City Hall - August 30, 2010

Reformers in Brooklyn and Queens try for state committee (Page 11), Velmanette Montgomery, below, defends against a rare primary challenge (Page 24)

Vol. 5, No. 2

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August 30, 2010

and George Gonzalez, above, explains how he will fix things at the BoE (Page 26).

a deeper look into the early jobs of the attorney general candidates

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The New Class War Is The Same As The Old Class War

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By Sen. Diane Savino

here is a class war brewing between the haves and the havenots. According to a recent column in the New York Times, the “haves” are public-sector employees who enjoy “cadillac pensions” and the “have-nots” are those in the private sector who don’t.

In recent months, right-wing think tanks and elected officials have been beating the drum that the decent wages and benefits that public employees enjoy are the cause of our economic woes.

News sources frequently cite accounts of those scamming the system by earning two pensions or skirting overtime rules.

The perception is that most public employees retire with $100,000 pensions, the truth is the average pension is 9 PM Pagewhen 1 $33,000 a year.

Earlier this year, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown railed against public workers’ “lavish pay and benefits,” even though, when education and experience are considered, they earn on average slightly less than their private counterparts. The GOP’s own political platform rejects any state bailout unless the “wages and pensions of public sector employees are brought into line.”

With a 10-percent unemployment rate and a desperate workforce who have seen dwindling wages and benefits, one would think that public anger would be directed at those that caused this mess to begin with.

But, in an expert sleight of hand, Wall Street executives are enjoying millions in bonuses, while we are being asked to direct our anger at the “greedy” sanitation workers and cops. Public employees have become a convenient scapegoat to those who would rather distract from the fact that corporations are enjoying record profits yet are not creating any new jobs.

Attacks on labor are nothing new, however: with anxiety about the recession, it is easier than ever to direct anger against those who have struggled to maintain some semblance of middle-class life—all at the “taxpayer’s expense.”

Americans are suffering “pension envy.”

This is not to dismiss the challenges that states face as they struggle to meet financial obligations in light of stark budget shortfalls. In New York, government pension contributions have sharply risen, and alarmists warn the system will soon go bankrupt unless we trim benefits.

The truth is, of course, New York’s pen-

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sion system is solvent and fully funded.

While it’s true that contributions have risen, it is because, for years, city and state governments relied on high-performing pension funds to pay for their share of contributions. In fact, in 2000, New York’s share dropped to zero. Public employees, however, continued to pay into the system.

The greed which led to the collapse of Wall Street also led to the diminution of those investment returns, thus forcing higher government funding. This is not

the fault of public employees.

The reality is, good pensions and retirement security are good for the economy. The vast majority of public-sector retirees remain in New York. They pay taxes, buy products and support local businesses.

The retirement systems of our state are huge investors in private companies.

Where would these private-sector jobs be without these investments?

Ultimately, however, this is not about pensions, it is about a concerted effort to pit working families against one another.

After all, when corporations are wringing as much productivity as possible from their workforce while slashing pay and benefits, public-sector workers with decent wages and retirement security are a glaring example of what is possible when workers organize.

There is indeed a war going on, but the real war is against the middle class.

Rather than envying public-sector benefits, we should be demanding the same for the entire workforce.

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Diane Savino, a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island, is chair of the Senate Civil Service Committee.

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Working Families Must Come First By sen. John sAmpson

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y mother was a UFT paraprofessional. My father is a retired union carpenter. Many of my Senate Democratic colleagues come from similar backgrounds, and know firsthand the hard work and sacrifice of working families.

Those families continue to face a stagnant job market, reduced employee benefits and a struggle to pay mounting bills because of years of failed BushPataki-Bruno economics.

Republicans controlled the State Senate for 44 years, and it’s going to take more than 20 months to climb out of the hole they created. We took up that challenge and are making dramatic progress correcting decades of dysfunction. We passed bills to create jobs, improve worker protections and secure fair health, pension and retirement benefits.

Nothing is more important for growing our economy than creating jobs. That’s why Senate Democrats made job creation and protection our top priority.

From Power for Jobs, to the Green Jobs program, to targeting stimulus dollars for new green construction and health industry jobs—we helped create, protect and save more than 400,000 jobs.

And in less than two years we’ve already stopped irresponsible giveaways of taxpayer dollars to businesses that took our money and gave nothing back.

We passed the Construction Industry Misclassification bill sponsored by Sen. George Onorato to eliminate the decadesold problem of worker misclassification, which cheats workers and robs the state of tax revenues.

We passed a package of bills to strengthen prevailing-wage requirements on public works projects so New Yorkers would receive the fair pay they deserve for a hard day’s labor. And after extending Unemployment Benefits last year, our next goal is to increase benefit payments so families can pay their bills.

We were among the first to challenge the governor’s misguided and illegal plan to furlough state workers. The court blocked the furloughs, citing our leadership.

Led by Sen. Martin Dilan, Senate Democrats urged the governor not to withhold critical construction funds from emergency appropriation bills. Our action helped secure sufficient capital spending for construction projects that support thousands of workers and their families.

We also passed early-retirement legislation to prevent teacher layoffs, and the historic Wage Theft Pevention Act, spon-

sored by Sen. Diane Savino, to enforce tough penalties against employers who don’t meet minimum wage requirements.

Senate Democrats propelled New York to become the first state in the nation to pass the landmark Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, also sponsored by Sen. Savino, guaranteeing domestic workers who care for our families are not denied basic protections.

Bottled up for years by Republicans, Farm Workers legislation was finally brought to the floor by Senate Democrats, giving farm workers the open and honest debate they deserved but for years were denied.

We stopped the wine-in-grocery-stores proposal and a new Soda Tax—both job killers that put an added burden on small businesses and union workers.

We blocked the health care Gross Receipts Tax because another harmful tax on union workers and hospitals is not what the doctor ordered when it comes to fixing our broken economy.

We fought, and we’re still fighting, to restore critical education funding to meet our constitutional and moral obligation to provide a quality education for all of New York’s children.

Through our relentless advocacy, New York will now be getting an additional $600 million in federal funding to

keep our educators working. That means keeping our teachers in their classrooms where they can continue to develop our next generation of thinkers, leaders and workers.

Republicans spent their 44 years in the majority putting working families at the end of their to-do list. For Democrats, working families come first. We will continue to make the tough choices and take the strong action these difficult times demand and working families deserve.

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John Sampson, a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn, is the New York State Senate Majority Conference Leader.

Labor Is Not A Special Interest, But A Movement Deserving Our Praise

By AssemBly speAker sheldon silver

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ach year, the State of New York sets aside a day to remember one of the more shocking workplace tragedies in our history, the 1911 factory fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which took the lives of some 146 garment workers—mostly women and children. It is a lasting reminder of the importance and the historical significance of the union movement here in our Empire State and throughout our nation.

It is hard to believe that in the year 2010, Labor is being characterized by some as a “special interest.” The suggestion that the interests of our working men and women—fair wages, safe working conditions, just treatment in the workplace, quality public education, adequate and affordable health care for all—runs contrary to the interests of New Yorkers as a whole, is as false as it is disingenuous.

As each of us wrestle with the challenges of day-to-day life, we take for granted the public- and private-union members whose hard and often risky work ensures our liberties and guarantees our quality of

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living. The teachers with whom we entrust the education and care of our precious children, the law enforcement officers who risk their lives to keep our communities peaceful and safe, the nurses and other health-care professionals who treat and care for the sick, the elderly and the disabled are, I believe, “special” people, but their interests in fairness, security and social justice are the fundamental tenets of our Democracy.

Ironically, the same greed that made the union movement necessary has caused a global recession that has forced governments and corporations to severely cut back on expenses. Inevitably, the cost of labor has been put on the chopping block, and tens of thousands of working men and women have been relegated to the unemployment rolls. At the same time, a small handful of the most affluent Americans have profited from this economic collapse. In fact, there were actually more millionaire New Yorkers in 2009 than there were in 2008; than there were in 2007. Union leaders have justifiably responded with outrage and are pushing relentlessly to protect the working families who are the backbone of our

American economy.

Here in New York, state government leaders were faced with a $9.2 billion budget gap; a massive financial challenge that forced us to make painful cuts in the programs and services that so many working families depend on. Many union leaders stood with the Assembly Majority and joined our fight to temper the cuts to our

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schools and to our health-care system, and to keep our public colleges, universities and community colleges—and their more desirable degree programs—affordable and attainable for working families. As the unions have throughout our nation’s history, they fight for all New Yorkers, not just for their union brothers and sisters.

As we approach another Labor Day, let us remember that there was a time, before the union movement, when child labor was exploited, when workers had no unemployment or disability insurance, when the quality of life for working families was under constant assault from poverty-level wages, dangerous working conditions and the outright hostility directed toward working men and women. Let us remember the sacrifices, the courage and the fortitude of the workers whose commitment lifted our nation from darkness, so that we might pull our state and our nation out of this recession and create a better, brighter future for the generations to come.

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Sheldon Silver, a Democrat representing Lower Manhattan, is the speaker of the New York State Assembly.

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unions Our Perspective The Battle for the Middle-Class is Being Fought in Williamson, New York

Unions: The “Great Recession” Beater

By CounCil MeMBer JaMes sanders

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he past two years have been among the most tumultuous in the economic history of our country. From Wall Street to Main Street, no one has escaped the devastating financial crisis rippling across our economic landscape. Not surprisingly, the “Great Recession” has hit the hardest on working men and women, who have once again been forced to accept longer hours, fewer benefits and lower wages.

For decades, as the power of unions declined, so have pay and benefits for workers. Citing the need to cut costs and reign in expenses, employers have demanded longer hours in return for lower wages for their employees, who dread seeing their job outsourced overseas. For these workers, economic downturns have the potential to be financially ruinous.

Forced to choose between a harder job and the unemployment line, most choose the former, even if their employer is mandating longer hours or unsafe work conditions. Those who accept lower wages face defaulting on their mortgage, and for those who have lost their jobs, bankruptcy looms on the horizon. Cleary we must do all we can to stabilize conditions for workers and avoid catastrophe for our nation.

History has provided us two paths that a society can take when facing economic calamity. On one path, falling sales and profits, plant closings, business failures, layoffs and the fear of unemployment can undermine labor’s bargaining power and ability to organize effectively. But a second path emerge from the Great Depression, when an enlightened government chose to attack the problems of poverty and unemployment head-on, reviving the spirit of unions. History is once again giving us our cue. We must draw from the example of the Great Depression, from which the U.S. built the largest middle class in the world.

America is the land of opportunity precisely because of the hard work of the men and women of our labor force. A strong labor movement is the cornerstone of a more just and progressive society. By offering workers a voice inside and outside of the workplace, labor unions offer benefits to members and non-members alike. Thanks to the bargaining power of unions, our society now champions the

By Stuart Appelbaum, President, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, RWDSU, UFCW

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ith Labor Day 2010 right around the corner, the most significant fight in our country at this time for the rights of working people is being waged right now in western New York.

eight-hour work day, 40-hour week, paid vacation time and secure health and educational benefits for workers. Non-union members have also benefited, as the average non-union worker in an industry with high union density was paid 7.5 percent more thanks to union activity, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Organized labor must regain its role as an effective check against any who would abuse workers. It is incumbent upon those of us in government to help labor address the many pressing issues it faces today. Government must ensure it is doing what it can to create an economic environment in which organized labor and business can thrive.

The working class is the engine of our economy. Its spending invigorates the American financial system and keeps our nation moving towards a healthy, robust economy. That is why we as a society should do all we can to support organized labor, and to ensure we are paying our workers a decent and fair wage; because these workers are a hedge against economic depression.

Now more than ever these tough times demand a strong and enlightened union movement that can navigate the swift tide of the economy and create a fairer, stronger environment for both labor and business. Enlightened unions make it easier for progressives in government to create “win-win” policies that benefit labor, business and the city. The American people, and their workers, deserve no less.

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James Sanders, a Democrat representing parts of Queens, is chair of the City Council Civil Service and Labor Committee.

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The workers at the Mott’s applesauce plant went on strike against their employer on May 23rd and have been on the picket lines ever since. Mott’s is a division of the Texas-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

What is particularly significant about this situation is that the employer, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, has imposed wage and benefit cuts — while stating clearly it has no financial need to do so. The company has never been more profitable — it made $555 million net profit last year.

Yet, it told the workers that they should think of themselves as a “commodity” like “soybeans and oil,” and that when when the supply goes up — there is high unemployment in Western New York — the price should come down.

The company cut wages by $1.50 an hour across the board, eliminated the pension, cut the health care benefit, altered work rules to lower pay rates, and slashed the 401K match. At the same time, the CEO has seen his own compensation increase by 113 percent to $6.5 million.

The workers remain incredibly strong — of the 305 workers in the unit, 295 remain on strike after 14 weeks. They understand that this has become something bigger than themselves — they are on the frontline in the fight against corporate greed. They are fighting to stay in the middle class. When they went on strike, they lost their wages and their health care. Seven families are dealing with cancer. And yet they remain committed to this fight.

This is symbolic of what is happening in our society generally, with record bonuses and profits for Wall Street and the banks (many of whom benefited from public funds) while workers continue to hurt and worry about their futures. These brave and heroic strikers are fighting not just for themselves, but for all working people.

As the workers in Williamson continue to walk the picket line, remember that their fight is really a fight about the future of the American middle class and the preservation of good jobs in New York State.

And as we celebrate Labor Day weekend, please take a moment to visit www.mottsworkers.org to learn how you can show your support to these heroes, the men and women on strike against Mott’s.

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Swimming In The High-Risk Pool, New York Argues For Coverage Of Non-Citizens Implementation of federal health care reforms could result in State Constitutional challenge

BY LAURA NAHMIAS

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ew York State has found a loophole in the federal health care reforms that it wants to use to cover a group that Washington specifically has not, of non-citizens since before the 1996 welfare reforms.

The same loophole, though, could also present a challenge to the state’s constitution, if the federal government decides to cover fewer people than the state currently requires, government watchdogs said.

At issue is whether a class of non-citizens known as PRUCOL (persons residing under color of law)—a designation that includes legally present, undocumented and in-between immigrants under federal laws, but recognized under state laws— are covered under the new guidelines for the state’s high-risk pool program, the temporary reform that provides coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, until insurance exchanges go into effect in 2014. The temporary program is set to go into effect this October.

These non-citizens can include people not currently covered by programs like Medicare, such as people waiting to re-

ceive immigration statuses from the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services. PRUCOL residents are already covered under New York State’s expansive health care laws. Immigration advocates say the challenge is to make sure the federal reforms do not shrink coverage for them.

When passing the reforms in the spring, Congress decided to cover all persons “lawfully present” in the United States.

But Washington has yet to issue a permanent ruling on who, exactly, falls under that umbrella.

“There’s sort of a question mark about what that means,” said Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society.

And that question mark could provide a golden opportunity for broadening federal benefits for non-citizens, said Sonal Ambegaokar, a health policy attorney at the National Immigration Law Center.

“There’s no set list for ‘lawfully present.’ We suggested, ‘Here are a few categories you may want to consider adding,’ as we have those immigrants already enrolled in state Medicaid,” Ambegaokar said.

New York State regularly creates new categories of immigration under PRU-

COL, leaving immigration advocates without a clear number of how many people would be eligible for high-risk pool coverage. There are close to a million lawfully residing non-citizens in New York, which does not include illegal immigrants but does include those applying for residency, Cubans and immigrants with sick children, said Jenny Rejeske, director of health advocacy for the New York Immigration Coalition.

If New York succeeds in its effort to have all its non-citizens covered under the federal reforms, this would represent a major expansion of federal benefits eligibility for New Yorkers, Rejeske said.

But the law is intended to be uniform, not vary state to state, said Ed Haislmaier, a research fellow for the Health Policy Center at the conservative Brookings Institute in Washington.

“The statute Congress wrote presumes a national uniformity,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to imply that states can have any discretion on that, and it introduces into federal law a concept that wasn’t there.”

New York is wise to push for clarification early before enrollees register for the program, Haislmaier said. Otherwise the state might have to kick people out of the program who are later deemed ineligible.

Despite Loss Of Energy Hub, State Consortium Vows To Continue To Pursue Innovation Philadelphia wins $122 million grant, citing ‘city within a city’ staging ground

BY JOHANNA BARR

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ew York may have won hundreds of millions of dollars in federal education grant money this summer, but when it came to energy innovation, the state short-circuited.

A group of more than 100 partners from across the state had collaborated on a federal application to house an energy innovation hub, which will focus on improving the energy efficiency of buildings. But in late August, the grant of $122 million was instead awarded to a team from the Pennsylvania State University in Philadelphia.

New York’s failure was not for lack of trying.

An unprecedented effort was launched to support New York’s bid for the EnergyEfficient Building Systems Design Hub. The main applicants were Syracuse University, the City University of New York, the State University of New York Research Foundation, and NYSTAR. They were supported by other universities, financial institutions, government part-

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ners, research-and-development labs, construction and architectural firms, media companies and non-profit organizations—a consortium that came to be known as the New York Energy Regional Innovation Cluster, or E-RIC. “We were very disappointed to learn that the federal agencies decided to award the E-RIC to the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster,” said Edward Bogucz, executive director of the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems.

Bogucz spearheaded the foundation of the consortium, and he insists that the group will remain active now that it has been formed.

“We’re not defeated,” he said. “Our exceptional partners from upstate and downstate remain committed to pursue collaborations to invent, demonstrate and deploy innovations to improve energy efficiency in buildings.”

Of the 12 applications that the Department of Energy received for the hub, several facets of New York’s proposal were unique enough to make it stand out, its

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backers said. Merrill Pond, VP of Research and Policy for the Partnership for New York City, cited the financial backing provided by Wall Street and the advertising support from New York’s media giants as key assets. Yet she believes the most striking feature of New York’s application was that it proposed to use New York City’s buildings to beta-test emerging technologies.

James T. Gallagher, senior VP for Energy Policy at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, agreed that the diversity of New York’s buildings would have served the hub’s purposes well.

“The EDC was very involved from the beginning. We supported the idea of taking research and technologies from New York’s universities and working to deploy them within the city,” Gallagher said. “We have such a mix of buildings here that there’s a spot for each type of technology.”

Much of the technology that was discussed involved improving the insulation of buildings, in order to decrease their heating and cooling costs. Plans were in place to retrofit New York’s older buildings, as well as to construct new build-

“That will be an enormous headache,” as well as a public relations problem, he said.

The biggest headache, though, could be yet to come.

Were the federal government to reject New York’s lawfully present definition, it could create a challenge to the New York State Constitution, due to a 2001 State Supreme Court ruling mandating coverage for all under the state’s equal-protections laws.

There would probably be multiple lawsuits related to the reforms, Haislmaier predicted, which he says would bring clarification to the law’s parameters that are not clearly spelled out.

The pools have come under heavy fire for their perceived faults, including vast underfunding—the state is expecting to be able to cover only about 15,000 people over three years with $297 million, irrespective of how many need the service or of issues of affordability.

“The states are kind of all over the place,” said Benjamin, the health initiatives expert at the Community Service Society. “That is the beauty and dysfunction of the new law—each state will be implementing it slightly differently from the state next to it.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

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ings in an energy-efficient manner.

Although the Department of Energy has yet to provide the New York team with feedback regarding its application, published reports have revealed details about Philadelphia’s proposal—and pointed to what may have perhaps given it the edge over New York’s. The sharpest difference between the two plans relates to their scales. While the New York team had hoped to use all of New York City as a laboratory to test and demonstrate innovations, the Philadelphia team plans to focus its efforts on a “city within a city,” comprised of more than 200 buildings located at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

While Gov. David Paterson, Sens.

Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and virtually all of New York’s Congressional delegation supported the application, Rep. Steve Israel was one of its main champions. Though he says he categorically believes that New York is uniquely qualified to host the hub, the process of compiling the NYE-RIC consortium was valuable in itself.

“I had the impression that nobody in New York was doing anything for clean energy. I soon realized I was wrong.

Everyone was doing something, but nobody knew what anyone else was doing—and that’s par for the course in New York,” he said. “But this process was a game-changer.” jbarr@cityhallnews.com

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The Pitched, Heated, Wild Battles For Unpaid, Obscure Positions

Even in races for state committee and district leader, intrigue, big fundraising, sex tapes

BY CHRIS BRAGG

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t a trendy bar in East Williamsburg, about 70 people gathered for a fundraiser in support of Esteban Duran, a community activist running an uphill campaign this year against Brooklyn Democratic leader Vito Lopez.

As Duran arrived, the crowd rose for a standing ovation. Duran put his fist in the air like a winning prize fighter—the young challenger who had somehow withstood an onslaught of petition challenges from Lopez’s lawyers and stayed on the ballot.

Then, Rep. Nydia Velázquez, in town from Washington, delivered a fiery speech about the importance of Duran’s race.

The whole spectacle—the big money, the big crowd, the big name—could almost obscure the fact that it is not Lopez’s county leadership spot, or even Assembly seat, that Duran is seeking.

Duran’s eyes are on the state committee: unpaid, non-governmental, and with few perks or powers.

Years ago, before politicians were allocated money for their own district offices, state committee members and district leaders were seen as more influential. Now, many see the positions as stepping stones for elected office: a place to start a political club, build a base and have a seat at the table when time comes for a county political organization to endorse you.

Nonetheless, in north Brooklyn and in pockets of Queens, small-scale proxy wars have broken over the stillunproven belief that winning district leader, state committee or county committee seats is the path to curbing the last excesses of machine politics.

In Brooklyn, for instance, the New Kings Democrats, a collection of Barack Obama volunteers that ran some 50 candidates for county committee spots in 2008, have upped that ante, this year running a handful of candidates for state committee spots against Lopez-backed candidates.

(In Brooklyn, state committee and district leader spots are a combined position.)

One of the candidates, Lincoln Restler,

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has already raised a whopping $49,000— more than many Assembly candidates— and has hired a full-time campaign manager and has a campaign office. Still, even if Restler and all his reformer compatriots win all the races they are contesting— a long-shot at best—there are still 42 total

district leader spots total, and they would be far from being able to knock off Lopez.

In the short term, according to the group’s founder, Matt Cowherd, the goal is simply to get some younger, active representation in the community, a greater level of internal dissent in the party. In the long term, the hope is to reform how the Kings County

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Democratic Party fundamentally operates—with or without Lopez.

“The ultimate goal is to force the leadership to pave the way towards small ‘d’ democracy and transparency,” he said. “If Vito J. Lopez decides to do that, we will accept that gleefully and thankfully.”

But serious hurdles remain. In 2008, when the so-called Rainbow Rebels flipped leadership of the Bronx Democratic Party by forming a new county committee, they were doing so in a party that had a natural internal divide between its Latino and black members. The revolution came from the top down and behind closed doors, with elected officials and district leaders flipping the coun-

ty committee votes.

In Brooklyn, the movement is from the ground up, with most elected officials

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unwilling to jump on board. Without their help, Lopez controls far more proxy votes than the number of county committee candidates the reform group can possibly run.

Incumbents can also grow entrenched.

Even though they do not get paid while in office, district leaders and state committee members can raise money and freely spend it. Some use the accounts to build a war chest with an eye on a future run. Others, like Steve Cohn, a nearly three-decade state committee member in Williamsburg who is retiring this year, dole out funds to numerous local Hasidic Jewish organizations and to political allies. Cohn has taken in nearly $250,000 in campaign donations since 2006, and spent over $288,000 since 2005, despite facing no opposition for his seat. Cohn’s son, Warren, is now running against Restler for the state committee seat.

Despite the long odds, Cowherd said he believes that if New Kings proves to be a viable turnout machine in its own right, undecided state committee members who are dissatisfied with Lopez will flip.

“There are a lot of fence-sitters who go along with things because it’s advantageous politically,” Cowherd said.

In southeast Queens, meanwhile, Farouk Samaroo is taking a more focused approach towards reforming the county Democratic Party’s operations. His idea is based on the results of a Citizens Union study from 2008 showing that over a third of all legislative seats in New York are filled by vacancy committee. He hopes to change the calculus of the vacancy committee in one small part of the borough.

He has personal experience with the issue. Last year, the young Afghan War vet and several other candidates were not given the chance to run for indicted Assembly Member Anthony Seminerio’s vacated Assembly seat. Instead, the Queens Democratic Committee forced a special election and chose Mike Miller as the Democratic nominee via vacancy committee. He won after two out of the three district leaders that showed up for the committee meeting voted for Miller.

“We have some of the most worthless members of the Assembly and State Senate in Queens,” Samaroo said. “That is a result of a very opaque, at best, selection system.”

Samaroo has now started the Southeast Queens Democratic Club in an effort to get independent-minded district leaders, county committee members and judicial >>continued on page 12

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Over the years, people living on the lower West Side of Manhattan >>continued from page 11 were served by an exceptional team of orthopaedic surgeons. Under delegates elected in the 38th Assembly disthe direction of Eli Bryk, M.D., this team attained a record of surgical trict. Over 90 people affiliated with SamaConvenient Downtown Location roo have made the ballot to run for these excellence and a large following from the community.

World Class Orthopaedics World Class Orthopaedics Convenient Downtown Location

spots in the Assembly district, he said.

Jeff Merritt, founder of the non-profit consulting firm Grassroots Initiative, has are pleased to inform you that many members of this team been advising insurgent candidates to run Over the years, people living on the lower West Side of Manhattan

We have decided to stay in the neighborhood and to continue serving were served by anpeople exceptional team orthopaedic Under Over the years, living on the of lower West Sidesurgeons. of Manhattan the people of Lower Manhattan from their new home at New servedofbyEli anBryk, exceptional of orthopaedic thewere direction M.D.,team this team attained asurgeons. record ofUnder surgicalYork Downtown Hospital. the direction Bryk, M.D., this teamthe attained a record of surgical excellence andofa Eli large following from community.

CITY HALL But the party favored another candidate, John Choe, and twisted Wu’s arm until he voted against himself. Choe got the party’s backing. (Both lost the primary.)

Wu remains a district leader and has the party’s support this year in his race for re-election. But Martha FloresVazquez, another district leader in the

Even though they do not get paid while in office, district excellence and a large following from the community. leaders and state committee We are pleased to inform that many team of Dr. you Andrew Sands,members Chief ofofthethis Division We decided are pleased to inform that many members of this team members can raise money and have to stay in the you neighborhood and to continue serving and Ankle and Surgery in theserving Department have decided to stay in Foot the neighborhood to continue the people of Lower Manhattan from their new home atspecializes New York in freely spend it. Some use the of Orthopaedic Surgery, the people of Lower Manhattan from their new home at New York accounts to build a war chest Downtown Hospital.

Downtown Hospital. orthopaedic trauma, and reconstructive with an eye on a future run. surgery of the foot and ankle, including Dr. AndrewSands, Sands,Chief Chief Division Dr. Andrew ofof thethe Division of of

sports arthroscopy and total Foot andmedicine, AnkleSurgery Surgery Department Foot and Ankle inin thethe Department this kind of campaign for years. The main ankle replacement.

Dr.specializes Sands in is in board of Orthopaedic Orthopaedic Surgery, specializes Surgery, benefit of a slew of people on a slate in orthopaedicbytrauma, orthopaedic trauma, andreconstructive reconstructive certified the and American Board one of area, he said, is that it creates buy-in for volunteers that can counter the offisurgery of foot surgery of the theSurgery footand andankle, ankle, Orthopaedic and isincluding aincluding member cial of Democratic clubs in a county party, sports medicine, arthroscopy and totaltotal sports medicine,Academy arthroscopy which have signature gatherers, doorthe American ofis and Orthopaedic ankle replacement.

Dr. Sands board ankle replacement. Dr. Sands is board knockers and block captains in place.

Surgeons. certified by the American Board of “And, if the folks get elected,” Merritt certified by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery and is a member of

added, “they now have their own ma-

Orthopaedic Surgery and is a member of chine.” the American Academy of Orthopaedic Dr. Sands isAcademy a nationally recognizedThough Samaroo the American of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Queens Democratic Surgeons. expert in the management of adult flatfoot

rails against the Party, executive director Michael Reich said the party’s Dr. Andrew Sands deformity of the arthritic Dr. Sands and is a treatment nationally recognized well-known cohesion is a result of years Dr. is a nationally recognized of building trust between leadership and expertSands in theankle. management flatfoot foot and Heofisadult also a leading Dr. Andrew Sands expert in the flatfoot district leaders. deformity andmanagement treatment of oftheadult arthritic consultant to Division I College athletic teams for sports injuries toStill, there are indications at times that Dr. Andrew Sands foot and ankle.

He is also deformity and treatment of atheleading arthritic internal dissent can be costly. Last year, the lower extremity. consultant to Division I College athletic teams He for sports injuries to foot and ankle. is also a leading when James Wu was running for the Counthe lower to extremity. consultant Division I College athletic teams for sports injuries to cil seat being vacated by John Liu, he was Newthe York Downtown tothe fortunate position of being a district lower extremity. Hospital is proud that Dr. Sands is helping in leader.

In other words, he was one of the New York Downtown Hospital is proud that Dr. Sands is helping to make our Hospital a center for orthopaedic excellence. four people who got to decide who the make our Hospital a center for orthopaedic excellence.

New York Downtown Hospital is proud that Dr. Sands is helping to Queens party would back to replace Liu.

room that day who chose to remain neutral, got a primary challenge this year from a Liu staffer, and was knocked off the ballot recently by Queens County lawyers.

Indeed, the battles for the unpaid spots can sometimes get ugly. In a Ft. Greene, Brooklyn race for state committee, for instance, Renee Collymore recently filed a police report against her opponent and requested an order of protection by charging stalking and harassment. Collymore has also accused her opponent of trying to spread information around the neighborhood about a sex tape she had shot with an ex-boyfriend.

All of this angst, for an unpaid spot, with few formal powers? Even for a true believer like Collymore, it all can be a little bit much.

“Politics such as this is not normal,” she said. cbragg@cityhallnews.com

C

Hospital aDr. center for at orthopaedic excellence.

Youour may contact Sands our of Orthopaedic You make may contact Dr. Sands ourDepartment Department of Orthopaedic Surgery: 312-5988 Surgery: (212)(212) 312-5988 You may contact Dr. Sands at our Department of Orthopaedic Surgery: (212) 312-5988

Outstanding Physicians.

Outstanding Physicians.

Exceptional Care.

Outstanding Physicians.

Exceptional Care.

Exceptional Care.

83 Gold Street, New York, NY 10038 Telephone: (212) 312-5000 www.downtownhospital.org

Gold Street, New York, NY 10038 8383 Gold Street, New York, NY 10038 Telephone: (212) 312-5000 Telephone: (212) 312-5000 www.downtownhospital.org www.downtownhospital.org

City Hall: Your stop for New York City political news. www.cityhallnews.com

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DSCC Spends On Consultants, WFP In the last month, Senate Democrats spent $227,000 on consultants, $69,000 on an additional contribution to the Working Families Party and $253,000 on behalf of a wide range of candidates—including nearly every incumbent facing a primary.

The money includes a total of $59,000 paid to G&L consulting, one of the two companies of consultant Melvin Lowe. That brings Lowe’s total to about $375,000 since he was brought on in the wake of last year’s Senate coup.

The Parkside Group also received an additional $58,000 according to the latest filing, bringing the total it has received so far in 2010 from the DSCC to $319,000.

Michael Tobman, a political consultant working with several candidates running primaries against incumbent Senate Democrats, took issue with the DSCC spending.

“As an informed outsider—or insider, depending on the day—it looks like folks who have known each other for too long making too much money together,” Tobman said. “Our financial successes should always take a back seat to winning. Anything beyond ‘everyone should make a living but nobody should get rich’ is bad for the client, especially when the money could be spent on competitive races that matter a lot.”

Como Likely To Lose Third-Party Line Over Flubbed Paperwork And BoE Politics Apparently, even a former commissioner of the Board of Elections and onetime hopeful for the executive director job can make mistakes on his elections paperwork.

That is what Anthony Como, the Republican running against State Sen. Joe Addabbo discovered some time late Aug. 24, hours after submitting 4,900 petition

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August 30, 2010

signatures to create a third party line for his candidacy.

The problem was that Como filed the petitions for the wrong election, submitting petitions for the “Tax Cuts Now!” line that were designated for the Sept. 14 primary, not the Nov. 2 general election, when he will face Addabbo. As a result, the Board has taken initial actions to invalidate Como’s signatures, according to Steve Richman, its general counsel. The 10-member Board as a whole will now get the case.

After realizing the error, Como’s campaign returned to the Board of Elections with photocopies of the petition sheets, with the Sept. 14 date crossed out and the Nov. 2 date written underneath, at 11 p.m. the same day, an hour before the deadline.

Campaign spokesman James McClelland argued that election law allows campaigns to take such curative actions to correct errors within three days of submitting signatures.

Dinallo Says Schneiderman Would Be Conflicted Out Of Investigating Senate All the Democratic attorney general candidates are talking about reforming Albany this year, but Eric Dinallo says that one of his opponents—Eric Schneiderman—would have his hands tied in trying to do much about it.

Schneiderman’s problem, Dinallo argued, is that he is part of the State Senate leadership, and so would be forced to step back from investigating the State Senate or its members.

“You can’t be a senior person in an organization and then be able to go back and investigate the same conditions you left behind. I think that’s a huge, at least appearance of, a conflict of interest, if not an outright conflict of interest,” Dinallo said.

Schneiderman’s campaign spokes-

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man, James Freedland, said there was no conflict. Freedland referenced a 1988 investigation mounted against then-State Sen. Israel Ruiz by Robert Abrams, who served in the State Senate until elected attorney general in 1978.

“Mr. Dinallo does not understand the law on which he is commenting,” Freedland said, in an e-mailed statement. “The notion that Eric would inherently have to recuse himself from investigating any senator is just wrong. Will Mr. Dinallo recuse himself from cases involving the insurance industry he once regulated, but now finances his campaign?”

Thousands Of Dollars And Required Paperwork Go Missing From Espada PAC Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada, Jr. failed to report both contributions and expenditures for a committee formed on his behalf last year by Steve Pigeon, his office’s general counsel.

On Aug. 5, 2009, Pigeon created the “Majority Leader’s Victory Fund,” and in a Buffalo News story two days later discussed the details of how the fund would help support Espada. But according to its filings, the Fund never seemed to quite get off the ground. The Majority Leader’s Victory Fund filed “no activity” statements in lieu of Jan. 15 and July 15 reports for 2010.

Yet there was activity, according to other campaign committees’ filings, which show cash coming in from Espada’s fund.

For instance, there was a donation from the RSA PAC, the political action committee for the pro-landlord Rent Stabilization Association, which gave the fund $5,000, RSA’s filings show. And on March 11, 2010, the Victory Fund gave $5,000 to expelled State Sen. Hiram Monserrate’s special-election campaign to win back his seat, according to Monserrate’s campaign filings.

Blair Horner, legislative director for NYPIRG, called for action by the Board of Elections.

“He’s the Senate majority leader, it’s not like he’s some first-time candidate,” Horner said.

Lobbyist-Blogger Compares Koo To Nazi-Collaborator For Flushing Commons Vote One guaranteed way to get the attention of an elected official is to accuse him of acting like a Nazi-sympathizing traitor.

Case in point: in early August, Richard Lipsky, a well-known lobbyist and blogger, called Council Member Peter Koo a traitor to small businesses for his support of the mammoth Flushing Commons development, which was approved by City Council on July 29 by a 44-2 vote. Lipsky has been hired by a broad coalition of homeowner and small business associations in Flushing to lobby against the development.

In a blog post for the Neighborhood Retail Alliance titled “Flushing as Poland: Party Like It’s 1939,” Lipsky sketched out his obscure analogy.

Calling Koo a “Quisling leader” guilty of “breathtaking dishonesty,” Lipsky likened a dinner between Koo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a Korean restaurant to the “Molotov-Ribbentrop” deal between Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up Poland. The development is part of Bloomberg’s broad development goals for the city.

“Quisling” refers to the Norwegian Nazi collaborationist installed by the party to lead his country during occupation. He was tried and executed as a traitor after the war.

Koo was not pleased with the comparison.

“I was shocked and disappointed that Richard Lipsky would utilize such insidious and hateful statements,” Koo said.

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A Deeper Look Into The Early Jobs Of The Attorney General Candidates With the state’s arguably most important and certainly most résumé-diverse primary drawing to a close, City Hall set out to bring a new level of understanding to the five candidates running for attorney general. The project: speak to each about their first significant professional legal experience that helped shape their careers and thinking about the law in the years since.¶ Those interviews were compared with others, as well as with information from extensive trips through many archives. From a connection to Sen. Charlie Goodell to the real starting point of the rethinking of the Martin Act, there were surprises, celebrity cameos (Sonia Sotomayor! Starr Jones!), revived memories and tales that remained untouched, even with all the forums and debates and other exposure in the long public lives of the candidates involved. ¶ There were also revelations: most notably, the evidence undercutting Eric Schneiderman’s claims to have been a deputy sheriff or to have actually been responsible for launching a drug treatment program at the Berkshire County Jail, as well as the details of a lawsuit brought against Kathleen Rice and others for alleged witness coercion while she was an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn. ¶ For each, these were formative experiences. They told their stories about them. Records and other accounts filled in some of the gaps, corroborating and contradicting along the way. And fuller pictures of each began to take shape. These are the stories behind the candidates hoping to become the Democratic nominee.

All articles by EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

Eric Schneiderman, Berkshire Deputy Sheriff

Schneiderman’s “Law Enforcement” Role As Deputy Sheriff Was Teaching, Grant Writing And Administration

AN DR EW

SCHWAR

TZ

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tanding on the steps of City Hall on April 10, Eric Schneiderman formally launched his campaign for attorney general by running through his background: legislator, private practice attorney, court clerk. private “In fact,” Schneiderman said, “even before I was a lawyer, as someone mentioned, I started my career as a deputy sheriff in Massachusetts, where I started the first drug-and-alcohol program.”

Actually, though Schneiderman had been introduced that bright Saturday morning by six different politicians, none of them had touched on this unusual bit of biography before he did.

Schneiderman brings up his deputy sheriff experience often. It is in his official Senate biography. It is a running thread in his floor speeches in Albany, like when he defended his stance against charges that changing residency requirements for police officers was anti-cop by saying, “I spent two years, before I went to law school, as a deputy sheriff. I’ve worked in—with law enforcement” in 1999, or in 2003, to argue against loosening rules on children carrying weapons by confiding, “when I was a deputy sheriff, I used to get to shoot at the FBI targets of the people.”

And it has been used to a significant extent in his campaign, mentioned three times in the policy book issued in early August with elaboration of how his work developing a drug-treatment program was fundamental in shaping his approach to criminal justice. His endorsement from the Amsterdam News notes the deputy sheriff experience as part of the rationale for choosing him. Even at that

kick-off press conference, Rep. José Serrano used Schneiderman’s mention of the topic to briefly get a “Law and order! Law and order!” chant going among the collected politicians.

Schneiderman still has his deputy sheriff badge, shiny as ever, complete with the six points and a pin on the back to attach to his shirt. But though many might understand that badge and title to represent a position of some significance in traditional police-style work, such as arresting criminals and patrolling streets, it was not. Schneiderman defines his experience in Pittsfield, Mass., for two years after graduating from Amherst as law enforcement. But interviews and records from those days demonstrate that this is an expansive use of the term, though one that his campaign says is consistent with the criminal justice philosophy he has been preaching during his campaign for attorney general.

The memories are now over 30 years old, and there are not many of them.

James Mooney, who served as interim sheriff for several months in 1978 after the elected sheriff retired mid-term, could not recall a deputy named Schneiderman. Now 79, Mooney admitted that his memory might be somewhat lacking, but said most deputies in his time did not do much in the way of law enforcement.

“They would mostly transport prisoners to courts,” Mooney said. “They would work in the jail and just oversee the jail.”

Nor could two former assistant district attorneys who were on staff in the office in early 1979 remember working with any deputy sheriff

CITY HALL named Schneiderman.

A trip to the sheriff’s office, located on a hill off the main road outside of Pittsfield, led only to an encounter with Robert McDonough, who scoffed at the idea of locating employment records dating back 30 years. Though McDonough was himself a deputy sheriff in those days, he appeared not to recognize Schneiderman’s name.

But Schneiderman was far from forgotten. During Schneiderman’s employment at the jail from 1977 to 1979, there were three different Berkshire sheriffs, due to a surprise resignation of one long-serving sheriff and an extensive search for a replacement (with Mooney serving in-between). However, the last, Carmen Massimiano, is still there today. This year, he is finishing his final term on the job after opting against running again, but he is Berkshire’s longestserving current elected official by far and arguably the leading Democratic power broker in Western Massachusetts. And even after all these years, Massimiano says he remembers Schneiderman.

Responding in writing to requests for information, Massimiano stated that his predecessor as sheriff “left very few records,” and so he could not produce any pertaining to Schneiderman’s employment, responsibilities, titles or clearance to use a firearm.

But, Massimiano’s letter concluded, he remembered Schneiderman, even 31 years after the young employee had left, with just six months of overlap.

“I can, however, attest to the fact that when I took office on December 28, 1978, Mr. Schneiderman was a Deputy Sheriff on the staff of the Berkshire County Sherriff’s Office Jail and House of Correction, assigned to the Human Services Office, where he was instrumental in forming the first comprehensive drug and alcohol treatment program at the jail and house

www.cityhallnews.com the county or county government, which was abolished effective July 1, 2000. The commissioners who were in office when Schneiderman was in Pittsfield are all either dead or faltering. Every piece of paper in the official records was kept in the basement of Pittsfield’s main courthouse by a well-known local eccentric and former elected official, and every one of them was tossed in a dumpster once he died in 2008, according to courthouse maintenance staff. Nothing from the county government was preserved in the Massachusetts state archives. Nothing was preserved in the Berkshire Historical Society. Nor in the Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield’s public library, despite a local history collection extensive enough to include Herman Melville’s passport.

Except for one: Berkshire’s annually published list of County, City and Town Officers. The 1976-1977 edition lists nine deputy sheriffs.

The 1977-78 also lists nine.

The 1978-79 edition lists 10.

The 1979-80 edition lists 13.

Schneiderman’s name is not on any of those lists.

In booklets that include positions down to the level of county dog officers and the doctors at the Berkshire County Tuberculosis Clinic—but also list the titles for the pre-release center director for the jail, and the deputies cleared to serve criminal papers—Schneiderman is nowhere to be found, apparently not having been in a position significant enough to record.

It seems that the only thing besides the badge and a few memories that document Schneiderman’s presence in Berkshire is a lone article in a cabinet of clip files: in the back office archives of the Berkshire Eagle, the local daily, is a small manila envelope with the name of the future state senator on it—or, at least, the name he went by at the time, before his current Eric T. Schneiderman. Inside is just a single article, announcing the staff of a new drug-treatment program, to be overseen

ate of Amherst College [Schneiderman in fact graduated in 1977], he majored in English and was director of the student drop-in center. He has been a teacher and a program development coordinator for the last 18 months.”

M

“

y recollection is that Tradd had been involved in the teaching side and the substance-abuse side,” said O’Leary, the then-human services director.

O’Leary has not been in contact with his former employee for decades—he was not even aware that Schneiderman was a sitting elected official, let alone seeking statewide office—but he said he clearly remembers Schneiderman as being very helpful in writing grants and working with prisoners, “so focused on what he wanted to do, and the contribution he wanted to make.”

In the years since, O’Leary went on to become the Massachusetts secretary of health and human services, before becoming a health executive at Microsoft.

But before that he was a deputy sheriff at the Berkshire County Jail, as, he presumes, Schneiderman was.

“I can’t even think of anyone who worked there who wasn’t a deputy sheriff,” O’Leary said.

There were many sheriffs in those days—so many that two years after Schneiderman left for Harvard, Massimiano undertook an explicit effort to trim the number of what he referred to in an interview with the Eagle as the “so-called uniformed deputies” by refusing to reappoint 10 of them.

The deputy sheriffs whom Massimiano removed, the newspaper recounted on Feb. 13, 1981, “buy their own uniforms, attend meetings and occasionally do traffic duty for pay. They do not collect money from the county nor do they perform any duties at the jail. However, they are authorized to make arrests.”

In an interview, Schneiderman said he was not a uniformed deputy. But as the newspaper detailed in that same article, the uniformed deputies made up only one part of the deputy force. There was also a layer of deputies who served

“Tradd Schneiderman, 25, a New York City native, was named administrative coordinator of the program,” the Berkshire Eagle reported on Feb. 13, 1979, continuing, while misstating the date of his BA, “A 1974 graduate of Amherst College, he majored in English and was director of the student drop-in center. He has been a teacher and a program development coordinator for the last 18 months.” of correction,” Massimiano wrote, mirroring the wording of Schneiderman’s official state government biography and campaign literature, which reads, as presented on his website, that “he started the first comprehensive drug and alcohol treatment program at the local jail.”

There are no remaining records of

by William O’Leary, then the director of human services at the jail, and run by a man named James Sansouci, with a staff of five others.

“Tradd Schneiderman, 25, a New York City native, was named administrative coordinator of the program,” the Eagle reported on Feb. 13, 1979. “A 1974 gradu-

as correctional officers working at the jail with prisoners, a layer appointed

by Massimiano to serve criminal and civil court papers, and the fourth layer, which, the Eagle recounts, was “perhaps the largest. It consists of every friend or foe who is willing to contribute to the sheriff’s election campaign and receive in

AUGUST 30, 2010

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return a gold-colored badge.”

Even in a county as small as Berkshire, the Eagle noted, Massimiano’s predecessor, John Courtney, had built up an “army” of about 600—though, as noted in a 1967 Eagle article detailing the first efforts to cut back the force, “they serve without pay, and, generally speaking, are warned not to act like policemen.”

The members of this army, a 1969 article added, were entirely honorary, and “they have been viewed by Berkshire residents more in humor than in seriousness but have nonetheless been considered a sizable political base.”

In September 1977, though, just after Schneiderman would have been starting, the deputy sheriffs themselves were being called a menace by some, following an incident when a man got drunk and drove through some property at the Barrington Fair and, when pulled over by the police, flashed his deputy sheriff badge in an attempt to evade arrest.

A count of impersonating a police officer was added to the man’s charges.

“The fact is that a great many deputy sheriff’s badges have been given out and few people know the difference between the badge of a sworn deputy sheriff,” a county commissioner told the Eagle on Sept. 16, 1977.

Though the badges “imply no special right or authority,” the commissioner added, they should be cut back, arguing that with the work of the county government already difficult enough, “we shouldn’t have to be put in a position of being ridiculous as well whenever a Kentucky colonel decides to flash his badge.”

As for the drug-treatment program at the jail, it was a success. Started with a $100,000 federal grant and a much smaller grant from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, it served about 250 people, including a large percentage of the 50 or so inmates and local troubled juveniles. Though no other article about significant staffers of the program mentions Schneiderman, the Eagle has coverage of its continued funding through 1983, with therapy, educational classes and Alcoholics Anonymous rounding out the program’s portfolio, and Massimiano boasting of how effective it and other educational programs at the jail were in lowering the number of repeat offenders.

By then, though, Schneiderman was long gone from the Berkshire County Jail. Less than six months after the Eagle reported him being appointed to the job for the drug treatment program that he would eventually turn into a key talking point of his biography and campaign, Schneiderman was headed east across the Massachusetts Turnpike to enroll at Harvard Law. His departure from the jail’s program just a few months into the job has not stopped him from talking about it, or how much he says the experience shaped him.

“It inspired me that there’s a lot we can

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AUGUST 30, 2010

do. We’re not necessarily investing money in the programs that work, which is a particular cause of mine I want to take on as attorney general,” he said in an interview, reflecting on what he saw in the late 1970s in Massachusetts and criminal justice issues he addressed while a member of the state sentencing commission.

“We know what works in New York State, and we don’t necessarily expend our resources on the stuff that works. It was a combination of being in the jail before we really knew a lot of this and then being on the sentencing commission—it sort of closed the loop for me.”

These days, becoming a deputy sheriff in Berkshire County takes at least seven weeks of training. Schneiderman recalled much lower hurdles when he was a young Amherst graduate looking for his first job out of college.

“There was an application process.

There was some rudimentary training.

It was not like the police academy,” he said. “It was much more basic than that. I guess the theory was you learn on the job, and that’s what we did.”

Part of that training, Schneiderman said, was on the firing range.

“Fortunately, I never had to fire a weapon on the job, but I was trained to shoot, and we used to go out and shoot the FBI targets,” he said, while noting, “There was very little actual violence that I encountered there.”

This, though, may not have been the impression he gave off when asked about guns at the WABC attorney general debate in mid-July, when he said, “I was a deputy sheriff. I’ve shot over the years.”

Though Schneiderman said his responsibilities were mostly focused on the drug-treatment program that was not started until he had been on staff at the jail for a year and a half, he said, “I also did some security work. I transported inmates,” adding after a beat, “At one point, my car was stolen in an escape attempt.”

At most, that security work would have consisted of occasionally helping get inmates to and from court or programs, which, according to Massimiano and the Massachusetts Sheriffs Association, is the only time a deputy would be armed.

Schneiderman said as much in the interview.

“I had a gun on occasion,” he said, “but I was not a uniformed officer, and I didn’t carry a gun.”

Responding to requests for more detailed information, Schneiderman’s campaign provided a rough timeline of employment, starting with his first being hired at the jail as a teacher in 1977.

Schneiderman was given a new position as a grant writer after another employee resigned, prompting him to be sworn in as the kind of deputy allowed to transport prisoners—all of which he did while continuing to teach a writing class at the jail.

The campaign asserts that at some point in 1978, it was Schneiderman who identified an agency called the U.S. Federal

www.cityhallnews.com Law Enforcement Assistance Administration as a potential source of funding for a desired drug-and-alcohol program, and that he then served as the administrator for the program from February until August 1979.

Massimiano, meanwhile, elaborated on his initial response to explain that employees of the human services area, to which he recalls Schneiderman as being assigned, provide “academic and work skills/training; case management; substance abuse services (assessment, group and individual counseling); self-help/cognitive restructuring groups including, but not limited to parenting, anger management, criminal thinking/ behaviors, stress management etc.; reentry services including discharge planning and referrals.”

Massimiano added that he could not attest to any of the hiring decisions or requirements from before he was appointed sheriff in December 1978, when Schneiderman was already on staff.

However, Massimiano wrote, during his tenure, employees have only carried firearms while transporting prisoners or managing inmate work details, but never while within the jail.

Massimiano said he was recently in contact with Schneiderman as a courtesy after receiving a request for information several months ago, but that “at no time did Mr. Schneiderman or anyone on his staff attempt to dictate what my response should be.”

Schneiderman campaign spokesman James Freedland stood by his candidate’s characterization of the teaching and employment by the drug treatment program in the jail as law enforcement.

“Given that the sheriff’s department where Eric worked as a deputy sheriff ran the House of Corrections and all of the programs associated with it, and that Eric worked with a federal agency called the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to establish a program in the jail, we assume most people would consider that to be a job in law enforcement,” Freedland said in an e-mailed statement.

“Further, we believe that working in a jail, educating people who are incarcerated, helping to develop a rehabilitation program, transporting the incarcerated, and seeing the criminal justice system up close, is indeed valuable experience in the law enforcement field, particularly for someone who believes treatment and rehabilitation should be a major part of any law enforcement/crime-prevention approach.”

Schneiderman has himself used the term “law enforcement” to refer to his time as a deputy sheriff in the past, as in a 2001 floor speech against a proposal to eliminate parole, in which he responded, “I think that from a law enforcement point of view, the elimination of parole is a bad idea. And I say this as someone who worked for two years as a deputy sheriff … I think parole is a tremendously powerful vehicle for law enforcement.”

For those who may have previously understood Schneiderman’s references to being a deputy sheriff as representations that he was involved in activities that might fall under the definition of traditional police work, Freedland said that the state senator has always spoken of his work in Berkshire County as being only about teaching prisoners, transporting them occasionally and working on the drug-treatment program, adding, “These duties are completely in line with the smart-on-crime philosophy Eric regularly articulates during the campaign, and so, far from trying to hide them, he is quite proud of these formative experiences and eager to discuss them.”

About the many times Schneiderman has spoken of firing a gun as a deputy sheriff, Freedland said, “Eric readily volunteers that he did not carry a gun, and has no intent or desire in having

CITY HALL people think otherwise. The fact is, as a deputy sheriff, Eric was taught how to shoot, did so at targets, and was trained in gun safety and maintenance.”

As for speaking so often about being a deputy sheriff who “launched a comprehensive drug and alcohol treatment program,” though he departed for Harvard just six months after being named to the secondary position of administrative coordinator, Freedland said that Schneiderman had been forthright about that, too.

“Eric is proud of his leadership in creating the jail’s drug and alcohol rehabilitation program through identifying a source of federal funding for the program, pulling together a coalition of stakeholders to collaboratively apply for the funds, coordinating the complicated procedure of assembling an application to the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, actually writing the application, and successfully obtaining funding to establish the first comprehensive drug and alcohol program at the Berkshire House of Corrections (the application process alone took more than six months of work during 1978),” Freedland said.

“As the sheriff who supervised Eric attests, there is no question that but for his work, the program would not have existed. Obviously Eric doesn’t claim to have run the program, as he’s not a drug treatment professional.”

And as for that car theft and great escape, when pressed for details later in his interview, Schneiderman clarified that it had not happened as part of a prisoner transport. Instead, by his memory, a fellow jail staffer had moved his car and handed the keys to an inmate who, instead of delivering them to Schneiderman, took off from the jail grounds with some of the other prisoners. Schneiderman said he recalled them driving just a few miles to break into a liquor store where they drank themselves into a stupor, until the police apprehended them again the next morning.

Schneiderman keeps his deputy sheriff badge in his apartment, a keepsake of his time in the jail. He has lost touch with most of the people with whom he worked then (though one of them is among his 2,639 Facebook friends). But even after 31 years, he said, if people want to know what to expect if he is elected the state’s next top law enforcement officer, they need to understand his time in Berkshire County.

“My work as attorney general,” Schneiderman said, “is definitely going to be framed and informed by the experiences I had in the jail.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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CITY HALL

Sean Coffey, Assistant United States Attorney, SDNY

Inventive Prosecutions And Commitment To Trial, Found At St. Andrew’s Place

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serving as a military assistant to thenVice President George H.W. Bush. There was also a stop at Paul Weiss right after passing the bar.

But the real shaping of his legal career, he said, was when he started with U.S. Attorney, Southern District.

Coffey had been looking forward to joining the office since his days as a night student at Georgetown Law (while his day job was at the Pentagon and the White House).

The secret service agents he got to know among his classmates used to go on about the

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he first trial did not go well.

A man had been arrested with an eight-ball of cocaine at a post office, and the agents thought they might have stumbled onto a drug ring of mailmen dealing on the job.

The case was assigned to Sean Coffey— young and eager and new in the U.S. Attorney’s office, confident he could get the conviction.

Coffey finished his opening statement. The judge turned to Ellen Yaroshefsky, a Cardozo law professor who had taken up the defendant’s cause.

She passed.

Over the next few days, Coffey laid out his case. Then Yaroshefsky finally stood up: the only thing that mattered, she told the jury, was that the man had been entrapped. They could not convict him of possession—the whole thing had been a set-up.

After two days of deliberations, the verdict came back: one count, not guilty; one count, 11-1 hung jury.

“It was a question of experience, and he didn’t have it, but he was just lovely about it,” said Yaroshefsky, who described Coffey as “conscientious, thoughtful, honorable—he was exactly what a prosecutor ought to be.”

But still: it was his first trial as an assistant United States attorney, and he had flubbed it.

So Coffey was a little surprised when James Comey—later the Southern District U.S. Attorney himself, and after that, the deputy attorney general who became famous for stopping Alberto Gonzalez from getting John Ashcroft to sign off on continuing the domestic surveillance program from his hospital bed—popped his head in to say “Congratulations.” “‘This means you’ll never be a member of the chicken-shit club,’” Coffey remembers Comey telling him, “‘those wimpy prosecutors who are so concerned about their perfect record that they never try a hard case.’”

Coffey talks about his early experiences working as a carpenter’s apprentice, building skyboxes at Madison Square Garden and swaying in the wind as he hung sheetrock on the 102nd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, as important eye-openers to the experiences of other people, particularly his fellow workers, when in high school. And he often references his time in the Navy, though in front of New York Democrats he usually leaves the part that had him

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office’s reputation, he said, and that was where he decided he wanted to be.

Coffey got a conviction on his second trial, for a post-office robbery in the Bronx, and went on to bring 13 cases to verdict over his four years at St. Andrew’s Place.

He was purposefully building a reputation, he said, and one that became part of a larger legal strategy for the rest of his career.

“I developed a very firm belief that if people believed that you will take cases to trial, you will get better pleas,” Coffey said.

Working in the Narcotics Division, Coffey got convictions of several cocaine dealers despite a criminal informant, who turned out to be a recovering heroin addict, who unwittingly wore a wire with a transmission problem. Purposefully, Coffey made sure he never knew the tapes were blank until the defense was cross-examining him, building up his credibility as a witness with the jury. He helped bring down the 48 Hours heroin ring in a multiple-wiretap, two-year process that netted 50 arrests (including the Columbia supplier), managing the DEA agents and pulling together the tapes and the information to build the case, said Tom Finnegan, then also an AUSA working with him on the case.

“At first, at the takedown, I thought we had a really weak case against the guy, but it turned out, with Sean’s work, we were able to build the case up really well,” Finnegan said.

At the end of his time in the office—he was already with Bernstein Litowitz by the time the trial started— Coffey was assigned a case of three North Carolina men arrested by the NYPD for gun trafficking. Thanks to an offhand comment from one of them in an

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interview, Coffey was able to build an investigation that demonstrated that the guns were being traded for a heap of crack that one of the men had shoved down his pants and later dumped down the toilet in the station, beyond the notice of the police. Without even a gram of crack as evidence or any of the arresting officers realizing they had been involved in a drug bust, Coffey got a three-way drug conviction.

“It was novel in the sense of: it’s pretty hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there were drugs when there were no drugs found,” said Ira Feinberg, who handled the appeal for the U.S. Attorney’s office—which challenged other aspects of the case, but not Coffey’s proof of the drugs.

“It was a unique situation, one that I had not had before,” said Robert Koppleman, one of the defense attorneys on the case, who remembers Coffey as “a good lawyer. I thought he was a straight kind of guy—not like everyone there at that time.”

Coffey was in the office from October 1991 through April 1995, and would have been there longer, if not for the financial pinch that came once he and his wife started having children, after years of trying.

“It turned out the solution was to go on a government salary,” he said. “I had just been at the office, and I got my first paycheck, and I called Anne, and I said, ‘Honey I’ve got news for you: the paycheck here is $100 less than half of my last Paul Weiss check.’ And she said, ‘I’ve got news for you: it’s going to have to feed three people.’”

But the experiences stuck with him, pushing him to reexamine evidence others might have missed and learning how to build business investigations while in the office’s Major Crimes unit, which he says were critical for when he launched his cases against companies like WorldCom in private practice years later. So was that early lesson of pursuing trials and building a reputation for being the kind of lawyer who did.

Expect more of that mentality and delegating downward to top recruits if he is elected attorney general, Coffey said.

“I’m going to try and take more cases to trial,” Coffey said, “and hopefully these young kids coming out of Paul Weiss, Skadden, who want to try cases in the public sector, will be throwing résumés to the OAG’s office, in addition to the Manhattan DA’s office and the U.S. Attorney’s office.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

“I developed a very firm belief that if people believed that you will take cases to trial, you will get better pleas,” Coffey said.

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AUGUST 30, 2010

Richard Brodsky, Staffer For Congressional Committee For A Vote On The War

From Bringing Anti-War Activism Into D.C. Committee Effort, Brodsky Discovered Power Of Legislative Process

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n Dec. 30, 1970, Charlie Goodell, the man who had been appointed to Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate seat and lost it to James Buckley two months earlier, spoke again, as he was often doing, about his opposition to the Vietnam War. With four days left in his term, Goodell asked for permission to submit an article that he called “an important investigation of the role leaders of my own Republican Party played in various historical controversies that arose over congressional power and responsibility in the American military enterprise.”

Goodell urged his fellow senators, especially the Republicans, to read the piece, hoping it would sway more of them to join him in a vote to cut off appropriations for Vietnam, forcing Richard Nixon to withdraw troops.

Goodell was apparently a big fan of the paper’s line of reasoning, and of the person who put it together.

“The author of this paper is Richard L. Brodsky of Hartsdale, New York,” Goodell said. “I believe he deserves the recognition and the appreciation of this body for the quality of the scholarly effort and for the persuasiveness of his work.”

By the time Goodell introduced the article, Brodsky was back in Cambridge, halfway through his third year at Harvard Law. He had only recently returned. On May 4, 1970—which happened to be his 24th birthday—four students were shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State in the turmoil following Nixon’s launch of the Cambodia Campaign. Harvard, like many campuses, immediately shut down.

Suddenly without a school year to finish, Brodsky and several other students followed a professor named Abe Chayes, a former JFK aide, down to Washington.

The way to actually do something about the war, Chayes told them, was to get involved in government. Brodsky signed up as a volunteer for a group called the Congressional Committee for a Vote on the War. Led by Goodell, Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield and South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, with help from Clifford Chase of

New Jersey, Frank Church of Idaho and several others, they tried to gain support for a bill called S. 3000, originally called the Hatfield-McGovern amendment.

In a building next to the Supreme Court, Brodksy and the other staffers

researched Congressional policy and lobbied Senate staffers to get their bosses on board.

There were riots in the streets of Washington. Brodsky remembers the tear gas.

He remembers the white-shoe Manhattan law firm job interview that he flubbed by telling the senior partners that he could not in good conscience represent Standard Oil, which was one of their biggest clients.

What he did not remember in 1970, though, was to head back to Boston when the summer ended and the new school year began.

Not that he took any formal leave of absence.

“I just didn’t show up,” he said, remembering the decision in light of the events he was living through. “Fuck that.”

Brodsky’s work culminated in that Congressional Record article. Though a liberal Democrat then and a liberal Democrat now, he was trying to get the Republican senators to return to what he said were the true Republican principles of asserting Congressional authority, or, as he wrote in the article, “to reveal the historical and present day concern of the Republican Party over the erosion of the Congressional role in the warmaking decision process.”

He even quoted Dwight Eisenhower saying, “Part of my fundamental concept of the Presidency is that we have a constitutional government and only when there is a sudden unforeseen emergency should the President put us into war without Congressional action.”

Republicans like these, Brodsky wrote in the piece, “recognized that the manner in which we make decisions is, in the long run, as important as what decisions we make.”

Mike Smith, a leader of the S. 3000 effort and now an executive at a major financial institution in Washington, has remained in touch with Brodsky over the years, and says there is a direct connection between the

CITY HALL politician of today and the student activist of 1970.

“In his own way, he hasn’t aged a lot.

He struck me then as he strikes me now: smart, principled and results-oriented,” Smith said. “Empty rhetoric was worse than useless.”

It took until 1973 for what ultimately became known as the Case-Church amendment to pass, and two years later, Nixon had resigned and the last helicopter had left the American embassy.

But Brodsky claims that experience as the turning point not just for him personally, but for many people.

“It changed the argument about the war from an outside, ‘We’re going to shut down the machine,’ to a, ‘No, this system gives you tools,’” Brodsky said. “And in retrospect, it was the great saver of the system, because it meant that if you were against the war, you did not have to go the way of the Weathermen. You had tools that this society, unique in the world, gave you, and they were firmed in the legislature. I think it saved the anti-war movement, and I think it saved the country.”

Brodsky ultimately did finish at Harvard, and after taking the summer to travel in Europe with his high school friend, the budding actor Peter Riegert (who went on, most famously, to play Boon in Animal House and to date Bette Midler), took the bar. Still searching for purpose, Brodsky was encouraged by a family friend to go work on Ed Muskie’s 1972 presidential campaign, and while working advance for the anti-war senator on a team that included Larry Kudlow, stumbled into one of the more famous moments in the history of presidential politics. Furious at an article in the Manchester Union-Leader that said his wife drank and told dirty jokes, Muskie convened a press conference in front of the newspaper’s offices two weeks before the New Hampshire primary to complain.

“That good woman,” Muskie started to say, then paused, put his chin down, and took a few ashen-faced moments before continuing.

Muskie’s face grew wet, though whether it was from tears or melting snow remains a debate. But the picture of the event, with his face pressed down against one microphone and another held up to the right of the frame has become the icon for the derailing of the presidential campaign.

Brodksy insists that the hand holding up that microphone was his. Widerangle shots, though, show that the hand belonged to a woman standing to the side on the flatbed truck that Muskie used for the speech.

But it is not hard to see how he made the mistake. He was on the flatbed truck, too, holding up another microphone, as can be seen in a black-and-white photo of the event, with an intense-looking young Brodsky kneeling out of the shot, snow gathering in his darker, thicker hair.

That experience was important, Brodsky said, as was a job working for the

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AUGUST 30, 2010

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Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation on the Commission of Inquiry into High School Journalism, as the group traveled around the country investigating racism and censorship in school newspapers.

Six weeks on staff (all, he says, he could take) for then-Rep. Bella Abzug back in Washington was the last stop before he

“It changed the argument about the war from an outside, ‘We’re going to shut down the machine,’ to a, ‘No, this system gives you tools,’” Richard Brodsky said of his time in Washington in 1970 working on the Committee for a Vote on the War. “And in retrospect, it was the great saver of the system, because it meant that if you were against the war, you did not have to go the way of the Weathermen.

You had tools that this society, unique in the world, gave you, and they were firmed in the legislature. I think it saved the anti-war movement, and I think it saved the country.” made his way back home to Westchester to sign on with then-County Executive Al Delbello. His path into politics, starting in the county legislature and, not long after, to the Assembly, had begun.

But those six months in Washington back in 1970, he said, was where everything, in a sense, really started.

“I came from a tradition and an experience in early life that if you’re going to make things different, it’s not a matter of being more charitable, it’s about being more just; it’s not about fixing a problem, it’s about fixing institutions,” Brodsky said. “And there is almost an inevitable arc from my discussions at the law firm and my work in the anti-war movement to running for attorney general.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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Ed Muskie, delivering the famous “crying” speech, which ended his 1972 presidential campaign. A young Richard Brodsky is crouched on the platform by his feet.

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Eva Moskowitz, right, mulls a 2013 comeback (Page 8), new Council Member Liz Crowley braves the harsh weather for her first day on the job (Page 18)

and Richard Ravitch, left, explains why everyone should get on board his plan to save the MTA (Page 23).

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The Brooklyn BP on being overlooked, and what he plans to do about it

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Complaints Of Violations, Misconduct And Coercion In Rice’s Early Prosecution Record

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s the Nassau County district attorney, Kathleen Rice prides herself on running an office that she says she understands from top to bottom. She got to the top, after all, from having started at the bottom—as far down as a summer intern for the office she now heads, and up the rungs of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and the Philadelphia U.S. Attorney’s office.

“I say to every single prosecutor in the office: I will never ask you to do something I haven’t done. So when you have to work overnight, you have to get a call at two in the morning, say, ‘You know what? Kathleen Rice did this.’ Because I did,” Rice said. “Every single stage that they have gone through in that office I did, and then some. And I think that gives me an awful lot of credibility with the young people in the office, because they say, ‘She’s not just ruling from on high.’”

Though she had interned in Nassau, Rice said that coming out of Touro, she only applied to the Brooklyn DA’s office.

The Brooklyn office, she had heard, was a place where a young prosecutor could very quickly build up trial experience, which is what she did from shortly after she arrived, in January 1992, until she departed, in November 1999. Her time there was critical to the development of her understanding of the law, she said, in terms of learning how to prosecute criminals, to deal with victims and to understand the role government should have through law enforcement and other programs in improving society.

“You recognize very early on as a prosecutor that there are limited things you can do to help people. But it also opened my eyes as to seeing how the system could be better, how this system could help people more,” she said. “It’s not just about locking people up, it’s about repairing the damage that crime victims experience, and trying to make people whole again and help them move on with their life.”

Most prosecutors have had things that occasionally went wrong, especially over the course of an 18-year career like Rice’s. Mistakes are made, trials are lost, convictions are appealed, people on the receiving end of prosecutions complain.

But when asked in an interview about her time as an ADA to name any examples of prosecutions she had handled that had gone awry, Rice initially appeared to draw a blank.

“I’m sure there were times,” she said, searching.

But she came up with none, even though she had just minutes earlier made passing references (without mentioning problems) to two cases where conduct was directly challenged in later court action.

Within her early record as a prosecutor, there were three cases where defense attorneys and judges cited issues with Fourth Amendment rights, due process and prosecutorial conduct.

Problems introducing evidence in 1995 led a judge to give a retrial to a man Rice prosecuted for child sodomy. Claims of witness coercion from a cocaine addict, who switched his testimony on the stand about the man he identified in a line-up for Rice in 1999, led to an almost immediate not-guilty verdict. And in 2002, while an assistant U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia, Rice’s trouble introducing evidence in a gun trial led to the release of a man who was later arrested again for a crime he committed when he would have otherwise been behind bars. Two of the cases were appealed. One led to a lawsuit settled by the city in which Rice, as the ADA who handled the initial investigation, was named as a defendant.

Even so, her campaign spokesman, Eric Phillips, said there was nothing to be learned by looking at these three as having particular significance in a career of a woman who has now spent eight years as an ADA, five as an assistant U.S. Attorney and nearly five as the Nassau County district attorney.

“To be able to point out a single mistake and a couple of disagreements with adversaries out of an award-winning 19-year career that spans thousands of cases,” Phillips said, “is a testament to the district attorney’s professionalism, integrity and effectiveness as a legal advocate.”

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ice says she cannot remember the details of the first case she brought to trial, but she remembers the feeling, arriving under piles of paperwork and standing in front of the judge, announcing herself as representing the people and engaging with

the defense attorney.

“It was nothing like reality TV, it was not Law & Order,” she said. “It was real life, and it was very fast-paced.”

Rice was assigned to Part 9 of the court, along with a pre-View Starr Jones and future Hiram Monserrate defense attorney Joe Tacopina. Their trials were not for major crimes, and the cases moved quickly, but Rice said she did her best to connect with the people affected

in each one. As she came to see it, the victims were her clients, and she was their “lifeline to justice.”

But though the details of the trials she handled then no longer stand out in her memory, Rice said she was careful to make sure that each of them did at the time.

“There was no case that you could just see in a vacuum and put through the assembly line,” she said. “You had to manage relationships with victims and ensure that they were informed about the process, make them feel that you cared— which you did, though it was difficult, since we had so many cases.”

Rice moved up through the beginning ranks of the office, going from prosecuting basic quality-of-life crimes, to a grand jury assignment bringing up to five cases per day, to six months of overnight shifts as a “riding” ADA responsible for being the first prosecutor on the scene to do witness interviews and put together initial case files.

It took her three years to reach a trial bureau and be assigned to the Red Zone in Brooklyn (Hynes’ office divides prosecutors in the borough into five color-coded areas, and Rice was eventually assigned to Canarsie and East New York). Rice was the first person from their incoming class of ADAs to make it to homicide, according to Ethan Gerber, an old friend from the office who is now the incoming president of the Brooklyn Bar Association, and she developed a good reputation as a prosecutor among her colleagues along the way.

“She wasn’t overzealous, but was very thorough,” Gerber said.

Rice also impressed Susan Mitchell, now a part-time defense attorney, who was another fellow ADA and remains a friend.

“She was just a natural,” Mitchell said.

“She just instinctively knew what she needed to do, whether it was getting an uncooperative witness to talk to her or finding people. She has good people skills. When she really believes in something, she’s very convincing.”

To Mitchell, the moment that stands out from Rice’s time as an ADA came during her next assignment, six months in the Special Victims Unit, when she was assigned the case of a boy whose stepfather, a Fire Department lieutenant named Carlos Ramos, was accused of sexual abuse.

Mitchell remembers Rice talking with the boy all night long, connecting with him, and gently leading him back to questions about what Ramos had supposedly done.

He came to trust her, Mitchell recalled, and within a day or two, the boy “didn’t want to be with anybody else but her. It was like a little duckling, the way he followed after her.”

Ramos was tried for 15 counts of TZ

Kathleen Rice, Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney

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CITY HALL sodomy, sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. With Rice as the trial attorney for the DA’s office, the jury came back with guilty verdicts on five.

Four of the five convictions dealt with a specific date in June that the child identified as the day of a graduation party.

But the Brooklyn DA’s office never told the defense that it had obtained school records of the child that showed no graduation party could have taken place on that day.

Because it dealt with sexual abuse, the records of the original case are sealed. But the judge’s decision in the appeal provides some details, including the defense’s claims of newly discovered evidence and prosecutorial misconduct.

As Joel Brettschneider, Ramos’ defense attorney, remembers that day in court, Judge John Leventhal very quickly found his argument convincing.

“He looked at the ADA and says, ‘Why isn’t he right?’” Brettschneider said.

Ultimately, the judge did not rule on the issue of prosecutorial misconduct, determining that more evidence would have been necessary to demonstrate this, and that anyway, there was enough to call for a new trial, especially because it was precisely the same kind of time chart evidence that led to Ramos’ acquittal on the other counts.

“It is clear,” Leventhal wrote, that the problems producing the evidence “severely interfered with defendant’s ability to adequately prepare a defense and amounted to a denial of due process.”

Rice claimed at the time that she was not aware of the evidence that had been obtained by two other ADAs in the office.

Brettschneider, who remembers Rice well from the trial, said he could not say whether she had anything to do with the evidence production delay. His overall impression from the trial, Brettschneider said, was that she had been “very competent.”

When initially discussing the case in an interview, Rice spoke passionately about her time with the boy, the child psychologists she said she worked with to improve her understanding of how to get through to victims like him, and how much helping him meant to her.

“I think about him. I think about him a lot,” she said.

Appearing to relive some of the old emotions as she spoke, Rice described the long-term effect that case and others she handled during her six months in the Special Victims Unit.

“I would get angry at times. We fail so many people. We fail so many people.

The criminal justice system should be just that—it should be a justice system,” she said. “And very often, I felt, ‘God, what kind of justice can there be for a little child who is abused by someone in their own family? How do you make that person whole?’”

But when presented with the judge’s

ruling in the appeal, Rice declined comment on the decision to grant a new trial.

Her campaign spokesman pointed out that the judge found her statements about the failure to introduce the evidence had been made in good faith, adding that “her advocacy for this child victim was

way. She became a big believer in early intervention programs, she said, even as she saw her own interests gravitating toward prosecuting the most heinous crimes: child abuse, sexual violence and murder.

Her sense of herself as an agent for the victim, developed early in her years in

passionate and legally appropriate, and the court didn’t disagree with that.”

the office, stayed with her through each homicide case. And there were many.

But one in particular became the source of intense controversy and legal action that lasted almost a decade, from start to finish.

A few months before she left Brooklyn, Rice was working a double homicide.

Thanks to the timing—Dec. 30, 1998, the week between Christmas and New Year’s—the Brooklyn bodega shootings had lit up the tabloids, creating a frenzy of interest in finding the killer. On Jan. 1, Police picked up a man named Martin Mitchell whom the cops had found outside the bodega and who said that he had seen the whole thing. Mitchell told two other ADAs someone nicknamed “Black” had been the shooter, which was later alleged to have been made under threat that if he did not sign the statement, he would be prosecuted for the murders himself.

Then Mitchell went to Rice, who took a tape-recorded statement, and a few days later met him at the precinct to have him look at a line-up that included Antowine Butts, an aspiring hip hop musician who sometimes went by “Black.”

Mitchell identified Butts, though the shooter had been wearing a ski mask and not wearing thick Coke-bottle glasses like the ones Butts wore. Another young woman who had been on the sidewalk outside the bodega at the time of the shooting also fingered a suspect via a nickname, which the police also linked to Butts. He was put in prison, where he remained for two years until the trial,

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fter she got her first two convictions in homicide for female defendants, Rice remembers people in the office joking that she was going to become known as the woman with a specialty in locking up other women. She also remembers being approached in the courthouse bathroom by family members of the first defendant trying to intimidate her. And she remembers vividly the feeling she describes as happiness when the guilty verdict came down and the tears streaming down the face of the mother of the boy who had been shot six times in the head.

“I turned around and sat in my seat and was like, ‘What am I doing? This is great, that she’s going to be convicted, she got 25 to life, but this family is still devastated,’” Rice recalled. “So you really realize that there’s only so much you can do when you’re talking about this kind of crime, like life-changing crime for people.

And the best thing that you can do is try to give them some semblance of justice and help them to move on if they can.”

Rice chalks up the roots of her interest in how others behave to growing up as one of 10 children. Eight years in the Brooklyn DA’s office of prosecuting people who committed crimes she could not comprehend fed this fascination, along with her belief that they could have turned out differently if not for a system that had failed them along the

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at which Mitchell testified that he had been drunk, high on crack and stoned on marijuana at the time of the murders.

When the prosecution asked him questions, he said Butts was the shooter.

When the defense asked, Mitchell said he had not, in fact, seen Butts at the bodega that day. Between that and phone records that showed calls going out from Butts’ apartment to Butts’ friends until just shortly before the shootings, the jury came back with an acquittal after 10 minutes of deliberation.

After the verdict, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert devoted a week of his op-ed space to Butts, writing that “to read the transcript of the trial of Mr. Butts (who once was caught jumping a turnstile, his only previous brush with the law) is to immerse oneself in the frightening reality of a criminal justice system gone haywire—a system that simply closed its eyes to the most elementary aspects of truth and falsity, guilt and innocence.”

Herbert accused the police and DA’s office of using “smoke, mirrors and two of the world’s worst witnesses to try to convict Mr. Butts.”

A year later, in May 2001, still recovering from his time in prison and his wife leaving him for another man while he was there, Butts filed a civil lawsuit against the city, the DA’s office and the NYPD. Rice and two other ADAs were named personally in the suit, as were the office, Hynes and four police detectives, all said to have been involved with a prosecution that was improper, on account of evidence that had been based entirely on witness statements that were themselves extremely troubled.

According to the claims, one of these witnesses was coerced and the other offered factually impossible testimony, plus “the district attorney’s office had knowledge of plaintiff’s alibi, which was verifiable through independent records.

Despite this knowledge, defendant took no action.”

Rice’s full deposition taken in the civil suit was never made public, but in an excerpt of it obtained by City Hall, she describes her role in the investigation as “taking statements from witnesses, documenting evidence recovered from the scene, ordering things like 911 calls, basically just getting everything together.”

The lawsuit also alleged that there were prior complaints against the named ADAs, accusing them of denying Butts his Fourth, Fifth and Fifteenth Amendment rights, and the office of failing to provide better training. It leveled six separate complaints, asking for $2 million each in restitution. The case was settled for $220,000, with no admission of guilt, in 2007, seven years after Butts was set free.

But not, according to Bruce Barket— Butts’ lawyer for the criminal trial and for the civil suit—before he had effectively proven that Rice had coerced Mitchell’s identification of Butts that day at the lineup.

Barket was himself an ADA in Nassau

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under Dennis Dillon, and he makes no secret of the fact that he remained close to Dillon or that he supported Dillon over Rice when she unseated the longtime district attorney in 2005.

He insists his problems with Rice with respect to this case were entirely factbased, stemming from his own interviews with Mitchell, who Barket said swore under oath in the civil suit that he told the people in the line-up, “‘That’s Black, but that’s not the Black you want.’”

“They—the cop and, as Martin put it, the ‘strawberry blonde DA’—said ‘Bullshit,’ and ‘If you don’t identify him, you’re going to go down for the guns we found in your apartment where you were arrested,’” Barket recalled, “and discretion being the better part of valor, I guess, he said, ‘Okay, whatever you say.’”

As for the other witness: Jay Salpeter, the private investigator hired by Barket was only able to locate Jane Debery, a junkie who had at the time been a pregnant 15-year-old, days before the settlement was signed and too late to take testimony. But according to the investigator, Debery told him that Rice had threatened her with locking up her boyfriend for statutory rape if she did not testify against Butts in court.

“The girl was terrified. She was threatened that her boyfriend was older and he would be arrested,” said Salpeter, who is perhaps most famous for his instrumental role in uncovering evidence that helped exonerate Martin Tankleff.

In her deposition, Rice described the woman as “afraid. She was a young girl, she knew that she saw something bad, and, you know, told one of her older relatives and was brought down and didn’t really want to be there. But not in a disinterested way. She was scared and nervous.”

Since the Butts case was first raised in her 2005 Nassau DA race, when an order for her deposition was issued in the closing weeks of the campaign (and which she ultimately gave a few days before taking office), Rice has dismissed the claims against her as political. She held to that argument in her interview about her time as an ADA, and said she was completely confident that Mitchell’s identification of Butts had happened as he originally said that day at the precinct, and not as he later testified in the legal proceedings.

“There was no question in my mind that we had the right people. No question in my mind whatsoever,” Rice said. “All of the allegations that he made were absolutely not true.”

She said she was also still completely confident that Butts was the murderer, no matter what the verdict was.

“From the very beginning, I knew we had the right guy. There was no question in my mind at all,” she said. “Sometimes that happens—sometimes guilty people get acquitted.”

Rice’s campaign spokesman, Eric Phillips, elaborated, saying that the

“allegations lodged against the office and the City of New York were completely false and without even one shred of proof.”

Phillips dismissed what Barket and Salpeter said about the two witnesses’ later claims, calling the supposed coercion and threats of arrest for both of them “absolutely, 100-percent not true,”

without that foundation, Coward’s lawyer argued, none of the rest of the case could stand.

Coward won the appeal. The U.S. Attorney’s office fought back by reviewing Rice’s time in Brooklyn.

“The trial prosecutor, Kathleen Rice, was inexperienced in this type of suppression matter,” the U.S. Attorney’s of-

CITY HALL Coward went free, instead of serving what would have been a five-and-a-halfyear sentence.

On March 18, 2004, Coward was arrested for robbery, receiving stolen property, criminal trespassing, reckless endangerment, theft, aggravated assault and possession of a criminal weapon with intent to commit a crime, according

After the verdict, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert devoted a week of his op-ed space to Butts, writing that the case w as “the frightening reality of a criminal justice system gone haywire—a system that simply closed its eyes to the most elementary aspects of truth and falsity, guilt and innocence.” and adding, “It’s common for prosecutors, police officers and government officials to be accused of wrongdoing without any even remotely relevant evidence to support the prosecutions.”

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ice left for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Philadelphia in November 1999, never appearing in court as part of the Butts case.

She says she left because, after eight years in Brooklyn, she wanted a new experience, to try her hand at federal cases, to move away from violent crimes for a bit and into some white-collar prosecutions.

Her best friend’s in-laws lived in Philadelphia, as did a cousin, and the reputation of the office was appealing. Rice said she would have done anything to go work for the then-U.S. Attorney Mike Stiles.

From the office next door to Beau Biden, her close friend in the office and the current attorney general of Delaware (Rice says she has gotten some political tips from him, but opted to keep them private), she had fewer cases, but more long-term investigations, with a number of successes.

Even though she had hoped to get away from violent crimes, Rice was still given some. This included the case of Alfonzo Coward, a man who had been pulled over in September 1998, while Rice was still in Brooklyn, and found with a 9-millimeter handgun in his car. Rice wrapped up the trial without much difficulty, winning a conviction of 68 months in jail for Coward on March 8, 2001.

But Coward’s attorney appealed on grounds that the gun had not been entered into evidence properly, and therefore should have been inadmissible.

The contention was this: the officer who had found the gun only had probable cause to pull him over in the first place because he had received a radio message requesting the stop of a green Subaru with that license plate. Rice had never entered the testimony of the officer who had requested the stop into evidence, and

fice argued in its court papers. “Although she served eight years in the Kings County District Attorney’s Office, and therefore, as the Third Circuit suggested, was appropriately chosen to try this case, she had more limited experience as a federal prosecutor. She had joined this office just over a year before the Coward suppression hearing, and this was her first such hearing in this office.”

The office offered an “excuse and apology” that “it did not present the available evidence because the prosecutor, mistakenly, did not believe she had to.”

The Pennsylvania Court of Appeals was not impressed with this attempted explanation, writing, “we note that the prosecutor’s ‘inexperience’ did not prevent the government from selecting her to handle the obligations of a criminal trial and, indeed, she secured Coward’s conviction. Moreover, there is testimony at the suppression hearing suggesting that the prosecutor was familiar with the controlling precedent on this issue.”

Pennsylvania District Court Judge Stewart Dalzell, to whom the case was remanded for a decision, wrote that the argument, in light of Rice’s previous experience working for Hynes, “contains an unstated, and very odd, premise.”

“In minimizing trial counsel’s eight years of service in the Kings County, New York, District Attorney’s Office, the Government seems to suggest that the Fourth Amendment, and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence under it, does not (somehow) apply in Brooklyn as it does in federal district court in Philadelphia, and therefore Ms. Rice could not have been expected to be familiar with controlling law.”

Rice, wrote the judge, should have known what to do from her time as an ADA, and therefore, “the Government’s explanation thus distills to the admission of a naked mistake.”

The judge ruled for Coward. The indictment was dismissed on Oct. 1, 2002.

to the records of Pennsylvania’s First Judicial District. He was convicted of the last three charges and sentenced to a minimum of five years in prison, though he was released on probation on Oct. 20, 2005. On Oct. 18, 2007, he was arrested again, this time for violation of that probation.

Rice has called what happened in the Coward case a mistake in the past, and her campaign spokesman reiterated this.

“Nearly a decade ago, she made a procedural human error with regard to one piece of evidence in a single hearing within one of the many successful trial convictions she obtained as a federal prosecutor,” Phillips said. “It was her first federal hearing of this type, and in defending her skill and experience, the court cited her subsequent conviction of the defendant and noted that her time as a state prosecutor made her ‘doubly qualified’ in representing the government in this case.”

For Rice, the many cases she handled in Brooklyn and Philadelphia have been crucially important in defining her office over the past five years as Nassau district attorney. She makes sure even her rookie ADAs are working toward getting assigned cases for trial, and that once they do, they approach everything conscientiously, she said.

“Because of my experience as a state and federal prosecutor, I think I’m a really good boss. I have the highest standards, I insist on absolute professionalism, understanding that when you’re in court, it’s an adversarial situation, but when you get out, you shake hands with your opponent, and be professional and be nice,” Rice said. “And, first and foremost, understanding you don’t work for me— you work for the people of the county.

You get a call from a victim, you return that phone call, before you return a phone call from anyone else. All of these things that I learned up to that point in my 14 years have really dictated how the office is run.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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CITY HALL

Eric Dinallo, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney

In Prosecution Of Early Financial Fraud Case As An ADA, Dinallo Discovered The Martin Act

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AN DR EW SC HWARTZ

ven with the personal recommendation from famed attorney Arthur Liman, his mentor at Paul Weiss, Eric Dinallo still had to pass muster with the boss himself, just like any other aspiring Manhattan assistant district attorney.

The clear memory of the interview, like the reflex of referring only to “Mr. Morgenthau,” is still with him.

“I remember the cigar and everything,” Dinallo said.

One Hogan Place was not the first stop out of law school for Dinallo, but it was where he says he really came into his own as a lawyer. Sure, there were high points to his first years as an associate working with corporate clients at Paul Weiss. But the same mindset that got him to enroll in a public policy master’s degree between college and law school, he said, drew him more to pro bono cases, like the one in which he successfully convinced Sonia Sotomayor, then a district court judge, to let two Santerian prisoners wear colored beads they said were important to their religion but which jail officials had argued would clash with the regulations against displaying gang colors.

Instead of trying to turn him around, Liman called Morgenthau to offer a new recruit for the Career Criminal Bureau.

Within a few months, Dinallo was out of Paul Weiss and working repeatoffender street crimes.

Dinallo’s first trial was a pickpocket specializing in tourists, always on the same corner, 18 times getting to plead out to misdemeanors because his victims had returned home by the time their eyewitness accounts were called for in court. Dinallo was still working on suppressing his stutter. He had no experience in front of a jury as a prosecutor. But

he refused to give the pickpocket another deal, and instead pursued felony charges hinged on a bartender, who had chased the pickpocket into a revolving door at a hotel, and an ATM receipt. While the victim himself did not fly back, Dinallo got the jury to accept the bartender’s testimony of a tourist gesticulating wildly and pointing at his pocket. Between that and the ATM receipt, Dinallo got them to convict. It took them 20 minutes.

The pickpocket was stunned.

“This is what happens when you get to the Career Criminals bureau,” Dinallo remembers overhearing the defense lawyer whisper to his client.

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AUGUST 30, 2010

few months later, the phone rang at his desk. Morgenthau’s assistant, Ida Van Lindt, put the DA on the line. They were going to meet with John Moscow, deputy chief of the investigations division, Morgenthau told him. New assignment.

Calls had been coming into the office and to Morgenthau directly about investments disappearing into a small Manhattan-based brokerage firm called A.R. Baron. NYU was down $700,000.

George Iain Murray, the 10th Duke of Atholl, was down $2.5 million. With the DA’s office looking to step up the kind of white-collar prosecutions that had traditionally been handled by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney (which had passed on the case), Moscow and Morgenthau searched their assistant district attorneys’ résumés for corporate experience. Dinallo was one of the few who had it.

“At the DA’s office, there are a lot of guys who’ve done homicides,” Moscow recalled. “We’re doing a securities fraud case, and the question was, ‘Who had ever dealt with securities fraud?’”

Today, financial fraud cases are standard issue for every office with jurisdiction in New York. But then, the A.R. Baron case was something new: the defendants felt they were being made examples of, and the prosecution was faced with making the jury, as well as the public at large, understand a different kind of crime.

To prepare, Moscow told Dinallo to read the Martin Act, the 20-page financial-fraud law that he had used in criminal cases before and he knew would present good avenues for prosecution in the Baron case.

Jon Feigelson, a colleague from the career criminal unit, remembers Dinallo arriving on his first day with a stack of criminal law and procedure textbooks under his arm, “a number of which he had already read.” That was nothing compared to how Dinallo behaved once he started poring over Martin Act case law, amazed by the extent of the jurisdiction it gave him for criminal cases, but struck as well by the latitude it provided for civil cases—though only an attorney general could pursue these.

“He said, ‘Do they mean this?’ ‘Can they really mean that?’ I said, ‘Yes they can. Yes they do,’” Moscow recalled.

Through interviews and research in New York, London and Hong Kong to meet with the defrauded people, Dinallo helped build an investigation over the next year and a half that produced a 3/4-inch thick, 174-count indictment of the company and 13 of its employees for cheating investors, filing false reports with regulators and promoting bad stocks.

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Everyone pled guilty except for the chief financial officer, John McAndris, who was ultimately sentenced to five to 15 years after losing his trial.

That conviction was appealed, unsuccessfully, on claims that the prosecution had not produced minor documents properly to the defense, but McAndris’ lawyer, John Rieck, said he never felt that Dinallo, whom he remembered as “decent and honorable,” was involved in the behavior at issue. The conviction was upheld at appeal.

“People think I just came to the AG’s office and I pulled the Martin Act like Excalibur out of a stone and handed it to Eliot Spitzer,” Dinallo said. “It’s a little bit more than that.”

“He didn’t have this blind rage that some of these other clowns had on the prosecution team,” Rieck said. “I don’t think he was involved in the shenanigans, and I think on one level he probably was embarrassed by it.”

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hile pursuing the conviction, Dinallo helped win a $35 million settlement with Bear Stearns, which had been working with A.R. Baron and several other “bucket shops,” as they were known.

And he had come to see a common thread between many of these fraudulent financial firms, from Baron to Bernie Madoff.

“All these cases have the same aspect—from the outside, the rules look like they’re being upheld. And in fact, there’s almost this veneer of credibility and authenticity because there’s regulators out there, and they must know this stuff,” he said. “They look very boutique, and they look high-end. But actually they’re just every day running a criminal enterprise.”

Though he helped with an insider-trading investigation while doing the Baron case, the investigation of the firm and trial of McAndris took up most of the rest of Dinallo’s time in the office. About six months after McAndris was sentenced, Dinallo applied to be a bureau chief under the new attorney general. He made his pitch entirely around his vision of what could be done with the Martin Act. Eliot Spitzer was convinced.

And if not for Moscow assigning him that reading on the Baron case, Dinallo said, none of that, or what came next for Spitzer’s attorney general office, would have happened.

“People think I just came to the AG’s office and I pulled the Martin Act like Excalibur out of a stone and handed it to Eliot Spitzer,” Dinallo said. “It’s a little bit more than that.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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CITY HALL

Flush With Charter Cash, Pollard Aims To Give Montgomery Run For Her Money Montgomery is unfazed by challenger, anti-incumbent mood in race for 14th term

Bedford-Stuyvesant Ocean Hill District

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Sunset Part

Mark Pollard is hoping to out-hustle State Sen. Velmanette Montgomery in his bid to unseat her.

BY LAUREN KELLEHER

T

he first week in August, at Old-Timers Day in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery and her challenger, Mark Pollard, nearly collided rounding opposite sides of the same tree.

Montgomery and Pollard, an attorney and law professor, stood face-to-face for the first time in their campaign against each other.

“I told her I was glad to see her out there,” Pollard said, “even in the heat.”

Montgomery’s camp recalls a slightly different dialogue between the two opponents.

“It was a little funny,” said Montgomery’s spokesperson Jim Vogel, recounting the interaction. “[Pollard] saw her and just sort of started giggling. He told me ‘I don’t expect to win, maybe in 25 years when the senator steps down, people will know my name.’ I told him he would be in his seventies by then.”

Pollard is in a race that few have bothered to wage during the 26 years Montgomery has held her seat. The only mentionable challenge came in 2006 from Tracy Boyland, who lost nearly 2 to 1, even with her last name and the eight years on the Council she had just finished.

Thanks to some generous hedge-fund donors, though, Pollard is in the running financially. But as he phone-banks and door-knocks his way through August, not even his former boss can figure out why he is running.

“I’m surprised that he ended up challenging her,” said Council Member Al Vann, whose 2009 campaign was managed

by Pollard. “I don’t know what his endgame is. Is he trying to build a reputation?

Is he trying to unseat her? I don’t know.”

Montgomery says the race is about scapegoating. Her primary is one of three targeted by the pro-charter-school lobby.

State Sens. Shirley Huntley and Bill Perkins, with whom Montgomery joined forces to demand greater state oversight of charter schools, are also facing wellfunded challengers.

But Pollard says his race is about unseating an incumbent, too insulated by the party faithful who have ignored her controversial, and at times divisive, voting record.

A couple of weeks after Pollard’s runin with Montgomery, he stood atop the stairs at the Utica Avenue subway stop in Brooklyn, greeting morning commuters with a “How’s it going, my brother?”

He passed out flyers: “Our incumbent State Senator has been in office since Ronald Reagan was President … it’s time to welcome in new independent leadership that understands the needs of our changing community.”

After two hours of hand shaking, he sat down on a park bench nearby to take a break and recount his entry into politics.

“I decided to run a year ago,” he said, “even if it was on a shoe-string budget.”

Pollard banked just under $100,000 in campaign money in his July filing: the largest contributions came from hedgefund managers championing charter schools.

Montgomery’s camp questions Pollard’s high-rolling donor list, which is populated by people with addresses outside the district.

Pollard has no issue discussing his early-spring courtship with the people who have built his fundraising base. Ten days after a reception, where he delivered a stump speech to a variety of donors

from the financial services, the checks started rolling in, he said. By the July filing deadline he had piled up $91,110—his closing balance after expenditures was $69,895.47, compared to Montgomery’s $80,851.32.

Pollard sees his political benefactors as only a means to an end.

“If you look at my donors,” he said, “I have $10 to $20 from over 200 people.

The problem with my district is that there are too many people hurting financially.

All incumbents get big money from unions and PACs that make it impossible for insurgents. These education reform donors made my campaign viable.”

Viable enough to afford a few months worth of mailers, but certainly not enough to concern Montgomery, who makes clear that she considers Pollard a non-threatening opponent.

On one of her first days traveling around the district after the budget was finally done, the feeling is less like a campaign

Montgomery has fended off challenges before, and says she is expecting to do so again this year as she runs for a 14th term.

swing and more like a normal day in the district. In the morning, she recorded a video that will be played at the ceremony for the Coalition for Public Education’s Courage Award, which Montgomery was receiving along with Huntley and Perkins.

In the afternoon, she made two stops in Red Hook and toured a health care clinic in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Visibility in the district, or lack thereof, is one of Pollard’s main criticisms of Montgomery. He said only two in every 50 constituents he meets are Montgomery supporters and that more people have no clue who their state senator is—indeed, a few stop to ask as he works rush hour at the subway entrance.

The Pollard campaign is also highlighting Montgomery’s voting record, which contains a number of what it says are votes over an ideological bent, on issues she claims to champion, like juvenile justice. In 2008, she was one of two no votes on a bill criminalizing facilitating a sexual performance by a child with a controlled substance or alcohol. This year she has voted no, in committee, against a bill to prohibit a sex offender from being granted physical or legal custody of or unsupervised visitation with a child.

“Sampson is supporting every incumbent no matter how controversial their votes,” Pollard said of Senate Leader John Sampson. “In one way it is a good thing to have incumbent loyalty, but for this long? It’s not democracy. It shouldn’t always be incumbents versus insurgents.”

Montgomery does not place much stock in the anti-incumbent sentiment.

“There is such a toxic environment for political people right now,” she said. “The fact that I have an opponent is part of that. There is an assumption that people are so angry that anyone in this position is fair game.” lkelleher@cityhallnews.com

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CITY HALL

AUGUST 30, 2010

25

Steps Toward Peace Between Brooklyn Community And Medgar Evers Negotiations ongoing over grant money for controversial program

BY LAURA NAHMIAS

A

month after residents and the central Brooklyn political establishment began calling for the ouster of new Medgar Evers College president William Pollard, an uneasy peace is being forged.

That is due in part to a series of conversations the university’s new administration has been having behind closed doors with Brooklyn electeds, sources say.

Electeds feel more confident the new administration will listen to them, and the school’s leaders believe they may still be able to solicit member items from Council members and state legislators, which are an especially important piece of funding in a year when city universities are experiencing drastic budget cuts, school officials said.

A fracas between the groups broke out over stylistic changes at the 40-yearold historically black university, where

former President Edison O. Jackson had presided over a relatively calm period for more than 20 years.

“We represent change, but change from long-standing practices,” said Dr. Lloyd Blanchard, the school’s new chief operating officer. “I think that will always come with some challenges, both instrumental and political.”

The changes, which some deemed insensitive to the school’s history and the context of its neighborhood, included switching from black-owned Carver bank to Citibank for the school’s ATMs, cancellation of a Jazz Festival (which was subsequently reinstated), and the administration’s decision to withhold funding for a $2.4 million grant for the Center For Nu Leadership, a think tank run by two

ex-cons whose goal is to research ways to integrate formerly incarcerated people into educational environments.

The last program had become a pet project for Brooklyn electeds, many of whom have secured member items for the center in the years since it began. In 2009, the center received a $25,000 and a $5,000 grant from State Sen. Velmanette Montgomery. In the same year, it received member-item funding from Rep. Ed Towns, Senate Democratic Majority Leader John Sampson and Assembly Members Karim Camara and Hakeem Jeffries in amounts of about $5,000 each, according to SeeThroughNY. But school leaders say they have been able to gain sympathy throughout the community for their changes by promoting an understanding of the school’s financial difficulties, including a recent federal and state investigation launched against members of the former administration, looking into the possible misuse

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of grant funding.

“I’ve had wonderful conversations with Councilman Vann, Jeffries, Camara, Senator Adams, Senator Sampson,” Blanchard said.

The leadership has not yet made a decision on whether to grant the Center for Nu Leadership’s funding, and has continued to make changes in both the faculty and administration, sources within the school said.

Elected officials say they remain wary of the new leadership’s ability to compromise on the center’s funding, a decision which will be made within the coming weeks, said an aide to one elected official.

“I think at a certain point they’ve dug their heels in,” the aide said. “For them to relent would show some sign of them being completely wrong. To me, from what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen, these are fairly prideful individuals with fairly large egos.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

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August 30, 2010

Elections Pick Blue Jay A

fter six months of deadlock following the resignation of Marcus Cederqvist, the surprise candidacy of former State Sen. Serf Maltese quickly crystallized the selection process of George Gonzalez as the new executive director of the City Board of Elections. Though new in the top job, Gonzalez has been with the agency since the early 1980s, and says he has become very familiar with its ins and outs, as well as the criticisms that are often leveled at its operations.

Between overseeing the final preparations for the roll-out of the new optical scanner voting machines, Gonzalez spoke with City Hall about his new office, what he has to say to people who call the Board dysfunctional, and the attention he pays to the Bloomberg administration.

City Hall: Have you moved into your new office?

George Gonzalez: Yes. It’s much bigger. Just for the record, when I came to this agency 20 years ago, I started out with the thenexecutive director as his assistant in this office here. So I’m kind of acclimated to the office environment.

November rolls around, I’m not sure how we’re going to finish our mandate, because of the funding issue. People don’t realize what it costs to put on an election.

CH: There are people who say that the Board of Elections is a dysfunctional place. What do you say to those people?

GG: The Board of Elections is not dysfunctional. People don’t understand what we do. People think that we only work two days a year. I challenge anybody from the public, anybody from the media, if they would please come and visit my office during our peak period. During this peak period, our staff is dedicated. People do not realize what we have to go through to put on these elections. And for them to sit there and say that we’re dysfunctional, I take offense to that. And I challenge you, if you really think we’re that dysfunctional, to do me a favor: why don’t you come in, roll up your sleeves, and get down to do the work that we have to do, and then you’ll understand what it’s like. Is it a crazy environment? It certainly is a crazy environment. But we have everything under control, and at the end of the day, at 6 a.m. on the day of the election, we are ready to conduct an election.

CH: Do you think the Bloomberg administration is out to get the Board?

GG: I’m not going to get into that.

I know what my job is: my job is to make sure that elections get put on. I really don’t care what anybody else thinks.

CH: You spent six months in limbo, not knowing what was going to happen with the decision in the executive director job.

What did you learn about doing it along the way?

GG: In that six-month period that I was by myself, for lack of a better word, I wasn’t doing it alone, because I have 10 commissioners who meet on a weekly basis on a Tuesday and they are fully briefed as to the day-to-day operations of the agency. And at those weekly meetings, they give me my instructions as to how I should proceed for accomplishing the tasks for the coming week. In addition to that, we have, citywide, a little over 350 people who, I have to say, go above and beyond what is required of them to do the job. The outside world does not understand the type of work and the amount of hours that are required to put on an election. Once we get to our busy season, it is literally non-stop here.

CH: Is the Board of Elections a political place?

GG: This is a bipartisan agency.

Everything that we do requires a counterpart. I am a Democrat and my deputy is a Republican. This system is set up to make sure that no one side gets an advantage over the other.

CH: Do you think that there should be representatives of some of the other parties, particularly Independence, Working Families and Conservative?

GG: No. This is a state-constituted agency, and also in accordance with state election law, it’s the two biggest parties that receive the highest votes. We have to follow these New York State election laws.

andrew schwartz

CH: Are the purported problems with the rollout of the new voting machines being blown out of proportion?

GG: I think once the average person takes a look at the new system that’s going to be rolled out for Sept. 14, they’re going to say, “You know what, this is not as bad as I thought it was going to be.” In our implementing this system in such a short time that we were allotted to put it in, we are doing a hell of a job, putting in these long hours, to make sure that when the voter goes out there and sees the system for the first time, they won’t be surprised. One of the things we’re doing to make sure that the voting public knows that this new system is rolling out is, we do have a media campaign where we are actually doing demonstrations on a daily basis. As of right now, we’ve demonstrated the system to over 10,000 people. We have the website that gives you information as to the new system. We have media buys. We have the learning center at each of the borough offices that are open until 7 every day, so anybody could come in and feel free to try out this new system. If you want to sit there and spend seven hours with this system, they’re not going to stop you.

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CITY HALL

CH: What about the budget problems the Board has been talking about? Have those been blown out of proportion?

GG: To be honest with you, we know how to conduct our business. In my mind, you cannot put a price on democracy. In my 22 years that I’ve been here, we’ve always had the same problem: we do not get enough funding to put on an election. We’re always short. Right now, with the funding that we have, we’re able to conduct the September and November elections. When the end of

CH: Have you spoken to Serf Maltese since you beat him out for the executive director job?

GG: Actually, I reached out to him the day after. I left him a voicemail. But I have not heard from him, so I don’t know if he’s in town, or whatever the case may be.

CH: It took six months for you to get picked as now the third executive director in the last five years. The last executive director before that was in for a long time. How many years are you planning to stay?

GG: I’m here for the duration.

—Edward-Isaac Dovere eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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