Spectator's Journal / Ferraro and Whitewater
Adams, James Ring
Ferraro and Whitewater by James Ring Adams H illary Clinton pulled off a Ferraro. Following advice from White House aides and Bigfoot Washington reporters, she finally held a full-length,...
...But such political surroundings shape the habits, the outlook, and the circle of friends that Ferraro would have brought—and the Clintons did bring—to high office...
...The real-estate partnership that Ferraro tried not to report during the campaign involved an entity called the Tieg Corporation...
...Most of the other reporters heeled on Fossedal with an almost unprecedented fury at his breach of decorum...
...One of its largest borrowers was a figure named Michael Rapp, which turned out to be the witness protection program pseudonym for a convicted con-man named Michael Hellerman...
...The top state judge in Queens, Francis X. Smith, was charged with five counts of perjury and three of criminal contempt of a state grand jury...
...His death brought to light lurid tales of his sex orgies, Quaalude abuse, and involvement with a bizarre psychotherapy cult...
...Defenders of Ferraro might have argued that this demi-monde was too far removed from her candidacy to be a legitimate issue, just as Clinton partisans say that Whitewater was a remote and irrelevant land deal...
...After releasing a mass of financial documents, she faced 200 reporters for two James Ring Adams is The American Spectator's special investigator on Whitewater...
...Imagine if Ferraro had been in office when the Queens scandals erupted...
...Another indictment charged Zaccaro himself with acting as Manes's bagman, in demanding a $1 million bribe for the cable franchise...
...But Senator Sam Ervin knew...
...The indictments were based in part on a financial statement released at Ferraro's press conference...
...The indictment charged that Smith had lied about a meeting with borough president Manes and Ferraro's own husband, John Zaccaro...
...S till, although the Washington-based press, including Hunt's bureau, backed off the story, other reporters plugged on...
...Revelations about Ferraro's political milieu emerged on a timetable remarkably like that of the Whitewater coverage...
...It also intensified a federal investigation into corruption in the Queens Democratic machine, which turned out to be heavily infiltrated by the Gambino mafia family, which had just been taken over by John Gotti...
...Zaccaro was acquitted after a two-week 40 The American Spectator June 1994 if trial when the main prosecution witness testified that he thought Zaccaro was only providing information, not demanding a bribe, when he said how much it would cost to get the franchise...
...Following advice from White House aides and Bigfoot Washington reporters, she finally held a full-length, no-limits press conference on her personal finances, much the way Geraldine Ferraro did in 1984 to answer questions about her family's supposed ties to the mob...
...Tieg had somehow managed to obtain a million-dollar line of credit, and ultimately borrowed $1.8 million...
...The suicide was apparently triggered by impending federal indictments on corruption in the city's Parking Violations Bureau...
...with a bill...
...After Manes's death, other Queens corruption cases came to light...
...After the failure of Flushing Federal in November 1985, Farrell and Wolk were indicted for bank fraud...
...Hillary's performance was skilled and polished, even in striking the warm-andfuzzy notes...
...How different would our history be if Ervin and the Senate had had as great a love of truth in 1964 as they did in 1974...
...From that moment, if not before, the press pack was eating out of Ferraro's hand...
...In a January 1984 deposition, Zaccaro had identified himself as secretary-treasurer of the corporation, along with Harold Farrell and Robert Wolk, who turned out to be two petty but active rogues...
...Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., author of On Strategy Call 1 800 215 3868: Record your name & address...
...In fact, the examiner who first spotted the problem loans was reprimandedfor being too aggressive and hostile to management...
...Others would have anguished about being too tough on a woman feeling her way in an unprecedented political role...
...EXCELLENT...
...B ut the Queens corruption scandal was only part of the iceberg hidden under the Ferraro/Zaccaro story—which turned out to include one of the more lurid episodes of the savingsand-loan debacle...
...But he didn't know that the swamps along the Potomac were more dangerous than the Mekong Delta...
...The Ferraro affair didn't quite unfold during the campaign of 1984 in the way Al Hunt remembered it...
...On" March 17, for instance, Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal's resident Washington insider, had urged a Ferraro-style performance on Hillary, arguing: "The Mondale-Ferraro ticket won only one state that year, but the press conference ended that issue...
...When Captain Jason Patterson left for Vietnam in 1962, he thought his beautiful wife Joan would be safe and happy in the social whirl of Washington...
...The origin of the savings-and-loan debacle, after all, was primarily political, and estimates of its total cost start at a quarter of a trillion dollars...
...A number of seasoned investigators stayed on the case as well, including Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times, Jonathan Kwitny and Anthony DeStefaho of the Journal, and a team of thirty from the Philadelphia Inquirer...
...General Phillip B. Davidson, author of Vietnam at War and Secrets of the Vietnam War What could have been...
...0 "IT'S A GOOD READ...
...Other trails from Flushing led to penny-stock fraud and the celebrity world of Jilly Rizzo, another indicted borrower, who had once been Frank Sinatra's bodyguard...
...The turning point came when someone asked why she hadn't included the supplemental schedules on her tax forms...
...What should have been...
...The lineup strongly resembled the journalistic split on Whitewater...
...But the story continued to develop after the election...
...Flushing Federal has since become famous as a mob bank, 'a paradigm of organized crime infiltration of the savingsand-loan industry...
...Wearing a soft sweater that matched a vase of spring flowers, relaxing in an open wooden armchair with no intervening podium, she played the nurturing mother as well as the successful career woman...
...Ferraro had once called Smith her political mentor...
...Wolk, a Midwesterner with a flat, Kiwanis manner, was still on probation after a grand larceny conviction...
...No one has ever accused Ferraro or her husband of outstanding voracity in New York's jungle, compared to, say, the borough presidents...
...A nd there is no reason to think that the wide-ranging corruption of both Queens and Arkansas politics would stop with the S&Ls...
...In that Jurassic Park, Zaccaro was definitely a grass-eater...
...He knew that trying to find the truth about a ruthless president could be dangerous, and dangerous to more than just his career...
...The "unrespectable" press, including the New York tabloids and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, took the lead...
...In August 1984, just two weeks before Ferraro won over reporters at her "full disclosure" press conference, a Federal Home Loan Bank Board examination singled out the Tieg Corporation as one of the bigger problems at the Flushing Federal Savings and Loan Association in Queens...
...Attorney Rudolph Giuliani later personally prosecuted the other defendants, including Bronx borough president Stanley Friedman, who drew a twelve-year prison sentence...
...Geraldine Ferraro's case does offer parallels to Hillary's situation (some eerily close ones, in fact) but they aren't the kind to give the White House much consolation...
...As she made an evasive reply, Gregory Fossedal of the Wall Street Journal editorial page started shouting, "Answer the question...
...Farrell, the brother of a former Tammany Hall leader, was a disbarred lawyer who had already served jail time for extortion...
...In October 1986, the Queens district attorney issued several indictments in connection with the borough's cable television contract...
...In his earlier career, Hellerman had testified against his Cosa Nostra associates and written a book entitled Wall Street Swindler...
...National political reporters failed quite dramatically in both the '84 and '92 campaigns at telling the public just what these milieus were like, possibly because of their sympathy with these candidates...
...The rejoicing in Washington may be premature...
...It would have looked a lot like Whitewater...
...The memory lapse about Ferraro shows they still aren't doing their job...
...Very much like Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, Flushing thrived on its dubious practices, despite the regulators...
...And the public would wonder why the watchdog press had missed the story in the first place...
...Your order will be shipped...
...Flushing accounted for only $80 million, and Madison Guaranty for $50 million of this loss, but every little bit adds up...
...Zaccaro and one of his partners were later indicted on state fraud charges, and Zaccaro pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts...
...They might have shown, as it later emerged, that her husband John Zaccaro had entered a real-estate partnership with two convicted felons...
...Yet these associations raise a number of concerns, even at two removes from the seat of power...
...A whistleblower by nature, she was hassled into leaving the examination corps and wound up working as a nanny...
...Box 1387 Winter Park, FL 32790-1387 The American spectator June 1994 41...
...In March 1986, Queens borough president Donald Manes, just recovered from an earlier suicide attempt, took a kitchen knife in his home and plunged it fatally into his heart...
...Her answers left open some big holes, such as whether her commodities brokers had steered winning trades to her account,and stuck other investors with the losers, but they were full enough to give the press corps an excuse to go away...
...Credit for breaking the story of the mob ties belonged, in fact, to the "Moonie" paper in New York, then the New York Tribune, whose talented young investigator Peter Klebnikov first noticed that a lower Manhattan building managed by Ferraro's husband had a notorious pornographer as a tenant...
...The Clintons and Ferraro may have been latecomers to their political environments, and maybe weren't deeply immersed in its more lurid aspects...
...As Washington learned with Bill and Hillary's Arkansas friends, the milieu these appointees come from greatly affects the way they perform at the federallevel...
...To order: Send $9.95 per copy to: Old Court Press (TAS) OR P.O...
...Ironically, the catalyst was the suicide of a political associate...
...What sort of protection, for instance, did political connections give to the corrupt S&Ls...
...It turned out that Ferraro had a good reason for not releasing the supplemental schedules...
...Very different...
...Then-U.S...
...The pornographer, distributor of such classics as Debbie Does Dallas, was murdered several years later in a mob rub-out...
...grueling hours in a hotel ballroom near Kennedy Airport...
...fascinating and beautifully written," — Lt...
...Some of the press would have leaped on the story...
...Ferraro's August 1984 press conference was indeed a personal triumph...
...Judge Smith and another alleged bagman were convicted, and Smith received a one-year prison term...
...And some of these journalists had already been signalling their willingness to get off her case...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
