Council by a simple legislative vote overturned term limits.  I had assumed that when this went to the division of the Justice Department that handles Section 5, it would deny approval for the change.  But no, it gave its blessing.  Millions of voters, including many minority voters, voted for term limits without any 'out' for the incumbent politicians.   True, a federal judge rejected a challenge to the Mayor's self-serving move.  But I felt sure that if this provision was supposed to have some meaning it was that self-interested localities could not up-end the will of the electorate.  And the minority electorate in particular.  But no.

This was the most blatant act of voter disenfranchisement in the history of our city.  And the Justice Department is fine with it.  I can tell you that Justice's acquiescence surely doomed the chances of a black man, Bill Thompson, from running an effective race against the incumbent, Michael Bloomberg.  This landmark piece of civil rights legislation has been used to deny a black man his opportunity to seek higher office.  Could that have possibly been the intent?  I don't think so.  This is Chief Justice Roberts' point in practice.  Evidence that laws can outlive their intended original purpose.

So here we are.  Section 5 does not protect minority or majority voting rights from a small group of grubby, self-interested politicians.  Then what is the point of it?  And how can we rationalize its further applicability in a nation that has just elected a black President or a city that has elected a black Mayor, black Comptroller, and various Hispanic Boro Presidents.  Or a state that elected a black Lieutenant Governor who is now our sitting Governor.

It seems that when it comes to the rights of prisoners and defendants the Supreme Court is only too happy to make broad, precedent setting decisions denying them their rights and vastly expanding those of the police.  But when it comes to the rights of average voters in a possibly courageous decision, timidity seemed to be the watchword of the day.

6/18    Honestly, is it just me?  Tell me, I can take it.  Am I the only one in this city who sees what a buffoon and dullard Mayor-for-Life Mike is?  He has gotten to be so out of touch that he doesn't have the faintest realization to be embarrassed at the things that come out of his mouth.

He tells us yesterday that maybe, just maybe, the Port Authority of NY & NJ doesn't have New York City's interests at heart.  Really.  This is just dawning on him apparently.  For eight long years the Mayor of this city has told the Port Authority he wanted nothing to do with them.  Not in the way Rudy did, however.  When Rudy said I want nothing to do with you, he referred to their total bloat and incompetence. He meant, I'll go it alone where I can and torture you unmercifully where I can't.  No, what Mayor-for-Life Mike meant was, do what you want, I won't trouble you.  And he never has, until now. 

The PA is dragging its feet on rebuilding Ground Zero.  They won't renegotiate terms with the developer, Larry Silverstein.  For the moment I won't get into the merits of that argument.  But it is nothing new.  I walk by Ground Zero every day and it is a testament to the failed leadership of this Red Sox fan masquerading as a New Yorker. 

Let me take you back in time.  First, almost one hundred years ago when the Port Authority was created.  It was created for one purpose and one purpose only; to build a cross harbor rail freight tunnel between NY & NJ.  Here we sit almost a century later and no tunnel.  Worse, the tunnel was alive and kicking again 10 years ago thanks to Rudy having revived the idea.  But Mayor-for-Life Mike, no fan of the tunnel, passed the buck from EDC to the PA and there it continues to languish.  The one and only thing the PA was supposed to do and it never has.  Bloomberg, the man who has made a disgusting beach of Times Square, all in the name of environmentalism, opposes the most green project in our lifetimes.  Namely, taking off our streets hundreds of trucks a day and moving their cargo on rail underground.  Could anything be more green than that?  No.  But he has done nothing.  

Second, go back a decade.  Rudy Giuliani told the PA to prepare to lose control of JFK and LaGuardia when their contract expired to run the airports.  JFK and LaGuardia rank consistently at the top of every list of worst airports in the United States.  One of the very first things Bloomberg did upon taking office was tell the PA he would renew the contracts.  Yea, the city got slightly better terms but the traveling public suffers and will in perpetuity.  Imagine, had Bloomberg been the innovator he pretends to be.  If he had privatized the airports like in his beloved London or most of Europe.  The cash windfall to the City would have been incredible and the improvement in infrastructure and service would have been commensurately impressive.  But no, the PA would and will continue to run NYC's airports.  Why?  I cannot imagine.

And now to present day and Ground Zero.  Again, for eight years, Mayor-for-Life Mike has consistently said,  this is a state issue, this is a Port issue.  He has shown no leadership on this matter whatsoever.  He gave millions to the the Memorial Fund.  Kudos to him for having done that.  But he can do that as a private citizen.  We need a Mayor, not a benefactor.

And now cynically, in an election year, he claims to have had an epiphany.  The interests of this bi-state agency don't coincide with those of New York City.  What Rudy Giuliani knew on the day he took office, Mayor-for-Life Mike claims to have discovered in his eighth year.  It is then not all that surprising that against the non-entity of non-entities, Bill Thompson, he musters only 53%.  I concede the point that he will be re-elected - or really elected since I do not believe this term limits extension was legal - but it is so bone crushingly disheartening to have to watch just how clueless and inept he continues to become.  The Great City deserves so much better than this for four, eight or twelve more years. 

{I wrote the above post prior to Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward's speech today.  If you see the excerpts he really makes my point for me.  He's not modernizing LaGuardia or JFK because of Ground Zero.  He blames others for the PA having to commit so many resources there which is wreaking havoc with his capital budget.  He's right up to a point.  The PA shouldn't be running our airports and then they wouldn't factor into these equations.  They should never have retained control of Ground Zero after 9/11.  But the subtext to all this - if you are a student of NYC politics - is that Chris Ward is telling Mayor-for-Life Mike to go fuck himself.  He's saying very plainly that he's not afraid of him and unlike the Mayor, who seeks responsibility for nothing but our schools, Ward is willing, up to a point, to honestly debate his options.  I don't think he should have these options, but at this moment in time they are his responsibility.  What a contrast with Giuliani.  No PA Exec. Dir. would have dared challenge Rudy this way.  It would have been unthinkable.  And rightly so.  He's the Mayor. His priorities should govern, not some unelected body. God, Rudy would have punished Chris Ward; it would have been amazing to watch.  But Bloomberg will say something in response not commanding but peevish.  He doesn't really care about NYC or New Yorkers so these fights don't trouble him in his gut. He views them from the prism of his Napoleanic complex and not as the Chief Magistrate.}      

Searching For Mayor Giuliani

6/16    Old axiom - never speak in absolutes, it will come back to bite you in the ass.  While I give virtually no weight whatever to some flighty ex-flack for Rudy offering inside tidbits and getting the vapors over the prospect of an RWG run for Governor, I have to say the Democrats are doing everything but circulating his nominating petitions for him.  It sure looks like he may have no choice but to run.  A near guarantee of victory is a lulling thing.  If ex Mrs. Andrew Cuomo, Kerry Kennedy, is to be believed, Andrew ain't running.  I've always said without the power to indict and subpoena, Andrew's political cowardice is nearly unmatched. 

So if there is no Andrew, Gov. Paterson is a political eunuch, and the total disarray in Albany keeps up, who but the man who tamed the wild City can clean up the current mess?  Even I buy that rationale.  Right now we have three majority leaders of the NYS Senate.  Can you imagine?  Can Paterson fix this?  Surely not.  He's too concerned about how this is affecting the poor lobbyists.  Can Andrew - if he were so inclined to take on the Gov - fix this?  Nah.  He's never shown the courage to take on the established order when it meant a fight.  So who else?  Charlie Rangel won't let anyone else challenge Paterson.  So no Democrat will be allowed to save the state or party.  That leaves the Republicans.  And who can they field?  The return of Pataki?  Don't laugh.  But not while a living, breathing Rudy Giuliani is around.  Personally I am a John Faso fan.  But I don't think he can muster the charisma wattage necessary for this battle.  So once again all eyes turn to Rudy. 

Back in 89, the first year the NYC Campaign Finance Law had teeth, Rudy hired a large accounting and compliance staff.  They were very young Republicans from D.C.  They all had one thing in common - they hated, absolutely hated, New York City.  They couldn't wait to get back to Northern Virginia and the watering holes of Capitol Hill.  I always found this amusing.  That influx, coupled with Bond, Schriefer, Ailes and Teeter created a very alien and extremely Bush presence in what was supposed to be a gritty New York campaign.  He learned from his 89 mistakes when it came time to staff-up in 93 but forgot them again in time for 08. He once again turned to a President Bush for a campaign staff with the same results.  Sitting in prison in 07 I knew Rudy would go down in flames when I saw whom he was hiring; it was 89 all over again.  The amazing thing to me then was that none of his people could see that.

Ethicists, lawyers, bankers and insurers are known to speak of Moral Hazard.  The practice of rewarding past bad behavior.  Saving or bailing out a liable party without assurance that their actions will be different in the future.  My fear in the coming Giuliani frenzy is that his 07 & 08 behavior will go unrepented, he will have to atone for nothing and he will in effect be rewarded for it.  The man who opposes gay marriage - not because he believes in the position, I happen to know he has no firmly held view, but because he thinks upstate voters are one issue on this - now finds himself opposed by Joe Bruno and yes, the Dark Lord himself, Dick Cheney.  I told him here a few months ago it was an unwise position with no upside.  He was on the wrong side of history, I said.  But it was cynical and calculated.  The Rudy of 08 and not of 93.

The Albany Democrats may have handed Rudy the 2010 election, time will tell, it's still early days.  To me the waste is that he would not challenge Mayor-for-Life Mike.  Bloomberg's new poll numbers against Bill Thompson are good but it's clear the voters don't want a third term for him.  They just want a first Thompson term even less.  Can you imagine Mayor Giuliani issuing a deadline to rebuild Ground Zero and having everyone ignore him?  But we have come to expect this from Mayor-for-Life Mike.  Inept and ineffectual, that's him.  The one common thread here is leadership; Albany and New York City.  The last great leader in this state any of us can remember was Mayor Giuliani.  God, how I wish we could find him.

    You've Never Had it So Good

6/9    With apologies to Harold Macmillan, that phrase comes to mind today as the first Guantanamo "detainee" (prisoner) is transferred from Cuba to the United States.  Unfortunately for him, he is being moved to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan (home to Mr. Madoff).  Having had a stay in the MCC, as I have previously mentioned, I can tell you that Mr. Ahmed Ghailani is in for a rude awakening.  The proponents of keeping Guantanamo open always fail to acknowledge that the vast majority of the prisoners there are guilty in all likelihood of nothing.  Two-thirds of all prisoners who have passed through there have been repatriated without a trial but after being incarcerated for years without charge.  These tours that the Army conducts showing how lush life is for the 'detainees' on the base always sicken me.  We know from the numbers that most of these men will eventually go home, wherever that is, and never be put on trial.  A prison is a prison whether you have a basketball court, Muslim food, access to a Koran, or they wind up putting in a spa.  Being held unjustly - without charge - as most of these men are, is criminal.  The irony is that all these members of congress who think Guantanamo is this magical place have no idea how much worse it will be for the "detainees" in Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) custody.   If they really want to seriously punish these guys close Guantanamo and send them to the MCC in solitary for a year.  That is far worse than any Guantanamo experience.  And yet American prisoners are subjected to it daily, all over the U.S., as part of the cruel administration of the BOP.  

It is almost laughable that North Korea and Iran will put suspects on trial - even if just show trials - but the U.S. refuses to grant suspects these same basic rights.  That is what we've been reduced to.  The sad part is that the "detainees" do not realize how much worse things are going to get for them inside the BOP compared with Guantanamo.  My positon has been the same on this matter for seven years; if they are guilty of something, put them on trial in the U.S.  We're tough enough to handle it.  If they're not, then set them free.  That is justice - or at least it used to be.  Reflecting back on his island stay from the filth of the MCC, Mr. Ghailiani will come to realize he never had it so good.



    Someone Is Listening

6/9    I just came across this piece on SLATE from the lovely Dahlia Lithwick, who has replaced Linda Greenhouse as my favorite Supreme Court reporter.  I can rant and rave on here all I want about prison reform, particularly federal prison reform, but nothing will happen until Congress forces the DOJ's hand.  So it appears that the ever surprising Sen. James Webb (D-VA) is a champion of this cause.  Who knew?  I encourage you to read this piece.  Cage Match


    Here We Go Again

6/8    Deja Vu.  Charlie Rangel - perhaps the most corrupt unindicted political figure in America - is throwing his racial Molotovs once again.  Peter Powers, Rudy's First Deputy Mayor, used to say his own management technique was, "we do what we know."  That appears to be the guiding principle behind Rep. Rangel's latest attempt at ensuring the success of another mediocre black Harlem pol.  On NY 1 the other night he said that an Andrew Cuomo primary against the failed governorship of David Paterson would lead to "racial polarization" and would be devastating to New York State Democrats.

You'll recall that during the primary of 2002, Rangel said that Cuomo should drop out of the governor's race against Carl McCall.  Carl McCall was the Bill Thompson of his time although with perhaps a bit more flash.  Well, Andrew heeded Rep. Rangel's advice and dropped out before the primary.  He did so presumably to save himself for another day.  There was, it was said, fence mending that needed to be done after that race between Andrew and black Democrats.  

Well here we are - another day.  Although Andrew finds himself in the unlucky position of having to achieve his aim by competing against another black man.  Back in 2002 he was told to drop out because "it was McCall's time."  Whatever that meant.  Also, as with David Dinkins, we were told it was time for a black man to be allowed to reach for the stars.  Now the excuse is that it would be treasonous to blacks or black democrats or the state party - I'm not really sure which - for Andrew to primary the sitting black governor.

I never bought into the whole mystique surrounding Obama and the triumph of the black man.  Instead, like Dr. King, I looked upon it as an amazing achievement of a very talented man - white or black, and applauded him for his tenacity, drive and intellect.  Hillary Clinton did exactly what she should have done.  She thought herself the best candidate, she ran and almost won.  She ceded nothing to him and I believe, in the end, he respected her for it.  It made his victory genuine instead of token.

But that's not good enough in New York State.  We have to rig our primaries lest the voters actually have a say.  And the strangeness of all this is that these admonitions are coming from the most corrupt man in elective office today.  Rangel cheats on his taxes, keeps affordable housing away from the economically disadvantaged and uses them for campaign lairs, lies on his federal disclosure forms and spend millions to create useless edifices to himself that his intense narcissism requires be branded in his own name.  And he is so powerful that no one will investigate him.  It is left to the newspapers to uncover his crimes.  But all without result.  No revelation seems to cause the slightest interest in any prosecutor.  Even the House, duty bound to investigate him, won't.

But he feels perfectly free to dictate to Andrew Cuomo how his conscience should behave.  Prior to attaining the power to subpoena and indict, Andrew was never known as a ballsy guy.  In fact, for all his Cuomo bravado, he was rather timid politically.  Bear in mind he would have beaten McCall in 2002 and yet he dropped out anyway.  So know here wo go again.  Rangel figured it worked once so he and the racial flamethrowers will try again.  Has Andrew learned anything in seven years?  We'll see. Giving in to bullys never works.  If Andrew were smart he'd open an investigation on Rangel and leave it hanging until 2010.  Trust me, with an easy indictment and conviction awaiting Rangel, he'd shut up.

    The Age of Obama

6/5    Nearly bumped into Mr. Carbonetti a few minutes ago.  I was walking down Vesey next to the Trade Center construction site and he was walking up.  Blue blazer, tan slacks and what looked suspiciously like the EDC umbrella I gave him so long ago.  I thought of saying hi - he didn't see me - but I figured too much water under the bridge.  I doubt he'd take a warm greeting from me as sincere; although it would have been.  I do miss him though.  Guess I always will.  Friends as close as brothers are a hard thing to lose.  They don't come along too often.

But missing Tony Carbonetti is not what brings me here today.  Fury and outrage are.  Although I am a firm opponent of racial quotas and affirmative action however practiced, I am always extremely reticent to begin sentences with, "Now if a white man said (or did)......."  It's not that I am cowed by liberal political correctness.  Rather, I fear being associated with imbecilic, half-literate, right wing, talk show hosts like Michael Savage or Marc Levin.  While I occasionally may agree with something they say, I loathe being joined in their company.  But I am making an exception today.  My anger has gotten the better of me.  I am not aware that either of them has commented on what I am about to mention.  But I am pretty sure they'd agree with me.

Imagine this: a white newspaper columnist - in addition to being an Ivy League professor - not only defends a white mob brutally beating a black man but states that future such beatings are a necessary way to redress a failed judicial system.  Can you imagine what would happen to this person?  Would he keep either of his jobs at the paper or the university?  You know the answer.

Apparently, in Philadelphia, an 11yo black girl was raped and brutally so.  The police named a "person of interest" that they were looking to question.  This person - not black - was discovered by an angry black mob and himself brutally beaten until the police stepped-in to stop it.  Now comes Marc Lamont Hill - Columbia Professor, regular columnist for the daily free NYC newspaper 'metro' and a contributor, I believe, to Fox News.  He writes a column in 'metro' that says he's saddened that the neighborhood felt it necessary to do what they did to this man but, "Until the broader society gets it, the community's brand of justice is both appropriate and necessary."  Necessary?  Appropriate?  The man named by the police was not a suspect, not accused, not convicted of anything - not that that would have justified the mob's behavior in any case.  He was, they were careful to say, a "person of interest."  

Mr. Lamont Hill wrote a column a few weeks ago comparing smokers with child rapists and serial killers.  He backtracked a few days later to say he meant chain smokers.  Nice save on his part.  If Mr. Lamont Hill is equating smokers with child rapists and according to him it's OK for  black mobs to beat or kill alleged white and Hispanic child rapists, does that mean it's OK for black mobs to attack and kill smokers?   Using his sick, twisted logic it doesn't seem too much of a stretch. 

If Mr. Lamont Hill wants to make speeches advocating this point of view I will take to the Web to defend his right.  If he wants to take out ads in the Times calling on black mobs to attack whites I will stand on the principle that he should be allowed to, however repugnant his views may be.  But what is this 'metro' newspaper doing paying him to advocate black-on-white/Hispanic violence?  It is shocking that he is not only a professor but an Ivy League one.  Less shocking is that he is employed at Columbia which has lately become a safe haven for black racists, anti-semites and Arab terrorist apologists.  Do the white and Hispanic parents of Columbia students know this man is teaching their children?  I can only imagine what the syllabus must look like for his classes.

The outrage here is not that he seems to be this century's Leonard Jeffries.  The outrage is that Leonard Jeffries wasn't paid by a daily newspaper to write about Ice and Sun people or by a major cable news channel to comment on the day's goings-on.  He was paid by a university, just as Mr. Lamont Hill is.  He had tenure however, I do not believe that Mr. Lamont Hill enjoys that honor yet.  Fox, 'metro', and Columbia really need to examine if they want this man on their payroll. 

If this type of incendiary rhetoric by someone seemingly in the mainstream of our society is what is meant by being in the "Age of Obama," then I truly want no part of it and neither should you.
 {I do not have a link to his column, but if you want a PDF of the whole thing, E-mail me and I will send it.}

5/28    First, a very Happy Birthday to this site's namesake.  Next, a number of you have written asking me for thoughts on the altercation in the Hamptons involving Rudy.  I have no comment.  I know what you know.  The alleged assailant seems kind of unbalanced to me, but who knows.  I don't, and never have, wished any harm to come to the Mayor.  It's his current ideas and philosophy I would like to see scrambled, not his face.  As of today the Mayor is officially a senior citizen.  It seems to me that at 65 his options for elective office are dwindling.  The 2010 race for NY Governor or maybe the 2012 presidential race and that's it.  Personally, the more I think about it, the more I think he should take the Jerry Brown route and run for NYS Attorney General.  He loves the law; its practice and nuances.  He's a law and order kind of guy, which is perfect for that job.  Moreover, like Louis Lefkowitz or Bob Morgenthau, he could hold the job in perpetuity; age would never become an issue.  He'd be great at it (too harsh for my tastes, I'm sure).  Being NYS AG involves you in so many different and varied aspects of the law; look at the huge exposure Spitzer and Cuomo get, involving themselves in large national issues. He'd remain relevant in the national debate.   I think at this point in his life nothing would provide him with a greater sense of fulfillment.   But I sense the call to destiny and the seeming letdown in status would prevent this run.  But what do I know.  Anyway, Happy 65, Mr. Mayor.



5/20    As promised, the brief background on how the '93' campaign attempted to remove the New York Times reporter covering RWG. New Post:  All The News.... 

5/18    As promised, the conclusion to GOV'T SHUTDOWN.

 

5/18    Please see '5/18 Updates' for info about this site.


5/15 - Here is my reaction to the smear against me in yesterday's New York Times.  New Post: Smeared by the NYT  

5/20    LOOKING BACKWARDS

I really don't get Barack Obama.  He decries - more and more forcefully - the national security policies of the Bush Administration and yet will do nothing to fully enlighten the nation on what went on for the past eight years.  He declared today that he is against a national truth commission inquiry stating, "our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability."  But there's the paradox: he will not permit or endorse those institutions proceeding lawfully with uncovering the truth.  Congress wants to establish a 9/11 style commission to explore and report on torture and surveillance excesses.  Obama is opposed.  In a pending court matter the ACLU is trying to have torture photos released.  Obama was for and now he's opposed, saying today that it would, "inflame anti-American opinion."  The Justice Department will issue a report shortly that does not call for any criminal prosecutions of the Bush Administration officials who concocted and condoned the criminal torture policies. 

So as the Obama Administration is fast becoming George Bush's chief enabler who, what and where are the "existing democratic institutions" that are supposed to provide this accountability?  It's not the Justice Department.  It's not the courts; Obama will block any attempt to access info, that now seems clear.  It's not Congress; he won't support their commission - which does not mean that they can't move forward without him.  Obama keeps saying let's move forward, not look back.  History, Univ. of Chicago Prof. Obama should know, is a study of the past.  We study the past to try and apply those lessons/outcomes to the present and future.  We don't know what went on in the Bush Administration.  Dick Cheney's room-size safes contain all those answers.   We know, most of us, that from what we do know that we don't like what went on.  But I, as a citizen, can't make a rational informed decision about my country's future without knowing what was done in my name and by my government for the past eight years.  No democracy can move forward on those terms.

I just can't fathom whether Obama really believes the things he's doing or he's nervous politically.  If he's changed his mind, then he's as inexperienced and untested as his opponents claimed in 08.  If he's calculating politically, then he's a craven sell-out to the internet base that funded and supported him.  All I know is the nation needs, wants and deserves answers.  At this rate, President Obama is laying a  foundation for the George Bush Library at SMU far better than any mason will ever pour.

5-18    TC - Farewell & Good Luck

Two weeks ago someone sent me an anonymous e-mail informing me that Tony Carbonetti was leaving Giuliani Partners to go work for Ken Langone.  He was telling me this to reinforce his belief that Rudy wasn't running for governor.  This anonymous writer used the non-de-plume of a dead friend and former Liberal Party Executive Director, Carl Grillo.  I have no idea why he did that.  I didn't mention it on here because I don't trade in gossip especially from unknown sources.  But, as it turned out, this person was correct.  In addition to working for Ken Langone Tony is setting up a consulting business with a former Karl Rove henchman to help hedge funds maneuver in the forthcoming regulatory tangle.

First, let me say I wish Tony all the best.   I have no doubt he will succeed in this as he has in everything he has done.  My guess is, however,  that there is something behind this departure.  I have many guesses, but no facts.  I doubt it's a Giuliani rupture between the two and lean more towards the notion that Giuliani Partners is in real trouble financially.

But this exit and the way I found out about it got me thinking.  Many of you don't know that Carl Grillo was the closest thing Tony had to a mentor.  Ironic that Tony has become this confidante and facilitator of the extreme right while Carl was a shlubby, left activist who was despised by the Republican Party on Staten Island, his home and base.  Tony loved Carl like family and I know Carl was very proud of how far Tony went and how gifted he became.

Carl Grillo was the one who taught Tony the mechanics and nuances to campaign field operations and also taught him the ins and outs of professional casino gambling.  After Carl passed away it was Tony who rammed through the naming of a new section of the S.I. Botanical Gardens over the vehement objections of Staten Island Republicans.  Carl had a fantastic garden, that he tended himself, in the backyard of his house.

What this got me thinking was what Carl would think of where Tony's life has taken him and where he's heading.  Tony knew Carl more intimately than I did from their frequent long weekends at the blackjack tables in Atlantic City.  But I knew Carl for decades before Tony did.  Carl was a true believer in liberal policy, not just politics.  In the Liberal Party he was much more the ideologue to Ray Harding's pragmatist.  As Ray would say, " He actually believes in this shit."  Carl loved winning, no doubt about that.  But to him you ran races to accomplish policy aims.  You supported candidates who wanted to do something to improve people's lives.  I don't think Tony ever knew that side of Carl but it was always there since his days as a very young Liberal Party activist.  It's unfortunate that Tony never understood that side of Carl and learned the positive lessons of why we do what we do; those of us who practice the political art. 

What would Carl think?  I feel I know.  He would be very impressed that Tony is a millionaire many times over.  He would be proud that Tony found someone as good as Carol and that, from what I have heard, they have a beautiful family.  He would admire the skills in business that Tony has acquired over the last seven years.  But, he would be deeply disappointed that Tony is putting these skills to the purposes that he is.  He would be saddened to know that Tony intends to spend his years helping hedge fund billionaires evade taxes and avoid regulations.  He would be truly horrified that Tony's befriended those who condone and initiate torture and illegal surveillance.  Carl would have spent his last breath fighting everything the Bush Administration stood for and did.  Tony could never have made him understand how supporting him and his friends was anything close to moral.  

Sadly, somewhere in Heaven, Carl is looking down and shedding a tear at these developments; that money and power have so corrupted someone who has infinite gifts and talents.  As I said, I wish Tony well.   But it pains me that his is a life and promise that is rapidly being squandered.  What I wish for Tony more than anything else is to find the candidate out there who excites him the way Rudy once did and help that person win.  Whether it be Mayor, Senator or some Assemblyman in Wisconsin.   Get back in the arena and make a real difference.  Find the passion and innocence for the game you used to have before money, fame, power and cynicism turned you into a hedge fund shill.

5/15 - I promised earlier today to post a piece on the battle during the 93 Giuliani-Dinkins campaign to have the NYT  replace its reporter covering RWG.  I apologize.  I ran out of time today.  It's a short piece and I will have it up by Wednesday.

 

5/14/09 - Well here it is, The Big Rudy piece.  I welcome your reactions. 
GOV'T SHUTDOWN 

               

4/23/09 - Here is the new post, the continuing series on my case - J'ACCUSE  PART VI

5/5/09 -  MR. SCHLAFLY?

I feel compelled to write about something I saw this past weekend in the wedding section of the paper. Not my usual beat.  It was the the marriage of Howard Koeppel to Mark Hsaio.  I knew Mark and Howard back in the day.  I lived 2 blocks from them.  I took a car of mine to Howard's dealership for repairs and he generously gave me a loaner each time I had to leave it overnight.  I have to say though that I found Howard off-putting because of his habit of hitting on me and making endless double entendre.  He did it to lots of guys and I don't really think he meant anything by it, it was just his manner.  I finally had to tell him once sternly to cut it out.  I was never sure what bothered me so much about it: was it the inappropriateness of it or more likely the fact that by hitting on me, even playfully, people might think I was gay, which was something I was desperate to conceal.  I can't say.

Howard and Mark made a nice couple.  Mark is a sweet guy; goodhearted and seemingly without guile.  It was extremely decent and generous of them to have taken Rudy into their home for what was probably two years.  Rudy didn't have much money back then and to have to shell out a few thousand a month for an apartment would have been a strain if not an impossibility.  There were lots of developers who would gladly have given him a place rent free but as he was mayor that would have been unthinkable.  So Mark & Howard played landlord, friend, shoulder, and safe haven.  Bear in mind that Rudy lived there for part of the time he was dealing with his cancer.

So it is inconceivable to me that he would refuse to attend their wedding this past weekend in Connecticut.  I just can't get my head around such poor manners and ingratitude.  I have been to dozens of Catholic services: weddings, funerals, confirmations, memorials, and I agree with very little of Church doctrine, why would I, I'm Jewish.  But my presence didn't confirm anything other than respect to whatever the proceeding happened to be.  So if the newspapers are correct, Rudy committed three appalling acts: he didn't attend, he had an aide inform Howard that he wasn't attending (rather than making the call himself) and he did it at the last minute.  I want to shake him and say: you were raised better than this.  Rudy, notwithstanding his public persona, used to be the king of the magnanimous gesture.  Early in his mayoralty he never minded the hostile audience or the backlash.  That changed over time, it's natural with power.  But he was at his best when he put himself out there.

What would cause him to behave this shamefully?  One of three things.  He and Howard have had a falling out over the years.  My understanding is that they are not close as they were but there has not been a serious falling out.  Next, Judith - for reasons that can only be Judith's - didn't want Rudy to go.  I give this some credence.  There's a whole psychology at work with Judith when it comes to those years that Rudy was dating her and still married to Donna.  One would think she would be grateful to Howard for putting Rudy up in his home that allowed him to continue this liaison.  But my guess is he's a reminder of the period when she was not "legitimate."  The third reason is possibly political.  This would be the most unforgivable reason if that's what it was.  What exactly is in these advisor's heads over at 5 Times Square?  Do they really think New York is North Carolina?  Do they think they're still running for something that North Carolinians have a say about or ever will?  The idea of embracing, rather than fleeing, from what I have dubbed the Randy Levine strategy of positioning Rudy to the hard-right, is madness in New York State in 2009. 

All this has done is to make Rudy look like Phyllis Schlafly.  Mrs. Schlafly is the type of person who would refuse to attend the wedding ceremony of gay friends (not that she would ever have any) on principle.  It looks mean and calculating.  Is Tony Carbonetti getting this advice from Karl Rove - the man who put anti-gay marriage amendments on state ballots in order to bring out the base - that this is a winning position?  Because he's wrong.  The national approval numbers on gay marriage are going up.  It is now the majority opinion of New Yorkers and only will increase before 2010.  And if Rudy is going to make a moral or religious argument for his position, all i can say is give me a break.  He married his cousin, cheated on his second wife first with an aide and then with his third wife.  I, along with the rest of New York, will not be requiring morality instruction from Rudy Giuliani. 

Hard,tough, unforgiving Rudy - Rudy the Prosecutor - was what we all spent the 1993 campaign trying to erase; to show his humanity to the electorate.  This notion that attending a gay wedding will make him lose Chemung County is crazy.  If I am wrong about everything I've just said and it was a simple matter that Rudy had to be in Zurich giving a long planned speech, better he say so publicly than leave the impression that he really is this aloof, cold, ungrateful person we're all perceiving him to be.  Even at the risk of offending 8 people in Elmira.

4/29/09 - Please see the new post on last night's presidential press conference and the dangers of The Big Lie.

4/24/09 - RUDY & TORTURE

Every day seems to bring more news that is just not good for Rudy.  Events keep reminding us that he is not part of the future but rather part of our past. I have to admit I am at a total loss as to what everyone is so worked up about regarding torture.  Does the minutiae of all these memos really matter except for figuring out to whom the indictments should be addressed?  I have been railing on this subject for a long time.  It's wrong and should never have been permitted.  John Yoo should be banned from teaching or appearing at any institution of learning in this country right before he's indicted for conspiracy.  That goes for Addintgton, Gonzalez, Bibey, Cheney, Ashcroft and probably a dozen others.  These men were clearly what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she spoke of 'The Banality of Evil.'

Does the fact that someone was waterboarded 83 or 183 times really shock you more than the fact that we're doing it at all?  It shouldn't.  Condi Rice apparently lied to a Senate Committee.  Shocking?  I'm shocked, you're shocked. It would be more entertaining to find the instances where she didn't lie over the last eight years than when she did. 

A senior Justice Department official, Jay Bibey, lies by omission to the Senate Judiciary Committee in order to speed his judicial confirmation.  All regarding torture.  Surprised?  These people may in fact be without morals; many may be truly evil, but they are not stupid - they knew what they were doing was wrong and certainly not within the limits of constitutional government.  Hence the need to conceal and deceive.

Obama could not be more out of touch in his instinct to forgive and forget.  We are punishing John Demanjuk 50+ years after the fact because we do not want anyone to forget or minimize what he and others like him did and stood for.  This generation cannot let the Bush years pass without clear, firm and legal denunciations of what transpired.  This ridiculous notion that Bibey, Yoo et al. just gave legal opinions and there is no basis for holding someone accountable for a legal opinion is fanciful.  The Wansee Conference was a day-long legal opinion.  Who would argue those men weren't responsible?

The sanctioning of torture by Yoo, Bibey, et al., lead to mostly innocent people being viciously abused; first by the CIA then by the Army.  It became easier to do as more people gave ascent and more participated in performing these acts.  From seasoned CIA interogators down to lowly Army grunts.  The conspiracy widened and became presumably less illegal because more men willingly joined.  Soon an industry formed around this: Bagram, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, probably a dozen secret CIA prisons, not to mention rendering suspects to counties where we knew they'd be tortured.  You still think my Third Reich analogy is far off the mark?  What would have happened had none of this been revealed or US Courts intervened?  How far would this have gone?  Certainly the Bush-Cheney doctrine on this subject does not preclude these practices being performed on US citizens with no constitutional protections.  Would there have been foreseeable limits?

The nation's comfort level with this subject is changing fast.  The release of these documents has not only put their defenders on the defensive it has made their position indefensible.  Watch the TV talk shows and see how difficult it's become for pro-torture advocates to defend themselves once their questioner starts reading the memos out-loud.  The country's view on this is becoming more moral and humane. People who took opposing views have a lot to answer for now. This is not about show trials, it's about accountability.

What you may ask does any of this have to do with Rudy Giuliani?  Simple.  Google 'Giuliani & Torture.'  Read Rudy's views on torture and watch the video of his debate responses to waterboarding.  It's kinda scary, mainly in his flippancy towards the subject.  But this was back in 2007 when he thought his campaign was going somewhere and he hadn't stopped that horrible practice of giggling all the time and at the most inappropriate moments.

Remember the Defense Dept memo that approved enhanced interrogation techniques and the Rumsfeld note on the bottom about how limiting standing to 4 hours seemed lax to him since he stands 8 hours a day?  Well watch Rudy's response to the waterboarding question and his answer will creep you out.  Like Rumsfeld, who compared torture to working in an office, Rudy compares torture with campaigning for President - and laughs.  The point I am making is that this whole subject is no longer glib.  Those Bush-worn phrases like "the evildoers" or "the terrorists" - designed to simultaneously obfuscate, confuse and widen the known threat in order to numb our innate response to torture - don't work anymore.  This is another example of what I have been saying for months.  Namely, that Rudy cannot move on until he settles the past 7 years.  When asked about these issues Rudy will, no doubt, instinctively defend Bush and Cheney.  He'll mention his years at Justice and how it would be wrong to hold people there accountable.  All these answers, while perhaps sincere, will play terribly with the changing  public mood on this subject.  They will, however, play with the ever decreasing fringe that Rudy seems determined to market himself to.  If the folks at 5 Times Square continue to allow this Rudy to be Rudy the 2010 campaign will be over a lot sooner than they expect.

4/21/09 - Here are some thoughts on Rudy's poll numbers, his possible entry into the Governor's race and where he needs to go from here.   New post:   The High Water Mark



4/20/09 - 

The New York Times on Saturday published an editorial about the need for more 'resources' for the Justice Department in fighting financial white collar crime.  Congress has a bill, The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009.  It would appropriate $490 million for more prosecutors, agents and analysts to detect, investigate and prosecute financial misdeeds.  The Times says that's not enough and any expenditures will pay for itself in found ill-gotten gains.  Naturally a big government newspaper like the Times believes it's not enough.  The NYT has never been the house organ for fiscal responsibility; either in government or its own company.  It is bewildering to me that in this time of severe fiscal calamity, no one ever, ever asks - Is the Justice Department apportioning its resources wisely?  Are its prosecutors overwhelmed because their workload is too big or rather just too much?

The Justice Department could free up resources - and a lot of them - immediately if it, or Congress, took some simple steps.  First, stop prosecuting essentially state crimes in federal court.  I have said over and over again that the proliferation of federal criminal statutes mirroring state ones has lead to this huge increase in the number of federal prosecutions, incarcerations and federal prisons.  It's not that there is more crime, it's rather that the feds are prosecuting the same crimes that were tried in state court instead in federal court.  Federal prosecutors routinely force and bully state and local prosecutors to turn over cases residing in local prosecutors' offices and instead claim federal jurisdiction.  It is needless and inexplicable.  Not to mention much, much more costly in time and dollars.  Bear in mind that after 9/11 Justice was given a large increase in dollars and manpower because it was assumed that the influx of terrorist cases would overwhelm it.  Ashcroft, Gonzalez, Yoo, Addington, Cheney, Bush, et al, decided instead that a constitutional process was too quaint and time-consuming.  So all those cases never materialized at Justice; they went to Guantanamo.  But the dollars and staff remained.  That's why I served time with pot smokers and small time arsonists.

Secondly, the Justice Department needs to clean up the US Attorneys section and force it to prioritize its workload.  I have said before that unlike states that are constrained by shrinking budgets - in this case often a good thing - the feds never have to consider that and treat every single case as though it were a major terrorist investigation, of which they have virtually none.  Not every investigation and prosecution has to be dragged on for months and years and lead to the maximum number of charges and sentence.  Some things are disposed of better through negotiation and plea with reasonable accommodations.  And how often do you hear of a federal investigation resulting in no charges?  It happens so rarely that it is big news when it does.  The Justice Department is simply incapable of saying we looked and found nothing really criminal.  They will always find something in the end to justify their lengthy and costly investigation, even if - as we have seen in the few terrorist cases Justice has - the charges have nothing to do with the original investigation; just something to rationalize to the bosses at Justice and Congress why years and millions have been spent.

It's wrong and dangerous to continue prosecuting people this way.  Rather than giving Justice more money, their budget should be severely cut.  Make them go through the same management exercise every other law enforcement agency in the states has to endure.  They can't have every item be the highest priority.  That is a contradiction in terms.  When times change priorities do as well and you make adjustments.  But Justice and Sens. Leahy and Grassley say no, Justice need not refrain from prosecuting pimps in Louisiana or pot smokers in California.  It's all equally important.  We need to give them nearly half a billion dollars more so that they can keep on prosecuting state crimes.  You would think the wastefulness of all this, the disruptive cruelty to defendants lives and the budget deficit would finally cause these people to stop and reexamine the way they do business.  But no.  I think Rick Perry is a kook too, but maybe I will have to start reassessing that.  This system just doesn't work anymore.

4/15/09    The prescience of these posts lately reminds me of that Albert Brooks line from 'Broadcast News' - "I say it here and it comes out there."  First, a number of weeks ago I predicted that Mayor-for-Life Mike would buy the endorsements of the Independence and Republican parties.  Further, I said he would not obtain the Working Families Party's endorsement.  Three for three.  Now you don't have to have spent a lifetime toiling in the vineyards of NYC politics to have seen that coming.  But still, the Republican county chairs just 4 weeks ago were near unanimous that he was not going to be on the party's ballot line this November.  So I deserve a tiny bit of credit for my gazing. 

The size of the checks he will be handing out to these guys for their endorsements must be staggering to the average mortal.  As I have said before, when candidate Bloomberg went to see Ray Harding in the Winter of 2001, seeking the Liberal Party endorsement, he promised him the moon: he would bankroll the Liberal Party, transfer business to Ray's law firm and keep and increase Liberal hires in City Government.  One truism in politics is that people will go to much greater lengths to retain power than they ever would have to obtain it in the first place.  Given that, I say again, Mike-for-Life Mike must have been like Ed McMahon swooping down from Publishers Clearing House with a giant check.  No more stale pizza and bridge tables for the Queens or Kings County GOP HQs.  It is all the deluxe treatment from here on out. 

There is probably not a single thing in the platform of the Working Families Party I agree with, but I will give them credit.  Bill Thompson will lose just as surely as George Bush cannot pronounce the word 'Nuclear'.  Yet they will endorse him because he matches up ideology-wise with them.  They could, I believe, figure out some way to hedge and endorse Mayor-for-Life Mike and collect the windfall due all his faithful.  But they've chosen not to and I gotta respect that a little.

The second item I mentioned a few weeks ago that seems to have gotten some action was the issue of 'Sexting".  I mentioned that unless people developed some common sense and realized there was in fact nothing that could be done about this, we would continue to prosecute and register as sex offenders 13 year old girls and boys.  Well the progressive state legislators in Burlington have taken action.  They are debating a bill that would legalize 'Sexting'.  Vermont would legalize Sexting between consenting youngsters between the ages of 13-18.  Someone referred to it as a "perverted form of courtship."  Maybe, but it's not going anywhere.  I still don't think the acknowledgment of realities goes far enough, however.  Say a 17yo HS senior Sexted her 19yo freshman college boyfriend - serious, serious crime under that law.  It's OK, under this legislation, for two 13yos to pass nude pictures of themselves back and forth over a phone, but not between a 17yo and a 19yo?  We're still not at the full extent of real world practicality yet.  But I give Vermont huge credit for doing this.  I have no doubt the crazies from law enforcement and child welfare groups will pillory the members of the legislature who vote for this.  But it's a great first step. 

4/7/09    New Post - A few thoughts about Rudy, Giuliani Partners & the 2010 race.  See: What To Do About Rudy?

4/3/09    NEW POST - Please see:  SENATE DAYS - Part II

3/23/09  NEW POST - Please see:  J'ACCUSE - Part V.

4/2/09       LESSONS FROM ALASKA

            I am concerned that the public is taking away the wrong lessons from the outrageous behavior by the Justice Department in the Ted Stevens case.  Not the request for dismissal by AG Holder, I commend that.  You can be damn sure that Ashcroft, Gonzalez and Mukasey would never have publicly admitted these failures and conceded defeat.  They would have continued covering this up.  No, that isn't the lesson I am speaking of.  First, the papers and airways are inundated with former federal prosecutors - and doesn't it seem that 1/2 of America is a former federal prosecutor - claiming that while this is shameful it is also rare.  Bullshit.  Common sense and the facts tells us that the only reason we know about any of this is because Ted Stevens had a top notch legal team headed by "I'm not a potted plant" Brendan Sullivan and was very lucky to have had a fair judge; something that is rare in the federal courts.  This sort of abuse is rife in the federal system.  Anyone who has been prosecuted by the feds knows how proud the Justice Department is of its 97% conviction rate.  The reason for that astronomically high rate is that US Attorneys all over the country bring to bear enormous resources that virtually no defendant, including Innocent ones, can withstand.  Most defendants plead guilty because they cannot match resources and federal guidelines mandate ridiculous amounts of prison time.  So an offer of a plea deal to a lesser sentence, than might otherwise be achieved at trial, gains them a victory.  I met many people in prison who pled guilty only because the time they were facing at trial would be 30 years, if found guilty, and the plea offer was for 5.  I read many of their cases and became convinced of their innocence.  But they knew they couldn't fight the feds.

In my own case, what should have taken a junior lawyer and a competent secretary 8 weeks to investigate ended up taking three years, millions of dollars and thousands of hours of inter-agency manpower.  The reason?  Unlike states and cities that have actual budgets that require balance and restraint, the federal government has unlimited spending.  There is in fact a great value to tight budgets.  In the case of District Attorneys there has to be some process for prioritizing their cases.  They cannot afford a full hammer and tongs trial and investigation into every matter that comes before them.  It forces them to examine their cases much closer to weed out those deserving of the full treatment.  No such governor exists in the federal system.  With totally unlimited resources, every case is treated the same.  Some argue that's a good thing.  And in the old days when there were actually very few federal criminal laws - remember the original meaning of the phrase "let's not make a federal case out of this" - it may have been worthy to prosecute most cases fully.  But now Congress has passed statutes that mirror nearly every state crime.  There is virtually nothing that cannot be prosecuted in federal court, which 30 years ago was not the case.  The full and massive weight of the US Justice Department is brought down on smaller and more trivial matters daily.  But the resources never diminish.  US Attorneys are willing to bring the same blowtorch response to a petty arson case as to a complex securities fraud.  They make no distinction because they don't have to.

The second missed lesson in all this is the terrible and growing overuse of the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department.  I ask you to Google 'public officials and corruption.'  Nearly every case of malfeasance by a public official these days is being brought by the US Justice Department.  I have very, very serious misgivings about this and so should you.  Forgetting the whole 10th Amendment issue, what is the national interest - and that's what a prosecution by the federal government represents - in some small town mayor taking kickbacks?  When you are indicted by the feds the indictment reads, "The United States of America vs. ______."  Inherent in that is a notion that this crime, this indictment, has meaning and resonance for people everywhere in this country.  When everyone's golden boy, Patrick Fitzgerald, went after Rod Blagoievic I asked myself: why do I as a citizen of New York have any interest in the back room deals of the Governor of Illinois?  The answer is I don't.  There was and is no evidence that Illinois is some backwater, corrupt state unwilling to investigate or prosecute their officials; which might give some reason to federal involvement.  If Fitzgerald found something, the proper thing to do was to turn it over to that states attorney general or even to the legislature for possible removal from office.  The arrogance in refusing to turn over documents to the legislature during impeachment because it might hinder his investigation was breathtaking.  In a democratic society the remaining tenure in office of the highest elected official of the state and that debate by its elected representatives clearly takes precedence over any criminal prosecution.  The minute Fitzgerald raised the slightest issue of turning over those documents the legislature should have been in court suing him.  Not a snowball's chance in hell would they have lost.  But they, like all states these days, cowered in the face of federal involvement.  

Having worked for the 107th Mayor of New York, I think back to the 96th, Jimmy Walker.  He was surely a corrupt official of one of the nation's largest cities.  There was very little secret about that.  But his downfall and removal played out as it should have, by act of the responsible state officials.  When FDR had enough he appointed the Seabury Commission to investigate Tammany corruption at City Hall and that was the beginning of the end for Mayor Walker who eventually sailed away to Europe.  His actions were dealt with correctly as an internal NYS matter to be handled by the appropriate and constitutionally designated agents.  

In White Plains Federal Court the other day a woman was found guilty of using her office as a town commissioner to steer some housing work to her boyfriend.  It was local corruption - favors for friends - in its most basic form.  Did this rise to the level of a federal prosecution???  Do people in Alaska have a vested interest in the clean running of this Westchester town's government?  Yes, there were federal funds involved because it involved housing , but the state could have prosecuted this matter on a whole host of grounds without that nexus.   And besides, in a 3 1/2 trillion dollar budget what don't federal funds touch?   If federal funds are the excuse for prosecution then nothing can be exempt when it is now 25% of our economy. There is also no question that the prosecution cost double and triple the amount alleged to have been misspent.  A state prosecutor would have achieved the same result at a much more reasonable cost.  And now this woman will travel all over the United States, at an added cost, in serving her sentence for malfeasance in some small suburban town in NY.

Be assured if the Justice Department can so flagrantly abuse the rights of Ted Stevens, a sitting United States Senator, one can only imagine how brazenly they trample the rights of poor defendants out of the spotlight on a daily basis.  It should worry and concern all of us.

           

4/1        SEXTING

Here is the dictionary definition of the word 'exploit': "to use selfishly for one's own ends...to advance or further through exploitation, promote".  I am sure you've read about this girl in NJ who was arrested and is to be charged with promoting, creating and distributing child pornography for sending her boyfriend nude pictures of herself via her cellphone; referred to in the vernacular as 'sexting'.  She was turned into the police by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  Since I first read about this I have been confused about one thing.  Who is exploiting this girl?  So far the only party I can see exploiting her for their own ends is the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  They've ruined her life all in the name of making a point.   Like all these groups, MADD, the anti-smoking zealots, and many of these foundations that seek to help children, they all end up becoming extremists, incapable of reason or sane argument.  21 year old drinking age?  It is only leading to more underage drinking, college binging, and drinking and driving by youth.  Every indicator over the last 25 years demonstrates it.  Tougher smoking laws?  Crime in the area of illegal cigarette trafficking is skyrocketing.  We can't find funding for poor children's health care in this country without tobacco revenue apparently, but at the same time repressive smoking laws with no scientific basis are promulgated and passed routinely.  And now we have a new phenomenon.  I first read about this in Dahlia Lithwick's column in Newsweek a few months ago.  Teenagers using phones and PDAs to take and send sexual pictures of themselves to friends.

Law enforcement, as usual, is perplexed how to handle this since it doesn't comport to the norms they've been taught.  It's not the Russian mob or seedy men in trenchcoats forcing youngsters to pose.  It's free-spirited - likely not very intelligent - teenagers having fun with technology.  The basis of all these laws on child pornography is predicated on one fundamental rationale: kids who pose for nude pictures are forced to do so and further, could not consent anyway. But what happens when the kids take the pictures and send them to other kids all in the name of good fun? 

The logic of these arguments has been reduced to this:  it's OK for 14yos to have sex, in fact the school will provide them with the condoms and teach them how to use them.  We will absolutely not prosecute them for that.  But for a 14yo boy or girl to send a picture of the act to his/her partner is a major state and federal crime.  I fully get to many if not most people in this country that makes perfect sense.  Many people will argue it is OK for a 14yo girl to have an abortion.  Some will argue she should be able to terminate the fetus without the knowledge or consent of her parents.  But apparently those very same people say she does not have the right to knowingly and willfully take a picture of herself and share it.  The ownership of her body only extends so far as to major and traumatic medical procedures but not a Kodak moment.

The argument I made recently about Harvey Milk and Proposition 6 is exactly on point in this case.  Of course most people in their hearts believe it's completely insane to arrest, prosecute, imprison and register this 14yo girl as a sex offender.  But where is the chorus of voices saying so?  Where are the newspapers editorializing for saner laws?  It is exactly what I said last week.  They are silent because the zealots will label them pedophiles, perverts or child haters if they speak rationally and sensibly. 

Why have we become so obsessed with law enforcement as the answer to every problem.  Don't parents have a right to weigh-in?  If the police inform this 14yos' parents what she's doing, shouldn't they ultimately be responsible for her discipline in a matter such as this?  And if they decide that it's harmless - they don't care - who is to tell these parents that they're wrong?    We have become so used to interceding in what are basically private matters that we cannot stop ourselves. 

It is so sad in this country when we reach the point - and we reached it a long time ago - that you cannot stare idiocy in the face and label it such.  Law enforcement is now wracking its brains as to how not to treat this girl as a child pornographer without creating a loophole.  Without saying: OK, sometimes nude pictures of kids aren't criminal.  Does anyone believe that with tens of millions of horny teenagers armed with camera phones and PDAs, that there is some way to stop this?  Do you really think the average teen who would send nude pictures of themselves in the first place, is going to be deterred by an abstract notion of prison or registration?  For God's sakes, that is the premise of the death penalty and we know empirically that was never a deterrent.  If an adult doesn't pause in his actions to avoid death, do we really believe immature and horny teens are going to reflect on the long term consequences?

So here we are.  I don't know what will happen to this girl.  My guess is that she'll get a slap on the wrist and be forced into some sort of "treatment".  The long term band-aid approach will go in one of two directions.  Either these crazy advocacy groups will call on the major phone carriers to start screening photos sent over phones, thereby breaching another wall of privacy, in the name of protecting children.  Or the police will adopt the Army's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy.  Cops desperately don't want to know about this sexting business because it can only produce bad headlines for local police like the ones in NJ.  They would much prefer not to know that kids are doing this, since there is no way to prevent it or to prosecute without looking foolish.

I hope someone forms a new organization to help teens from being exploited by huge national organizations intent on preventing their exploitation.  I'll be interested to see which way this goes.  The answer of course depends on whether sane people of conscience speak truth to zealotry.

REASON # 1,012 WHY WE NEED A NEW MAYOR

3-30-09    When I am wrong, I am the first one to admit it.  Based on David Seifman's piece in this weekend's NY Post I was clearly wrong when I said  Mayor-for-Life Mike sat silent on the issue of the MTA budget mess because he had no interest in asserting himself.  According to Seifman, it was not because he did not care - although I maintain that he doesn't - it was rather because he is so hated in the state capital that he cannot lobby or travel there on behalf of NYC issues. 

Yup.  It's astounding.  Can you in living memory recall a Mayor of New York City so despised by the legislature that the mere mention of his name would instantly doom legislation?  Don't say Giuliani, because I know that was never true of him.  He had his disagreements with Silver, Weprin, Marino & Bruno but never to the point that it effected the City's ability to lobby and influence NYC legislation.  We certainly lost some battles but Rudy never sat out the fight.

If Seifman's sources are to be belived Mayor-for-Life Mike didn't intervene publicly or privately, travel to Albany, or speak out sooner because his voice would have only made things worse for New York City.  Now ask yourselves this question: are we really going to re-elect a mayor who cannot call legislators or travel to Albany to push for the interests of New Yorkers because he is universally loathed?  It appears we are and I say for the 50th time; I cannot understand it.

3/27/09    UPDATE

A little Friday update.  Some of you complained that I removed old posts and thoughts from the HOME Page.  I was trying to clean things up a bit and make it more navigable.  But I am if anything responsive, so I created a new post called, "Old Musings" and bundled them there.  I have been flooded with e-mails about J'ACCUSE - Part V.  Thank you all for your thoughts.  In the days ahead, be on the lookout for J'ACCUSE - Part VI, Senate Days II, a piece on Cristyne Lategano and as always the countdown continues.  For those of you new to the site, the number in the upper right hand corner reflects the days until I post the big Rudy story.  Expectations seem high for it.  I think you'll enjoy reading it, it's the longest piece to be published.  Have a nice weekend.  RAH 

3/25/09   FILLING THE VOID

Read today's newspapers and you will witness the ultimate in leadership abrogation:  Mayor-for-Life Mike calling on the citizens to call someone and say something.  Where to start?  Leaders can and have asked voters to call on legislatures for action.  But they do it only as a single tool in an arsenal.  Ronald Reagan did it effectively many times to pass his budgets and tax cuts.  But he NEVER took to the airwaves in support of nothing and asked his fellow Americans to merely vent at someone.  Imagine the fool he would have looked had he done that.

This was a very calculated move on Mayor-for-Life Mike's part.  He waited until the last minute, offered no leadership of his own and then like an irate idiot taxpayer yelling "I pay your salary" at an elected official, he behaves like some common helpless Joe importuning his fellow Joes to yell at someone. 

Back in the real fiscal crisis of the 70's we had a mayor who was in over his head.  I have great respect for Abe Beame - I got to know him slightly during the Giuliani years - but he was not up to the tremendous task that faced the Mayor of New York in 74, 75, and 76.  So Providence lent a hand.  Hugh L. Carey was elected governor in 1974 and filled the leadership void left by the Beame Administration.  I won't bore those of you too young to remember of the greatness of the early Carey years.   But Hugh Carey didn't care about credit or avoiding the blame that attaches to bold action.  The city was in deep trouble and was compounding the serious trouble the state was already in.   So he took Beame by the hand; forged unprecedented coalitions, devised unique funding solutions and also inflicted necessary fiscal pain.

Now we have as inept a governor as we may well witness in this or any lifetime; an accident of history.  OK, it happens.  What would Rudy Giuliani do?  What would Ed Koch do?  What would Fiorello LaGuardia do?  What would they do?  They'd fill the void, that's what they'd do.  They would take charge of the MTA using their three votes and shape a plan.  They would coalesce the surrounding counties that will be equally devastated by these commuter increases.  They would lead, not complain.  But Mayor-for-Life Mike does nothing.  His hatred of the automobile and drivers, or at least those of us with less than twenty automobiles, blinds him to seeking any other solution than bridge taxes - another term for his beloved Congestion Tax.  So while Gov. Paterson tells the MTA to do its worst our Mayor first stays silent and then at the 11th hour tells us, like Howard Beale, that he is mad as hell and encourages us to open our windows and shout the same.

I have told you since I started this blog that Mayor-for-Life-Mike has no leadership abilities.  So I expect nothing more than he is giving me.  What I never expected and sit stymied by is how stupid and compliant the voters are.  This man has a 65% approval rating?????  How is that possible?  Of what are people approving?  His inability to prioritize his budget cuts, his lack of leadership on a whole host of development projects throughout the city, his aloof and condescending manner?  Or maybe it's just his general cowardice and blame shifting.  He says today that, "He tells it like it is".  What he has always failed to understand is that we don't elect echos, we elect leaders.  Paterson is a totally lost cause.  The New York press corps is in love with Mayor-for-Life Mike and gives him a pass on almost everything.  But I would strongly recommend that Col Allan go to press tomorrow with a banner headline reminiscent of another failed mayor and proclaim, "MIKE: DO SOMETHING".

3/24/09  Escaping The Deficit

The New York Times today has a good story about closing prisons and other reforms in order to balance desperate state budgets.  Jennifer Steinhauer looks at very red states like Kentucky and Kansas and their search for innovative ways to deal with their criminal justice programs cost effectively.  I applaud them, although it is too bad they are doing the right thing for the wrong reason.  The 80's and 90's saw states and the federal government go on a spending spree building prisons, creating tough mandatory minimum sentencing laws, reducing time for good behavior and increasing time spent on parole.  All this resulted in a burgeoning of the prison-industrial complex.  As it was with military bases, it has become nearly impossible to stand the political heat necessary to close a prison.  But states are doing what states always do because they have to balance their budgets; namely they make choices, they prioritize and they innovate.  The pernicious evil of the central government in Washington is that it is never forced to do any of these things.  Not having to balance a budget means our elected officials can duck and pass on ever making a truly hard budget decision.  The U.S. government, so says the CBO, is going to run trillion dollar deficits for years.  Not the budget, just the deficit.  As they do not have to balance their budget no tough choices are called for.  Take prisons.  Every state gives more "good time" than the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, 15%.  The average time a felon is on probation after leaving a U.S. prison is 3 years.   The vast majority of first-time offenders do not require three years of supervised release post prison.  It is wasteful and unnecessary.  But the trend has been for longer and longer probation in the federal system at a staggering financial cost.  The U.S. Justice Department has no plans to close any prisons, increase good time, shorten probation or propose to Congress that the spiderweb of overlapping federal laws be streamlined so as not to mimic every single state law in existence. 

Why?  No incentive.  If New York City or New York State or Michigan or the nightmare that is California's state budget is wildly out of whack, something has to give.  It's just that simple.  In the federal system - remember I worked in Congress for 2 years - nothing has to give because there is no imperative.  Print more money, pass a CR (continuing resolution) sell China another trillion in debt, anything but deal with the underlying issue that we either cannot afford what we want or we are going to have to pay more for it.  It's that simple.  Tax more or spend less. My conservative inclination is to always fall on the spend less side of that argument. 

In every state in America when the bad times come the executive says to his cabinet: I want your list of programs to be axed or give me a proposal for 7% reductions in your department.  Why has it become so completely unthinkable for the federal government to do the same?  The short answer, and I am not saying anything new, is that we want it both ways.  If they actually started cutting many would howl.  We have come to the mistaken conviction that most of what the federal government does is essential.  In fact, very little of what it does is essential.  Think about your daily life and figure how much the federal government has to do with it.  Not your mail, they're off-budget and self sustaining.  The intangibles you cant see are worthwhile to a small degree, namely the common defense and some public good.  I agree the meat should be inspected and someone should sit over a screen to make sure planes don't crash into each other.  But even there cuts could be sustained.  When a budget becomes so enormous, 3 1/2 trillion dollars, that you cannot effectively manage it - and no one is managing this budget - then it is time to cut and cut and cut until you can rationally explain to the citizenry what your priorities are and why.  It would take Obama 10 years just to explain what's in that budget and why.  Rest assured he doesn't know 1/100th what is being spent in his name.  Can the exercise hurt?  Ask the cabinet secretaries for that 7% reduction and send it to congress.  Let's have the debate.   People like to belittle and ridicule Newt Gingrich but he was one of the very few people who had the courage to say: let's discuss what it is we're spending on and see if it still makes sense.  Federal Depts of Education and Commerce?  He rightly called for their elimination and was mocked.  

My focus these days is prison reform so let me do my part and call on Eric Holder to ask the BOP for those reductions and the lawyers in the criminal division for those legislative changes.  Most people don't belong in federal prison.  They either belong in a state prison or no prison at all.  Unfortunately, we've reached the point where even a trillion dollars in the red can't force a corrupted, bloated and atrophied system to create priorities.

Stealing Third

I don't believe in futile gestures.  I am not a Don Quixote and I try not to tilt at windmills.  Most lost causes are just that, lost. Sometimes, however, either because of heart or head - a battle must be joined.  The best example I can give right now is on display across the river in New Jersey.  A few months ago only Chris Dagget and his family could have explained the formula and rationale for a successful candidacy.  Now, whatever happens this Tuesday - whoever wins and by however much - Chris Dagget will have caused that outcome; simply no question about it any longer.  What started as a pointless third-party candidacy has become a real game changer.

I fully accept the outcome of this Tuesday's Mayoral election.  Michael Bloomberg will be elected Mayor.  Notice I did not say re-elected.  I refuse to accept the legality of the coup that permits him to run in this race.  Since it cannot be legal for him to run for a third term, this is just an election to me, not a re-election.  Even if he gets 65% of the vote, he will have stolen this election as surely as any third-world junta at the point of a bayonet; through bribery, chicanery and illegality.

But however pointless it may be at this time to outline the case for not electing him, I feel the need to make it since it seems no one else will.  I was sickened by the endorsement that appeared this past weekend in The New York Times.  There was a time that the NYT took a very principled approach: If you do not participate in NYC's Campaign Finance program they would not endorse you.  It was simple and they were not kidding.  While I could not agree with them less on the issue of campaign finance reform, and NYC's in particular, it was a principled stand that had to be respected.  What happened to that ironclad policy?  They mentioned briefly and only tepidly the $150 Million dollars he will spend in this race.  Instead of mocking and shaming this obscene expenditure, they blithely commented on it.

Sadly, Bill Thompson seems incapable of making the case against the conventional wisdom that Mike Bloomberg has been a great Mayor with a significant record of accomplishment (In fact, Bill Thompson could not have run a more lifeless campaign if his name were Mel Carnahan).  I will try therefore to lay out the case against another 4 years.

I worked for a great Mayor, Rudy Giuliani.  When you know one and see one up close it helps to spot a pretender or someone who merely aspires to greatness.  Just consider what Rudy Giuliani accomplished in slightly more than his first term in office:

1.    Merged three police departments: NYPD, Housing and Transit.

2.    Instituted COMPSTAT at NYPD which, among many other police innovations,  lead to a 50% reduction in crime.

3.    Launched WEP (Work Experience Program), NYC's workfare program that resulted in a 2/3 drop in welfare recipients.

4.    Merged the City's two information and telecommunications agencies and created DOITT (Dept of Information, Telecommunications & Technology).

5.    Sold the City owned WNYC and made it self-sustaining.

6.    Merged the City's administrative functions into one agency, DCAS (Dept of Citywide Admin. Services).

7.    Merged the many design and construction functions of the various agencies into a streamlined single agency, DDC (Dept of Design and Construction).

8.    Removed mob influence from the waste carting industry and cut costs to businesses by an average 40%.

9.     Forced the MTA to unify zones and fares for all residents under the banner, "One City, One Fare."

10.    Rejected increased education aid from Albany and forced 110 Livingston Street to reduce its bureaucracy and account for its spending.

11.    Eliminated the fare on the Staten Island Ferry.

12.    Negotiated employee buy-outs which reduced City headcount without the need for lay-offs, an innovation for NYC government.

13.    Managed an inherited three billion dollar deficit without raising taxes.

14.    Reduced the Hotel Occupancy Tax which began the record setting return of tourists and business conventions to NYC.

15.    Worked to bring Visy Paper to Staten Island.  The first new major manufacturing plant in NYC in decades.

16.    Reopened the Howland Hook Marine Terminal.

17.     Declared war on the CUNY bureaucracy (City University of NY), demanding higher standards and more accountability.  Result: One of the lowest rated public university systems has become one of the best.  CUNY schools now compare and compete favorably with distinguished private colleges, laughably unthinkable a decade ago.

18.    Negotiated the toughest union contacts in City history, including: givebacks, privatization initiatives and the famous (infamous) double zero pay package.

19.    Developed and implemented a new waste removal plan & system for the city's trash that resulted in the long promised closing of the Fresh Kills dump before the end of his second term.

20. Produced the first year to year budget with an actual decrease in expenditures, FY 95.

21.    And perhaps most impressive, the decades long decline in population turned around with a one million person increase in NYC's population.  As is often said, people vote with their feet.

I created that list in 5 minutes without any reference material.  There's a lot more to list, both small and large.  But it does no one, except Michael Bloomberg, any good to forget that remarkable and singular record of achievement.  It's probably unparalleled by any Mayor in any city, anywhere.  And yet how soon we forget.  I challenge Bloomberg's Deputy Mayors, a decade from now, to put together a list of three Bloomberg accomplishments from memory that matches any one of the above.  I guarantee you now, they will not be able to then.

Only Rudy Giuliani's deplorable behavior since 2002 could make us think the Bloomberg years could compare with the Giuliani years.  But many, mainly lead by The New York Times, are so happy that Rudy Giuliani is out of office that anyone compares favorably.  The NYT, in its glowing embrace of Bloomberg, seemed to reflect on the recent inflammatory comments by Giuliani and just sigh loudly - once again - how relieved they are that he's no longer our Mayor.

And the incumbent's record of achievement over two full terms?  Let's take a look.

If you're thinking school governance, I assure you you're mistaken.  I was there in the final years of the Giuliani Administration.  Any informed observer will remind you that the legislature and Gov. Pataki were fully prepared to hand over the schools to the Mayor of NYC.  They were prepared philosophically to do it in 2000 and 2001.  The votes were there in the Senate and the Assembly.   But Speaker Sheldon Silver was resolutely opposed to giving Rudy Giuliani this final feather in his cap.  He would not not do it while Rudy was in office.  The next Mayor, whether he be Green, Ferrer, Bloomberg or a corpse, was going to get school governance for the asking.  Any success Bloomberg wishes to claim on this front can only be that he was not Rudy Giuliani in 2002, because that is the sum and substance achievement in getting mayoral control of the schools for him.

But put that aside for the moment.  So he got the schools, what did he do with them?  Unlike Giuliani, who made it clear that what was wrong with public school education was not a lack of funding but structural/core issues, Bloomberg increased the annual schools budget 65% from over 12 billion dollars to a mind blowing 19 billion dollars.  He claims serious success in testing scores.  All analysts of those increases either dismiss them, see them as part of a general statewide pattern or credit any bounce to the teach-to-test curriculum that has been adopted by Chancellor Klein.  Certainly no parent with a child in a city school believes their kid's education is anywhere near 65% improved over the last eight years.  The vast majority would aver that they have seen no positive change.  Their children are no smarter, more well spoken, better behaved or any other metric you might wish to use.

Of the great middle class, whom the Mayor claims to champion, how have they fared over his two terms?  Compared to the Giuliani years, they have been sucker punched again and again. Where Rudy Giuliani decreased taxes and fees, Bloomberg has increased any and every tax, fee, toll or revenue enhancer he could find.  The last eight years have seen double digit increases in property taxes, subway fares, tolls on bridges and tunnels, water rates and the sales tax.  And this does not include the divisive Congestion Toll he hoped to impose on those of us who do not consider traveling within the city a luxury.  Even the sports stadia he gave hundreds of millions of dollars to, turned right around after gouging on all this public money and raped the public with massive increases in ticket and concession prices.  On what credible basis can anyone claim that Michael Bloomberg looks out for the little guy, let alone relates to him?

Housing?  This is a subject I know a little bit about.  While our friends at The New York Times write fawning news stories to the Bloomberg housing initiatives, the truth lay elsewhere.  Two significant facts that have been overlooked in all the analysis of these housing stats.  First, the numbers don't add up.  Many of the 100,000+ units that are claimed to have been created or rehabbed do not exist.  They are included in the development plans for large scale economic development projects that may or may not get approval and funding years from now.  Second, as a keen observer of the ads placed by developers for HPD & HDC projects, I have seen an alarming trend toward high-cost City sponsored co-ops over the last eight years.  Prior to the Bloomberg Administration there were literally only a handful of City subsidized co-op projects, all extremely affordable.  Now there are dozens and none can be deemed affordable. 

Bad enough that they are diverting needed funding for affordable rental housing on co-ops, the price of these co-ops are eye popping.  Eighteen months ago I saw an ad for an HPD sponsored co-op selling for over $700,000.  Why in God's name would City tax dollars or even the time needed to work on these projects be expended to create and sell apts. for $700K?   What you see when you examine the ads are City sponsored co-op apartments regularly selling for $300K, $400K, $500K.  Only in a Mike Bloomberg world could this type of housing be deemed "affordable" and worthy of the City's interest, time and money.  In short, on housing, his numbers don't add up and his priorities are not ours.  His housing record can be summed up simply by the extraordinary number of luxury apartment buildings that have been erected, many with little mentioned City subsidies.

And of the Mayor's 'signature' initiatives?  Well, first let me say that it's embarrassing that anyone would want to claim these things as representative of one's best efforts over eight years in office.  But he does, so let's look at them:

1.    Smoking -  I smoke and feel that most of these measures are simply the frustrations of a former smoker against those who can and do continue to enjoy smoking.  As any smoker will tell you, the worst people are former smokers.  They hate that you can do what they cannot or will not partake in any longer.  As for the results, no sensible person believes the statistics coming out of the NYC Dept of Health (DOH).  Smoking has not decreased 20%-30% over the last eight years. Be assured of that.   All this has done is imposed another tax chiefly on the poor and middle class and made NYC an even more financially undesirable place to live.  These never ending attempts to target out-of-state tobacco retailers is a God awful waste of the overtaxed resources of the City's Law Department.  Which, by the way, recent independent analysis has shown settles more and more litigation because they do not have the resources to take these cases to full trial and fear the outcome given their limited resources.  The lesson - unlike the federal government, which has unlimited resources - on the city level a cost paid somewhere will result in a loss somewhere else.  These are the trade-offs Bloomberg is making with our money and they are not worth it.  And while we're on the subject of smoking, it is another act of Bloomberg cowardice that the promised grotesque advertisements that will be going up in drugstores, food marts, candy stores and bodegas have not appeared before the election.  DOH has promised rules that will require any establishment that sells cigarettes to post large depictions of sick lungs and such.  The outrage will be swift and hard when it comes.  Store owners will win this one in court for sure.  Notice these rules - and the resulting signage - were not promulgated before the election.  As to the effect of these doctored DOH stats, I'll get to that in a minute. 

2.    Guns - No one believes that this on-going attack on out-of-state gun dealers is anything other than an extremely anti-gun, anti 2nd Amendment Bloomberg trying to impose his views on the red states.  Not a single killing or crime of any kind has been prevented in NYC from these actions.  It's Bloomberg lashing out at a guaranteed right that he personally hates.  More work for the Law Department when they're not writing huge checks to career felons for frivolous lawsuits, as reported recently.

3.    Calories - I suppose a case can be made that sometimes the benefits of an intrusive government policy might outweigh the costs.  This was never the case with mandatory calorie information, however.  The recent comprehensive Yale University  study of NYC's law told us what we all already knew; they don't work and never would.  When you go into a McDonald's - unless you walked in with the intention of ordering a salad - discovering that a Big Mac is fattening is not going to get you to change your order.  But the larger question here always was less about government intrusion and more "why bother?'  How is it the government's business this I should order skim milk as opposed to whole and why would they want to?  It's really outrageous when you stop to think about it.  It is also not surprising that DOH has this week announced that old Yale Univ was wrong.  DOH's own in-house stats supposedly show the law is working and people's behavior has changed.  You know that's not true.  Can you imagine a Bloomberg Health Department, or any City agency under Bloomberg, stating that a major mayoral initiative was a bust?  Of course not.   The net effect of these policies is that a once highly respected municipal health department has become a biased, propaganda arm of City Hall.  When DOH speaks on any subject; smoking, calories, the flu, who would believe them?  Their track record is filled with consistent misdirection and outright prevarication.  The latest example is a million dollar campaign against sweetened beverages.  This campaign not only demonstrates that you cannot trust anything DOH says anymore, it also shows what a weasel Mayor Mike has become.  Remember during his first term when he inked a landmark deal with Snapple to provide beverages exclusively to schools and government buildings?  Remember the joint press conference where DOH, among others, told us how Snapple was going to help solve the obesity problem in our schools?  Not to mention how this deal was going to fill City coffers (it turned out to be a colossal bust).  Well low and behold not a term later and the ad in the subway depicting a sugary drink dissolving into fat is none other than Snapple.  Look at the ad.  The shape of the bottle, the color of the label and the tea-like color of the beverage being poured.  In one term DOH has deemed Snapple scourge from savior.  Honestly, in a Bloomberg Administration, who would trust anything DOH says anymore? 

4.    Stop & Frisk - It would be unfair to rap Bloomberg with this one since it was initially a Giuliani policy, but he's embraced this as his own so the criticism sticks.  If by stop and frisk we mean that when a police officer sees a man stroking what appears to be a gun under his jacket and stops to pat him down, then no I don't oppose that and nor would most people.  More to the point, you never needed any special legislation or court ruling for a cop to do that.  It's reasonable suspicion.  But that is not what mean in NYC in 2009 by stop and frisk.  And that is where everyone is getting confused. 

The thing about this policy, and I accept my share of the blame, is that if you're a middle to upper middle class white person, living in Manhattan, this all seems perfectly reasonable.  It appears that way because for all the years I lived on the Upper West and East Sides, I never saw a single person stopped and frisked, white or black.  Not one.  It's all an abstraction to you when you live in those neighborhoods.  Now when I lived in a halfway house off of Fordham Road in the Bronx, I saw young black and Hispanic men stopped routinely.  On a number of occasions as I walked back to the house with a black or Hispanic resident they were stopped and put up against a wall while no one gave me a second look.  If they were acting suspiciously, I was equally suspicious.  Yet as a middle-class looking white guy, I was never going to be stopped.  Never once could I say objectively that I witnessed someone stopped for anything that appeared suspicious.  I have no knowledge of this, but my guess is the cops operate on a quota.   They would just stop any black or Hispanic guy, put them up against a wall, frisk them and let them go.  I witnessed this hundreds of times in the six months I lived there.  Try and imagine for one moment the white editorial page editor of the Daily News - who vociferously supports this policy - being stopped in his Manhattan neighborhood routinely and put up against a wall.  Do you really think the Daily News would be for this if, let's say,  Mort Zuckerman was frisked every few days for no reason?  Of course not.  The Supreme Court has never accepted the rationale of stop & frisk the way it is being practiced in NYC.  It is sad, as a Democrat and a black man, that Bill Thompson is generally OK with all this.  It's sadder still that in a city filled with black and Hispanic elected officials virtually no one says a word about this policy.  I've never been personally effected by this policy and never will be, yet as a lover of the Constitution, it's sickening.

5.    Terror - I give the NYPD all the requisite plaudits for their Joint Terrorism Task Task work.  It's been around for years now and continues to be far more effective than the FBI or the CIA in finding domestic terrorist activity.  To the extent Bloomberg hasn't monkeyed this up or Rudy/Bratton policing, kudos to him.  His 'signature' initiative in this regard, I do not applaud. More and more of the Island of Manhattan is being ringed with outdoor spy cameras - CCTV.  Bloomberg believes it is important to get as much of Manhattan on CCTV as possible.  It costs millions in city and federal dollars to install and maintain the operations necessary for this program.  And the results?  Well we don't know anything practically but we do know that the largest such system tried in the world is a total bust.  Bloomberg - who is a lover of all things British - is either unaware or disdainful of a recent nationwide study done in Great Britain as to the effectiveness of their CCTV system which covers nearly every outdoor inch of that country.  It found that the hundreds of millions of pounds spent were a waste.  It deterred no crime and actually thwarted the capture of criminal suspects.  Why?  You'll never guess.  Criminals started to wear low slung hats, hoodies and shades in the commission of their crimes.  No pictures proved useful.  The value in Britain has been that after suicide bombings the police are quickly able to identify the attackers and their movements leading up to the attacks.  That has an investigative, after the fact value, I suppose.

But given no deterrent effect, is ringing Britain visually like a prison yard - weighed against the civil liberties cost - worth the price?  I would argue it is not.  I oppose these cameras here because I believe them to be an unwarranted intrusion into our daily lives.  Couple that with the fact that it has no practical benefit, and you have to ask yourself why.  The answer in Bloomberg's case is the same as smoking, calories, stop & frisk, all of it.  He hates people, individual rights and liberties and loves big government.  Ironic isn't it.  The perfect standard bearer apparently for NYC's Republican Party. 

6.    311 - Oh, please. 

7.    The Economy - Remember how we've heard nothing for nearly two decades in state politics except how badly the upstate economy is doing?  Pataki ran on it, Hillary ran on it, Spitzer ran on it.  Now wouldn't it be astounding to discover that in the midst of this nightmarish recession our billionaire chief executive has mismanaged our financial affairs to such an extent that NYS now has a lower unemployment rate than does NYC.  I cannot remember when that was the case.  The whole reason for a Bloomberg mayoralty was that this financial genius would lead us through the tough times and we'd come out the other end unscathed.  Try and get your head around this fact: NYC now has a higher unemployment rate than Buffalo.  It's unthinkable and yet true.  For those of us who are New Yorkers we cannot remember when such a thing existed.  This is the heralded stewardship that we were promised?  That we would actually make Buffalo's economy look good by comparison to ours.  And this is just the beginning.  On the one hand Bloomberg has increased spending at an alarming rate.  On the other he has raised taxes sky high on everyone but the wealthy.  When the time comes that the budget outlays are unsustainable we're all going to discover that the economy of the city requires a giant kick start.  That's going to mean budget cuts or tax cuts.  The budget will not be able to be cut because the increases Bloomberg has imposed are, in the main, permanent and ever growing.   Tax cuts will be deemed too risky since, in the short term,  they would require more budget cuts.  He has left his successor(s) with a budgetary time bomb only rivaled by - and maybe far worse - than that of the Financial Crisis of the 1970's. 

8.    The Olympics - True this an unattained achievement, but Bloomberg set so much of his prestige and time during his first term towards this unsuccessful bid that it's only fair to judge the effort, even ignoring the outcome.  This more than anything else I have or will write should tell you why you do not want Mike Bloomberg to be your Mayor.

Who vies for the Olympics?  As we all know, cities that need to prove something.  Even great cities find they need the Olympics for the affirmation they think it bestows (i.e. Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, London).  They believe it shows the world, "we've arrived" or "we're back" or "you approve!"  Guess which city singularly of all world cities needs none of these things and never has.  Yup, New York City.  Yea, we'll throw the occasional World's Fair but it's not the same thing and not done for the same reasons.  Only a Bostonian, complete with a second city complex, would think NYC "needs" the Olympics.  We need to demonstrate nothing to anyone, that is our greatness.   Bin Laden could have blown up the Sears Tower in Chicago (taller than WTC) or the Bank of America Building in SF (better design).  But he choose the WTC because it was here, the heart of the great city; center of the world's attention.  Mayor Mike doesn't get that, he never will.  I have no problem voting for an immigrant from China, Mexico or Korea to serve as our Mayor.  I have a very serious problem about electing someone from Boston, however.  The only Boston resident who ever transformed into a real New Yorker, as we all know, was Babe Ruth.  Every time Mayor Mike speaks in that grating New England accent it's like he's spitting on us all.  His quest to bring us the Olympics showed better than any policy or program pronouncement that he is not one of us, just doesn't get who we are, and what we're about.  Moreover, he never will. 

Mike Bloomberg's great selling point back in 2001 was that he was the Great Manager. The trains would run on time finally and he would do more with less.  If that were the promise then he as failed miserably.  Any of the twenty Giuliani achievements I have listed is more impressive, more meaningful to the life, future and history of NYC, than is the cumulative record of the last eight years.

He hates smoking, the automobile and obese people.  His vision is comprised not of ideals but of pet peeves.  He brags that he's an independent.  Anyone who can travel in eight years from being a liberal Democrat to a Bush Republican to a Nader independent is not free thinking, he is totally devoid of convictions or an ideology.  We don't elect people like that to lead us, we assign them to the category of schizophrenic.

I fully acknowledge the unfairness in contrasting a great leaders record with every other officeholder who follows.  We would never re-elect any president if we judged them simply by how their record compared to Washington's, Lincoln's, FDR's or Reagan's.   So it is inherently unfair to judge Bloomberg (mediocre) by Giuliani (great).  But conversely, looking back after eight years in office and summing it up essentially by saying, "I didn't make things worse," - which is probably the most charitable thing I could say - is also no reason for another term, let alone a stolen third.

Do the right thing on Tuesday on behalf of all of us who can't.  Don't reward arrogance and mediocrity with four more years.  Vote for a competent, quiet man to helm the ship.  Elect Bill Thompson, Mayor.

Kerik, Valhalla and Me

Never let it be said I can't take a joke.  In today's paper, Ellis Henican writes a satirical 24 hours in the life of Bernie Kerik behind bars in Westchester County jail.  On this fictional to-do list at 5:30PM it says, "Contact Russell Harding, Jr. about starting a Westchester County jail chapter of Giuliani Alumni Behind Bars."  Funny.  Timely, topical, relevant - not especially mean, I laughed.  I didn't quite get the 'Jr.' reference.  He must not read this blog and isn't aware I am Jewish.  Jews don't name children after the living, hence the sparseness of names like Shlomo Rabinowitz IV.

It surprised me however that Mr. Henican would mention me in connection with Bernie Kerik and Westchester County.  While it is true I live there now, I certainly had no connection to Westchester prior to my case and very few people are aware of the fact that I was in the jail where Bernie Kerik is being housed for about 5 weeks in the Summer of 2005.

In April of '05' I was at FMC Butner in North Carolina (next door to the prison where Bernie Madoff is held).  It had been agreed between all parties in my case that, as I very much did not want to return to NYC and the Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC) for my plea, I would do it by video conference from Butner.  Video conferencing (VC) was very common at FMC Butner since so many of its inmates were from far and wide as Butner was the BOP's 'premier' medical facility.  VC was used for pleas, sentencings and motions of all kinds.  They had a special room set up for this purpose.  Interestingly, I was told that my court had never used VC for any appearance by a defendant and mine would be the first.  My judge fancied himself a techie and liked the idea of his courtroom being the first. 

The plea went off without a hitch from a technical and legal standpoint.  It was agreed that my sentencing would also be done that way three months hence.  Well, Debbie Landis, my prosecutor, did what she always did, she lied.  After the plea she discovered that no press had covered it because I wasn't physically there.  She was not going to be deprived of her crowning moment after 3 1/2 years and millions of dollars spent by Justice.  She told my lawyers she was withdrawing her consent and was insisting I be brought back to appear in person. 

I told my lawyers I would not go back and be housed at the MCC.  Everyone understood that returning to the MCC was what had caused me to attempt suicide while I was at a prison in Minnesota.  So Debbie agreed to house me at a Westchester County medical facility while I was in NY for my sentencing.  Knowing Debbie to be the lying cur that she is, I expected her not to keep her word and instead send me to the MCC. 

Only my then lawyer, Henry Mazurek, knows what I am about to tell you now.  I have never spoken of this before.  The day before I was supposed to begin the trip back to NY, I tried for a third time to commit suicide.  I mailed Henry a letter from Butner saying goodbye.  The first time was carbon monoxide, the second time a ton of pills, this time I would try a plastic bag as I had no access to the other two methods.  I ended up passing out, but did not asphyxiate myself.  Three time loser, I guess.  The next day I called Henry and told him I mailed him a letter and asked that he not open it until he saw me again.

When I get off the con air plane in Westchester - what a shock - Debbie lied.  I was not going to a medical facility but to Valhalla County Jail.  When my lawyer complained later that she went back on her word, Debbie's response was, "I said I would try, I never promised to make it happen."  Henry, my lawyer, told me flatly she had lied to him.  But nothing was to be done, I was going to be at Valhalla for the next few weeks.

Valhalla would end up being the only non-BOP owned facility I would be housed at.  I was at eight prisons within two years.  In the end, it was an interesting experience because I was able to contrast county/state facilities with federal.  Valhalla at that time - and may still - had two jails, an old and a new one.  The old jail, where I was initially housed, was a horrible place.  It must have been 70 years old.  The cell was filthy, tiny and hot.  The old jail lacked any A/C.  It was now July and that particular summer NY was broiling.  The old jail also represented the only time that I felt in constant physical danger from other inmates.  In the MCC everyone is terrified of the physical and mental brutality of the guards, not the other inmates.  In prison you're always 2 steps away from a fight or physical harm from your fellow inmates.  But if you knew how to conduct yourself you can seriously minimize the danger.  Valhalla I realized, was different.  Whether because it was a county facility and the inmates were there for more common physical crimes like murder and assault than in federal prison, I don't know.  But these guys in the old jail were looking for a fight all the time.

I got lucky.  After two days - I think because of the heat - they closed down one wing of the old jail and moved a bunch of us to the new jail.  The new jail and the old jail are connected by a central building so it was not as though you had to be transported.  Compared to the old jail, the new jail was really nice.  Elis Henican in his piece today kept making reference to a prison like setting; mess hall, outdoor recreation, things like that.  Valhalla isn't that type of place. 

You never see the outside except for a caged recreation area attached to your unit.  The unit itself it two-tiered.  All your meals are eaten in your unit at collapsible tables in a small dining/rec nook.  The meals are brought up in large warmers on individual trays.  Valhalla is a very boring place to do time.  The unit Bernie Kerik is in most likely is the same one I was in, unless, God forbid, he's in the old jail.  It's also likely he's being segregated. Not because he's famous but due to his police and corrections background.  But if I had to guess I believe he's probably in that same unit I had been in.  It's just like every other unit at the new jail but they kept the federal prisoners there.  Since there weren't enough fed inmates to fill a whole unit, you were housed with state inmates awaiting trial. 

For me the one nice thing about Valhalla was smoking.  Smoking was prohibited, and if you were caught, punishable by some pretty severe sanctions.  But the open-air, caged rec area made a perfect spot to smoke and usually not get caught.  The other nice thing was how cheap cigarettes were compared to federal prison.  At Butner we had been paying $15 a cigarette.  Here they were $5.  How do you get contraband in prison?  Just like you think, the guards. 

Within a day of being in any new federal prison you quickly knew from other inmates which were the guards on the take and who brought in contraband.  I never got involved at that level, I was just a customer, but I knew all the inmates who were running the contraband operations.  I've said it before, there is no more corrupt institution than the Federal Bureau of Prisons.  No other correctional agency in the country - local, county or state - is completely immune from oversight the way the Federal Bureau of Prisons is.  No FBI, no Justice, no US Attorney ever examines complaints about federal prisons - that's why you never hear of any.  Local and state authorities have no jurisdiction.  And because of that, the staff acts with an arrogant immunity that you will see nowhere else.

Staff all over the BOP have PO Boxes and bank accounts in family members' names in order to receive money from inmates' families to pay for cigarettes and drugs.  It's as common as 4:00PM count time.

Valhalla had some weird policies compared to federal prison.  In the BOP you order commissary once a week.  In Valhalla you could order it 3 times a week.  You chose from an order slip and it was delivered to your unit.  There were six different soda choices but the jail prohibited ice machines.  There were four different types of instant coffee you could buy but the commissary did not sell mugs or cups, as opposed to every federal institution.  To drink coffee you had to beg the guards to give you their used Dunkin Donuts styrofoam cup that they brought to work with them and then reuse it until it wore out.  Why would anyone sell coffee and yet nothing to make it in? 

Besides the smoking, the big treat for me was a silly thing.  It's hard to anticipate what things from your former life you will miss in prison.  You always think you know, but it's never what you actually miss.  One of the big things I missed was a nice towel after a shower.  BOP towels are small and very thin.  They don't absorb water, they're always damp and unless you have a 30" waist, you can't wrap them around yourself.  But Westchester County was, like many counties, not willing to pay for things the federal government did.  The federal mentality  - and from a correctional standpoint, I can't really argue with it - is that if you create a closed system where no outside products whatsoever can be introduced then you can control the introduction of contraband and limit other safety issues.  You've heard in some state prisons you can receive care packages from your family.  In the federal system your family can only send you money in order to buy things from the BOP; no outside food, clothing or sundries.  The exception is books and they must be ordered from someplace like Amazon not sent in by individuals.

Valhalla was perfectly happy to let your friends and family send you radios, books, clothing and music.  There was a lot of basic clothing that they wouldn't provide or sell in order to encourage you to have your family pay for it.  I don't think you were allowed to receive food, however, like in state prison. 

Anyway, a friend at the time dropped off some books, a radio and a huge, fluffy, white towel.  That towel was awesome.  

The other big difference was visitation.  I had never had a visitor before I went to Valhalla.  Friends offered to visit me in Minnesota and North Carolina but I said no.  When I got to NY, a personal friend and a family friend wanted to visit and I acquiesced.  Visiting policies differ from prison to prison in the BOP, but only because some prisons don't have facilities large enough to house visitors at-will.  While there is no outside oversight of the large scale corruption within the BOP, federal courts take very seriously things like visitation, so the BOP generally doesn't screw around with that. 

Some prisons work on a points system.  You get so many points a month.  Weekday visits use up X points.  Weekend visits use up more since more people want to visit on weekends.  One prison I was at also awarded preferences to people depending upon where they were coming from.  Long distance visits were given priority over local.  The last federal prison I was in, FMC Devens, had a large visiting area and visitation was at-will.  Come as often as you liked.    

Valhalla had by far the worst visitation policies and facilities.  In the federal system, when you showed up to visit, the inmate was sent for.  Whenever you came that's when he was called.  If you came early in the morning you could spend the whole day with your loved one in the visiting room.  At Valhalla there were two visiting shifts, each lasting only an hour.  Your family or friends had to wait on a line outside, for hours sometimes, in order to get inside.  And even when you waited there was no assurance you would get inside.  As I said, that summer was very hot and my two visitors were drenched in sweat when I finally saw them for 30 minutes.

One of them, a fancy upper east side lady, decided she wanted to visit again but was not standing on that line in the sun.  I explained to her there was nothing to be done about it.  She told me she would call the warden.  I laughed.  Jails don't work like that.  No warden is going to care that she's been inconvenienced.  Well, I guess you just have to know that lady because she got the associate warden on the phone and he arranged it so that she would not have to wait on line anytime she visited.

Enough about me.  The real question here is what should Bernie Kerik do and try to avoid doing.  My guess is that there is almost no chance an appeals court is going to reverse the judge's order revoking his bond.  I also think there's a chance the prosecutors will try and move him to the MCC, to further punish him.  However much the Feds pretend that they have no knowledge of conditions at the MCC, they know perfectly well what a depraved hellhole it is.  My advice to him is that if you can be fine with limited visits then stay at Valhalla.  

I think Bernie Kerik probably brought this on himself.  It appears that he violated a cardinal rule of the accused.  It's OK to thumb your nose at your prosecutor.  There may also be some rare times when it's OK to behave defiantly towards your judge.  But you must never attempt to get at one by defying the other.  That appears to be the case here.  Kerik was trying to lash out at the prosecutors and unfortunately didn't mind violating a judge's order to do it.  That's not good.

I wish him the best in Valhalla and hope that the caffeine withdrawal that we all go through upon unexpectedly entering prison has subsided by now. He's getting a really raw deal all the way around.  It's particularly unfortunate in his case because he was probably the finest Department of Corrections commissioner NYC ever had.  He reformed Rikers and made it a much safer and more tolerable place for both inmates and staff.  I am glad he's fighting the charges and wish him the best.

The Worst of the Worst

By the dramatic increase in hits to this site over the last 24 hours I have to assume readers were looking for my reaction to yesterday's decision in Westchester County Court to assign me Level 3 sex offender status.  The bottom line reaction can be summed up in two words, "as expected." 

For possessing 11 illegal images, I am now assigned to the most dangerous, predatory category of criminals in all of NYS.  Without a finding that I had done more than that, planned to do more than that, or have attempted to do even that since my release from prison 20 months ago, I am now the most dangerous man in NYS. 

I have written numerous times that no justice can be expected in Judge Jeffrey C. Cohen's courtroom.  Unless of course either the prosecution or his law secretary chooses to offer some.  I have said that Judge Cohen is a smart man.  I admit when I am wrong.  Not because he assigned me a Level 3 status.  I expected nothing less from him, it was what the prosecution wanted.  I am just constantly amazed at how openly inept he has become.  Maybe I just never noticed the full extent.

Yesterday began as it always does in Judge Cohen's court, jokes.  There was a group of visiting Canadians who want to establish sex courts in Canada.  Judge Cohen welcomed them by saying "We have here today visitors from our neighbors (sic) to the North."  He then went on to warn them that they wouldn't find his court or the process illuminating and then mocked the process in-whole.  Nice, when people's liberties are at stake, make jokes.  I was first up.  He announced his decision. 

Now step back here one moment.  He's saying - by assigning me a Level 3 - that I am the most out-of-control, predatory, type of individual out there walking around.  If that's the case, why did he wait eight months to announce that?  My hearing was eight months ago.  In the interim - according to the law - I have to be considered a Level 1.  You would think that immediately after the hearing, having seen the evidence and reached the determination that I am this menace, that to protect the community from me - something he said yesterday he clearly wants to do - that he would announce his decision, rather than letting me walk around posing this extraordinary threat to the public.  Eight months to announce this; putting the public at risk the entire time?  Hard to comprehend how I pose this serious threat to the community when it took him eight months to announce it.  You'd think with the public's safety in jeopardy that he'd want people to know right away.  God only knows what I might do in the interim.

At the moment after he announced his decision my lawyer asked for a stay.  At this point, at this serious moment in my life, I almost started laughing.  Why?  Because Judge Cohen couldn't articulate his stay order.  He started, then stopped, then tried again.  But that wasn't the funny part.  Like most judges he has a law secretary.  In his case a very, skinny middle-aged woman.  What you realize is that even more than with most judges, he is completely lost without her.  It is she who rules that courtroom, not him.  He is constantly looking to her for her approval to his rulings and she revels in it.  What was so funny to me was that I was facing her head-on and while he's stumbling around to announce the stay order she is rolling her eyes and making the most exasperated expression.  If there were a cartoon bubble over her head it would have said, "what an idiot!"  Moreover, while waiting for my lawyer after the decision, I found out from someone who had been there a few weeks ago that he had issued the exact same stay order then and simply couldn't explain it.  Further, all that was required was for him to check a box on a form that said 1, 2 or 3 and he simply could not do it without his law secretary's assistance.  This guy told me that Cohen was pathetic. 

Now what was his reasoning for giving me this extraordinary classification?  What did his decision say?  It said two astounding things. 

The controlling case in these matters is a NYS Court of Appeals case, People v. Johnson.   First, Judge Cohen acknowledged that Johnson applied to my case (it could not be more directly on-point).  The Johnson case recognizes that the state law creating a sex offender registry and process is flawed in matters of child pornography.  The law was written poorly and in a hurry back in 2007.  The court said in Johnson that there were anomalies between the law, the levels, and the crime of possessing child porn.  But rather than throw the law out, the court counted on the common sense and good judgment of judges to address these obvious anomalies.  What are these anomalies?  The most glaring of them is this: You are assigned extra points if the victim is a stranger.  Had I somehow had pictures of children I knew that would have been OK, and I would not have been assigned extra points.  The law is clearly intended to relate to the crime of molestation and not child porn.  The legislature mad a total mishmash of the statute in writing it. 

Judge Cohen clearly acknowledges this in his decision but goes on to say, "Johnson permits, indeed may even suggest, that a court consider a downward departure in such cases, but it does not mandate the court to so depart because it is a child pornography case."  He thumbed his nose at the NYS Court of Appeals.  It was the clear intent of the Johnson decision, as it related to child porn, for lower courts to realize and take into consideration the anomalies between the system created to determine levels and the crime of child porn possession.  They did not mandate it because to do so would have, in all likelihood, invalidated the law or at least made it open to much greater challenge.  They did not want to invalidate the law and further, did not want judges putting them in the necessary position to do so.  So they stated rather clearly that the drafter's legislative intent and their final product may not be consistent with the crime for which I was charged.  What the court was saying was, "use your good judgment to fix these cases and don't force us to throw out the whole thing."

But Judge Cohen yesterday flipped off the NYS Court of Appeals.  He told them, "not gonna do it and you can't make me."  But that was not the truly outlandish part of his decision.  Nope.  He determined I was a Level 2.  He then disposed of our motion for a downward departure to a Level 1 - for the reasons stated above.  He then accepted the prosecution's motion for an upward departure to a Level 3.  Why?  Because I had defrauded HDC.  That act made me more of a danger to the children of Westchester County and New York State.  See the correlation?  No?  Neither do I.  Neither would anyone.  But that wasn't what blew me away regarding the HDC statement.  Right after my appearance Judge Cohen accepted a plea bargain in which he agreed to sentence a priest - who stole over $400,000 from his church - not to the prescribed four years in state prison - nope - but to six months in county jail.  I am excoriated by him in his decision for HDC, but this priest gets maximum leniency.

Now Judge Cohen could have said no - he could have rejected the plea, like Judge Rakoff did in Federal Court in the BOA case.  It is every judge's prerogative.  No, he accepted it because his law secretary and the prosecutor were for it.   There is no evidence that in a serious matter of sentencing Judge Cohen ever departs from the prosecutor's "request."  It's hard to see what neutral, buffering point he serves in all this.

The evil, perniciousness inherent in depriving people of their civil liberties is the ease with which people can become accustomed to doing it.  What HDC has to do with the safety of child is beyond anyone's ken.  But once you start labeling, registering and tagging people it's a very slippery slope to throwing out wild add-ons like the HDC example. 

The worst of the worst make up a very small percentage of those who ever get registered.  Prosecutors view these hearings as easy ways to up their win-loss stats.  Most judges - Cohen in particular - are deathly afraid of taking the criticism that comes with making a tough call.  As I have said before the one's who suffer - besides those being registered - are the police and the community who think this registration business makes them safer.  The police now have to treat me like a Level 3 Offender.  No one but the prosecutor and Judge Cohen believes I am a Level 3 offender.  But all the police know is that's my designation.  I guarantee you that there is some guy out there with a Level 1 or 2 who poses a far, far greater risk but the police - whose resources are naturally limited, not limitless - will focus less attention on him because the Westchester D.A's office and Judge Jeffrey Cohen thought it would be fun to tag me with a Level 3 designation. 

There are consequences to society for this reckless behavior.  When you lose sight - as they clearly have done in my case and so many others - of the extreme seriousness of what's taking place here, then you demean the very position of trust you hold.  The public is not better informed.  They are barraged with meaningless and useless information that can only confuse and frighten them.  And in case you're missing it, that's the point.  The Sex Offender industry, whether special courts, prosecutors, treatment clinics, graduate courses, books and videotapes, reference material, prisons, expert witnesses is now huge money.  federal money, state money, private money.  This is major business being plied all at the expense - in most cases - of people who may have committed a crime, did their time and simply want to get on with their life.  I have told you before that contrary to talk radio, 'sex offenses' have the lowest recidivism rate of any major crime. 

I was in prison with numerous members of the notorious gang, MS-13.  They originated in El Salvador and are now considered one of the largest and most dangerous gangs in the United States.  One of the features of gang life - and life in MS-13 most especially - is recruitment.  They are always seeking out young, poor, disaffected Hispanic kids.  Regardless of their sentence, they all told me that as soon as they were released they were going right back to MS-13.  Now imagine for a moment you're a poor, single, Hispanic mother, raising your son in the bad part of town.  Now, would you rather know that an MS-13 gang member recently released from prison has moved in next door to you or that some guy who looked at illegal pictures on the internet moved in?  The white middle class amongst you are all answering wrong.  The answer, I assure you, that she'd much prefer to know that this kid, intent on recruiting her son, just moved in.  But we don't register that kid just leaving prison.  His recidivism rate - gang membership - is nearly 100%.  But no one is doing anything to inform that mother that her son is in real danger of his life spiraling out of control.  Now I am not endorsing registration for that kid just released from prison because I don't believe in registration.  But if the goal here, as espoused by its advocates, is to keep parents informed of threatening dangers to their children, then I can guarantee you that Pedro or Raul next door poses a far greater risk than do I.  And yet the mother is ignorant of her surroundings.  How do we explain this?

What saddens me most about Judge Cohen - and I do not expect most of you reading this to understand my point - is that he's Jewish.  I try not to throw around the Holocaust card too much, but I am in fact a first-generation American; both my parents are Holocaust survivors.  I've studied that period intently, read all the books, been to Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.  No one can make a case to me that we were willing participants in the destruction of six million of our own, but it also cannot be denied that all Jews bear some shame for acts of complicity in aiding the Nazis. 

The Jewish Councils in most ghettos compiled the lists which the Nazis used to determine transport.  It is our way to follow the rules, keep calm and try and maintain a semblance of order even if the final outcome is our destruction.  The diaspora made us keenly aware not to rock any boats and to 'go along to get along' in a foreign land, even one we may have lived in for a century.  Part of, 'Never Again' is that sense that we won't go quietly into any good night.  Israel's existence and the constant struggle against its neighbors; it's willingness to fight first, if necessary, is all a testament to that.

Accordingly, there are certain things Jews simply don't do - or shouldn't.  This business of sex offender registration is a modern day tattoo, like those put on the forearms of Jews in camps.  It's an electronic tattoo so it seems less personal, but it's a tattoo all the same.  Jews don't help in registering people.  I've seen my grandmother's papers with a Star of David and the word, Juif (Jew) on them.  Once you've seen that you don't forget and could never partake in doing it to someone else. 

Before you get all outraged about me comparing the victims of the Final Solution with child molesters, let me finish.  If this business of registering sex offenders were a perfect system I would still oppose it.  I just do not accept in this country the idea of registering our citizens.  It is dangerous and "unamerican."  But if it were a perfect system where only the worst of the worst were registered; people who were completely incorrigible, where every protection was afforded them before they were registered to make sure no mistakes were made, then maybe it could be justified.  But the system we have in place is the exact opposite; Judge Cohen is all the proof you need to see that. 

Under the law, Sex Offender Registration hearings do not guard defendants rights stringently, to make sure they are protected in order to ensure a scrupulously fair and just outcome before their greatest liberties are removed.  It is the exact opposite.  In those hearings every piece of evidence is admissible: hearsay, feelings, uncorroborated statements and written evidence.  Practically anything you can think of to say or submit is admissible.  In death penalty cases every possible protection is afforded to make sure this grave sentence is being handed down correctly.  With Sex Offender hearings no protections are afforded before we label and tattoo for life.  

For a Jew to make it his living to register people is a travesty.  I think if Judge Cohen's mother - who I am sure is proud of her son - knew the full and reckless extent of what it is that he does, she'd be ashamed.  Jews in the ghettos used to rationalize their participation in Jewish Councils by saying, "Someone has to do it."  But most Jews said, "Maybe so, but not me."  For a Jew to do this as a living - to earn income from electronically tattooing people, it is a shandeh un a charpeh - A shame and a disgrace.  Judge Cohen tried to make me into the worst of the worst - I reject the label totally. 

When asked to do this job - and for all I know he volunterred, believing it would advance his career - what Judge Jeffrey Cohen should have said was, "Maybe somebody has to do this, but not me."  That he does this job willingly, and so recklessly, makes him judicially and as a Jew, the worst of the worst.

On My Mind

I Don't Get it

I like to think I am a fairly intelligent person.  No genius, but I try and stay informed.  I read 2-3 newspapers each day.  Each week I read Newsweek, Time and The Economist.  In addition, I listen to hours of NPR every day.  Now I mention this as background to make the point that our President has been on a tear lately, appearing everywhere.  I would not be surprised at this point if we turn on the TV and there he is turning letters while explaining to Pat and Vanna what his thinking is on climate change in Copenhagen.

And yet for all these appearances, I never come away having learned anything.  I feel so stupid that I am never any more enlightened after he's finished.  At first, I blamed myself.  But it's not me.   He's a smart guy and should be an excellent communicator, but he's not.  He's charming, funny and seemingly sincere. Yet I don't understand the first thing about health care.  Sixty percent of Americans don't understand what's in any of the proposals.  I don't blame them, I don't either.  More frightening is that our representatives don't and have no plans to learn before they vote.  Health care, climate change, Afghanistan, the economy, Iraq, I haven't the faintest idea where he stands or where he's concretely going on these issues.  But he's out there all the time talking about them.

I think the White House thinks it's trite but what I'd really like to see is an Oval Office address on health care with charts and graphs.  People mock Reagan as simplistic but the tax cuts sold because the people watched him, understood what he was saying and what he wanted.  They then phoned Congress in droves.  The problem with Obama is that he can't make his case.  There is all this cheering today in Democratic circles because 40% of Americans now support health care reform.  That number is only great if you ignore the fact that we are weeks away from this vote and yet not even a plurality - 40% oppose it - supports even the notion behind the legislation.

Yes, we all agree their needs to be a fix to the rising costs and the lack of care for the uninsured.  But is his proposal - whatever that may be - going to result in a better system overall then the one it's replacing?  That is the question that millions of Americans can't answer because he can't give them the comfort level and understanding to answer in the affirmative.  And the fact that they don't understand what's happening, while at the same time the process is speeding forward, scares the hell out of them.  There's such a thing in business as 'buy-in.'  Getting stakeholders, whomever they may be, to understand and buy-in to what you're proposing.  Without that you can't move forward.  But Congress clearly does not care that the vast majority of Americans have no idea what it is they're doing on health care.  That, I believe, is where the anger comes from.  Are the radio yahoo nutjobs exploiting that anger to turn the argument into socialized medicine?  Yes, they are.  The White House doesn't get that. 

Maybe there's a growing arrogance at play here.  Obama thinks a speech before Congress will make the poll numbers turn around, just like a few hours in Copenhagen will bring Chicago the Olympics.  Both calculations turned out to be gravely mistaken.  I don't know how to make him turn this around.  Clearly a Nobel Prize is not going to be the answer.  All I know is that if I haven't the faintest idea what's going on then I can guarantee you that 97% of Americans don't either.  That is not the right atmosphere to remake 1/5 of our economy in a few months.  Nor is it democratic.

Wrong Lessons Learned & The Keystone Cops

Usually when a scandal erupts involving law enforcement the analysis on how to fix the problem is invariably wrong.  Two recent examples - one local and one national.  The national one involves this man in California who kidnapped this then young girl ten years ago.  He kept her imprisoned, raped her and sired two children by her.  Now all you're hearing as a result of this matter is tougher restrictions on sex offenders.  The problem of course is that all of this was eminently preventable had the system then and now done its job properly.  He was sentenced to serve 50 years for a previous sex crime and got out in 11.  Why?  When he left prison the parole board gave him a letter of commendation.  Huh?  He was visited regularly by the local police, who never bothered to check the outlying buildings on his property.  His probation officer described him as a model probationer.  Now be clear on this, he had this young kidnapped girl - and eventually two children by her - on his property and no one discovered them.  They were not - like the Austrian case - locked in a cellar for 20 years.  And no one thought this odd. 

One of the main lessons to be learned from this, which no one has yet mentioned, is how much of a mockery this case makes of the whole burgeoning sex offender registry industry.  This man would clearly have been of the highest level.  Certain resources would be devoted to monitoring him as opposed to someone who was a much lower level offender.  But I can tell you from first hand experience that the drive to classify everyone convicted of any 'sex crime' no matter how non-violent or minor at the highest level, draws resources away from someone like this California guy who might have needed them.

It is the burden of local police to live with the classifications made by zealous prosecutors and cowardly judges.  Label everyone the highest level, looks good at election time.  But it's the local cops who have to deal day-in and day-out with the ramifications of that, not the judge or the prosecutors.  If cops were smart they would be as outraged as I am by this 'level inflation.'  The classifications are meaningless if everyone, regardless of severity of crime, is considered the same.  The lessons from this California case is that the system needs reform and people need to do their jobs.  It is not an expansion of the sex offender registry industry in all its manifestations.

The local example of law enforcement incompetence is right here in New York City.  Once again the public and newspapers are taking away the wrong lessons.  The story is this.  It turns out, astonishingly, that numerous employees of the NYC Buildings Department (DOB) were active members of organized crime.  They worked in the Department for years while maintaining their links to their crime family.  All of this went undetected.  Now it would be one thing if all these men joined the DOB and then went into a life of crime.  But no, they entered City service as active mafia members.  Some newspapers are blaming Mayor-for-Life Mike (I'll explain in a minute why I don't really blame him).  I have seen no account that pins the blame squarely where it ought to lie.  And that is with the Keystone Cops at the NYC Department of Investigation (DOI). 

You may not know this, but every single City employee is fingerprinted and a background check is performed through the FBI database before you can be considered a full-time employee.  It has been that way for at least 25 years. All of those checks are handled by DOI.  How is it even conceivable that all these members of organized crime went undetected?  Further, how is it that there has been no assigning of blame or call for reform at DOI.  The only comment has been that DOI will now expand its use of federal databases. 

After I left HDC, the City forced HDC to sign an agreement with DOI allowing them to check their employees as well as review annually low income tenants living in HDC subsidized projects.  DOI has and does bill HDC millions for their staff assigned to the corporation as well as the work performed.  I can tell you with some knowledge what an extraordinary waste of money this is from HDC's perspective.  From DOI's it is a nice income stream since they rip off the corporation outrageously.  But forget all that for a minute.  In the 6 years that DOI has been doing this their big accomplishment was discovering that a cop lied about her income to receive Section 8 housing and that the wife of a band member from the Monkees had been falsely claiming residency to stay in subsidized housing.  Those two things cost HDC millions in payments to DOI.  Millions that could have gone towards housing.  Does anyone besides DOI think this has been a good financial bargain for HDC, the City or those needing affordable housing?  I can assure you it is not. 

And of the mob infiltration of DOB?  Well, the larger point I am making - having worked in and around government for decades - is this: when you try and do everything well, you're usually going to do nothing well.  DOI used to have a limited function.  It checked the background of city employees, investigated incidences of wrongdoing in city agencies and ran the Vendex system to monitor contracts and contractors who do business with the City.  It also oversaw the City Marshalls.  Now it has its hands in everything.  It has completely run amok.  So much so that at the end of the day it's primary mission, verifying that the City is not employing gangsters, never gets done.  The culprit is not DOB, they relied on DOI.  But you will never see DOI being pilloried either in the press or at City Hall.  It is an agency completely out of control that has no sense of its core missions.  They constantly want to glom onto every state and federal investigation.  They are known by everyone as a joke for their investigative abilities.  Not to mention their total lack of professionalism.  If there's a leak in an investigation run jointly by DOI and the Feds or the State, everyone knows it came from DOI.

As to why I don't blame Mayor-for-Life Mike, you can't blame him.  Even though he sold himself as a manager par excellence he is probably the worst manager we have had since Jimmy Walker.  I always want to qualify sentences like that by saying, "except of course for David Dinkins," but in this case I can't.  The reason Bloomberg is so much worse than Dinkins as a manager is that Dinkins had Norman Steisel.  Dinkins' Harlem gang knew he was inept.  They forced him to bring on a deputy mayor who would run the city, which Steisel did.  It was Dinkins' policies that made him such a disaster. That coupled with his total hands-off approach to the job. 

Bloomberg believes that commissioners should be left alone to do their jobs not encumbered by strong deputy mayors.  And so you have agencies that have become completely unaccountable.  No one oversees them so no one at City Hall knows whats going on or seems much to care.  And this is his preferred method of managing the city.  The exception of course was Dan Doctoroff, but he didn't oversee line agencies.  It is amazing to me that no newspaper has called-out DOI for their massive bungling of this.  As an agency it remains immune from criticism, for which we all suffer in a hundred different ways.

Jerry Shargel to the Rescue

I usually don't comment on celebrity news stories.  But I will on this one.  Is Robert Halderman guilty of blackmailing Dave Letterman?  I don't know.  He is presumed innocent before the jury that will hear his case. And that is as it should be.  But I do know two things.  First, he and I were both represented by Gerald Shargel.  Jerry was my lawyer for 3 1/2 years.  Jerry has a pattern.  He takes high profile cases with big fees.  Mostly he has a bad track record of winning acquittals for his clients.  The press focuses on Gotti and the gangsta rap producers so the impression is that he is very successful.  The hallmark of a Shargel case is that the press will be all about him and not his client.  Sure enough, as I expected, the day after Mr. Halderman was arraigned there was a profile story on Jerry.  He gets these case, he bombasts, gets profiled and his clients point of view is rarely expressed.  Jerry has used this refrain "there's much you don't' know," as entree to the morning talk shows to promote himself in this case.  This is all a tactic to intimidate Dave Letterman, but it won't work.  Jerry is hoping to frighten off Letterman by the prospect of the grilling of a lifetime in the witness box.  It won't happen.

The second thing I know is of the public's unfettered affection for David Letterman.  It used to be, when I was growing up, that Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.  A good case can be made today that that person is David Letterman.  No jury is going to accept the mud thrown at Dave.  Further, the Manhattan DA's Office under Morgenthau doesn't prosecute outright bad cases.  They are not the US Attorney's Office.  They are not contriving evidence to get Mr. Halderman for no reason.  Do I believe there's more we don't know about David Letterman's sex life?  Probably.  Do I believe it will have any material bearing on whether this guy extorted him for $2M?  Not a bit. 

Letterman is a smart guy.  He is, in a very timely fashion, getting out all the sordid stuff about himself.  By the time Jerry gets him on the stand there will be nothing there.  Do I think Jerry Shargel knows some bombshell secret?  Some Perry Mason moment waiting to be sprung at trial?  Nope.  This is classic Shargel.  It will ensure that the next potential defendant thinks of him first when needing a criminal defense lawyer.  It will do nothing to help the defendant's case or his chances of retaining his freedom.

Polls show that 30% of Letterman's audience would abandon him because of the scandal.  Don't believe it for a second.  Dave is beloved in a way that Leno can only dream of.  He is cranky, obstinate and opinionated.  But he is always a straight shooter and a seemingly very decent guy.  It is that reputation, built up over thirty years, that will see him through this and any mud that Jerry Shargel tries to throw will rebound causing him to look like Crispin Glover.

Hate Crimes Legislation - Always Wrong

I am opposed to hate crime legislation regardless of which group is receiving the protection.  Murder me or beat me up and all the law should care about is the act.  Motive only plays a role in determining your level of guilt and occasionally severity of punishment.  I don't have a lot of issue with a judge sentencing someone on the upper end of a range because the defendant killed X because he hates blacks or Jews or Mormons.  But a separate crime with more severe penalties?  It's really outrageous.  I am a gay man.  Love me or hate me because of that fact.  I am indifferent.  Crack my head open because of that fact and all I care about is that you are caught and sentenced for busting my skull.  I don't want you penalized because you're a homophobe - that's between you and your god.  Is it unfair that gays do not have federal protection while a whole host of other minorities do?  Sure.  But I don't want to compound the original mistake of hate crimes legislation by adding my group or anyone elses.  Furthermore, as you all know I am huge proponent of the 10th Amendment.  These federal hate crimes statues are just an excuse for the federal government to intrude in state crimes when it doesn't like the result.

I am covered by this statute at the moment because I am Jewish.  I reject that protection.  No Presbyterian's or Baptist's murder is less serious than mine because he believes in Jesus Christ and I do not.  If I am attacked by a white Evangelical do we get to choose whether he accosted me because I am gay or because I'm a Jew?  Does it matter to me, all bruised and beaten up, which part of me he dislikes more?  No, it does not.  If Pres. Obama wants to do something productive he should focus on expanding rights, not reducing them to a few protected classes.   Rather than continuing to vaguely promise to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, If he were a man of his word, he would just do it.  That would be a worthy accomplishment

This added hate crimes protection for gays and lesbians will pass Congress and be signed into law.  It is unfortunate that so many gay men and women can't understand that this is one club we should not be standing in line to get into.

Abasing the Judiciary - Let's All Go to the Lobby

As you know I am currently undergoing sex offender registration in Westchester County and have been for the last 16 months.  The judge overseeing my case is the Hon. Jeffrey Cohen, judge of the county court.  Judge Cohen was selected - as I told you he would be many months ago - three weeks ago by the county Democratic Party to run for State Supreme Court.  I've listed Judge Cohen's numerous deficiencies in the past and will again before election day.  Westchester County is comprised mostly of suburbs.  As such, like much of America,  campaigns are waged by lawn signs sprouting up everywhere.  They're an eyesore but there's something very democratic about the whole thing.  Being raised in the city we never saw many lawn signs.  It was all palm cards and posters in store windows.  And even that isn't done much anymore.

But again it's grass roots and always gave me a good feeling.  But we live in an electronic age.  One in which even are most revered and cherished institutions and offices have been made low.  Clinton on Arsenio, McCain on Twitter and everyone on The Daily Show & SNL.  New York is held out as a very progressive state because we no longer elect the judges to our highest court.  We do, however, for most other judicial positions.   But judges are still expected to display some decorum in how they wage their campaigns.  This is not Texas after all.

Now imagine my shock when reviewing Judge Cohen's campaign expenditures (available on- line) the other day to discover that he paid almost $6,000 to Val Morgan/Screenvision.  Do you know what that company does?  They place ads in movie theaters prior to the  film starting.  You know, usually it's Coke or Mountain Dew.  Sometimes it's for a tanning salon or the local Italian restaurant.  Occasionally it's for a Tony Hawk X-Box game.  But State Supreme Court is not some county judge hearing speeding tickets and variance requests.  It's a serious office that requires some gravitas.  It doesn't always happen, as I have written.   We expect better of candidates for the office than selling themselves like so much popcorn, nachos or pretzel bites.  I know the data doesn't concur, but I tend to be totally turned off by products that advertise in movie theaters.  I think it's a horrible trend and I try to punish advertisers by not buying their products.  I hope and believe the citizens of Westchester County will feel the same with anyone wasting their time and delaying their show. 

Every day this election season candidates routinely appear at my Metro North station to shake hands and hand out palm cards to commuters.  Recently I've seen a County Executive, District Attorney candidate and a few Supreme Court candidates. That is the proper and respectful way to run for that office.  I have not seen a lawn sign for Jeffery Cohen anywhere, although his opponents have them everywhere.  Perhaps movie theatre ads will be his sole communication with the voters.  Or maybe he views everyone through the prism of seeing us all only as potential perps, to be held at arms length.  In this case, however, they're called voters.  In short, catering to an oversized ego by displaying yourself fifty feet across a movie screen, while hiding from the voters, does nothing but abase an otherwise honorable position.

Copped a Plea - Follow Up

I have received a number of e-mails today in response to my post regarding Ray Harding's guilty plea.  To a one they have focused on my contention that I am not the motive for whatever may have transpired as alleged by the Attorney General.  I think I need to be clearer about this because there is an important piece I have as yet not mentioned and might help you understand why I truly believe what has been alleged regarding payments to my lawyers is untrue.

Gerald Shargel was my attorney is this whole criminal matter with the exception of the first eight weeks in 2002.  Shargel and I arrived eventually at a fixed fee retainer agreement that provided he would represent me in this matter for a fixed fee.  That meant whether the case was plead or went to trial.  Whether it lasted two more months from when we signed it or two more years.  I ended up personally paying Shargel and his associates nearly $600,000 for this case.  Most of that came from the sale of my home which was  sold specifically in order to pay my lawyers. Furthermore, as I have said many times on here, the timeline of my case and Alan Hevesi's term in office don't jibe.  Ray is accused of accepting these payments long after I was already in prison.  The case was over.  Shargel stopped returning my phone calls and responding to my letters.

Now here's the point.  It is a very, very serious thing for an attorney to sign a fixed rate retainer agreement and then solicit funds without the knowledge and consent of his client.  It is an extremely serious breach of attorney ethics that can get you disbarred.  In fact, it's criminal.

What has been missing in all the coverage of this is that when the Attorney General alleges that Ray Harding did whatever he did motivated solely by the need to pay my lawyers he is alleging criminal activity by Gerald Shargel.  For the record, I do not believe Ray paid Shargel or that Jerry Shargel solicited or accepted funds behind my back.  I do not believe it.  But Andrew Cuomo keeps saying it and the New York Times prints it repeatedly; most recently above the fold, on the front page yesterday.

I used to have a boss who would frequently say, "The laziest people in the world are reporters."  Ironically, he was a former reporter himself.  It has not been my personal experience that his belief is true.  I have found reporters to be needy - especially during my tenure at EDC having to explain complex financing deals - but generally not lazy.   Lately though, the New York Times is making me reconsider.

The galling thing in all this is not the the NYT owes me the courtesy of a phone call to verify the AG's claim and never places said call.  No, because I am felonious scum different rules apply and the NYT doesn't check facts with felonious scum.  The galling thing is that when they keep printing the AG's assertion they are unknowingly accusing someone of a crime.  A crime that can get them disbarred.

What I do not get is why the New York Times is so lacking in inquisitiveness as to ask the AG to substantiate this claim.  Since Cuomo keeps saying this I am assuming he must have canceled checks or wire transfer confirmations into a Shargel account from Ray.  The money certainly never came to or through me.  Isn't the fact that the AG is alleging this serious charge at Gerald Shargel worthy of checking up on?  Is Danny Hakim so busy that he can't ask the AG's press office for the evidence?  Is Danny Hakim so clueless that he can't see that if this were true it might be another story or a good paragraph in the one he was writing?  I guess so.

Gerald Shargel is everywhere on TV these days promoting himself under the guise of advocating for his client, Robert Halderman (the alleged Letterman blackmailer).  Am I wrong or wouldn't the serious accusation made against very high profile Gerald Shargel by Andrew Cuomo be newsworthy? 

I have a pretty good idea I know where that $800,000 went and I do not believe it went to Gerald Shargel.  But on the off chance I am wrong I would sure like to know because I would immediately file charges with the NYS Bar Association and the Manhattan D.A. against Mr. Shargel.  All I can say is that if Ray Harding is using me falsely as an excuse for whatever he did, it's contemptable.  If he's not, then Gerald Shargel's conduct needs to be brought to light so his current and future clients can be made aware to beware.

Copped A Plea

One of the great brass rings in politics is getting your name mentioned favorably in a page one article above the fold in The New York Times.  My father, Ray Harding was no exception.  Happiest were the days he could go down the night before the story appeared to get the paper from the Times building.  Well today he got the biggest story ever about himself, above the fold.  From my point of view it's a sad and shameful day.  But not for the reasons you might think.

In Agatha Christie's wonderful work, Witness For the Prosecution, Sir Wilfred, a criminal defense attorney, says to his client who will soon be indicted for murder, "There is no shame to sitting in the dock.  Kings, prime ministers, even lawyers have stood in the dock."  When my father was first charged in this criminal complaint I made it very clear that I thought the charges were baseless. I was happy to say that I believed him innocent and that he should fight for his name.   It was the criminalization of routine political life.  Change the law, fine.  But do not decide post facto that we don't like how politics is conducted in this state.  I've said before if rewarding political favors by officeholders is now a crime, then every Surrogate Judge in the state - and especially in Manhattan - is guilty of far more serious criminal activity than has been alleged and plead to here.  Every conservatorship or guardian ad litem awarded to friends and political backers is now criminal.

But now he has copped a plea.  OK, that's fine.  We do what we need to do to put things right and move on.  I have no problem with that.  I copped a plea, but for different reasons and damaging only myself in the process.  I deeply regret that I plead to the charges against me but, as I will explain another time, I had no choice.  My father on the other hand did have a choice.  He could have chosen to fight the charges or, if the prosecutors agreed, plead to something lesser to expedite this and save the need for a trial.  There would  have been a felony conviction, probably prison time and a loss of his ability to practice law. But he would have only hurt himself, no one else.   Now faced with similar circumstances what would I do?  In fact, what did I do when I was faced with exactly the same situation?

In 2002 and 2003 the US Attorney's Office approached my lawyers several times seeking my cooperation in what they hoped would be a far ranging inquiry into the Giuliani Administration.  You see its completely misunderstood by the public and most of the press that Rudy Giuliani is not liked by his former colleagues.  In fact, they hate him.  I was shocked to come to that realization.  They desperately wanted an indictment of high Giuliani officials, and I don't mean me.  I can say with 100% certainty that had I agreed to cooperate and given them nothing more than what I have written in these posts over the past months, Tony Carbonetti would have been indicted and in all likelihood convicted by the Federal Government.  There is simply no question about it.  Further, on the Bear Stearns deal alone, Randy Levine would have undergone a major investigation.  I knew all this then and I know it now.  A deal to cooperate would have helped my situation immeasurably.  I doubt I would have avoided all prison time, but it sure would have reduced it significantly. 

When presented with these requests I said no.  I said it once, then twice, and on the third time I told Henry Mazurek, my attorney, to tell them to fuck off.  It would never even have dawned on me to "give up" Tony Carbonetti in order to save my hide.  Even if I had known of some extremely serious crime like he killed someone or ran a drug ring out of his apartment (neither is true) I would NEVER have told the US Attorney's Office.  It would have been unthinkable.  And that is especially true if I were involved in something fishy with him.  Throw him over to save myself on something we were both involved in?  I simply could not have done it then and I for sure absolutely could not do it now.  That doesn't make me a hero.  It just made me a good friend.

Now I get it's scary at the age of 74, almost 75, to think about prison and penury.  It was scary for me at the age of 40.  But you have two choices in life: fight for your rights and freedom or concede and accept your fate. There is no third way.  Hurting someone else where the only rationale for doing so is to lessen your pain is never acceptable.  Under any circumstances.  If Ray Harding and Hank Morris conspired to defraud or commit some crime and Ray Harding now feels that what he did was wrong, fine cop a plea, take your punishment.  But from everything I have read Hank Morris didn't mislead Ray; he didn't deceive him into doing something illegal that he thought was something else.  They are both savvy adult men who did whatever it is they did, legal or illegal, with full knowledge of their actions.  I see no 'out,' no escape clause from the two choices I have described above.  

Is Hank Morris's fear of prison any less real or distressing than is Ray Harding's?  When presented with a choice back in Nov. 2003 of letting me kill myself or working with my shrink to have me put under observation at a NY hospital, Ray Harding chose the third unthinkable option.  He, on his own accord, gladly sent me to prison.  More precisely, the hell that is the MCC in Lower Manhattan.  Now he is sending Hank Morris to years in prison.  It's an easy thing to do, send people to be incarcerated, when you've never experienced it firsthand.  Much harder - in fact unthinkable - when you've been there yourself.  Thanks to the deal he cut yesterday, only Hank Morris will have to know what it's like to lose his freedom.  Ray Harding saved himself from that nightmare at Hank Morris's expense.

You learn in prison that there is nothing, and I mean nothing, worse than ratting.  Rapist, child molester, Islamic terrorist, all pale as labels compared to being tagged a snitch.  Especially, boy I can't stress this enough, especially when you are doing it only for self gain.  I never held to the 100% absolutist view of this rule - I could see a few exceptions.  But the street view prevails in prison - nothing worse you can do than snitch.  So here we are.  Knowing what I know now - that Tony Carbonetti and other RWG administration friends would disown me after prison - would I have done anything differently?  As far as that goes, not a thing.  My disappointment in them is far, far outweighed by my hatred for the US Attorney's Office and the corrupt way it administers justice.  I wouldn't have dropped a dime then and I wouldn't do it now.

Making this worse for me is that the NYT insists on printing again this scurrilous statement that Ray's now admitted crimes were motivated by his need to pay my legal bills. I don't know how many different ways to say this but there isn't a single word of truth in it.  I believe Cuomo's office continues to say it because it provides a motive and I believe Ray Harding doesn't publicly deny it because it provides him with some excuse other than venality. It also perpetuates Ray's view of himself as the loving, long suffering father of me.  He never paid for my legal defense.  I don't know how many other ways to say it.  I said at the beginning that it is a sad and shameful day. It is indeed.  It's shameful what my father did and the sadness I feel is entirely for Hank Morris and his family. 

Remembering 9/11

God, I hate this day every year.

Early every Tuesday and Thursday morning, I would walk around the corner from my apartment to the Equinox gym to meet my trainer.  Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was no different.  Even early in the morning, it was very warm for September.  While on the elliptical machine I watched the morning news shows on the bank of televisions.   I was watching Good Day New York, the local Fox morning show.  Jim Ryan announced that something had struck the World Trade Center.  They quickly had a camera on the Tower.  It was believed to have been a small plane and they were guessing a pilot had gone off course.

I was interested but not fascinated and kept on peddling.  I finished my workout and headed home to shower and get dressed.  Rocky, my driver, was already in front of my house.  He waved me over and told me to call Luke.  From the car I called Luke and he told me not to come to work.  The way things looked it appeared that the building was going to evacuate at some point.  I went upstairs and told Rocky to come with me.  We watched TV.  Luke and I spoke several times about the situation at HDC and with the building.  110 William Street is just a few blocks from the WTC.  Not being a city agency, HDC was not governed by the City's residency requirements.  Many of our employees lived in New Jersey, Long Island and the northern suburbs.  On days I had closed the office early (e.g. Christmas Eve, New Years Eve, etc.) we had a system in place for letting the most distant commuters leave first.  I told Luke to start initiating that plan.  I had a feeling, knowing Rudy, that it was going to be difficult to get out of the city if this was to become as bad as it looked.  As the morning wore on I had a feeling Rudy might shut down Manhattan.  Luke set up a large screen TV in the boardroom for the employees to watch the news.  Luke and our General Counsel, David Boccio, took charge and were superb; calm, organized and reassuring.  I told Luke early on that if people couldn't get home to tell them they were all welcome to come to my house.  I would get air mattresses at the nearby Bed, Bath & Beyond if needed.

Months earlier we had developed and enacted a disaster recovery plan for HDC.  T.J. Mignone and Luke had been pushing this for some time.  Early in 2001 I accepted their proposal and HDC signed a contract with Sunguard, one of the largest disaster recovery companies in the country.  What that entailed was a mirror site at their offices across the river in NJ.  In addition, copies of our computer tapes - with all our financial, investment, mortgage and investment data - were picked up nightly from HDC and stored at their facility.  In the event we activated the service, HDC would have guaranteed office space, using our same equipment, as well as all of our records no more than 12 hours old.  HDC would be up and running within a few hours should we need the service in the event of a crisis. The deterrent to activating the site was that once you pulled the trigger it was very expensive.   

At first, the management at 110 insisted no one leave.  I told Luke to ignore them and start sending people home.  The management was scarred of a panic that would have everyone in the building racing for the exits.  Fair enough, but I wasn't buying into it.  As the Towers started coming down I asked Luke where he was going.  He told me he was headed to Chinatown to find Dennis, his boyfriend, who taught at an elementary school there.  I tried to talk him out of it, but he was resolute.  Rocky meanwhile was growing very alarmed about Sylvia.  Sylvia Santiago was an HDC Vice President and Rocky's girlfriend.  He had not heard from her in awhile and could not get her on his Nextel.  Finally, she bleeped to say that she was in trouble.

Sylvia had somehow sought refuge at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza near our offices.  But once she got into the building they wouldn't let her leave.  Moreover, security there was forcibly herding anyone left in the building into some basement bunker.  She was scarred.  Sylvia had a young son at school in the Bronx and she wanted to get back home as soon as possible.  I took the phone, told her to get the head of security and put him on the line.  With my most official and officious sounding voice I told the guard who I was.  I told him that Sylvia was a senior member of my staff and needed to be released immediately.  Further, I told him that his instructions were all wrong.  The directive was for people to leave their buildings and head east towards the river and the FDR Drive.  The air was better the further east you went and the FDR Drive was now closed to traffic and opened only for pedestrians to walk north.  The guard apologized and said he had only been following his orders.  He released Sylvia along with everyone else.  I told Sylvia to head to my house.

Rocky and I continued to watch the carnage and the misinformation.  The State Dept was hit, the Capitol was next.  My father called asking if I had heard from or about my brother.  My brother was a Deputy Mayor and had been with Rudy.  My father sounded very worried, unusual for him.  I told Ray I would get Carbonetti and have him track down Bob.   I could not raise Tony on my Nextel and my pages went unanswered.  All sorts of crazy thoughts and scenarios started popping in and out of my head.

My apartment's windows all looked out onto Third Ave.  It was like a scene from Dawn of the Dead.  All these weary, dusty people, in the street, walking north.  The buses were crammed and apparently had stopped charging fares.  At some point Sylvia arrived looking the worse for wear.  She had walked from the financial district to the E. 60's.  I found some of my thin clothes and gave them to her.  Her shoes were ruined.  My mother had left a pair of her sneakers at my apartment and I gave those to her as well.  After she showered and dressed we went out to lunch.  This is when it really started hitting me.  Even though everything was open, the wait times were hours because staff hadn't been able to come to work.  We went to Jackson Hole for burgers and Sylvia recounted her trek north.  When I got home Tony called and told me that he was fine.  He also asked that I call Ray and tell him that Bob was safe.  I will not recount here the harrowing tale that morning of Rudy, Tony, Bob, et al. because it is now part of history.

I told Rocky and Sylvia they were welcome to stay but Sylvia wanted to get to her son.  Rocky was a single father of two, but his mother had arranged to pick up his kids in Brooklyn.  I told Rocky to take the car and use whatever lights and sirens were necessary to get through the barricades now closing off Manhattan from the rest of the city and the outside world. 

I spent the rest of the day with Seabe.  Even a dog knew something wasn't right that day.  Eventually his dogwalker showed up.  I don't know how Ralph got into Manhattan from Brooklyn.  I went with them and we surveyed the neighborhood. 

That night it became clear that in this technologically dependent age, all that has to happen is for a substation to blow up and we we're all back to basics.  None of our beepers or cell phones worked.  Only our Blackberrys still functioned (much would be made of this fact later on and was a major reason why all members of congress were issued them shortly thereafter).  I spoke to Luke and told him to get his staff going on accounting for all our employees.  Also, I wanted instructions given for everyone to leave a contact number and to check in daily.  I had no idea what condition our office was in or if we were going back.

The prosecutor in my case made much of the fact that she possessed a sexual chat I had on the evening of Sept 11th.  I of course don't recall it, but I also don't doubt it.  Everyone in my neighborhood - and most of the city, in fact - were either getting drunk, smoking pot or taking tranquilizers that night.  I escaped by chatting.  It had been an unreal day and I am sure I just wanted to forget it.  Earlier that evening Seabe and I had gone for a walk.  Make-shift memorials started to go up on phone kiosks and just on the ground.  At first, my natural NY cynicism kicked in and I thought how hokey and Midwestern this was.  But as we walked, it all started to overwhelm me.  That night the odor began.  Starting that evening and every day thereafter for many weeks, the smell of the pit at ground zero wafted north.  You wouldn't smell anything in the morning hours but every afternoon the wind would shift and the odor came north.  It was a sensory reminder like no other.  Truly the smell of death, disaster, misery, suffering and loss.

The next morning I awoke as i would for many days thereafter.  Convinced this had all been a dream and that the Twin Towers were still there.  I would immediately put on the TV to see if this were real.  Like many, if not most New Yorkers, I didn't particularly care for the Twin Towers.  It wasn't very good architecture, had been roundly panned by critics for years, and as anyone who had gone there, was a pain in the ass to get around in.  But instantly after they were gone I think we all realized how much they had grown on us and how they had become a genuinely iconic part of NYC.  As much as the deaths, their disappearance was deeply upsetting to me in those early days.

As for the running of HDC, we had no office and there were bank codes that hadn't been taken when the office was evacuated.  HDC gets most of its income from fees charged to developers and its own investments.  Without the bank codes it was difficult to continue our overnight investments.  Moreover, Bank of New York, which cleared our transactions, mindblowingly had absolutely no disaster recovery plan in place and they were totally out of commission (after the crisis was over we reached agreement with Bank of New York to compensate us for the millions we lost - HDC was held financially harmless by their neglect).

We had to go back to the office to get those codes.  So on Thursday, September 13, 2001, I along with about 4 other members of my staff, made our way to the office.  Rocky, who had my car, picked me up at home.  Without my official car there was no way we were getting into that area, it was completely sealed off with armored personal carriers. 

It was as close to a nuclear winter as anyone will ever see without actual nuclear weapons being detonated.   Everything downtown was covered in soot and ash.  There was no movement on the street and everything was just frozen in time.  To say it was eerie would be a massive understatement.  Our office building had no electricity and no phone service.  One of the staff sat in a desk chair in the doorway guarding the building; I think he was packing heat.  Luke had called ahead and they knew we were coming.  They were not happy about it though. We had to climb up ten flights of stairs in the dark.

And climb we did.  We had flashlights and made our way up.  The offices were all locked magnetically with key cards and therefore all our doors were unlocked.  Entering the offices freaked me out.  Either intentionally or by happenstance all the windows had been closed in the office.  There had been reports on the news that many offices had been destroyed downtown not by the blast but by the soot and debris that had entered nearby offices through open windows.  I was very concerned what we would find.  HDC was pristine.  Not a spec of dirt or a file out of place.  I was relieved and shocked at how placid the interior of this building was compared to the lobby and the street outside.  We gathered what we needed and headed back down.  We had promised the management we would be no more than 10 minutes.  They explained to Luke that the building had not been structurally cleared for reoccupancy.  Now that we had what we needed we had to find some place to sit and sort out the documents.  We need a space.  I thought of maybe renting a hotel room but it seemed a waste for only 20 minutes.  I'm not sure why but the backroom of a favorite bar came to mind.  We all piled into my car and headed to McManus's on 7th Ave.  You've all heard stories of how people came together and gave of themselves during those days.  This is not one of them.  We got to McManus and I showed the bartender my badge and explained the situation.  I asked if we could use his backroom for twenty minutes.  The bar was nearly empty.  He said no.  Finally I said we'd order a lot of beer and food while we were there.  He relented.

So we ate and drank and sorted through the material that would keep us going.  Making the situation worse was that the person in charge of our overnight investments was on vacation in Florida and could not get home.  She did, however, manage the accounts and her staff from there.  I said goodbye to those who had come and told them I didn't know when we would be together next.

I had been thinking about the space problem.  Whether to activate the disaster recovery site in NJ at great expense or rent space.  We had no way of knowing how long this would last.  On Friday Luke called and said that the Commissioner of HPD, the ex-officio Chair of HDC, was having a meeting with her staff that weekend and we were invited.  Luke and I went to 100 Gold St. near our offices.  At the meeting Jerrilyn offered us the use of her conference room until we were up and running.  I accepted and had the executive staff of HDC meet there on Sunday.  We ended up using that space only until Wednesday.  We were informed that 110 William had power but no phones.  I had Luke & TJ work out a plan to utilize everyone's cell phone for office use.  On our last day at HPD, Jerrilyn took me aside and told me that many of the HPD employees were in bad shape and needed counseling.  Did I know of anyone who could do it.  More importantly, would HDC pay for it.  I said as a matter of fact one of the management consultants we used had a specialty in exactly this type of grief counseling.  And yes, I would pay for it.  HDC's grief counseling was done in-house and by our insurance company.

Leslie, the consultant, was retained and sent over to HPD.  It turned out to be a much bigger job than she or I expected and she asked for the OK to hire staff to help her.  I agreed.  This went on for weeks and the eventual bill came to over $100,000.  {The prosecutor and judge in my case chose to ignore this fact but there was as much official HDC nexus to HPD as there would be to IBM, Pfizer or any other entity.  Meaning there was none.  They chose to ignore that $100K expenditure because it would have embarrassed the City and Bloomberg who kept Jerrilyn on as HPD Commissioner.  It was as much of an unauthorized expenditure of HDC funds as anything else I was charged with.  You can say it was compassionate but it didn't legally excuse it if the prosecutor's absolute 'give no ground' standard of my other expenses was taken into consideration.  If you overlooked that cost as well as the thousands spent for the plaque outside HPD commemorating their efforts during 9/11 that we also payed for, not to mention the additional thousands to renovate the Commissioner's conference room, then you had no rational consistent basis for many of the things I was charged with.  It was wholly inconsistent.  HDC had absolutely no official or legal relationship to the City or it's housing agency, HPD.  As such, my having authorized those expenditures should have been equally criminal.  But it was covered up. Initially by the City's Department of Investigation, then by the US Attorney and finally Judge Kaplan who scoffed at my mention of it in my elocution at sentencing.  At some point in a criminal case facts have to matter and things have to be consistent if you're sending someone to prison.  That didn't occur in my case.  And I imagine in many others.}

A few days later, Tony asked me to meet him for a late dinner at an Italian restaurant near his house.  It was 11:30 and Rudy was on Saturday Night Live.  There was a TV above us in the restaurant and we watched.  Maybe you saw that show.  At the end of dinner Tony asked me if I wanted to go to ground zero.  I had been back in the area for a few days now but nowhere near the site itself.  You could not get close to it if you worked down there.  Rudy had issued new IDs out of the temporary Office of Emergency Management site at Pier 57.  As you know, OEM was located at 7 World Trade center and disappeared early on 9/11.  You needed these new IDs to get anywhere near the site.

I had thought about that question: did I want to go there, did I want to stare down into that pit?  I was of two minds.  Part of me wanted to see it as a matter of history.  But the other part thought it ghoulish and voyeuristic.  This wasn't a tourist attraction it was an open grave.  But I said yes.  We left the restaurant and headed downtown in Tony's City car, Eddie, his driver, behind the wheel.

We were stopped a number of times along the way to check IDs.  Tony and Eddie had theirs.  Tony being Chief of Staff and vouching for me got me through.  Once we got through the last checkpoint you were free to walk around anywhere.  Masks were required at all times.  It was as unreal as anything you could imagine.  I kept thinking if a Schwarzenegger movie about the end of the world was filmed this is what it would look like.  The Amex building at the Winter Garden had a huge chunk missing out of the building's corner like Godzilla had just bitten it off.  You could see right into the offices and computers were just hanging over the side.  The thing that disturbed me most was standing in the middle of this and having no ability to get my bearings.  I couldn't remember where things had been.  We forget that without landmarks on a terrain its all just empty ground.  And now the landmarks were gone and I felt like such an idiot that I couldn't remember where many of the buildings and streets had been in an area I had traversed regularly.

Then we walked up to the smoldering, smoking pit and I stared down.  I am not wordsmith enough to tell you how I felt looking down into that hole while all around me rescue teams were digging away. I bowed my head, said a prayer and walked away. 

The other major impression I came away from ground zero with was a new found awe and respect for Rudy.  There were times during those eight years when many of us - Giuliani acolytes - would think to ourselves or ponder to each other, what this city would be like had he not been mayor.  Here we were mere days after that catastrophic event and Rudy, Tony, Joe Lhota, Ritchie Schirer, Bernie Kerik and Tom Von Essen had created this mini city.  There were streets created through this mountain of debris, huge wash stations for all vehicles leaving the site, and the whole thing was totally organized and meticulously planned - just days after 9/11.  Can you imagine what Rudy and his team would have done with New Orleans after Katrina?  Can you contemplate what a disheveled, unplanned mess that site would have remained been for weeks, months and years had Mike Bllomberg been in office?  This was leadership writ large and Rudy's finest moment.

Tony had told me that he sat in on Rudy's meetings with elected officials days after the event.  He told me that he and Rudy were most impressed with Hillary.  They were most unimpressed and annoyed with Sen. Schumer.  Tony said that Hillary came without staff, listened intently, asked thoughtful questions and offered unqualified support.  Schumer on the other hand came with staff, spent all the briefing on the phone and immediately held press conferences at the conclusion of each briefing. 

I hate this anniversary more than I can explain.  For four of them I was in prison and grateful to be there.  I could avoid TV and newspapers; just stay in bed.  I don't know why it effects me so much.  It's not just the memory of all the death and smoke and funerals that I attended.  That of course is part of it.  It's also not the memory of Terry Hatton, Beth Petrone's husband and a New York City firefighter who died that day.  I think of Terry more than just on 9/11.  He was a great guy.  No, it's not all that.  I believe I feel terrible guilt for not having been there that day.  Not for a second do I believe my presence would have mattered.  Luke and David Boccio did a tremendous job and I wouldn't change a decsion they made.  I certainly do not miss not having had to walk miles and miles in wingtips from the office back to my home.   But in a leadership position showing up is 50% of the work.  I wasn't there and I should have been. Also, after the Tuesday I know my leadership did matter.  Getting HDC back up and running, holding the staff together, working to stabalize our finances and those of the projects we oversaw, it mattered that I was President.  I guess you could say I also miss making a difference.

J'ACCUSE - Part VII

During the summer and fall of 2002 the investigation went-on and the grand jury continued to do their work.  It was during the summer - and months after the search on my home - that Debbie revealed they had found one illegal image of child pornography.  She explained they were continuing to look.  {For the full story on that discovery see J'Accuse Part V}.  I was devastated.  I was sure there was nothing to find.  My depression was getting worse.  I was also gaining weight which always added to my depression.  I decided to start exercising and went for 5-7 mile walks around the Central Park Reservoir every morning with Seabright and a friend of mine.  It was a very hot summer and I started to sweat off a few pounds.  I had a wedding to go to in Los Angeles that October and I wanted to lose as much weight as possible before then.

After the search warrant was executed, before anything was found, Debbie insisted to Jerry that I agree not to have a computer in my home.  Jerry agreed.  I thought this was ridiculous.  I won't argue the merits of whether I should or shouldn't have had one.  I will say that it was another of a long list of 'gives' by Jerry to Debbie.  I was merely under investigation.  At that point they had absolutely no justification for making the request or getting anyone to enforce it.  What was her leverage?  That she was going to indict me sooner?  That's a meaningless threat and a good lawyer would have told her to fuck-off unless there we a reason to say yes beyond "goodwill."  But Jerry was completely bamboozled by Debbie.  He would go on and on about what a tough guy he was with prosecutors and judges and then in the end he was always the creampuff.  In the three years he was my attorney he fought Debbie on two or three things, succeeded in one,  and that was it.  And the one thing he succeeded on, while important to me at the time, was very minor in the case.  It was also the only time I saw Jerry truly stand up to Debbie and she backed down.  If only that had been his regular practice. 

As I have said, he would always rationalize her behavior.  This was long after his associate, Henry Mazurek, came to agree with me that Debbie's behavior was vindictive and totally out of the norm of his experience.  Henry confided to me that he saw that Jerry was simply blinded by his friendship with Debbie to see her true nature.  She was a vicious, deceitful person.  It spoke so little of Jerry that he would even be friends with the likes of her.  I could never reconcile that. 

In the fall, as my depression worsened, Mark Mills, the forensic psychiatrist in the case, prevailed upon me to seek out a therapist.  Mark had been kind enough to talk me through some bad days, but he wasn't a therapist - that's not what he did.  So I asked my walking partner if she was happy with her shrink and she told me he was very good.  She told me he was the Chief of Psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital.  That sounded impressive so I went to see him.  My first appointment with Dr. Allan Collins was on the one year anniversary of 9/11.  For reason I won't bore you with now, that day is always very difficult for me.   At first, I thought he could help me.  He was very understanding and told me flatly that whatever chats I had online about sexual subjects, even illegal ones, were not deviant and can in fact be healthy.  He did not believe the prosecutorial view that discussing something means you will act on it.  Quite to the contrary.  He believed those chats could be a useful outlet for some as sexually repressed as I was.  He charged $250 an hour and recommended I come 2-3 times a week. 

He quickly suggested that I go on medication for the depression.  I wasn't opposed, as I had been on various anti-depressants in the past.  I had one condition.  I would not take anything that had as a major known side effect of weight gain.  I had been fat, was fat, and knew that gaining weight would defeat the purpose of any pills to cheer me up. He said he would prescribe nothing that had that side effect, he told me there were options in selecting which meds to choose.

After trying a few different things, he ended up putting me on Lexapro, Desipramine and a third pill I cannot now recall, to be taken in combination.  They never really worked very well and the depression did not let-up substantially.  But I continued to take them.

During part of this period, Tom Robbins and the Village Voice continued to run the fabricated chats that Robbins and Fred Sawyers had created.  It was amazing to me that he could get away with this.  Real newspapers continued to pick-up his stories and run them.  I developed a new disrespect for the integrity of the New York media. 

In one piece he quoted a fired HDC employee regarding my use of my company car.  Robbins went to great pains to point out that this employee was fired by me for no apparent reason.  I came off looking like a capricious, heartless boss.  The truth was that this employee - a mail room worker who backed up my driver at night - had disappeared for three days from work.  He simply didn't show up with no phone call as to his whereabouts.  When he returned he gave the VP of Human Resources some excuse and he was warned.  Again he disappeared for days with no word.  His mother called to say that he was in jail again (we had no idea he had been previously) for having beaten up his sister.  When he returned he was dismissed.  All of that was left out of Robbins' article. The fired worker came off a saint in Robbins' hands. You think all I have just relayed might have cast some doubt on the employee's credibility?

For those of you who have read Tom Robbins, whether in the Voice or the Daily News, you know that this is his modus operandi.  Why he behaves this way is a mystery.  I have to assume it is because he is just a bitter person who thinks he should have done better with his life journalistcally than bounce back and forth between the Village Voice and the Daily News.  But with Robbins, the axe is always out and the ethics sit on a shelf.  Ironic since his bread and butter stories are based on the ethics of others.  Can there be a lower form of journalist than one who simply concocts his facts and quotes?

As I have said previously, Debbie Landis, the prosecutor, was convinced of two things in this case: that I had absconded with millions of dollars as yet undiscovered and that I had done much, much more than chat on line about kids.  Towards that end she turned the world upside down trying to find some "victim" who would come forward and point an accusatory finger at me.  Of course, nothing came of it.  But Jerry and I were tiring of this.  Jerry suggested and found a polygrapher whom he hoped would allay Debbie's baseless concerns.  Jerry hired a man out of Virginia who had the longest CV either of us had ever seen.  He was the former chief polygrapher for the US Army and the FBI.  Jerry asked me before he hired him and then again on the day of the test if I was sure I wanted to do this.  I did not particularly want to, only because I resented the need.  I was not obligated to prove I had not committed a crime.  She was required to demonstrate that I had.  Jerry had never seemed 100% convinced that my assertions were true.  He told me that if I had something to hide we might not want to do this even though were the test to come out badly he naturally wouldn't turn it over to Debbie (she had no idea we were doing this).  Jerry clearly had had clients lie to him before and he wasn't taking anyone's word as fact.  I told him for the 50th time, I had done nothing, and there's nothing to worry about.  It was after meeting the polygrapher that I saw in the modern era polygraphs are done on laptops, not those huge machines with bouncing needles and paper.

It's a myth that questions in a polygraph are usually sprung on a subject.  i have done some research into this since I took mine.  A bad reaction is heightened by the subject knowing a particularly troubling question is coming.  On TV shows the questions are sprung on the subject without any warning.  In real life an examiner will tell the subject what's coming, as it heightens the fear of that question you want to evade.  The examiner in my case told me broadly what he was going to ask.  He mentioned that he would ask me questions regarding sex with minors; the word he used was 'minors.'   I told him not to ask me that.  I told him it wasn't exculpatory enough.  In some states it is legal, with consent to have sex with 14 or 15 yos.  I said ask me if i have ever had any sexual contact or relations with anyone under the age of 18, as I had not - ever.  Because of my sexual repression I had done nothing until college and then only with men my age or older. 

When the test was done Jerry went to talk to the polygrapher and I waited.  He came back beaming.  I don't think i had ever seen him that happy.  He told me I passed with flying colors (In reality, the polygrapher explained to me, this expression has no meaning, what you hope to score ideally, which I did, was the lowest possible on a deceptiveness scale).  Jerry seemed relieved that what I had been telling him all along had been proved.  He would send the results to Debbie who could not challenge this polygraphers work, much as she would have liked to.  She did however back off on this part of the investigation.  None of that episode made me especially happy.  I resented that I had to take the test and then later on that it was and remains totally inadmissible.  Debbie would frequently make cryptic allusions in court to not knowing what I may have done in my past with children.  Since the polygraph wasn't admissible - however she knew and did not dispute the results - it was a cheap shot and another in a long series of disadvantages that defendants suffer under in Federal Court.

In Part VIII I am indicted and arrested.