City for Sale
Newfield, Jack & Barrett, Wayne
CITY FOR SALE: ED KOCH AND THE BETRAYAL OF NEW YORK Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett/Harper & Row/$22.50 Thomas Mallon E leven years after first taking office as Mayor of the City of New York,...
...in race relations at the University of Chicago...
...But the 78-year-old Esposito doesn't get it: BIAGGI: Listen to me, listen to me...
...It doesn't interfere with any other software you use...
...Or even on lesser questions, like whether state and federal governments are inherently cleaner than municipal ones...
...You knew her before...
...Or return it and you owe us nothing...
...Actually, I wouldn't let Mr...
...If every such episode in New York's history were called by that name, then most new administrations would be stealing the ashes of the last one...
...In fact, she's what the mayor used to like to call a "wacko"--a publicity glutton who testified against her own mother and, while the trial was still going on, sang a couple of numbers one night at THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 El Morocco...
...UnionSquareware, P.O...
...A basic, essential tool for anyone doing research...
...There's no question Koch read the bosses wrong...
...Why 1951 is chosen as a watershed is a bit perplexing, but one thing that occurred that year is the testimony of former mayor William O'Dwyer (who had resigned and hotfooted it to an ambassadorship in Mexico the previous year) before a Senate rackets committee...
...The little tin boxes never stop jingling, but Newfield and Barrett quote Jimmy Breslin, after he'd figured out his friends, writing in his column that "this is the scandal of our time, and from now on I will bring it to you first . . ." This only adds self-importance to chagrin...
...You're my host...
...And the authors never back up from it...
...I am not a schmuck," said Koch, several years ago, and no one doubted it...
...Try it for 30 days...
...Lindenauer would finally testify against Stanley Friedman, the Bronx borough president who had another piece of the action...
...each hidden blot seemed determined to be found...
...From page one: "Ed Koch, three weeks past his sixty-first birthday, was the king of this singular city-state that was the finance, media, and creative-energy mecca of the planet...
...Kot operate on my grocery list...
...On page 107, Newfield and Barrett write: "A former law partner remembers Koch as having had the perfect personality for acrimonious divorces `vengeful, punitive, thriving on personalized conflict, even if it was vicarious.' "2 At the top of the following page, Adlai Stevenson is said to have had an "elegant purity that appealed to intellectuals, and to young idealists like Ed Koch...
...You can't find things when you need them...
...What Koch's most liberal opponents really dislike is anyone's success and victory, and throughout his first two terms they had to snarl and writhe as 'See William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (1978...
...He has undergone a physical transformation from loud bald stringbean to loud bald muffin ("Not bald, balding," Koch insists), and he seems less happy, but he is no less smart...
...From Chapter Four: "The Depression made the Koch family downwardly mobile...
...That's how politics go here...
...The most vivid moments in the book come from surveillance tapes and trial transcripts...
...And from Chapter Ten: "The Mafia has never issued a printed organizational chart like the Ford Foundation, or a published roster like the New York Mets...
...ESPOSITO: Of course...
...Every sleuth knows you have to look for both opportunity and motive, and every theologian knows that God distributes the first much less evenly than the second...
...Then, if you want to keep it, send us $99...
...He hardly expected Manes, the Queens borough president, to be at the head of a scheme (along with his quack psychoanalyst, Geoffrey Lindenauer) to make a fortune in bribes out of running the city's Parking Violations Bureau...
...The authors offer some witty epigraphs for their book, among them Gibbon's statement that "Corruption is the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty...
...But it is also true that he is sometimes held to a ridiculous standard of civility...
...But all we get is a kind of higher meaninglessness: "The crime rate among ordinary people in the poorest neighborhoods of New York—Seventyninth Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Forty-eighth Precinct in the Bronx—is one per hundred...
...This doesn't show a taste for the lurid so much as a sense of humane proportion, mercifully still intact...
...Mario Biaggi about the Florida vacation he and his mistress were treated to by Brooklyn's Meade Esposito, Biaggi calls Esposito so they can get their stories straight...
...it was a newly middle class of municipal workers—who finally voted against Lindsay, anyway.' Whatever the dangers of moral relativism, this reality, which Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett never discuss, should be kept in mind throughout any reading of City for Sale, as should what the authors state on page three: "Koch . . . restored the city's credit in the bond markets, reduced its debt service from 17 to 9 percent, and paid back the federal loans a year ahead of schedule...
...ESPOSITO: I met her before...
...Most people outside New York would still consider Koch a liberal, but things are different here...
...ESPOSITO: Sure...
...3Myerson had helped get Koch elected in 1977 by appearing with him everywhere—even on a campaign poster—in "The Immaculate Deception," media-meister David Garth's attempt to get around rumors that Koch was gay...
...Newfield and Barrett refer to his "orgy of verbal assaults on Jesse Jackson," including the time when, here in Hymietown, Koch told the Jews they would have to be "crazy" to vote for Jackson...
...ECS, Ilion, NY WRITERS AND RESEARCHERS: LEND US YOUR MESSY DESKS, CLUTTERED DRAWERS, AND STUFFED BRIEFCASES FOR JUST 8 MINUTES A DAY...
...Newfield and Barrett acknowledge their editor, Rick Kot, for his "surgically sensitive" work...
...When FBI agents come to question Rep...
...In 1975, the city had a $1.8 billion debt...
...Among the county leaders of the Democratic organization in this one-party city, that rate had become fifty per hundred...
...If events proved them a bit sappy, how much less so than Newfield and Barrett, who refer to the "sacking of a government...
...Koch "lay in his oversized bed"--lonely—taking "his bunker mentality" with him to the office...
...In fact, Koch has about as much of a bunker mentality as Jessica Hahn...
...People in this city, for all their quick temper, have a high threshold of genuine outrage...
...If you counted up the dollars stolen by every commissioner, inspector, borough president, and county leader during Koch's time in office, I doubt they would meet the sum required for one month's worth of pension checks being mailed out to those retired city workers lucky enough to have had their union leaders negotiating with Lindsay twenty years ago...
...the deviationist in Gracie Mansion had a wonderful time, gleefully kvetching the city into new life and confidence...
...This is impossible, since no one has ever considered these felons—either seen them in the paper or watched them on TV—without those things being on the facing page or the next graphic...
...BIAGGI: Remember her name...
...But understatement is rarely the authors' chosen key...
...Newfield and Barrett say, "Koch was not bothered by the fact that the mayor had no jurisdiction over capital punishment, nor power to institute such a policy . . ." True enough...
...BIAGGI: No, I did that...
...Scheme after scheme, scam after scam, Newfield and Barrett lay them out in detail that proves more numbing than outraging...
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...And that's why you invited me down to the Spa...
...venal Taxi Commissioner Jay Turoff...
...N one of the above is meant to suggest that there isn't material to fill a book about corruption under Koch...
...The authors also refer to the mayor's "flip attacks on beggars": I think they mean his suggestion that New Yorkers give what they can spare to charitable institutions rather than panhandlers, so they can be sure it goes for blankets instead of crack...
...but then why do "reform" Democrats running for city council seats always have foreign policies...
...Favoring decentralization of the school system, for example, is the left position in New York...
...Box 228, Somerville, MA 02143 Winner of PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award my city.' " If Breslin (who once ran for city council president on a nightmare ticket with Norman Mailer) didn't know, how was Koch supposed to...
...By September (unless Giuliani runs as a Republican, the Democratic primary will be the election), no one will have forgotten the name Joel Steinberg...
...When do you want to go down...
...He lives in the Manhattan congressional district once represented by Ed Koch and John Lindsay...
...Probably because the well-intentioned John Lindsay was such a . . . well, let's say he was dumb...
...Bess was acquitted, and while everyone thinks she's guilty, they're glad she got off because she's had a terrible time with men and is, in fact, a fairly serious wacko herself...
...Like the mayor's rule, City for Sale goes on and on...
...The Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data for City for Sale gives its primary subject classification as "New York (NY...
...But, according to Newfield and Barrett: "[Breslin] went into a titanic rage when he found out that friends he thought were amusing rascals had crossed the shadow line behind his back and become 'scum gangsters stealing from the people of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 "This program saved my neck when faced with teaching two new courses and two months to prepare...
...This is serious...
...But she was emotionally fragile...
...Why Koch became so friendly with Brooklyn's Meade Esposito and the Bronx's Stanley Friedman and Queens's Donald Manes, allowing their soldiers to assume jobs with lots of potential for payoffs and kickbacks, can probably be explained by a triangle of factors: everybody's agreement that Chicago ran better than New York...
...calling somebody "sugar" in Mississippi...
...34 BOOK REVIEWS say the following quote: 'Tonight I have sent a telegram congratulating my opponent on his victory.' " They were once friends, back in the days when Koch was considered a liberal...
...His third administration has brought predictable "revelations" of all sorts of financial fraud, perpetrated mostly by or through party leaders he disdained in his early career and embraced during his mayoralty...
...a decade later Koch had managed to produce a budget surplus...
...The authors' very best material is of course The Bess Mess, the story of how Bess Myerson, Miss America '45 and Koch's cultural affairs commissioner, supposedly tried to get the aging Justice Hortense Gabel to lower the alimony payments for Myerson's mob-connected lover, Andy Capasso, by getting the judge's daughter, Sukhreet, a city job.3 Newfield and Barrett manage to stack even this ridiculous deck against Koch, describing Sukhreet Gabel as "a self-absorbed intellectual who spoke five languages and had completed studies for a Ph.D...
...Sometime in the 1970s, when Koch began to make aggressive sense about issues like the death penalty, he became in Greenwich Village politics the equivalent of a capitalist roader who had veered off from the Long March in a Mercedes...
...But Koch is denounced...
...What's her name...
...They are usually performing madly melodramatic duets: "The beast had almost as many lives as the mayor had shameful memories...
...What's the point...
...And We'll Give You Complete Control Over Your Scattered Notes, Memos, Clippings, Research Drafts, and Letters...
...City for Sale is full of vulgarity and solecism...
...You know my friend Barbara Barlow...
...He holds so many press conferences that the local stations have trouble keeping him off the air...
...Politics and government-1951...
...in the end he wasn't needed against Manes, who managed to kill himself on the second try...
...In case you think this last one is an attempt at humor, you should know that it is followed by the solemn words: "It is a secret society...
...Koch is indeed a less merry man—at least in his public appearances—than he was a decade ago...
...The operation involved characters who were friends of the supposedly worldly-wise Jimmy Breslin...
...BIAGGI: Right...
...ESPOSITO: This sounds like a fuckin' grand jury...
...and, perhaps, some sort of desire on the part of the gawky bachelor weenie, the Village do-gooder, to feel, finally, like one of the boys...
...SQUARENOTE gathered all the research, organized it, and even printed out my lecture notes...
...A couple of years before the scandal broke, the columnist had even given a eulogy for one of the bagmen at a funeral home on Queens Boulevard...
...Even the principals in the Steinberg child-killing case are "Joel" and "Hedda" in New York, referred to as such not just by headlines but by TV reporters doing live remotes...
...All, all of this...
...Koch's own gubernatorial ambitions...
...sleazy Transportation Commissioner Tony Ameruso...
...For all the massive if under-documented research Newfield and Barrett put into their book, they end up being guilty, on some level, of that thing more contemptible to people here than anything else: naivet...
...And the city remembers it...
...At the beginning of the book they mention AIDS, crack, and homelessness—the still burgeoning municipal disasters of the third Koch term, but they never come back to them, somehow expecting us to concentrate on Friedman and Manes and Esposito to their complete exclusion...
...CITY FOR SALE: ED KOCH AND THE BETRAYAL OF NEW YORK Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett/Harper & Row/$22.50 Thomas Mallon E leven years after first taking office as Mayor of the City of New York, Edward I. Koch's greatest political asset remains the fact that he is not John V. Lindsay...
...That's certainly more than the city should have had to endure, but it is probably also more than a reader will want to take...
...most people already couldn't tell you who Stanley Friedman is...
...They try to make City for Sale a story of quiescent newspapers turned once again crusading, with a lot of puffing of Newfield's new employer, the News, but the two of them don't seem to understand the way the tabloids, where everyone is encountered on a screaming first name basis, tame stories as soon as they inflame them...
...PAPER CLUTTER makes you inefficient, frustrated, and may hurt your career...
...And, of course, if any of the Democratic candidates had said blacks would have to be "crazy" to vote Republican, no one's ears would have suffered in the slightest...
...Newfield and Barrett earn a certain amount of admiration for their unrelentingness (just as U. S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who's now quoted in ads for the book, has earned theirs), but the back-and-forth narrative they grind out becomes impossible to take in, in any comprehensive way...
...Calling someone "crazy" in this city, where every transaction is an incipient confrontation, is about as severe as 'There is no footnote citation for this—or anything else—in City for Sale...
...BIAGGI: Right...
...I want to hear Ed Koch Thomas Mallon is the author of Arts and Sciences and other books...
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...Even the New 36 York Times, endorsing Koch for a third term before the scandals broke, must have known there was a man-bites-dog quality to their statement that Koch "has hired first-rate officials, provided honest government, and greatly improved municipal management...
...Having offered it, why not meditate on such a statement...
...It is quite possible the scandals won't be much of a factor in this year's mayoral election...
...One can almost hear Robin Leach: "BUT BEHOIND THE GLITTA . ") Political and cultural clichés compete with one another for space, both of them struggling against co-authorial redundancies ("The final serene and optimistic peroration," "the close friend she and the mayor shared in common...
...The authors might as well mention that on some streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant 35 THE LIMITS OF SOCIAL POLICY Nathan Glazer/Harvard University Press/$22.50 Michael Novak no one has been convicted of improper conduct during a leveraged buyout, whereas probably a couple of people from Rye will be...
...The occasional faux-profound remark ("Yet like so many others who seek and seize worldly power, Donald Manes had a dark side") is hardly enough to get to the real bottom of doings like this in a city lived in and loved by many people, myself included, mostly for the way it excludes all nature but the human kind...
...ESPOSITO: Barbara Barlow...
...He tries not to say anything incriminating into a phone he correctly surmises is bugged...
...With such trivial accomplishments and the mayor's personal honesty acknowledged (the fish doesn't rot from the very top), the authors—long-time Village Voice writers, though Newfield is now deputy city editor of the New York Daily News—are free to spend their 455 pages of text trying to stifle Eddie the Lip...
...There's crooked "leasing czar" Alex Liberman...
...But, in just eight minutes per day, with SQUARENOTETM, our new software package, you can gain complete control over all your notes, clippings, letters, and documents...
...Lest anyone think this book is written with even a glint of objectivity, let me quote Jack Newfield's New Year's wish from a recent issue of the West Side Spirit, a local paper: "What I'm looking forward to in 1989 is what I've been looking forward to for the last eleven years...
...It was not the needs of the poor that bankrupted New York...
...Two sentences compete to be my favorite...
...I am not a crook," said Nixon, and no one believed him...
...He so confused them that they can no longer recall what the man himself was like long ago...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 3
