Debates, street campaigning, door-to-door

Some of the Democratic clubs hosted debates among the candidates. Some civic groups did as well. I remember a debate in the gym at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic church, on 129^th  Street in Belle Harbor, down the block and across Neponsit Avenue from where I lived until I was nine years old. Pauline Emanuel, my fourth-grade teacher at P.S. 114 on Beach 135^th Street, showed up to cheer me on. An old regular Democratic clubhouse in Woodhaven hosted another debate; as did Rockaway Independent Democrats, the reform club my mother helped to found in the 1950s and that had supported me in my 1970s City Council races; and a few reform Democratic clubs in Brooklyn hosted others. Usually, the moderator would ask questions, and the three of us would take turns answering, rather than debating each other directly. I don’t remember whether Noach Dear ever participated. I don’t think he did, and if he did, it could not have been more than once.

I noticed something about the way the audiences responded to Katz and Weiner. Of course, I thought I responded with far more intelligence and substance than either, but Katz clearly gave much more relevant and substantive answers than Weiner. However, the audiences responded much more enthusiastically to Weiner, whose comments were “cute” in the attractive sense of that word, or self-deprecating, or funny. I persuaded myself that I got a good audience response too – probably wishful thinking. In retrospect, my responses must have been substantially more substantive, and substantially less effective, than Katz’s.

Knowing what the nation later learned about Weiner’s personal behavior, it may seem odd for me to attribute his success to “emotional intelligence.” Some might prefer to characterize his behavior as reflective of emotional idiocy. But the ability to charm, persuade, and mislead requires empathy, a close relative, if not the equivalent, of emotional intelligence. Studies have found that fraud perpetrators not only score higher on empathy than do other property offenders, they even score higher than a comparison group of college students. So Weiner’s odd personal proclivities could very easily coexist with an empathic understanding that underlay his ability to win over voters.

Democratic politics in the Rockaways had so deteriorated that an unstable and generally bizarre person from the reform club, Lou Simon, had defeated Sy Sheldon after the latter’s long and unimpressive tenure as male district leader (and Simon remains the district leader there). But I won the endorsements of the other reform Democratic clubs after debates at the forums they provided. Wishful thinking notwithstanding, the more intellectual audiences clearly gave me better responses than they gave Katz or Weiner. Of course, when told that he had “the support of all thinking Americans,” Adlai Stevenson quite correctly noted “That’s not enough. I’m going to need a majority.” It wasn’t enough for me either.

If Weiner out-campaigned me in debates, he did even better on the street. He gave short, brief, confident answers to questions. He joked and charmed and endeared himself. Preternaturally thin, his appearance and appeal regularly impelled older women – the largest voting bloc – to pinch his cheeks and urge him to eat more. His poise and charm coexisted with his patently urgent plea for voters’ support.

In contrast, while I did not actually say “if you want to be an idiot, vote for someone else,” I probably made it clear enough that that’s what I thought. On countless occasions I urged voters to “look at the record and make a rational choice.” Voters do not ordinarily do that, and my campaign was no exception.

While Weiner raised about as much money as I did, I believed he needed less time to do so, since Schumer was not actively opposing his fund-raising efforts, as he opposed mine, and may have helped him. Therefore, Weiner had more door-to-door time than I did. I think I rang all the doorbells in Trump Towers, a huge set of middle-income housing projects in Coney Island (built by Donald Trump’s father), and in the Dayton Towers apartment buildings along Shorefront Parkway in Rockaway, another such rich mine of middle-income voters. But Weiner rang them all several times, according to reports I received. Whatever Katz was doing, it did not win her a large percentage of the vote outside her own district. But as the final tally would ultimately reveal, that was almost enough for her to win.

 

Characters: Noach Dear – “a piece of work”

Noach Dear has his good points. Now a judge, he has stood up for suffering debtors against sleazy debt collectors. Even as a rascal, his uninhibited forthrightness had a certain charm. At one point in my congressional campaign, some mutual friends introduced me to a few wealthy Syrian Jews from the Ocean Parkway neighborhood, from whom I tried to raise money. None contributed, but one was open enough to tell me that Noach had done too many favors for him and his friends for them to help an opponent of his — me. He went on to reassure me, though, that he knew what Noach was – because Noach had told him. They were marching together in some parade, he said, when he began mildly berating Noach for a vote on some City Council item apparently at odds with the views of the Syrian Jewish community. Noach responded, “Look – I know what I am. I’m a prostitute!”

In my personal dealings with him, that kind of bizarre forthrightness was part of an openness and warmth that made it difficult for me to dislike him personally. However, friends of mine involved in certain business ventures with Dear complained bitterly about his behavior. I found his political behavior absolutely appalling, and thought he was a terrible public official.

A former professional saxophone player, he had served as District Manager of Community Board 12 (much of which covers Brooklyn’s Borough Park community) and helped Howard Golden attract the growing Orthodox Jewish population of Golden’s Borough Park-based City Council district. When Golden became Brooklyn Borough President, he helped engineer Dear’s succession to the City Council seat. Unlike the politically moderate Golden, however, Dear rose to prominence as a fierce opponent of gay rights who “often compared homosexuals to criminals and deviants.”  The Village Voice noted his “lifetime of hostile rhetoric towards gays, blacks, and women.”

Dear also created a charitable foundation, ostensibly to help Soviet Jews, but used the proceeds to pay for trips for his family and other personal expenses, for which was required to reimburse over $37,000 to the foundation and was censured by then-Attorney General Robert Abrams.  The foundation also paid him about $250,000 a year. During our congressional race, he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions (perhaps a third of the money he raised for that campaign), for which his campaign was fined $45,000 by the Federal Election Commission. Dear’s campaign treasurer, Abe Roth, also served as the CPA for Sholom Rubashkin’s Agriprocessors, the Iowa “kosher” meatpacking plant that mistreated animals and workers alike.

Most of my “member item” money – the infamous “pork barrel” or “slush fund” money that legislative leaders allow individual members to direct to pet causes – went to pre-kindergarten programs in the public schools in my district. However, out of respect for the work that Catholic schools and yeshivas also performed for the children in my district, and cognizant of the financial pressures many of them faced, I had sought ways to help them as well. I led the fight to reimburse those schools for administrative costs imposed on them by the earlier enactment of a law requiring them to exclude children who had not been immunized, and of course to keep records in order to do so. My amendment to the “mandated services” statute created the first new stream of public revenue in a long time made available to non-public schools in the State of New York. Its enactment won me effusive plaudits from the Orthodox Jewish community.  But Noach was “one of them,” and had done so many political favors for individuals and individual organizations that I could not win any substantial support in the Orthodox Jewish community (not counting my own Orthodox synagogue, the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center, most of whose members at the time, like me, were not actually Orthodox).

Ultimately, on September 11, 1998 the New York Post would endorse Noach in the race, while noting “some ethically questionable choices [he had made] in the 1980s,” calling me “a serious student of government,” but noting that I was “a truly straight talker, almost to a fault,” perhaps really meaning it was a fault.

Characters: Marty Markowitz

Among the many, many speeches I gave during the District Attorney campaign was one to the 71^st Precinct Police Community Council. Police community councils, enlisting volunteers who want to make sure that their local police contingent responds to the needs of the community as they see them, sometimes draw big crowds to their meetings when some incident or condition arouses that wider community. The neighborhood, and thus the crowd at the meeting, was one hundred percent black, except for three of the speakers: me, one of the police officials, and then-State Senator Marty Markowitz. Assembly Member Clarence Norman spoke, to polite applause. The police official spoke, to polite applause. Another black elected official spoke, to polite applause. I spoke, to polite applause. Then Marty Markowitz spoke.

Markowitz had represented a mostly Jewish district in southern Brooklyn. Almost without impact in Albany, Marty represented his constituents with fierce tenacity. I visited his office for some reason in the early 1980s, and heard him screaming at some commissioner on behalf of a constituent who needed some bureaucratic attention. I recognized the constituent: he was an obnoxious semi-lunatic who regularly annoyed his neighbors; Markowitz would have won more votes by insulting him publicly. But he was Marty’s constituent, and that was enough.

After the 1980 census, though, the Republican-controlled Senate leadership redistricted Markowitz so that his new constituency was almost entirely black. Marty stood in front of the crowd. “I know who I am,” he said. “I’m a short, fat Jewish guy. But don’t think that means I don’t understand your problems.

“My office is on Church Avenue, on the second floor. Some guys stand in front of it all day, dealing drugs. So I went down to talk to them. I said, ‘Look, I’m a State Senator. It doesn’t look right for you to be selling drugs right in front of my office.’ They thought about it, and answered me, sounding very reasonable. ‘You make a good point,’ they said. ‘You should move your office.’”

I’m sure my rendition doesn’t do justice to Marty’s performance. The crowd went nuts. They loved this guy.

The precinct council people tended to be older. When walking among younger black constituents, Marty sometimes carried a “boom box” with him, tuned to hip hop music. He seemed to become one of them, to the extent possible. I think he was sincere.

He was still single when we served together in Albany, although he was approaching 50. The legislative scene in Albany in those days included lobbyists’ receptions for legislators with enticing spreads of food and plenty of alcoholic refreshment, before the ethics laws restricted lobbyists’ ability to provide that sort of thing. Mary Lee King was not a lobbyist, but for decades ran the ZAP courier service, specializing in expedited delivery of memos to legislators for lobbyists facing some urgent legislative deadline. Mary Lee, a grandmother, still wore extremely short skirts. Six feet tall and gorgeous, she always made a strong and extremely pleasant impression. As I chatted casually with her, Marty sauntered over. From his five foot five inch level, he slowly raised his eyes to take in Mary Lee’s full dimensions. “What’s the use even fantasizing,” he mused very audibly, and walked away.

Marty’s years representing black Brooklyn won him enormous popularity. When he represented white Brooklyn, he solicited enough money from private sources to put on fabulous popular music concerts in Midwood and Brighton Beach, drawing thousands of people, at which he would give appropriate recognition – advertising – to the corporate sponsors. When he moved to black Brooklyn, he continued to preside at the original concerts, in his trademark white tie and tails, but added concerts in his black neighborhoods.

In 2001 [David Eichenthal and Howard Graubard corrected the mistaken date in the earlier version of this post] he ran for Brooklyn Borough President against Ken Fisher, a very intelligent white member of the New York City Council, and Jeanette Gadson, a very capable black deputy to Borough President Howard Golden. Golden of course disliked Markowitz for having tried to unseat him in previous years, before borough presidents were term-limited out. Toward the end of that race I had breakfast with Steve Cohn, my old subcommittee counsel (see post #57). Steve grew up with Ken, and considered him to be virtually a brother. I asked him how the race was going. “Well,” he said, “Marty will split the white vote with Kenny, and he’ll split the black vote with Jeanette.” Steve was too loyal to Kenny to say outright that Marty would win. But his meaning was clear enough.

The New York Times ran an endorsement in that race. After noting that Fisher “clearly prefers wrestling with global policy issues,” the Times endorsed Markowitz, suggesting that he “hir[e] technical experts to deal with complex areas” and thus “free himself to do what he does best, promote and help Brooklyn residents,” or, essentially, “The borough presidency is a job for an idiot. We endorse Marty Markowitz.” And Marty has in fact been a great borough president.

Hynes, Breezy Point, and the Times

As noted in an earlier post, Hynes had been president of the Breezy Point Cooperative, the organization that actually owned the land on which he and his neighbors lived in Breezy Point. Having grown up only a few miles away in Belle Harbor, a community then populated mostly by a mix of Jews and Irish-Americans, I knew very well how the Breezy Pointers excluded those who were not Irish-American, even as visitors, in the 1950s. By the 1980s, some Italian-American families, and even a few Jews, had been admitted to Breezy, but certainly no blacks. Hynes would argue that Breezy did not exclude blacks, they just did not happen to live there, but that explanation did not square with my historical knowledge of the place. (Based on the census of 2000, Breezy Point remained the “whitest” place in New York City.)

Hank Sheinkopf, my political advertising guru, designed a flyer portraying Breezy Point as America’s version of South African apartheid, and highlighting Hynes’s former presidency of the Co-op. Since the media had anointed Hynes the paragon of racial justice for his successful prosecution in the Howard Beach case, the flyer imposed inconvenient facts on the narrative. The City’s liberal establishment denounced the flyer. Mario Cuomo used it as an excuse to break his pledge not to get involved in Democratic primaries by endorsing Hynes.

The New York Times ran an editorial viciously condemning me. It said,

 

Assemblyman Dan Feldman, candidate for Brooklyn District Attorney, has all but accused his chief opponent, Charles (Joe) Hynes, of anti-Semitism and racism because Mr. Hynes owns a summer house in Breezy Point, Queens. Breezy Point is a cooperative community that’s predominantly Irish and Italian, with a smattering of Jewish, Hispanic and Asian residents. Mr. Feldman plays blatantly to ethnic and racial fears in fliers, one mailed to blacks and another to Jews.

Mr. Hynes successfully prosecuted the Howard Beach racial murder and makes his permanent home in polyglot Flatbush. To accuse him of bias is scurrilous, and incredible.

 

The Times and Mario Cuomo also joined in attacking me after my defeat based on a last-minute campaign flyer that my campaign had issued without my approval or knowledge, but Post #60 already told that story.

The Times editorial page attack may have been the work of Dorothy Samuels, a member of the Times editorial board and a very close friend of Schumer’s. Schumer might well have endorsed me publicly, and then had his friend Samuels try to destroy my political career from behind the cloak of anonymity via the Times editorial page. Many years later David Trager, sitting as a federal judge in the trial of Lemrick Nelson, the man who killed Yankel Rosenbaum in the Crown Heights race riot mentioned in post #67, tried to achieve racial balance in the composition of the jury.  The Times published a nasty editorial accusing Trager of “violating in one maneuver rules against seating jurors out of order, seating anyone who persistently expresses doubts about his ability to be fair, and excluding people from a jury on the basis of race or religion,” and acting “more like a politician with a mandate to satisfy ethnic constituencies than an impartial judge,” thus “badly damaging the city, and his own reputation.”  Two distinguished jurists, in a letter to the editor, noted that “the federal appeals court that ordered a new trial held that the procedures employed by Judge Trager were ‘undoubtedly meant to be tolerant and inclusive rather than bigoted and exclusionary,” that Trager had “worked hard to empanel a fair and impartial jury,” and called Trager “one of the best and most conscientious of federal trial judges.” Why, then, the over-the-top vicious editorial?

Back in 1981, while U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Trager thought that he should indict Schumer for using his state legislative campaign staff in his congressional campaign, and sought permission from the Department of Justice to do so (unsuccessfully). Of course I cannot prove that Samuels, acting as Schumer’s political version of Luca Brasi, wrote either editorial or others over the years attacking Schumer’s enemies. But circumstance suggests that explanation.

Fundraising for a District Attorney campaign

I had an important resource even for the fundraising part of the D.A. race: Louis Bochette. I had met Louis very briefly in the Lindsay presidential campaign in 1972 (see post #34). In 1977 when I started working for Schumer’s Subcommittee on City Management, I saw him again because our office at 270 Broadway was down the hall from that of Assembly Member and Education Committee Chair Leonard Stavisky’s office, and Louis worked for Stavisky. We renewed our acquaintance. In fact, Louis had just taken his master’s degree at John Jay, and recommended me to Eli Silverman, the public administration department chair at the time, to teach the administrative law class in which I had met Sheinkopf (see post #71). Stavisky, a highly intelligent legislator, had a difficult personality, so a few years later, Louis went to work for State Senator Joe Pisani, chair of the Senate Labor Committee, and, like Louis, a liberal Republican. Giuliani, as U.S. Attorney, won convictions against Pisani on eighteen counts, all of which, except those for tax evasion, were reversed on appeal.  Upon conviction, Pisani had to leave the Legislature, and I hired Louis for ten thousand dollars a year so that he would help me develop a strong pro-labor record, and incidentally help me get to know more of the leadership of organized labor.

Louis had started as an advance man for Nelson Rockefeller in the 1950s. He had grown up in Mechanicville, New York, a tough town near Albany, and although a small fellow, had played a lot of high school football. He spoke with a pronounced lateral lisp, wore a hearing aide, and was mostly bald by this time. You would first suspect that there was more to him than met the eye, or ear, when you met his wife of many years standing: an elegant, charming and articulate blond from Ohio, who held a significant management position at the Steelcase furniture company. As you got to know Louis, you would eventually recognize his considerable intellect and character. When my wife first met this paragon in my Albany office, he was walking around barefoot, offered her a limp handshake, and then spit into a cup. But after a while even Cecilia grew to love “Uncle Louis.”

His role in the D.A. race, however, was to torment me. That is, I needed to raise a lot of money for this campaign, and he knew how to do it. He would sit beside me in the tiny office at 16 Court Street that George Jaffee, a friend of Lupka’s, had let me use as a law office, and force me through hour upon hour of fundraising telephone calls. Using my desire to win as the stick, he made me call everyone I knew, everyone I had ever known, friends, relatives, enemies, and beg them for contributions. Then he made me call everyone I didn’t know.

This was much worse than subway stops. Most people there ignore you, but at least the process ends after a two-hour stretch, and it’s mindless enough to do in your sleep. Fundraising requires consciousness of what a boring and degrading thing you are doing. It’s not a question of selling out; it’s just a matter of projecting confidence, repeating the same pitch ad nauseum, tweaked appropriately to each calling target, and accepting a tiny success ratio. But I became sharply aware of the fact that had I spent my years in some sort of boiler-room telephone scamming operation, I would have been better trained for this than from the years I spent steeping myself in the details of public policy and the public interest.

Even so, I did not know how much I would be able to raise, or that I would be able to raise enough. What I did know, from my past campaign experience, that I could mail to Brooklyn’s prime voter list for about $35,000 a mailing. Prime voters are those who voted in three out of the last four primaries. They make up as little as a fifth or so of registered Democrats, depending on the district.  Most years, that list changes by only about fifteen or twenty percent. Therefore, campaigns save enormous amounts of money by mailing to only prime voters rather than to all Democrats. Of course, in Brooklyn, especially in those days, once you won the Democratic primary, you were pretty much guaranteed to win the general election.

To use electronic media successfully in a Brooklyn primary, you had to spend at least $250,000 on it. Otherwise, you would buy too little television or radio time for voters even to notice you, given the cost of media in the metropolitan area. Not knowing that I could raise that much, I felt forced to go the mailing route.

As it turned out, I raised about $500,000, and might have been able to go electronic. But I did not know that early enough. And in most years, it would not have mattered. But in 1989, with the candidacy of David Dinkins, the first successful black candidate for mayor of New York City, voters turned out in unprecedented numbers in the half dozen predominantly black Assembly district in Brooklyn. Based on the usual Democratic primary turnouts in those districts, I did extremely well – my vote total there would have constituted large majorities. Those voters had received my mailings.

But Hynes beat me in those districts two and three to one. Those who had never voted before in primaries had never heard from me, but they heard Hynes’ radio ads and saw his television commercials. Especially with the racist murder of Youssef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, coming on the heels of the Howard Beach case, his campaign had special salience.

Why I Ran to be Brooklyn District Attorney

When it became clear that Liz Holtzman would run for New York City Comptroller, I decided to try to succeed her as Brooklyn District Attorney. As chair of the Assembly Correction Committee, I spent time in most of the State’s prisons. I saw the tremendous waste of lives and money produced by the prosecution and incarceration of massive numbers of low-level non-violent drug offenders under the Rockefeller drug laws. I also saw the political need of upstate senators to keep prisons full in their districts in order to provide at least some correction officer jobs to ameliorate the economic disaster tormenting their region. I knew that they would therefore frustrate my efforts to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws for a long time to come. At least as Brooklyn D.A. I could choose other prosecutorial priorities.

Also, Brooklyn had nineteen other Assembly members, but only one D.A. Reasons of ego played a role.

Charles “Joe” Hynes had recently won convictions of three white Howard Beach defendants who had caused the death of Michael Griffith, one of four black men chased by those defendants into moving traffic apparently because they stood out in that overwhelmingly white neighborhood. Mario Cuomo had appointed Hynes as special prosecutor in the case because prosecution witnesses had refused to cooperate with Queens District Attorney John Santucci, whom they viewed as too close to his Howard Beach constituency. The case garnered tremendous attention and publicity.

Rampant rumors had Hynes entering the race. But this did not deter me. My friends told me that Hynes voted out of his residence in Breezy Point, where he spent his summers, a few miles west of where I grew up in the Rockaways, in Queens, although he lived in Brooklyn the rest of the year. I thought we would be able to disqualify him as a legal resident of Queens, based on his voting record. However, when I sent campaign workers to the Queens Board of Elections, no voting records for Hynes could be located. Nor could we locate any in Brooklyn.

Still, Mel Miller said “No Hynes beats no Feldman in Brooklyn.” Based on traditional voting patterns, this should have been true. For a long time, Jewish turnout in Democrat primaries had been decisive in Brooklyn. Also, I thought my strong pro-prosecution record would serve me well: author of the Organized Crime Control Act, Oral Search Warrant Law, Juror Shield Law; a yes-vote on the death penalty when that was still a hot and popular issue; the leader of the unsuccessful, but law-enforcement-backed campaign to change New York’s criminal-friendly transactional immunity law to use immunity (read Tales from the Sausage Factory for an explanation of this technical but important effort).

When Howard Golden, Brooklyn’s Democratic County Leader and Borough President, had pleaded with me to take a job I did not want, Democratic district leader, I had accommodated him. I had also supported his re-election when Marty Markowitz challenged him in the 1985 primary.  I thought he owed me some support. Further, seventeen of my nineteen fellow Brooklyn Assembly members endorsed me – all except Al Vann and Frank Barbaro. Schumer endorsed me at my special request, in an effort to reduce the friction between us. Two of Brooklyn’s three other Members of Congress, Ed Towns and Steve Solarz, endorsed me as well. I had helped Major Owens win his congressional seat against his then fellow State Senator Vander Beatty, but of the congressional delegation, only he refused to endorse me. The law did not permit Holtzman, as a sitting District Attorney, to make a political endorsement, but she did appoint me to her Advisory Committee.

Norman Adler, my old college political science teacher and the extraordinarily intelligent political director of District Council 37 of AFSCME, a major public sector union, agreed to advise my campaign, as a friend, for very little money — $5000, with another $10,000 payable when I won. Hank Sheinkopf had been a police officer and a student of mine when I taught administrative law as an adjunct professor at John Jay College in 1977. Now his star was rising in political advertising, which he would handle for me. I had a lot going for me, I thought. I worried mostly about raising money.

The Club

Just as politics and decency required my continued attention to my neighborhood and my synagogue, they required my continued attention to the Democratic clubs. The reform clubs imposed a lesser burden: they did not meet very often. In fact, I did not regard my attendance at their meetings as a burden at all: these were people with whom I would naturally want to associate, and our shared principles made for more interesting and enjoyable disagreements when we did disagree.

The regular club was another story. I don’t think I am a snob. I like most people, and I liked most of the people at the club. But they did not engage in politics to better their society. Their fundamental motivations and interests rarely connected with mine. Of course, as Democrats I was glad to see their support for such candidates as Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton, but even in those campaigns I could see that my emotional investment considerably exceeded theirs.

And a few of them were truly repulsive. In the interest of avoiding a libel suit, I will not use Milty’s last name, but no one used it at the Club anyway. He was generally known as “Milty Weasel.” In the 1973 Democratic primary for mayor, Abe Beame and Herman Badillo came in ahead of Mario Biaggi and Al Blumenthal, requiring a run-off between the former two. Late in the campaign, a carousel playing loud Puerto Rican music, accompanied by a loud voice amplified on a bullhorn shouting “Vote for Badillo!,” made its way through Jewish neighborhoods at midnight or one or two in the morning. Needless to say, the Badillo campaign was not responsible for the carousel.  This was a Milty Weasel production, on behalf of the regular organization, which opposed Badillo.

In a City Council primary in the same era, photos on opposition leaflets appeared showing candidate Rhoda Jacobs’ lawn covered with garbage. The text questioned the fitness for office of one who had so little respect even for her own property so as to keep it in such condition. Of course the garbage had been strewn, and photographs taken shortly thereafter, under the direction of Milty Weasel.

I heard these stories about Milty, and was assured there were others. I encountered two people in my life who seem to radiate a palpable aura of evil. As it happened, both were small, slight men, but a rattlesnake isn’t very large either. By sheer coincidence, Roy Cohn once came within ten feet of me at some large event. I moved away as rapidly as I could. I fled Milty’s presence the same way.  (Many years later I met him relaxing on a beach. He seemed to regret his sins, and no longer exuded evil vibes.)

Like Milty, the chair of the Community Planning Board that covered most of the 45^th Assembly District resided in the district’s most expensive neighborhood, Manhattan Beach, and naturally belonged to the Club as well. A good-looking, well-educated and well-spoken man, he was the object of deference in the Club and in the community. On July 1, 1980, the New York Times reported his indictment as a member of an “arson-for-profit ring.”

Shortly after the indictment, Sandy Singer, the big-mouthed but good-hearted criminal defense lawyer, summed up the situation by loudly announcing a question in the Club one night: “Who are “Manhattan Beach’s most prominent citizens?” When no clear answer was forthcoming, Sandy supplied it himself: “Milty Weasel and Bruce the Torch!”

Those of you who know Tom Lehrer’s song “My Home Town” may find some of this familiar.

Nancy Nierenberg and Florence Arfin served as Lupka’s chief lieutenants. Lupka seemed to consider Florence his sergeant-at-arms as well. Both were fiercely loyal to Herb, for reasons I never learned, but on the basis of Florence’s large size and aggressive Brooklyn demeanor Herb told me she’d put any threatening visitor to the Club outside – through the wall. Florence always treated me with great kindness, though, and Nancy seemed to treat everyone that way. [The following comments were prompted by Howard Graubard's reminder to me that after the 1982 reapportionment, Mary Tobin succeeded Florence Snyder as female leader:] When Liz Holtzman was elected State Committeewoman/District Leader in the 44th Assembly District in the 1970 Democratic primary, most female “leaders” in Brooklyn allowed their male counterparts to dominate. Liz, of course, did no such thing, and in her one term in that role sued the party for gender equality and generally established herself as a force to be reckoned with. Florence Snyder, the female district leader in the 45th, followed the more usual pattern.

The 1982 reapportionment added Marine Park and Gerritsen Beach to the 45th, which shifted the religious balance of the district, making it somewhat more Catholic. Although I have never seen a formal estimate, I would make an educated guess that pre-1982 the Democratic primary vote would have broken out as about 10 percent Protestant, 25 percent Catholic, and 65 percent Jewish, with the vote in the first few years after 1982 vote still perhaps 10 percent Protestant, but now 30 percent Catholic and 60 percent Jewish. Jews still registered Democratic and voted in primaries more heavily than their numbers would indicate. Therefore, while pre-1982 the general population and general election voting breakdown might have been 15 percent Protestant, 35 percent Catholic, and 50 percent Jewish, post-1982 the numbers were probably something like 15 percent Protestant, 40 percent Catholic, and 45 percent Jewish. Florence had been female leader for many years. Although her name was Florence Snyder Campagna, she was Jewish and ran as “Florence Snyder,” a name that did not trumpet a non-Jewish identity.

Mary Tobin had been active politically in Marine Park. A Roman Catholic, and with a name that signaled her Irish-American ethnicity, she brought geographical, ethnic, and religious balance to the “ticket.” Ideologically more conservative than Lupka or myself, she also better reflected the political leanings of the new parts of the district. She became the third members of what was, at least nominally, the Democratic triumvirate of the 45th.

In 1987, the Office of Court Administration adopted a rule prohibiting any employee of the New York court system from serving in an elected political post, such as district leader. Herb, as the jury clerk in the Office of the Kings County Clerk, had to step down. Neither Herb nor anyone else in authority had any confidence in those members of the Club who wanted to take his place. They did have confidence in someone who very much disliked the idea of taking his place – me. By this time, Howard Golden, the Brooklyn Borough President, had succeeded Meade Esposito as County Leader, and he and Herb pleaded with me to take the job temporarily – for three months, they said, till they could find someone else. For selfish reasons, I didn’t want to see the Club decline, as it surely would have otherwise. (Mary Tobin, although more assertive than Florence Snyder, would not have been accepted by most of the Club’s stalwarts as the “real” leader.) If I could no longer count on the Club to get petition signatures to put me on the ballot and to help me fend off potential primary challengers, my life would be more difficult. So I accepted.

Three months turned into eighteen. I learned that much of the leader’s job consisted of providing psychotherapy to its members, in the guise of settling ridiculously petty disputes among them. I had and sought no patronage to dispense.

I don’t think County – Howie Golden, at that point, but he might have acted through his underlings —  really had much to allocate to me in any event, even if I had sought it. Over the sixteen or seventeen years of tenure as leader, Lupka did promote several club attorneys to judgeships: Victor Barron, whose political work, judgeship, and criminal conviction we mentioned in a previous post, Richard Huttner, Irving “Red” Levine, Jerry Cohen, Marsha Steinhardt. Liz Holtzman, when she was District Attorney, on the basis of credible allegations accused Red of judicial misconduct by abusing a rape victim who was testifying. When it appeared that Holtzman was mistaken, the word on Court Street was that she had accused him of the only bad thing he had not done. He was later removed from the bench for fixing a case. Huttner was rebuked by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct for unethical behavior. Jerry Cohen, whose guilt was less clear, was removed for supposed involvement in bribery. Steinhardt, who had been on the bench since the early 1990s, has served with honor. Lupka also placed lawyers in the Club with some of the judges he had “made,” and probably acquired and dispensed patronage posts such as law guardianship or perhaps city contracts that I never knew about. Even if County had offered me such things, I would not have wanted to be involved. In any event, they didn’t offer.

I escaped the district leadership when Hal Epstein, a school principal and an expert in the education of children with speech and hearing difficulties, agreed to take the job.

Schumer Suffers, and Hates

Many years ago Schumer, then a member of Congress, told a friend of mine that the three people he hated most in the world were Liz Holtzman, Steve Solarz, and me. I had excellent reason to dislike him; why did he dislike me? The following may explain his dislike of Holtzman, who had tragically, in my view, lost her campaign for the U.S. Senate by less than one percent of the vote to Republican Alphonse D’Amato, but in 1981 became Brooklyn District Attorney. I will leave to others the explanation of his dislike for Solarz.

Shortly after Schumer won his primary for Congress on the same day I won mine for the Assembly, and by an even bigger margin, with 78 percent of the vote against two members of the City Council, Schumer became the target of a federal investigation. The Village Voice had run an article in December charging that Schumer had used his legislative employees to work on his congressional campaign, and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York launched an investigation on that basis. Schumer asked me to recommend a criminal defense attorney, and I suggested Paul Rooney, an excellent solo practitioner who had been a key prosecutor in Robert Morgenthau’s office when he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. Schumer engaged Rooney for a while, but then turned to Arthur Liman, a partner at the Paul Weiss law firm with strong political connections as well as great legal skills.

I saw no evidence that Schumer used taxpayer dollars to pay for campaign work. Certainly my own case strongly suggested the contrary. If the time I spent representing him at community events counted as campaign work, taxpayers certainly had not been shortchanged, since I was putting in at least fifty hours a week, and often more, on the investigative work the State paid me to do. But, as a reporter close to the matter told me, and as an article in New York Magazine strongly implied, with Schumer as the obvious source of the implication, Schumer was convinced that I had “dropped the dime” on him to the Village Voice, and was therefore responsible for his torment.

In actuality, as the reporter told me much later, one of our committee staff members, Bob O’Melia, had in fact made the allegations to the Voice. We had hired O’Melia, a former U.S. Marine with a Ph.D., because he had impressed us with his earnestness and intellect, and seemed likely to be a good investigator. As time went on, he did begin to seem somewhat eccentric, but I certainly had no idea that O’Melia would do or had done such a thing as to attack Schumer in such manner until the reporter told me.

I was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury investigating Schumer, and told them exactly what I knew – that in fact I had never seen a shred of evidence that Schumer had shortchanged the State by using committee employees for campaign work.

Nonetheless, Schumer remained convinced that I was the villain responsible for his suffering. And his suffering must have been intense. It took more than three years for the investigations by two successive U.S. Attorneys and then by Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman to conclude. Whatever his faults, he deserves considerable credit for sustaining the tremendous energy with which he pursued his congressional and political interests while under such agonizing psychological pressure.

Why blame me? I speculate as follows. As explained in previous postings, on the basis of the vast differences in our personal style, Schumer had probably concluded, prior to my successful Assembly campaign, that I had minimal ability as a politician. In fact, compared with him, I did lack many of the important political traits. When I won, however, he may have reassessed, and concluded that I resembled him more than he had thought. On that basis, he may have come to a wrong conclusion.

Had Schumer just won the Assembly seat, with me having won the congressional seat – the next higher rung on the political ladder – he would undoubtedly have taken the opportunity to destroy me in order to clear a path for himself. He may well have been persuaded that I had “ratted” on him on the basis of his conclusion that I must resemble him more than he had imagined. In this he would have been mistaken.

 

The Democratic Assembly Member from the 45th A.D.

Technically, I had won only the Democratic nomination for the Assembly seat. But even my Republican opponent knew better. As we campaigned at the same subway stop one morning, he did not bother to use a different entrance, but greeted voters with “Hi! I’m Barry Kaufman, the Republican candidate for Assembly, and here is Dan Feldman, your next Assemblyman.” I won the election with about 80 percent of the vote, as was normal for a Democratic in that part of Brooklyn. The last time a non-Democratic had been elected from the neighborhoods that now comprised the 45^th Assembly District was 1937, and the district did not elect a Republican. Then designated the 2^nd Assembly District, it elected Benjamin Brenner of the American Labor Party. He lost to a Democratic the next year, but in 1939 Mayor LaGuardia appointed him to a city judgeship.  So far as I can ascertain, Brenner was the only non-Democratic sent by that district (first designated as the 2d Assembly District in 1896) to the Assembly since 1923. From 1896 to 1905, John McKeown, a Democrat, was its Assembly member; in 1906, Patrick Donohue, Republican; 1907-1908, James Jacobs, Democrat; 1909-1916, William J. Gillen, a Democrat; 1917, Patrick Larney, Democrat; 1918, William H. Fitzgerald, Republican; 1919, Thomas J. Cox, Democrat; 1920-1921, James Mullen, Republican; 1922 Edmund H. Alexander, Republican; 1923, John Lucey, Democrat; 1924-1929, Murray Hearn, Democrat; 1930-1937, Albert D. Schanzer, Democrat; 1938, Brenner, American Labor Party, as noted; 1939-1944 Leo F. Rayfiel, Democrat; 1945-1955, J. Sidney Levine, Democrat; 1956-1962, Samuel Bonom, Democrat; 1963-1965, Noah Goldstein, Democrat. [An earlier version of this post included a few errors and some gaps in the information. Howard Graubard's invaluable research remedied these deficiencies.]

The one-person one-vote decisions by the United States Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 633 (1964) had repercussions for New York State. The courts were dissatisfied with the reapportionment scheme the Legislature devised for the 1964 elections. They allowed those elections to go forward under that scheme, but required the Legislature to devise a new plan under which the State would be required to hold a special election only one year later. Thus, the district drawn for the 1964 elections would be represented for one year, 1965, and the new districts drawn for the 1965 special elections would be represented for the next year, 1966. What had been the 2d Assembly District for the most part became the 54^th Assembly District for the 1965 election and the 1966 term. However, the courts, unhappy with the 1965 reapportionment plan as well, demanded a new plan for the normal 1966 elections. But the Democrats now dominating the Assembly and the Republicans dominating the Senate fought for so long that it appeared unlikely that they would agree on lines in time. Thus, the respective party leaders agreed to have the New York State Court of Appeals appoint a commission to draw the new lines. Those lines would shape the districts to be represented by the legislators to be elected in 1966 and to serve in 1967 and 1968. After that, reapportionments took place on a normal schedule, that is to say, during the years after the decennial censuses, for the elections in years ending in “2”: 1972, 1982, 1992, 2002, 2012, etcetera. What had been the 2d, and for one year the 54^th, now (more or less) became the 45^th Assembly District. With minor changes, it remains so to this day.

Max Turshen had represented an Assembly District known as the 19^th, in the northern part of Brooklyn, from 1937 to 1944. His district was redesignated as the 1^st from 1945 to 1965, and, for the 1966 session, as the 43^rd.  For the 1966 session, Noah Goldstein still represented what had been the 2^nd Assembly District, now the 54^th. But the reapportionment plan governing the 1966 elections could not accommodate both Goldstein and Turshen. Turshen, with far more seniority, and according to Lupka, a warmer personality, had his boundary lines extended so far south that his new district took over the bulk of what had been Goldstein’s territory. Turshen then represented the new 45^th Assembly District in 1967 and 1968.

Seniority and personal warmth may not have been the only factors favoring Turshen. Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows invented “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York” in making Guys and Dolls out of Damon Runyon’s Broadway stories. However, Albany tradition holds that members of the Assembly populate what is truly the oldest established permanent floating card game in New York, a poker game dating back to the nineteenth century, also known as “the Assembly Finance Committee.” (The actual fiscal committees of the two houses are the Senate Finance Committee and the Assembly Ways and Means Committee.) When I arrived as a member of the Assembly in 1981, I learned that certain other members gave my late predecessor Stephen J. Solarz a less-than-warm reception after he defeated Turshen in the 1968 primary. Turshen’s popularity in those quarters derived from the fact that he played regularly but ineptly in the card game, and almost always lost. Solarz took away their favorite “pigeon.” Perhaps Turshen’s popularity on that score also helped to account for the line-drawers’ preference for him over Goldstein in the 1965 reapportionment plan.

Solarz represented the 45^th from 1969 through 1974; Schumer from 1975 through 1980; and I would do so from 1981 through 1998. Lena Cymbrowitz succeeded me in 1999, and after her untimely death from cancer in 2000 was succeeded by her husband Steven, who still serves.  Turshen served for 32 years, but since he represented the 45^th for only two of those years, I represented the district longer than anyone else at least going back to 1896.

Winning

Schumer had endorsed Lupka, but not me, by mid-summer. My campaign printed joint leaflets and mailings with Lupka, including Schumer’s endorsement of Lupka and Holtzman’s endorsement of me. Lupka assured me that most voters wouldn’t read the material carefully enough to understand that Schumer had not endorsed me.

By the late summer, our campaign’s informal polls (we didn’t have the money to pay for formal ones, but ours turned out to be quite accurate), had me beating Margules two to one. Apparently Schumer had the same information. Now that I was virtually assured of victory, he endorsed me.

The day before the primary, the Margules campaign dropped another leaflet throughout the district filled with baseless accusations against me. Apparently, the leaflet scared our street-level campaign supporters, because a few voters must have asked them if the accusations were true. The street-level troops reported their fears to our captains. At that level, having perhaps each heard from two or three underlings, the captains got nervous. When the captains’ reports got to me that night, by that time concentrated and exaggerated through three levels of distillation, all the trauma of my previous defeats came back to me. Momentarily convinced that the voters would believe the lies, I literally writhed in psychic agony on the floor of the regular clubhouse on Coney Island Avenue.

Lupka, knowing no other way to run, had followed another valuable morsel of political wisdom throughout the campaign: run scared. Whenever I had gotten too optimistic, he had pulled me back to earth. But that night, he laughingly chided me that now, when victory really was about to be ours, I had finally decided that we would lose.

Having seen Larry’s somewhat scattered approach to organization, Lupka carefully chose a primary day coordinator from his own ranks instead. The primary day coordinator would have the assignment I had taken on in Liz Holtzman’s district leader race: assuring that our people covered the inside of polling places, to prevent cheating, and the outside, to hand out leaflet and beg for votes, in the hope of influencing those who waited until the last minute to make up their minds. The Board of Elections assigns voters to voting machines based on the “election district” in which the voter resides. The Assembly District included 104 election districts. Some polling places included only one voting machine, for one election district; other polling places could include as many as twenty.  Polling places could be the lobby of an apartment building, a library, a church, but most of the voting machines were in school cafeterias or gyms. Voters in the 45^th Assembly District reported to about forty different polling places, all told.  The job also required a “pulling” operation: making sure that every voter we had previously identified as favorably inclined toward us, actually got to the polls to cast a vote.

Campaign experts know that these election day operations affect a tiny percentage of the vote – probably less than two percent. But two percent can make the difference in a close race. Also, the size and scope of the election day operation offers a good indicator of a campaign’s overall strength and efficiency: if the candidate has a lot of support and good organization, he or she will be able to mobilize more volunteers on election day (or primary day). Among the regulars, the reformers, my campaign people, family and friends, we had a fair-sized army.

The regular Democratic organization also had a tradition at this time with which I, as a reformer, was unfamiliar, called “walking around money.” The night before primary day, the club’s captains – thirty or so in number, all told – formed a line facing Lupka and Florence Campagna, the female leader. In turn, each approached the leaders and was given fifty dollars. Lupka told me that this would cover whatever expenses the captains incurred on primary day. I still don’t know what expenses those were.

Lupka made an excellent choice of primary day coordinator. To call Victor Barron a perfectionist would be an understatement. If Victor needed to confirm an assignment with a volunteer and the volunteer didn’t answer the phone at 8 a.m., 3 p.m., 7 p.m., or 11 p.m., Victor would call at 3 a.m., or so it seemed. Lupka joked that if the volunteer tried to beg off, having broken a leg, Victor would ask why she couldn’t use crutches; if both legs, why not a wheelchair? Victor, in those days an attorney, would many years later become a hard-working and intelligent judge. Unfortunately, he would also go to prison for taking a bribe. But Victor ran our election day operation to a T.

A voter could not approach a polling place without being accosted by a group of volunteers handing out leaflets for Feldman and Lupka. Barron assigned Lupka’s wife and my father to the biggest polling place, Cunningham Junior High School, on East 17^th Street between Avenue S and Avenue R. My 76-year old father, warm, kindly, and a shade under five feet tall, would ask each voter to vote for me so that he could “sleep well” that night. Quite a few voters told him that he would get a very good night’s sleep, and many eventually reported the story back to me as well. Lupka later insisted that his wife had been almost equally effective.

As the polls closed at 9 p.m. on September 9, 1980, we gathered at the Kings Highway Democratic Club on Coney Island Avenue to tally the results as our poll watchers brought them in from each polling place. No bad news came. In short order it became clear that we had won a smashing victory: about 10,000 votes for me, 5000 for Margules, 2500 for Rothman. The membership clamored for a speech. I thanked them for their enthusiastic and strenuous efforts. Despite my disapproval of Margules and his campaign, I could not help but express my sympathy at that moment: “I know what it is to lose,” I said, suppressing some rumblings among the crowd that wanted to take some joy in his defeat. But I took plenty of joy in our victory.