A couple of weeks ago New York City’s term limits law was extended legislatively by the New York City Council and Mayor Bloomberg based upon the rationale that the City needs consistent leadership to get us through the coming economic crisis. The editorial boards of all the city’s daily newspapers made this exact case to their readers and our elected officials echoed their argument. Council Speaker Quinn said “given the level of economic tumult that exists, I have decided to change my position [opposing the extension of term limits] because I believe the potential of consistent leadership by this council and this mayor would be in the best interest of the city during these hard economic times." 

But just eight days after the extension of term limits became law the City Council’s professed agenda of economic cooperation with the Mayor was all but abandoned. Expressing outrage at the Mayor’s fiscal stewardship, the Council blocked Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to rescind the City’s promised $400 homeowner property tax rebate without the Council's approval. 

All of a sudden, the Council had forgotten about the Mayor’s economic expertise, which they asserted was so important to save our City from financial meltdown. What changed in eight days? Now that the City Council has successfully overruled two public refenda and the 89 percent of New Yorkers who opposed a change to the term limits law, they no longer have to worry about maintaining false pretenses to keep their jobs. Speaker Quinn, Bloomberg’s staunchest ally for extending term limits, and Councilman James Vacca, who was one of the 29 Council Members who voted “yes” on term limits, have already gone so far as to protest the Mayor’s plan to restructure the City’s senior centers to improve efficiency and save money. 

Are the editorial boards of the City’s three dailies suddenly crying foul? Not a whisper. 

Bloggers Got the Real Story When It Counted 

“It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what news was and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened. Today editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore.”- Rupert Murdoch

Only the city’s bloggers like Your Free Press, Pardon Me For Asking, The Brooklyn Optimist, The Daily Gotham, Queens Crap, and Washington Square Park reported to their readers during the term limits debate that the Council’s argument for continuity of leadership to save the city’s economy was nothing more than public relations spin to cover the Council’s blatant power grab for an additional term in office. At the same time these citizen journalists across the City were reporting the real facts, the Mayor was meeting with the publishers of the three major dailies to coordinate a cover story for his support of extending term limits. Working in concert, the dailies provided the Mayor with the rationalization to disregard Bloomberg’s previous public statement that “it would be an absolute disgrace to go around the public will” to extend term limits. 

Rafael Martinez-Alequin, publisher of Your Free Press, wrote on his blog that it was a sad day for democracy when the Council passed the term limits extension. He openly expressed anger at those that voted for its passage, echoing the spirit of Former Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. As Breslin said, “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns that exposed the wrongdoing in government.” 

It is bloggers like Martinez-Alequin who are keeping journalism alive and vital in New York City. They are following in the footsteps of newspaper greats like Joseph Pulitzer of the long lost New York World, whose legendary name is ascribed to journalism’s greatest honor. Pulitzer’s passion-filled editorial pages were the true heart of the World. There he crusaded against the robber barons and oil and rail companies, exposed corrupt politicians and brutal policemen, and advocated for decent working hours and humane living conditions for the poor. 

That’s just what Martinez-Alequin has dedicated his life to trying to do. And that’s just what has gotten Mayor Bloomberg so mad at him. 

Norman Siegel Sues on Behalf of All Bloggers 

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”  - Thomas Jefferson

New York City blogger journalist Rafael Martinez-Alequin and his lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, recently filed a lawsuit to protect the First Amendment Constitutional Rights of bloggers in a case which has the potential to dramatically change journalism in New York City and the rest of the county. Siegel is challenging the New York City Police Department's policies for issuing press credentials. (For somewhat arcane reasons having to do with access to crime scenes, the NYPD issues all City media credentials.)  Martinez-Alequin was a credentialed member of New York's working press since the early 1990s, but in 2007, his yearly press pass application was suddenly denied. 

The NYPD officials decided that Martinez-Alequin and two other independent journalists weren't entitled to a press card because they didn't regularly cover breaking news for a professional news organization. The other two journalists, Robert E. Smith, publisher of The Guardian Chronicle and David Wallis, founder and CEO of Featurewell.com, are also plaintiffs in Siegel’s case.  

Siegel’s lawsuit argues that the current system of issuing press passes amounts to privileging those who work for large corporations. Besides unfairly excluding citizen journalists like Martinez-Alequin, the problem with this system is that those who are credentialed often find themselves in situations that pose a certain conflict of interest between reporting the facts and not offending the corporate policies of the media giants for whom they work. As a result, in favoring corporate-employed reporters over citizen journalists and independent bloggers, the City’s press credentialing system effectively chooses to license primarily staid, cautious reporting - with a strong bent toward corporate coddling – over the dynamic, unadulterated articles of journalists like Martinez-Alequin. 

Given the high stakes for citizen journalists like Martinez-Alequin, Siegel’s lawsuit is now seen by the blogging community as the epicenter of its battle against the old media for equal legitimacy of the New Media; the New Media being defined as essentially anything published online that is not affiliated with a major corporate news entity. 

Martinez, an independent gadfly who has reported out of City Hall for the last two decades, is a modern-day Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine was one of the first journalists to use media as a weapon against the entrenched power structure controlled by the King of England. He is often credited as the journalist that propelled the American colonies to break free of British rule. 

It now falls on the shoulders of Norman Siegel, who always seem to be around when the rights of New Yorkers need to be protected, to ensure that Internet bloggers in New York have the same rights as Thomas Paine. The city’s fast-emerging community of bloggers is quickly growing its readership simply by providing the type of truthful analysis that is hard to find in the City’s dailies. In so doing, New York’s blogosphere has established itself as the City’s premiere forum to debate controversial opinions, encourage participation in local politics, and further the belief that people should control their own lives. 

 “It’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.  The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and the country is in great danger.” - Hermann Goring, at the Nuremberg trials

New York has always been at the epee center of the fight for a free press 

John Peter Zenger was editor of the New York Weekly Journal in 1734 when he was jailed by British colonial authorities on charges of seditious libel. He had criticized the corrupt administration of New York's governor, William Cosby.  Zenger's subsequent trial and acquittal is considered a landmark case in the history of freedom of the press, paving the way for the American Revolution.

On June 13, 1971, The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a documentary history tracing the ultimately doomed involvement of the United States in a grinding war in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.   They demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.  The Government sought and won a court order restraining further publication after three articles had appeared.  On June 30, 1971, the United States Supreme Court ruled, by a vote of 9 to 0, that publication could resume.

Paine and Zenger have now passed the Freedom of the Press touch to a new generation. The success of President Elect Obama’s Internet new technologies has given us the opportunity to democratize journalism like our founding fathers envisioned.

The Founding Father of Blogging: Thomas Paine 

Siegel should start his case in court by filing a brief entitled, “Thomas Paine is the moral forefather of Internet blogging.”  The example Paine set for the need of freedom of the press to ensure our Constitutional liberties, and the sacrifices he made to preserve the integrity of his work, is being resuscitated by a means that hadn't existed or even been imagined in his day - the blinking cursors, clacking keyboards, hissing modems, and bits and bytes of another revolution: the digital one. If Paine's legacy was seemingly derailed by the Nixon Administration’s FCC changes that have led to increased corporate ownership and consolidation of the media, the Internet has brought Paine’s vision back to life. 

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas and you do not do that by silencing” Max Lerner, former NY Post columnist

Early in this century when New York City had dozens of daily newspapers engaged in fierce competition it would not have been possible for elected officials to extend their terms in office for their own self interests.  William Randolph Hearst’s conservative New York Journal, Dorothy Shifts’ liberal New York Post, the original New York Sun’s crusading muck breaking journalist and the other great passion filled paper of that time would make politicians scared of even dreaming about the scam they pulled on us.

It not just the term limits swindle.  Lobbyist and the Robber Barons they work for have destroyed our economy and have left millions without proper medical care.  Only on the Internet could you read in when the Glass- Steagall Act was repealed in 1999 of the dangers that action fueled by campaign donations, posed to the nation’s banking and housing industry.  Only on the blogs could you hear the voice of opposition to Bush’s request to the Senate for permission to start the war in Iraq, during the congressional debate to grant him those rights.

Paine’s mark is now nearly invisible in the old corporate media culture, but his soul is woven through the Internet’s New Media, his fingerprints on every Web site, his voice in every online thread. That spirit was part of the political transformation he envisioned when he wrote about change 250 years before Barack Obama ever uttered the word. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," said Paine. Through media, he believed, "we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.

”If we let the City of New York deny bloggers like Rafael Martinez-Alequin one of the most essential journalistic tools – a press pass – we consent to accept a media that is not truly free. Bloggers, citizen journalists, and all of the readers of their important work must band together and raise their voices in support of Norman Siegel and Rafael Martinez-Alequin. Their fight belongs to all of us who believe that citizen journalists can help change our government and make ours a more just society. - Gary Tilzer

But, the prevailing diagnosis of what ails the Board of Elections (BOE) is the system.  Its structure is corrupt and its controllers are unaccountable.  But merely attacking the management of the board is meaningless.  You have to first understand who is pulling the strings and why.

The BOE is closely guarded by the incumbent protection society, because it serves as a gatekeeper to deliberately make it very hard and costly for anyone independent of the insiders from winning party positions or elected office.  Since Robert Wagner in the 1960s, New York City mayors have tried to reform the BOE, but they have been mostly rebuffed by its arrogant leadership. In each instance, the mayor usually settles for threatening to withhold funding from the Board, until it makes minor changes. 

Mayor Bloomberg once said the structure of the BOE is a remnant of the days when Tammany Hall ruled New York.  He did not make this comment during his current battle with the BOE, in which he is demanding reforms, before he will turn over additional city funds to deal with the humongous anticipated turnout this year; but four years ago, immediately after the 2004 presidential election, which was he said was ineptly managed, causing long lines and confusion at the polls.  Bloomberg, pushing back at what the press has called an arrogant BOE leadership, told the BOE to spend the unused $20 million in reserves the Board has in its budget. 

But where is that money? According to press reports, most of those funds, or at least part of them, have already been promised to the lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller, whose CEO Mark Penn is best known as Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist. Burson-Marsteller has been contracted to promote a brand new voting machine system that does not even exist yet.

Immediately after the 2004 election meltdown, City Councilmembers sent a letter to Bloomberg demanding why the $27 million in capital money that was budgeted to improve the election system was not used to hire more workers or make improvements.  Last week, our City Councilmembers voted themselves another term in office, claiming they understood how best to help with the City’s economy.  Let’s hope they understand investment banking better than the BOE, because if they think throwing money at the BOE will fix it, they are clueless.  Even Mayor Giuliani, who took down the five organized crime families, was limited to bargaining before the 1998 presidential election that he would give the BOE $18 million in funding if they agreed to accelerate its schedule for counting paper ballots.  It is interesting that most of the clashes between the BOE and the City’s mayors happen occur before a presidential election or just after an election mess.

Mayor Koch set up a task force to transfer the management of the BOE to the mayor’s office. He said the BOE operated in the 17^th century after it became clear that the Board would not be able to process new registrations before the 1984 presidential election. Well before he was mayor, Koch vowed to fight for a nonpartisan BOE with civil service employees after the machine-controlled BOE tried to steal away his 41-vote victory over the leader of Tammany’s machine Carmine De Sapio in 1963.  He failed to reform the
BOE and so has everyone else.  Why? 

A half century after Tammany has disappeared, everything has changed about New York City politics and government, except for the BOE.  We no longer have the Tammany Hall machine or a two-party city. We don’t even have a party.  All we have is an incumbent protection mob. The Republican and Democratic leaders who control the operations of the BOE work together on judges and have a non-aggression pack against each other’s candidates (the takeover of the State Senate and Congress by the Democrats breaking that agreement for the first time).

All the BOE cares about is getting good press to suppress public pressure from mounting to reform it.  That way, the City’s mayors keep having no additional ammunition on their side to clean up the BEO.

The reason that every mayor since Wagner has failed to reform the operations of the BOE is that it operates independent of City Hall, overseen by commissioners chosen by the Democratic and Republican parties.  There are ten commissioners: one Democrat and one Republican from each of the five boroughs.  The state constitution requires a bi-partisan BOE.  Employees of the board are hired after being recommended by the leader of the county political organizations of both parties.  Mayor Bloomberg called the hiring procedures a “recipe for ineptitude”. But, in truth, it is really part of a recipe to keep incumbents and friends of the county leaders in office.

County leaders use their control over the BOE in conjunction with the complicated petitioning system and the Supreme Court Judges they handpick at their phony judicial conventions to keep incumbents’ opponents off the ballot. Even if they can’t knock the incumbents’ opponents off the ballot, the county leaders use the system to wrap up the opponents’ valuable campaign resources and time in almost endless obstacles.  More than half of the legal challenges against candidates in the entire country are in New York! 

In Brighton Beach, Russian-American candidate Alec Brook-Krasny was knocked off the ballot the fist time he tired to run for Assembly against incumbent Adele Cohen in a district where the majority of the people were newly registered Russian-American citizens.  His friend Tony Eisenberg tried to run a few years later for City Council against incumbent Dominic Recchia and was also knocked off the ballot.  A few years later Brook-Krasny running again for assembly after Cohen retired, the dumped the reformers who helped him in the past.  Joined up with the corrupt Brooklyn machine, made the ballot and won.  The BOE plays an important role in keeping in keeping reformers who would fight for change in City Hall and Albany out of elective office.   

Those who stopped computer voting machines in New York, including the editorial boards of the newspapers, for fear they could be rigged to steal elections have overlooked the undemocratic way our state have run elections.  If this week’s general election is a mess only Mayor Bloomberg can lead the press beyond their limited focus on the reasons for the BOE ineptitude and start the battle against the county leaders and Albany, which will bring real reform to New York’s undemocratic incumbent election conspiracy.  A good fight to end the final remnant of Tammany Hall-ruled New York would go a long way to restore not only fairness in New York City, but, more importantly, the people’s faith in our City’s government.    

Today’s reporters do not cover politics like Jimmy Breslin, Jack Newfield, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton and other members of their hard-working greatest generation, who understood neighborhood politics and never quoted politicians like celebrities.  Reporters of Newfield’s era understood that elected officials always had motives, and that truth could only be reported by analyzing their words and investigated their actions.  Fidler is one of the most quoted councilmembers in the city’s newspapers and blogs on virtually every topic and issue, except for one: what he does with the member items money in his district.    

Some people claim that the way the media covers Fidler shows a racial bias in its reporting of political corruption.  By reading the dailies we know how Councilmembers Erik Martin Dilan and Leroy Comrie sent member items funds to nonprofits that hired their wives.  Maria del Carmen Arroyo sent money to nonprofits that employed her sister and nephew.  Darlene Mealy tired to find a nonprofit to hire her sister.  Hiram Monserrate, Larry Seabrook and Kendall Stewart used nonprofit money to help in their campaigns.

 What is never covered is a more complicated corruption in the white community where member item funds and campaign contributions go through interlocking nonprofits, lobbyists and special interests developers.  Umbrella nonprofits like Fidler’s Millennium Developers are just the tip of the iceberg of corruption; Emily Giske of Bolton-St. Johns, Parkside’s Evan Stavisky, Jeff Plaut’s Global Strategy, George Artz, Yoswein, Geto & De Milly, and Knickerbocker SKD help campaigns more than Councilman Hiram Monserrate’s nonprofit Libre get a free ride from the media’s corruption coverage. 

Putting racial motives aside, it is clear that the owners of the mainstream media control how and when it reports on political corruption.   Not one word has been printed about the councilmember items slush fund scandal since all the major papers’ editorial boards came out for extending term limits.  Earlier this year, for a few months, there was a story almost every day about the council’s member item’s “little tin box”.

Fidler’s Member Item-Funded Nonprofit Reelection Industry is a Widespread Practice 

The late former Assemblyman Tony Genovese, who made the Thomas Jefferson democratic club into a powerhouse with the late county leader Meade Esposito, invented the scheme which uses member items and other government funds to build political power for their club in their district.  They set up an umbrella nonprofit called New Perspectives that received and distributed government funds to most of the local nonprofits in their community.   Genovese wanted all power to emanate from his club.  His clubhouse hack pal Alan Weisberg ran Perspectives. Genovese’s Assemblyman Stanley Friedman was the last elected official in the city to open up a district office outside the Jefferson Club.  In the days of Tammany Hall all elected officials operated their district office out of the clubhouse.  Genovese and Esposito’s genius created the umbrella nonprofit funded by the government tied to the clubhouse to keep the Thomas Jefferson Club powerful in an era in which most clubs were dying off.

Since that time, elected officials and consultants throughout the city have copied Genovese’s umbrella nonprofit model.  Brooklyn Democratic Leader Vito Lopez, an early protégé of Genovese, funds the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Center as an umbrella-type nonprofit with millions of dollars in government patronage to his district.  Bolton-St. Johns’ Emily Giske uses the High Line and the health care industry to build an umbrella for her team, including $50,000 to Speaker Quinn for her mayoral campaign from High Line supporters.  The Parkside Group used their relationship with former Speaker Miller, former Queens Democratic leader Tom Manton and convicted felon Brian McLaughlin to pull in over $7 million in consulting fees from nonprofits receiving council funding.  Former Thomas Jefferson Club leader Bruce Bender, now working for as chief lobbyist for Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner, helps fund Borough President Markowitz’s umbrella nonprofit Best of Brooklyn.  Pedro Espada just defeated State Senator Efrain Gonzalez with the help of his nonprofit organization, Soundview Healthcare.

After Genovese’s death New Perspectives got in financial trouble, so Fidler and the other new stewards of the Jefferson Club simply closed it down and transferred Perspectives’ functions to a new nonprofit, Millennium Development.   Paul Curiale, the husband of Fidler’s council aide Debbie Malone, runs Millennium Development.  Both are heavily involved in the operation of the Thomas Jefferson Club and regularly collect signatures for candidates endorsed by Fidler’s club.

 Another way Fidler controlled government money was to appoint Georgia Hamilton, the wife of his driver Daniel MacBride, to Neighborhood Advisory Board 18. The board distributed city and federal youth money in Fidler’s district.  Fidler knows a lot about how funds are distributed through the Neighborhood Advisorary Board system as chairman of the Council’s Youth Services Committee.  With the Councilman’s knowledge, Hamilton illegally continued to serve on the Advisory Board after she moved out of the community.  Fidler said in a recent blog post that he received the most discretionary funding last year at $985,000, and snagged a considerable amount of capital too, because he chairs the Youth Services Committee, which oversees a lot of the programs in the city that would be eligible for these types of grants. "Which is also why I am able to put together a pot of properly vetted discretionary items,” said Fidler. 

What the Press Did Not Report 

As Chair of the Youth Services Committee, Fidler oversaw the funding of the Donna Reid Memorial Education Fund.  Two staffers of Councilman Kendall Stewart, including his chief of staff Asquith Reid, were indicted by U.S. Attorney Garcia for skimming at least $145,000 from the Donna Reid fund, a charity that had received council funds.   Fidler’s committee funded the Memorial Education Fund after the Department for the Aging rejected the group's application for city money in 2004 after noticing that its office address was identical to Asquith Reid's home address. Reid, like Fidler’s staffer Georgia Hamilton on Board 18, was a member of his Neighborhood Advisorary Board – Board 17 – which funded youth groups like Donna Reid in his community. Councilman Erik Martin Dilan’s North Brooklyn Community Council and Councilman Hiram Monserrate’s Libre are other nonprofits that have been funded with council funds dispensed by Fidler’s Youth Service Committee that have been written about in the press for their practice of hiring the councilmembers’ family members and helping in their reelection bids.  Not one word has been written in the press about how the questionable funding was approved for these and other nonprofits by Fidler’s Youth Committee, which, by the way, he gets paid $10,000 extra a year for chairing.

Judging by a series of recent loses by the Thomas Jefferson Club, Fidler’s funding of the nonprofit Millennium network is about the only thing keeping the councilman’s club from falling apart.   Last year, the club lost its control over the Brooklyn Surrogate Court when its candidate Judge Shawndya Simpson lost to Judge Diana Johnson.  Judge Johnson only lost by 200 votes in the club’s 59^th district and won in the Assembly District where Fidler is District Leader (the 41^st AD) two to one.   The Club’s former Assemblyman and Surrogate Judge Frank Seddio was pressured into retirement, according to The Daily News, because of illegal contributions from his Assembly account to Fidler and other elected officials of the Jefferson Club when he was running for the surrogate judgeship.  The club lost the other Surrogate position in 2005 when Judge Margarita Lopez Torres beat their candidate. In addition, the Jefferson Club only managed to get 11% for the candidate it backed in the 2005 Democratic Mayoral Primary, Gifford Miller.   In the General Election that same year, Fernando Ferrer, the Jefferson Club’s endorsed candidate, only got 27% in its district.  Moreover, in 2001, the club’s candidate in the Democratic Primary runoff, Mark Green, failed to carry the Jefferson Club’s district or Fidler’s District Leader district.  Finally, in the primary that same year, the club’s City Councilman Herbert Berman lost the controller’s race to William Thompson.

Fidler’s smart enough to know his good relationship with reporters allows him to get away with almost anything 

Fidler represents a boutique niche market lending company called LawCash. Fidler’s cousin was made V.P. of the company right after he graduated college.  New York Supreme Court Justice Ira Warshawsky said that LawCash, which advances money to plaintiffs while their civil lawsuits are pending, charges high usurious rates.  The judge blasted LawCash for making a high-interest loan to a poor African-American family.  LawCash has charged 50% or more in interest for one of their loans. Fidler’s loan company operates like subprime mortgages in that they both take advantage of the uninformed poor.  A representative of LawCash said his firm can charge such high rates because, unlike banks, its money is "advanced," not lent, to plaintiffs, and this is a high-risk investment.  When elected officials use their position to make money and deliberately fail to protect the public by promoting weak laws and regulations, the people suffer.  Wall Street called derivatives trading “barter” instead of an insurance policy to avoid government regulations. Now the federal government must bail out that $600 trillion dollar business.  Many of the high level consultant firms in the city today call their services education to avoid lobbying regulations.  They make secret deals between each other in a type of exclusive “Star Chamber” that runs campaigns, nonprofits, and healthcare institutions without any legal requirement to report their cooperation on city or state financial forms. 

Fidler is the District Leader in the 41th Assembly District, which has a minority population of at least 65%.  Not only is the Councilman not protecting his own voters from high-interest lending operations, he profits from one.  Yet the press reports that Councilman Fidler is fighting predatory lending.  If you Google Fidler on predatory lending you will find articles that quote him speaking out against subprime mortgage lending.  Fidler supported Frank Seddio for Surrogate Judge.  Right after Seddio left the Surrogate Court he advertised in local newspapers his services to get homeowners subprime mortgages in Canarsie as a mortgage lawyer.  According to Crain’s, Canarsie has the highest subprime default rate in the city.  Fidler was also frequently quoted in the press how he was trying to reform Brooklyn’s corrupt judicial systems with a Blue Ribbon Commission, while he and his club backed every Norman machine judge, many of who were removed from the bench. Some went to jail.

What never gets printed in the press is how Fidler uses his control of nonprofit funding to eliminate political opposition in his community.  When minority Assembly candidate H. R. Clark showed up to protest overdevelopment at a City Planning Commission’s local hearing in a building owned by a nonprofit funded with government funds, he was thrown out. According to neighborhood activist Mark Fertig, Fidler was under pressure by Assembly candidate H. R. Clark and community leaders since their meeting last year with mayoral candidate Tony Avella to downsize zoning in his district.   To this day the area has not been downzoned.  According to Fertig, all Fidler wanted to do is show the appearance of doing something while protecting his developer friends from downzoning.

Fidler has even figured out how to rip off the Campaign Finance Board (CFB) to make money for his friends when he runs for reelection.  Fidler wrote a letter to the CFB in 2003 to qualify for full campaign finance funding after the CFB ruled he would only get 25% of the matching funds because he did not have a serious primary or general election challenger.  All that is needed to quality for full funding is a letter from the elected official to the CFB saying they have a competitive primary.  Fidler got $82,500 in 2003 in matching funds, the full allowable amount, and went on to get 87% of the vote in his so-called “competitive race.”  He wrote the same letter to the CFB in his 2005 reelection bid and received full public funding in both a primary and general election he won overwhelmingly.

Besides using the government for political gain Fidler has not show much loyalty to his supporters.  Fidler supported Ferrer for mayor in 2005, going back on the endorsement commitment he gave to Gifford Miller after the Speaker passed that year’s city budget, which contained Fidler’s pork requests for his district.  Two-timing is something Fidler has always been known for.  He supported Anthony Weiner for City Council against his own cousin, Michael Garson.  When Weiner’s council seat became vacant in 1998 after he was elected to congress, Fidler supported Michael Nelson against Irma Kramer, despite the fact that Kramer was one of Fidler’s earliest supporters. 

Sometimes Fidler’s double crosses are a work of art.  At the same time Fidler’s committee was funding Councilman Stewart’s indicted aide’s nonprofit, according to Wellington Sharpe, Stewart’s 2005 Council opponent, Fidler was helping Sharpe with his ballot access.  Sharpe was later knocked off the ballot after Stewart’s lawyer brought him into court and produced a mortgage prepared by Fidler that was supposed to turn over a house to Sharpe’s kids, but actually showed Sharpe as the primary resident of the house, which was outside of Stewart’s district.

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

                                     - Thomas Jefferson 

The false way Fidler is covered by the media, while he rips off government funds to accumulate power is just a warning sign of how the press is endangering the lives of New Yorkers.  Our City and Republic are in jeopardy because today’s media has abandoned its role of informing the public, leaving the people powerless to defend themselves.  What the press did not tell the public during the term limits debate was that the two-term restrictions were voted for by a public that was upset with the corruption in the Koch Administration in the 1980’s and the role that the City’s impossible-to-defeat incumbents played in allowing that corruption.  Now even that small safeguard against incumbent protection in our society is gone.  George Orwell would have to write a new chapter in 1984 to explain how 34 City Councilmembers under investigation for illegally using the member items slush fund were able to receive press coverage that basically said that extending their time in office would increase choice, democracy and improve our economy.

Without an informed public, elected officials act like organized crime mobsters, working against the voters’ needs for personal gain.  They create government-funded umbrella-type nonprofit reelection organizations to stay in office. They also create a dysfunctional, unregulated government with no legal accountability to carry out their greedy friends’ scams to make money at the cost of the public good.  Our city would be a lot better off if it listened to a few independent voices about the dangers of repealing the Glass-Spiegel Act, rather then constantly devoting their coverage to political celebrities and their meaningless news conferences. 

Look at what Gordon Gecko’s greed has done to Wall Street. New York City is next!

Changes needed to give challenges a better chance against incumbents include:  a reduction in the number of petition signatures required to get on the ballot; non partisan redistricting; reductions in constituent mailings and office staff; equal time on the city’s cable TV stations and council web sites for challengers and opposition voices and an end to member items.

The current petitioning system favors incumbents by making it easy for them to knock their opponents off the ballot (for an insufficient amount of signatures), tying them up in court for the purpose of draining precious campaign time and resources.  In 2005 David Galarza who challenged Councilmember Gonzalez was tied up in court until a week before his primary and only received his matching funds that week. It is also time to end the unofficial campaign subsidy elected officials receive from the city’s budget in their ability to offer poll inspector jobs to their petition collectors.

Bloomberg contends that under the redistricting system, elected leaders create districts with voters who are expected to support them, all but guaranteeing their re-election and encouraging partisan leadership that appeals only to narrow groups of constituents. That is why he donated $250,000 of his own money to back a proposition in California to put a panel of independent citizens in charge of that state’s redistricting. He should do that here.

You’d have to look long and hard to find a senior citizen in the city that does not feel that if they vote against their local legislature, their senior center will be closed.  That same feeling goes for every interest group funded by member items.  Most of the local federal money is distributed by panels made up of distinguished leaders in fields such as: The Arts, Health Care, and Education.  A similar type of system should be set up in the city to replace member items.

It is a disgrace to democracy to watch these elected officials say that if the public does not like their support for legislative change to term limits, they can vote them out of office at election time knowing full well they won’t be challenged.  Wake up good government advocates; it is time for the public to be educated on the realities of campaigns and it is time to make supporters of term limits extensions pay for their vote with reforms that they normally never would otherwise pass.  

Dominic knows that if term limits passes he will be reelected.  Dominic knows that 95% of the incumbents who ran for reelection in the 2005 City Council elections were reelected.  Only Allan Jennings, who was censured on sexual harassment, was defeated that year and that was by a former incumbent, Thomas White Jr.  “Incumbents have a taxpayer-financed staff, which may act as a public relations operation; the ability to mail newsletters to constituents,” Ron Lauder said in a 1993 letter to the New York Times.  “Thus we have noncompetitive races, members increasingly insulated from constituent pressure and ossification of municipal government.”  Lauder did not even get into the unfair advantages that incumbents get from redistricting, member items and New York’s election system.

“Journalism's ultimate purpose is to inform the reader, to bring him each day a letter from home and never to permit the serving of special interests,” proclaimed Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, former New York Times publisher. Will the Times, which blindly printed Recchia’s quotes without offering analysis, mislead the public in an attempt to mold public opinion to support its goal of another term for Mayor Bloomberg?  A proper attempt to inform the public of the unfair advantages incumbents have and a review of the dirty tricks that Recchia has used over the years to repress his opposition would let its readers know what the Councilman already knows: that if term limits are extended he is a lock at reelection.

The Missing Analysis

In 2003, after Dr. Oleg Gutnik, running (2001) on the Republican line, came very close to becoming the first GOP candidate to win in Recchia’s 47^th Council District in a hundred years, Recchia hatched a plan to divide the Russian community. The Councilman made a backroom deal with the Redistricting Commission, controlled by former Council Speaker Gifford Miller, to cut about 33% of the Russian voters out of his district.  

1.      He was only elected with less than 30% of the vote

2.      His opponents, all Jewish, split the Jewish vote

3.      The Italian neighborhoods were becoming Russian

4.      The Russian citizens were increasingly registering to vote

After redistricting, Recchia conspired with the corrupt Clarence Norman-led Brooklyn machine to throw his opponent, Russian candidate Tony Eisenberg, off the ballot.  Eisenberg was thrown off the ballot after a judge picked by Norman ruled he did not live in the district.  The election law says a candidate for City Council can live anywhere during a redistricting year, which 2003 was.  However, the law was no obstacle to a Norman judge.  Recchia appeared shortly after removing Eisenberg from the ballot at a rally backing Norman, who was indicted by Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes for selling judgeships. 

In 2005 after a New York Post reporter wrote a story about community leaders making a complaint to DA Hynes Assembly was not a legal resident of his district.  They charged Lopez renting a tiny room in a home of a director of a non-profit he funded to maintain a legal residence, voting several times there.  The net result of the charges to the DA was the county leader moved out of his single room to a real apartment and the reporter left the paper.  If I were John J. O’Hara I would run for county leader to get my illegal voting conviction overturned.

In 2003, Recchia still managed to spend $82,500 in city matching funds, despite not having had a primary opponent and receiving 75% of the General Election vote.    Recchia spent $35,000 on the election lawyer to throw Eisenberg off the ballot, $3,500 to hire a private investigator against Eisenberg, and $2,500 in rent to his own wife.

Recchia has distributed millions in member funds from the Council, Mayor’s Office and capital budget throughout his district to buy political support.  He has worked with a team of political supporters who have moved Russian polling sites and threaten poll workers to make it harder for the new immigrant community to organize and vote.  The Russian activists who were organizing campaigns in Brighton Beach got tired of spending money and worn out from all the dirty political tricks Recchia and his friends play against them.  Several said the machine was worse than the KGB in the Soviet Union.  It was not until I met with Congressman Nadler in the winter of 2006 about how the dirty tricks against the Russian community were hurting any chance of reversing the declining Jewish vote in Brooklyn that Adele Cohen was talked out of running for reelection to the Assembly and Alex Brook-Krasny, the first Russian-American Assemblyman, was allowed to succeed her.

Recchia, the lawyer, is the top outside money earner in the City Council.  In 2006, Citizens Union reported that Recchia has an outside income of over $210,000. In addition to the near quarter of a million he takes in, he receives a salary of $100,000 as a Councilman, plus $10,000 more for chairing the Council’s Libraries & International Intergroup Relations committee. Recchia has done very well for someone who graduated from a law school that was not accredited at the time he graduated from it.  If the neighborhood buzz is true, Recchia’s tenure as President of Community School Board 21 was also good for his well-being.

Recchia’s biggest backer, at least in terms of campaign contributions, is the developer who wants to turn historical Coney Island into a co-op project.  Most of last year, developer Joe Sitt of Thor Equities pushed Recchia for U.S. Congress. But Recchia decided not to run after Rep. Vito Fossella dropped out of the race - when it was discovered

Fossella has a second family - and backers of Councilman Michael McMahon applied pressure to Recchia to have McMahon replace him. Despite Sitt’s longtime support for Recchia, by voting to extend his time in office to a third term, the Councilman is now destroying Sitt’s plan to build housing in Coney Island. The biggest opponent of Sitt’s plan is Mayor Bloomberg, the City’s staunchest advocate for keeping Coney Island an amusement park district. If Bloomberg stays another term, Thor Equities is likely to lose the battle to reshape Coney Island.

An addition of an extra term for city officials will have a chilling effect on competition for elective office, worsening a political system in the City which is already on life support.  The immediate critical problem is not that less than 1% of registered voters during the last primary had a choice at the polls; it is the centralization of control in the hands of a new breed of powerbrokers that has evolved since the corruption scandal uncovered in the 1980’s in the Koch administration.

Only one man can stop this elite gang of elected officials, party leaders, lobbyists and their clients from a complete takeover of New York City’s budget and political system: Michael Garcia, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. Garcia, whose office is mostly known for convicting members of violent organized crime families, must not let the city’s secret powerbrokers end his investigation of the City Council’s member item slush fund scandal.  Mr. Garcia, you have assembled valuable resources to stop this new ruling gang from continuing to loot the City’s budget. You must use the power in your hands to do so now.  It was the municipal scandal of the 80’s that led to the term limits reform not the money of Ron Lauder

Will Garcia Uncover a New Municipal Scandal to Rival NJ U.S. Attorney Christie’s Accomplishments?

A new type of lobbyists maneuver unregulated through city government causing the same kind of damage to our city as Wall Street investment bankers have done to the nation’s banking system.  They scheme around unclear rules, limited regulations and non-existent oversight deliberately left vague by elected officials to benefit themselves and make money for their campaign contributors.  But while damages to Wall Street are easy to show, this corruption, though just as harmful, is much harder to prove.

Starting a decade ago, a small group (ten or less) of campaign consultants like the Parkside Group began to function as lobbyists specializing in obtaining City Council funding.  From 2002 to 2006, Parkside Group made over $7 million dollars by lobbying for over 40 non-profits that were funded by member items and developers who force their projects on unwilling communities.  This new class of power players not only influences policy, which they are supposed to do as lobbyists, they are actually choosing the government officials who will then turn around and act on behalf of clients whose interests firms like Parkside represent. (footnotes: 1, 2, & 3) (www.parksidegroup.blogspot.com/) 

Campaign operatives took on the role of lobbyists after ethics rules issued after the Koch scandals in the Parking Violations Bureau—which involved two of the five county leaders—boxed out party leaders and elected officials (except Anthony Seminerio, one of your new targets, Mr. Garcia) from profiting, at least directly, from those doing business with the City.

It what can only be described as local triangulation, the combining of the campaign consultant and lobbyist has had a chilling effect on independent politics, reform and the will of the people. The city’s elected officials, wealthy establishment and lobbyist-consultants have all joined together to ignore the choice of the people to have the system of two term limits that they voted for twice in the last 15 years.  With the efficiency of the Soviet Union they have sent independent political leaders to Siberia. And some, like me, have even met worse fates.  Only a new municipal corruption scandal will galvanize the public pressure necessary to update the City’s ethic rules to regulate these new super lobbyist-consultants and give the citizens of New York back their government and democracy.

Why Term Limits Exist

Term limits, the most important government reform in the modern history of New York City, were instituted in 1987 after then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani convicted lobbyists and government officials for turning the Parking Violations Bureau into a “racketeering enterprise.”  Giuliani proved that City commissioners loyal to Queens Borough President and Democratic Leader Donald Manes permitted Bronx County Leader Stanley Friedman and his business partners to win a $22 million contract for a company called Citisource to build a hand-held computer for parking meters, even though Citisource had no assets, no employees, and not a single computer.

The public’s vote in two separate elections for limiting City officials to two terms was a response to then-Mayor Koch conspiring with the Queens and Bronx Democratic County Leaders to shake down a City agency in return for their support for Koch’s election and reelection bids.  The term limit reform theory was that turnover in elective office would prevent future takeover of city agencies.  What the reformers did not foresee was the creation of lobbyist-consultants and their subsequent alliance with the county leaders and elected officials to centralize power and take over the entire City government..

In 1984, I wrote an editorial in a small newspaper I managed called Talking Turkey, which uncovered the corruption inside the Parking Violations Bureau.  At the time, my story was ignored for two years by the City’s press until Queens Borough President Manes attempted suicide on the eve of his indictment by Giuliani.  It is creepy that over 24 years later, despite clear anecdotal evidence, knowledge of a corruption investigation by your office and the hiring of criminal lawyers by present and former Council leaders, the member item corruption story is still being ignored by the press.  I wrote the Parking Violations editorial at that time because the mainstream media was ignoring government corruption in the city.  Two decades later, amazing as it may see, I am publishing this government corruption story on a blog, because we have an even more oppressively controlled media in this town than we did then. (footnote: 5)

 (www.Talkingturkey.blogspot.com)

Hoist Them By Their Own Petard:

The reason the Council Members hired lawyers right away is because they know you have two atomic bombs in your hand, Mr. Garcia.  What would be more fitting than to use the member items which the Council Member’s now use to ensure their reelection, to catch consultants/lobbyist in a conspiracy to rip off from the rip off (member items).  While he continues to wait for his sentencing, former Queens Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin could offer great insight into how his former chief of staff Evan Stavisky operates the Parkside Group. Evan Stavisky, son of Queens State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky, is one of the partners in Parkside Group.   Since McLaughlin teamed up with Stavisky to cut themselves into the county machine, leading to the success of the lobbyist-consultant operation, it is fair to reason after reading your indictment of Mr. McLaughlin that the Assemblyman micromanaged and took a piece of everything he was involved in. McLaughlin even paid Parkside to lobby for the Central Labor Council, when he was the Labor Council’s president.  It is a slam dunk that McLaughlin can do more to break up the monopoly that secretly operates New York City than Frank Lucas did for breaking up the corruption in the NYPD narcotics squad in the 70’s.  (Footnotes: 1, 5, 6, 7 & 8)

(www.usdoj.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/October06/mclaughlinindictment.pdf)

Parkside’s former President Harry Giannoulis helped Gifford Miller become speaker in 2002 and also assisted him in picking his chief of staff.  Giannoulis quietly left Parkside several months ago.  (footnotes: 9&10)

We know according to Citizens Union that several political consultants like Parkside took on a second role as a lobbyist when Gifford Miller became speaker.  Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a nonprofit civic group that has no budget request before the city, said the competition for money among nonprofits had "created this frenzy" to hire lobbyists out of a belief that doing so would increase their chances of securing appropriations. He also expressed concern about what he called "a growing problem" of council members being lobbied by firms that serve as political consultants to many of them. "It's a closed circle of influence that is totally inappropriate," Dadey said. (footnotes: 1, 11 &12)

What Else Did Fast and Loose Speaker Miller

We know according to a report by the Comptroller that Speaker Miller played fast and loose with the city’s budget and rules.  An audit charged that Miller split $1.67 million into several smaller contracts to avoid competitive bidding requirements for a mailing that touted the Speaker’s accomplishments. (footnotes: 13 &14)

We know that Miller combined fundraising and lobbyists to work together to benefit his campaign for mayor in 2005.  City Council Speaker Gifford Miller's fundraising effort for mayor operated for 15 months in an office that housed the same lobbying firm that was also working on his campaign for Mayor.   (footnotes: 13, 14 & 15)

Who made the decision in the Council’s finance office on who got member item funding?  Did certain lobbyists get preferred treatment?

The second bomb in your hands is Councilman Kendall Stewart’s former chief of staff, Asquith Reid, who, like McLaughlin, has also become a customer of yours.  Reid's attorney told a Manhattan federal judge Friday that he has no plans to go to trial on charges that Reid embezzled more than $145,000 in public funds.  He faces more than 80 years in prison for allegedly stealing the cash from tax money Stewart allocated over three years to the Donna Reid Memorial Education Fund, a nonprofit group.  The indictment said employees in the New York City Department for the Aging initially rejected the group's application for city money in 2004 after noticing that its office address was identical to Asquith Reid's home address.  The group then reapplied for city funds through the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development. That request was granted. Some of the money passed through fictitious groups created by the City Council before being awarded to the fund.  (footnotes: 16, 17)

City Council Finance Committee Chair (and New York City Comptroller candidate) David Weprin said these “fictitious groups,” never came before his committee or the Council as a whole – it was merely the work of a “couple of staff people.” (footnote: 18)

An Open Secret?

For the six years Council Speaker Christine Quinn served on the Council prior to the discovery of the slush fund scandal, where did Speaker Quinn and the other Council Members think they were getting the money to fund additional nonprofits after the passage of the annual budget?  Friends and co-workers of two former City Council staffers accused of disobeying orders to scrap a phantom budget system fumed that they're being scapegoated.   The two, Michael Keogh and Staci Emanuel, left after Council Speaker Christine Quinn said they ignored instructions to stop reserving millions of taxpayer dollars under the names of fictional organizations so the funds could be dispersed later to genuine nonprofit groups.  The Speaker’s finance director, Michael Keogh, immediately joined Bolton-St. Johns, the second most successful lobbying firm in the City.  Mr. Keogh is already listed on the City’s database as the contact person for the non-profit High Line, which this year received $290,000 in member item funding from the slush fund, sponsored by Speaker Quinn.

City records show Friends of the High Line also received $290,000 from the Council for borough needs in 2005 and 2006 and millions more from the capital budget.  It is not know if Quinn was the sponsor of these funds or if these funds also came from fictitious nonprofits, because until this year, sponsors weren’t publicly listed on member items.  It is still a secret who the sponsors of the much larger capital budget contracts are.  What is known it that Friends of the High Line has contributed more than $50,000 to Quinn and $60,000 to Miller since 1999. 

The New York Times called the member items hidden in the fake nonprofits “Potemkin Accounts”.  The Times editorial from April 5th, 2008 said: “The device was apparently designed to allow the City Council speaker to hand out funds for pet projects throughout the year, getting around a requirement to allocate money at the start of the fiscal year. While it does not seem as if the public’s money was spent illegally, it does seem likely that political favors were bestowed without accountability… Quinn says she was disobeyed when she ordered her staff to stop stashing ghost funds last spring (two top finance aides later departed for undisclosed reasons).  She says she tried to stop the phony allocations, something her predecessors, Peter Vallone and Gifford Miller, did not do. But she was oddly ineffectual.”  What the Times did not address was how Miller’s policy of creating fake nonprofits to park member item funds not only continued, but the number of made-up organizations in the budget doubled after Quinn became Speaker and replaced the previous financial director and 40% of her staff.  “Finally, last fall,” the same Times editorial continued, Quinn “alerted the United States attorney’s office and the city’s Department of Investigation, who were already examining other council-related finances. That action was late in coming.” The Times called for a “full investigation”.  We fully agree. (footnote: 19, 20, 21, 22 & 23)

Spin Masters Replaces Service and Influence Network

These new “lobbyist-consultants” have risen to a level of power that rivals old-time Tammany leaders like Carmine DeSapio. But what makes these campaign consultants different—and more dangerous—is that they are beholden to no one. The old political machines needed to provide services to working families, because they depended upon their vote to survive. Lobbyist-consultants, on the other hand, rely on spin, polls and special interests to keep the money flowing in for their summer homes in the Hamptons

.  

From Angry New Yorker to Disconnected Wimp

The old machine’s network operated from the bottom up giving the average Joe a voice, the spin masters have destroyed that system and changed the culture of government.  Today New York’s government has become a Potemkin Village controlled by insiders, blocking everyman’s influence and ability to pressure government for there needs.

Local district attorneys, who rely on the same lobbyists-consultants and local elected officials for their reelection campaigns, conveniently look the other way on this type of insider trading.  Even the city’s Conflict of Interest Board retreated under pressure from lobbyists when they tried in 2005 to restrict lobbying of elected officials by consultants who work on their campaigns.  Only a U.S. Attorney has the independence to prosecute the racketeering scam that is pretending to be our government. (footnote: 4)

The future of New York City is in your hands,

                                    Sincerely,

                                    All New Yorkers

------------------

Getting help to end government corruption is as difficult as President McKinley’s efforts to win the Spanish American War by sending a messenger with a letter in 1898 to seek the help of rebel leader General Garcia hiding in the mountains of Cuba.   

Dedicated to Jack Newfield, the father of modern investigative journalism in this town   

Sidebar News Articles . . .

 1. We know the Parkside Group was formed around the 2001 election“In Queens, the Parkside Group leads the newcomers in attracting candidates. Evan Stavisky, Bill Driscoll and Harry Giannoulis bring their years of political experience together to represent dozen-plus odd Council candidates.” -Queens Tribune, July 12, 2001 

2. We know that Parkside took in 7.5 Million from 2001 to 2006"As the city examines the power that lobbyists exert on municipal government, new figures show the top influence-peddlers are hauling in big bucks.  According to a list compiled by the Citizens Union and obtained by The Post, the Parkside Group is the city's top-billing lobbying or consulting group, having earned $7.5 million in fees since 2001." -New York Post, February 3, 2006 

3. Top Lobbyists

New York Observer, June 7, 2007 The City Clerk’s office just put out its annual report on lobbying. Here are the Top Ten Lobbyists for 2006: Kasirer Consulting Revenue: $3,020,645.79, Bolton St. Johns, Inc Revenue: $2,462,786, Parkside Group Revenue: $2,358,950, Greenberg Traurig Revenue: $2,233,433.34, Law Offices of Claudia Wagner Revenue: $2,162,200, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP Revenue: 41,857,925, Constantinople Consulting Revenue: $$1,649,500, Connelly McLaughlin Revenue: $1,418,900, Geto & De Milly, Inc. Revenue: $1,323,996, Yoswein New York, Inc. Revenue: $1,187,000

4.  Conflicts of Interest Board Rescinds Memo on Lobbying“Under pressure from lobbying-and-consulting firms, the city's Conflicts of Interest Board has backed away from its first attempt to restrict lobbying of elected officials by consultants who work on their campaigns.  The board caused a stir in political circles in January when it issued a memo reminding municipal employees of the ethical rules for taking part in campaigns, which included a new admonition against lobbying by political consultants. It said consultants hired by public officials “may not lobby or in any other way communicate” with those officials on behalf of private clients. . .  The Parkside Group, for instance, has worked on the campaigns of more than a dozen City Council members, including the speaker, Gifford Miller, and has also lobbied the Council on behalf of private clients. . . .Mr. Rosenkranz (lawyer hired to represent lobbyist against the conflict of interest board) declined to say which lobbyist-consultants he was representing, although others involved in the case said Parkside was among them.” –New York Times, March 3, 2005 

5. We know that Speakers Miller and Quinn and the rest of the City Council have hired criminal lawyers to represent them“Gifford Miller, the former City Council speaker, has hired a criminal defense lawyer to represent him in a federal investigation into the Council’s longstanding practice of allocating millions of dollars to phantom nonprofit groups, people involved in the case said on Friday. The Council, which had hired a criminal lawyer to represent itself in the inquiry by federal prosecutors and the City Department of Investigation, recently hired another one to represent staff members who were being questioned, several of the people said. The two lawyers, along with a third criminal defense lawyer representing the current speaker, Christine C. Quinn, are being paid with city funds; Mr. Miller’s lawyer, Henry Putzel III, is not.”  –New York Times, May 17, 2008 

6. The Press should be Reading the Press and Connecting the Dots About eight years ago, Brian McLaughlin and his former chief of staff Parkside’s Evan Stavisky went on an attack against the leaders of the Queens organization.  There were a series of newspapers articles in the New York Sun claiming that all the leaders lived on Long Island.  The late Thomas Manton and his co-leaders in the Queens organization did what they always do to avoid trouble: made a deal to combine forces with McLaughlin and Stavisky.

7. We know McLaughlin took a piece for himself of everything he was involved in“The former head of the nation’s biggest municipal labor council painstakingly detailed years of thievery from his own union and the state on Friday as he pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in federal court in Manhattan.” The thievery included stealing $95,000 from Little League baseball teams to pay his rent, to stealing from own his labor union, to brazenly creating two no-show jobs on his legislative payroll and keeping part of one of their salaries.  – New York Times, March 8, 2008 

8. We know that McLaughlin is in cooperation with the U.S. Attorney to reduce his prison sentence“Disgraced ex-lawmaker and union boss Brian McLaughlin is a secret witness in an FBI probe that led to Wednesday's arrest of a Queens’s pol on influence-peddling charges, the Daily News has learned.  The ongoing investigation - which featured an undercover FBI agent trolling the Assembly floor for corrupt pols - has snared its first collar: Assemblyman Seminerio (D-Ozone Park). Sources familiar with the investigation said McLaughlin, a former assemblyman who pleaded guilty to bribery charges and faces up to 10 years in prison, is cooperating in the probe.” –New York Daily News, September 10, 2008 

9. We know that The Parkside Group’s President Harry Giannoulis helped Gifford Miller become Council Speaker "Gifford represents a completely new paradigm," said Harry Gianoulis [sic], a consultant who helped coordinate Mr. Miller's campaign for Speaker. "It's consistent with the way that all of these new guys think that he took a multi-track approach and tried to talk to everyone, instead of saying 'I've got Queens and the Bronx' and ignoring everything outside that target audience. He started early with his campaigning, and he didn't make enemies. The old model doesn't work anymore, where you sit on your ass and wait for a county leader to pick you." –The New York Observer, Jan. 13, 02 

10. Miller got help from Parkside’s lobbyist in finding his new chief of staff and that Parkside is getting paid from both sides"The position is traditionally that of gatekeeper and top adviser to one of the city's most powerful officials. . . The lobbyist, Harry E. Giannoulis, a partner in the Parkside Group, a lobbying and political consulting firm, said yesterday that while he did not believe he had played a pivotal role in helping Mr. Miller choose his chief of staff, he had given the speaker advice on what to look for in a candidate and had advised some potential applicants to seek the job. He also participated in meetings at which candidates were discussed, according to Mr. Miller's staff. Mr. Giannoulis wears two hats, one as a consultant helping candidates get elected, another as a lobbyist, who then helps his clients gain access to the people he helps elect. It is a standard strategist-lobbyist model that is common in the city and in the federal government. In this case, Mr. Giannoulis acknowledges wearing both hats at the same time -- saying he is collecting a $2,000-a-month retainer from Mr. Miller's campaign committee for political work while also representing clients like the Telebeam Telecommunications Corporation of Long Island City, which owns pay phones throughout the city." -New York Times, May 18, 2004 

11. Good Government: Citizens Union reported lobbying firms were created to do work in Miller’s Council “More political consultants in New York have taken on the second role of lobbyists over the last five years, prompting good-government advocates to press the city's ethics board to revive attempts to regulate the practice. An analysis by Citizens Union, a nonprofit policy group, shows that half of the top 10 consultant-lobbyists last year earned no money from lobbying in 2001, but gradually adopted the practice, sometimes lobbying the same public officials they helped elect. Altogether, those 10 firms earned $32 million from lobbying and consulting from 2002 to 2005, according to the analysis, which the group intends to present today to the Conflicts of Interest Board.” -NY Times, Feb. 3, 06 

12. We know the lobbyist consultant role at City Hall is Inappropriate"Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a nonprofit civic group that has no budget request before the city, said the competition for money among nonprofits had "created this frenzy" to hire lobbyists out of a belief that doing so would increase their chances of securing appropriations. He also expressed concern about what he called "a growing problem" of council members being lobbied by firms that serve as political consultants to many of them. "It's a closed circle of influence that is totally inappropriate," Mr. Dadey said. -New York Times, June 22, 2005 

13. We know Miller played fast and loose with the city’s budget and rulesThe City Council played fast and loose in awarding $1.67 million in printing work under former Speaker Gifford Miller, a city audit charged yesterday.  The report said competitive bidding requirements were skirted by splitting big contracts into several smaller ones that didn't reach the $5,000 bidding threshold.  Initially, his office had reported mailing only 100,000 flyers, which featured Miller and touted the Council's budget positions, at a cost of $37,000. But a few days later, Miller aides admitted 5.5 million flyers had been mailed at a cost of $1.6 million. –Daily News, September 22, 2007 

14. We know Miller’s combined fund-raising and Lobbyists worked together to benefit his campaign for mayor in 2005"City Council Speaker Gifford Miller's fund-raising effort operated for 15 months in an office in the same lobbying firm that reportedly has advised him on selecting a new chief of staff. The executive director of Miller for New York, Lisa Esler, rented an office from the Parkside Group since February 2003 before relocating to another floor in the same Nassau Street building three weeks ago. Ms. Esler and aides to Mr. Miller said the space was rented by her consulting firm, The Esler Group, and not the campaign, although Miller for New York is paying for the new office, the aides and Ms. Esler said." - New York Sun, May 19, 2004 

15. The Miller campaign for mayor paid Parkside for fundraising from 2002 to 2205 –Campaign finance website 

16. Indicted former council staffer knows . . . The indictment said employees in the New York City Department for the Aging initially rejected the group's application for city money in 2004 after noticing that its office address was identical to Asquith Reid's home address.  The group then reapplied for city funds through the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development. That request was granted. Some of the money passed through fictitious groups created by the city council before being awarded to the fund. –Daily News, April 16, 2008

17. And is Talking!A former top aide to Brooklyn Councilman Kendall Stewart is negotiating a plea deal with the feds in the hopes of avoiding prison.  Asquith Reid's attorney told a Manhattan federal judge Friday he has no plans to go to trial on charges that the former chief of staff embezzled more than $145,000 in public funds.  Reid, 64, faces more than 80 years in prison for allegedly stealing the cash from tax money Stewart allocated over three years to the Donna Reid Memorial Education Fund, a nonprofit honoring the memory of Reid's late daughter.  Reid has alleged he put the $145,000 back into the charity. –Daily News, September 12, 2008 

18. Council Finance Chair claims two staff workers controlled member items slush fundsIn an appearance last night on the Perez Notes radio show, Council Finance Committee Chair (and comptroller candidate) David Weprin said the Council slush fund incident, was a minor blip. These “fictitious groups,” Weprin said, never came before his committee or the Council as a whole – it was merely the work of a “couple of staff people.” - Daily News Blog, July 31, 2008 

19. What was going on in the Council Finance Office?Friends and co-workers of two former City Council staffers accused of disobeying orders to scrap a phantom budget system fumed yesterday that they're being scapegoated.   The two, Michael Keogh and Staci Emanuel, left after Council Speaker Christine Quinn said they ignored instructions to stop reserving millions of taxpayer dollars under the names of fictional organizations so the funds could be dispersed later to genuine nonprofit groups. "Staci is the consummate professional," one former co-worker told The Post.  "She's totally honest. She'd never ignore an order like that. For her to be vilified publicly is not right."   Keogh, the council's former budget director, and Emanuel, his deputy, have both refused to talk to the press. –NY Post, April 5, 08 

20. Former Council financial director who now works at one of the city’s top lobbyists firms, says he is cooperating with investigators  "Her finance director, Michael Keogh, has since joined Bolton-St. Johns, a lobbying firm where Emily Giske, a top official in the state Democratic Party and close ally of the speaker, also works. Quinn’s communications Chief Jamie McShane said the speaker played no role in Keogh landing that job, and Keogh has told reporters he is cooperating with investigators.” -Daily News Blog, July 31, 2008

21.  From the Council Finance Committee to Lobbyist Michael Keogh is listed as Bolton-St Johns lobbyist in a contract with the High Line non profit which according to news report received member items funds, even some funding from the fake non profits. –NYC Lobbyists Database 

22. Quinn: “We Went Back and Fixed It”The Friends of the High Line - a pet project of former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller - received more money than any other group from the phantom accounts squirreled away by the council last year, records released yesterday showed.  Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the High Line was originally allocated the funds during the budget process, but was mistakenly left high and dry when the final list of grants was issued.  "This was just a clerical error," she said. "We went back to fix it." –NY Post, April 4, 2008

23. Quinn Replaced Finance Director and most of his staff  “Michael P. Keogh will become the Council's new finance director, with primary responsibility for negotiating the city's $50.2 billion budget with the Bloomberg administration, Council aides confirmed.  Mr. Keogh will replace Larian Angelo, the longtime finance director, who was fired along with 17 of her staff members, or roughly 40 percent of the budget department.” –New York Times, February 18, 2006

“Someone intentionally designed this scheme. It was no mistake.” Norman Siegel    

Siegel was talking about U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia’s investigation of the City Council’s appropriations of member item discretionary funds to fake non existing non profits.  Unrelated to Garcia’s investigation Siegel brilliantly filed a tax payers lawsuit against the council’s member item system that was designed to get at the truth of Tammany corruption over 150 years ago.

This crack into what the federal prosecutors are up to came up when they asked for a delay in Manhattan Supreme Court of civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel request for an inquiry on behalf of eight New York taxpayers. The inquiry would not determine guilt or innocence, but would merely lay out the facts surrounding the case for public review. The inquiry being sought is known as a judicial summary inquiry, and it comes from a rarely used section of the City Charter. The section, 1109, was created in 1873, a product of the Boss Tweed era, when the New York politician William M. Tweed bilked the city of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Holding a judicial inquiry before the federal investigation is complete would make it virtually impossible for the authorities to prosecute anyone because testimony from the inquiry is not permissible in a criminal proceeding.

 It clear the U.S. is looking to do something and remember many of the major players have all hired lawyers. 

Garcia’s inquiry has led to the hiring by council members of three different criminal defense law firms and a tax payer lawsuit by Siegel himself.  The city is paying the bill for Lee S. Richards III, a former federal prosecutor for Speaker Quinn and for Sullivan & Cromwell, a firm that the council has hired to assist in responding to the federal investigations.  Former speaker Gifford Miller has hired Henry Putzel III, as his lawyer, with his own money.  It has not been reported if former speaker Peter Vallone who has been interview by the U.S. Attorney has hired his own lawyer.

 Let’s now look at how this developing story has been reported or not reported in the local media and what kind of job the reports did in informing the public what is really going on

After reading John Eligon New York Times article on June 27, 2008 titled, "U.S. Inquiry Into Funding by Council Is to End Soon," the reader is left wondering what the U.S. Attorney was investigating.  Eligon did not even mention that councilmembers were lawyer-up, and why?  Eligon was so busy spinning that the investigation was ending and attacking Siegel that he overlooked several other main points.  Is Garcia getting ready to prove an organized criminal conspiracy as Norman Siegel charged?  Was the crime intentionally designed by Quinn, Miller or others to rip off the city for their friends and supporters?  Is Garcia being helped by an inside informer who was part of a conspiracy to help build his case?   Who would the grand jury indict?  Councilmembers? Lobbyist? A-Rod?

From the New York Times: “A federal investigation into the City Council’s appropriation of funds to fictitious groups should conclude within 90 days, a prosecutor said on Thursday. But the prosecutor, Rua M. Kelly, an assistant United States attorney who spoke at a hearing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan to determine whether the court would hold a separate public inquiry, did not indicate whether anyone would be charged.” - New York Times, June 27, 2008

The Times writer continued to downgrade the investigation by adding the following spin line to his story “If she does indeed grant it”: “The U.S Attorney asked Justice Joan B. Lobis of State Supreme Court in Manhattan to delay any public inquiry for 90 days if she does indeed grant it. Mr. Siegel said he was fine with a 90-day stay and, in fact, welcomed Ms. Kelly’s news that the federal investigation was nearing completion.” – New York Times, June 27, 2008

Nowhere in the Times' article, was the fact that Garcia’s office could request an extension on the 90 day delay. That came out in a Daily News story by Frank Lombardi three days earlier. “Garcia’s office wants the inquiry, which has yet to be approved by the court, postponed for 90 days, with possible extensions.” – New York Daily News, June 24, 2008

Also not in the Times story, but included in Lombardi’s Daily News story was who was a target of Siegel’s suit: "It seeks to have officials such as Mayor Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Quinn and her two predecessors as speakers, as well as current and former Council budget aides, testify under oath.” – New York Daily News, June 24, 2008

The Times story did include a hit by a city lawyer against Siegel, which had noting to do with the point of the story: “Stephen Kitzinger, a lawyer for the city, said he believed Mr. Siegel’s request for a public inquiry was motivated by his desire to run for public advocate, an office he has sought twice before, in 2001 and 2005. “It would appear that this is a publicity stunt designed to promote a campaign,” Mr. Kitzinger said in court.” - New York Times, June 27, 2008

Since when is getting at the truth a stunt?  That is the job of any good journalist.