Indiscreet Corruption

...the lady in question is now in jail...

...Most officials are more honest, and the dishonest ones are more discreet...

...Lindsay has been embarrased since by the discovery that people in his administration have had resumes even phonier than Marcus...

...As he moves from indictment to prison, he admits that he was being destroyed by childish stock speculations and that he tried to cover up by soliciting and receiving kickbacks on city contracts he authorized, particularly an $800,000 project to clean a Bronx reservoir...

...Perhaps I expected too much...

...There is something rotten about the fact that lawyers are willing to raise and spend $50,000 or $100,000 to campaign for a $15,000-a-year seat in the State Assembly...

...More recently, the citizens of New York learned that Lindsay is angry because he read in the papers that both his executive assistant and Corporation Counsel have been practicing law on the side without his knowledge...

...The possibilities seem endless for a writer willing to spend two years on the project...

...Basically because government has gotten so big that it is into everything...

...Neither is there much excuse for John Lindsay in this whole thing, and I was disappointed that Goodman let the Mayor off as easily as the daily press did back in 1967...

...All discreet, almost all of it both legal and American-ethical...

...Why is an Assembly seat that valuable...

...by Henry Fried, a multimillionaire contractor and improver of the breed who had been around city politics and subpolitics long enough to know better...

...Turning to the larger patterns of corruption in the second half of the 20th century, Goodman contents himself with this observation: "We owe our glimpse into the enduring system of favors, pressures and bribes to an odd set of circumstances--and the reader may be left wondering how many deals are completed around the land each day in which no revealing accident intervenes...

...finally, a couple of years later, a good writer, say Walter Goodman, would come out with the book that cleared away the misinformation, revealed why and how the people involved did what they did, perhaps offered a broader historical perspective and, if the writer was lucky, fresh information that might win a few new headlines...

...there was no suit...

...I seem to remember that stories like the Marcus affair would unfold in a kind of pattern: First the newspapers would go crazy, publishing every bit of fact and almost-fact in a splashy confusion of interviews, quick profiles, whispers from police and lawyers on the case, and quotations from legal documents or court transcripts...

...Regulars are more disciplined in milking the public tit, and they know their men better before they let them near the big udder...

...The difference, please remember, is that it is against the law for public employes to accept payoffs and favors like the ones that purchasing agents for "X" Chemical Corporation take time and again in the course of "doing business...

...Yet even if conditions are better today, they are still terrible...

...But Lincoln Steffens would have been staggered, and poor Jimmy Marcus never understood the undying wisdom of George Washington Plunkitt, an old Tammany politician whose quote opens Goodman's book: "The politician who steals is worse than a thief...

...in one atypical case a millionaire's son spent $500,000 in a Manhattan race...

...At the same time, I would like to emphasize that my own experience has convinced me that the public ethic is higher than the private ethic in this country...

...Reviewed by Richard Reeves Chief Urban Affairs Correspondent, New York Times Maybe books, like thieves at City Hall, just aren't what they used to be...

...With the grand opportunities all around for the man with a political pull, there's no excuse for stealin' a cent...

...We all felt pretty sorry for Big John then--I remember reporters looking as if they wanted to rise and applaud in sympathy when Lindsay called a news conference to talk about "personal betrayal"--and we did not really push His Honor about how he could have been fooled by Marcus when every two-bit chiseler in town seemed to spot him a block away from Gracie Mansion...

...By now the sympathy has faded, but Goodman only has this to offer: "The Mayor was unlucky in James Marcus, but insofar as the fault can be laid to John Lindsay for choosing his favorites without scrutinizing their references, it seems merely to have been a form of social snobbery which exempts the son-in-law of a Lodge from the kind of questions that ordinary job applicants must suffer...

...by Carmine De Sapio, a legendary politician who had lost his titles but not his clout...

...The outline of the story, for anyone who is still interested, runs roughly as follows: Handsome James L. Marcus--friend of John Lindsay and son-in-law of the Lodges, Commissioner of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity for New York City and soon to become head of its Sanitation and Air Pollution Control departments--turns out to be a phony, a thief and a fool...

...Nonetheless, there are no characterizations in this book...

...The clerks and those matronly typists have a pipeline to a district leader or somebody, and the word gets out when the boss installs a second private telephone in his desk drawer and locks up certain files, like the Bronx reservoir file...

...He is a fool...

...It obviously goes deeper than that...

...As the jacket of this book blurbed: "Walter Goodman's last book was The Committee: The Extraordinary History of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which Arthur Schlesinger described as 'a first-rate historical study, exhaustive in research, cool in judgment, brilliantly perceptive and eminently readable.'" A Percentage of the Take is cool in judgment and eminently readable...

...As a means of writing history, that has its drawbacks...

...He then adds that we "must in fairness conclude that conditions are better than they used to be...

...And the workings of municipal corruption in this country have not been diagrammed very well since the days of Lincoln Steffens...

...the principals do not even make it as cardboard figures...

...What made the Marcus-Itkin affair unclassical was their singular lack of discretion...

...Reformers, alas, are prone to confuse a man's in-laws or his saying the right thing about Vietnam with competence and honesty...

...Even if Jimmy had been able to worm his way into that big office in the Municipal Building, he would have been spotted by one of those little clerks long before the district attorney got on his trail...

...then a good magazine, say Harper's, would put together an article with greater perspective, some small insights into the principals and a little analysis of what it all really meant...

...A Percentage of the Take--actually the story of a most unclassical case of American municipal corruption--fits the definition of the good magazine article...

...Reform administrations have always been ripe for spectacular scandals...

...Because he was incompetent both as commissioner and thief, Marcus was helped along the way: by a hustler named Herbie Itkin, a slimy ne'er-do-well who double-crossed everybody he met and claimed to be an agent of both the FBI and CIA...

...You can bet that if Robert F. Wagner had been Mayor there would have been no Marcus scandal...

...Three of the characters--Marcus, Itkin and De Sapio--would engage most novelists...

...by "Tony Ducks" Corrallo, a Mafioso of some note who also should have known better than to deal with amateurs...

...To put it another way, those crooks down at City Hall are a lot more honest than the commuters on the New Haven who tsk-tsk over their newspapers' revelation that a building inspector or policeman has been indicted for taking a few bucks...

...What we have here are the roughest sketches of a courtroom artist--Goodman seems to have done no more original legwork than to conduct a rambling interview with Itkin, a man who long ago lost any conception of truth--and the author is candid about his sketching: "As most of the principals in our story could find no incentive to speak of their affairs to an outsider, and certainly not to speak of them truthfully, the preceding account is based largely on the records of their trials...

...If you think an Assembly seat is a bad investment at $50,000, keep tabs on the legal practice of legislators for a little while and notice how the ones on the right committees suddenly become qualified to sit on the boards of banks and insurance companies...

...Probably...

...It was printed...

...Still, I regard public corruption as a very serious matter not only when it involves an anachronism like Jimmy Marcus but when it discreetly falls under Webster's definition: "decay, rottenness...

...Discreet corruption in New York City government is so pervasive, and perhaps inevitable, that it has to be linked to the city's startling decline and what is now called the American malaise, the feeling of frustration and impotence throughout the land...

...After all, Paul Powell of Illinois was dead before they found $800,000 in his closet...

...and finally by an assorted cast of guys on the make that included executives of good old Con Edison...

...Or maybe it's just me...

...It is a fine piece of work, beautifully and professionally organized, with no holes in the telling--a 60,000-word narrative touching all the events and characters...

...Just as the cop on the beat may be getting payoffs from a tavern because he has the power to close the place down for one of a thousand nit-picking violations of state law, an Assemblyman may have enormous power over the movement of private money--bank and insurance money, to cite an example...

...I remember being threatened with a libel suit by Lindsay's Commissioner of Investigations if I dared to print what he could not seem to find out--that the fiscal director of the city's antipoverty programs had used at least five different names while bouncing checks and credit cards all over the country...

...Forgive the chauvinism, but an interested reader could learn more about Marcus and Itkin from the 3,000-word profiles written for the New York Times four years ago by Martin Arnold and Barnard Collier...