Ed Koch, New York’s ebullient mayor for most of the 1980’s, saw himself as a cheerleader-in-chief. His style was encapsulated in a famously self-congratulatory catchphrase: “How am I doin’?”
Ed Koch in 1982.
It was the wrong question to ask in 1980, when the city was hit with a crippling transit strike. Bicyclists squeezed their way between angry motorists. Workers streamed like refugees across the East River bridges. This was the moment when working women put their high heels in a purse or tote bag and tied up the laces on a pair of running shoes. The style continued after the strike ended.
Better news was just around the corner. New York, still reeling from near-bankruptcy in the mid-1970’s, was struggling to regain its economic footing and recover the brash self-confidence that had long made it the most hated city in the United States, a status that residents prized.
It managed to do both. After weathering a severe recession, Wall Street came roaring back after 1982, embarking on a bull run of historic magnitude. The shower of gold in the financial markets worked wonders. Suddenly, the city was awash in money, and it showed. Not since the Gilded Age had New York seen such unbridled displays of wealth, as a wave of freshly minted billionaires preened and strutted, fighting their way into the upper reaches of society by funneling their wealth into charity balls and clamoring to join the boards of august institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library.
Socialite Nan Kempner attends Tiffany’s 150th Anniversary Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1987.
They liked to collect art. Their money helped float the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art. It kept the hammers pounding relentlessly at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. It touched off a boom in high-end galleries of contemporary art and made instant millionaires of artists like the Neo-Expressionists Eric Fischl, David Salle and Julian Schnabel. All of them showed at Mary Boone, the gallery of the decade.
Commuters walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on the first day of 1980 transit strike.
The city’s sports franchises did their bit to keep spirits high. The once omnipotent Yankees sank into the doldrums, but the lowly Mets, who had not won a World Series since 1969, staged a comeback and won the big prize in 1986. That same year, the New York Giants finished at the top of the NFC and went on to defeat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. Meanwhile, the New York Islanders emerged as a powerhouse in the National Hockey League, winning the Stanley Cup every year from 1980 through 1983. Yes, the Islanders played in Nassau County. The Giants played in New Jersey, but New York took credit anyway.
The New York Mets celebrate their 1986 World Series victory.
It was a heady time. The Brooklyn Bridge celebrated its hundredth anniversary. The Statue of Liberty got a makeover. New York was back, or so it seemed.
But two specters darkened the city’s streets. Rising real estate prices and the continued erosion of the city’s manufacturing base led to an epidemic of homelessness and the widespread use of a new drug, crack cocaine. In the gay community, a mysterious pneumonia-like disease took hold. Once identified, AIDS became the modern-day equivalent of the Black Death, attacking an entire generation of gay men.
Police patrol walking past a homeless man in Tompkins Square Park.
Mayor David Dinkins with wife, Joyce, giving acceptance speech after winning the mayoral election in 1989.
In addition, racial divisions remained an ugly scar. On three occasions, young black men who had strayed into the wrong Brooklyn neighborhoods were set upon and beaten to death by local thugs. Bernhard Goetz, a thin, bespectacled white man dubbed the Subway Vigilante, pulled out a handgun and shot four black teenagers who mugged him on the No. 2 train. In 1989, however, the city elected its first black mayor, David Dinkins.
New York has always been a city of extremes. In the 1980’s the extremes widened. After its near-death experience in the 1970’s, when it fell into receivership, the city came back to life. But now it was both richer and poorer, safer and more desperate, more exciting and more hopeless. It was New York, only more so.
DECEMBER 9, 1980
CROWDS OF LENNON FANS GATHER QUICKLY AT THE DAKOTA AND HOSPITAL
A crowd began to gather at West 72nd Street and Central Park West immediately after John Lennon, the former Beatles star, was shot and killed last night. Some of the first people to gather were eyewitnesses to the murder. Others had been only a block away.
By midnight, the crowd of mostly young people at that corner outside the Dakota, where Mr. Lennon lived with his family, had grown to several hundred, and by 1 A.M. it grew to nearly 1,000.
Many were crying and they were all asking questions about the shooting. Some said that they had come to the scene from other boroughs and others said that they had come from surrounding communities.
The scene resembled a pilgrimage, with cars double-parked as young men, some of them on roller skates, and women, some in slippers and housecoats, stood on the street.
Some of the people were singing and humming the lyrics of “All My Loving” in soft voices. “Tomorrow I’ll miss you / remember I’ll always be true / and while I’m away / I’ll write home ever day … .” Then people in the crowd joined in and sang out, “And I’ll send all my loving to you.”
POLICE TRACE TANGLED PATH LEADING TO LENNON’S SLAYING AT THE DAKOTA
While John Lennon was mourned yesterday by millions around the world, the New York City police were trying to understand the erratic behavior of the 25-year-old former mental patient who is accused of fatally shooting the musician Monday night at the entrance to the Dakota apartments on Central Park West at 72nd Street.
The accused assailant, Mark David Chapman of Honolulu, was arraigned yesterday afternoon in Manhattan Criminal Court on charges of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a revolver he bought for $169 in Hawaii six weeks ago.
Yoko Ono is helped by David Geffen as she leaves Roosevelt Hospital after learning her husband, John Lennon, had died after being shot by Mark Chapman.
The police said Mr. Chapman had been seen loitering around the arched 72d Street entrance to the Dakota on both Saturday and Sunday.
About 5 P.M. on Monday, the police said, Mr. Lennon and Miss Ono left the Dakota for a recording studio. Mr. Chapman approached Mr. Lennon for an autograph, the police said, and he scribbled one on the cover of his new album, “Double Fantasy,” recorded with Miss Ono and released two weeks ago.
The Lennons returned to the Dakota at about 10:50 P.M., alighting from their limousine on the 72d Street curb although the car could have driven through the entrance and into the courtyard.
As the couple walked by, Chief Sullivan said, Mr. Chapman called, “Mr. Lennon.” Then, he said, the assailant dropped into “a combat stance” and emptied his pistol at the singer. According to the autopsy, four shots struck Mr. Lennon, two in the left side of his back and two in his left shoulder. All four caused internal damage and bleeding.
According to the police, Mr. Lennon staggered up six steps to the room at the end of the entrance used by the concierge, said, “I’m shot,” then fell face down.
The first policemen at the scene were Officers Steve Spiro and Peter Cullen, who were in their patrol car at 72d Street and Broadway when they heard a report of shots fired at the Dakota. According to Chief Sullivan, the officers found Mr. Chapman standing “very calmly” where he had been.
The police said he had dropped the revolver after firing it; the elevator operator took it for safekeeping. The police said Mr. Chapman had a paperback book, J.D. Salinger’s 1950’s novel “Catcher in the Rye,” and a cassette recorder with 14 hours of Beatles tapes.
The musician’s last interview was with RKO Radio, recorded a few hours before his murder. He talked of his love for his wife, his new music and the peace he was trying to find.
“I’m really talking to the people who grew up with me,” he said. “I’m saying, ‘Here I am now, how are you? How’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn’t the 70’s a drag? Here we are, let’s try to make it through the 80’s, you know?’ ” 
SEPTEMBER 20, 1981
SIMON-GARFUNKEL REUNION JAMS CENTRAL PARK
In weather carrying more than a hint of autumn, several hundred thousand people seeking remembrance of the 1960’s carpeted the Great Lawn of Central Park yesterday evening for the free reunion concert of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.
As the singers, who had parted company 11 years ago, joined their voices once again in “Mrs. Robinson,” “Homeward Bound,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and other wistful anthems of a rebellious decade, cheers of recognition rolled in from the vast gathering, put at 400,000 by the police.
There were couples who had fallen in love to Simon and Garfunkel and who sat on blankets holding hands, and there were younger people whose only perspective of the 60’s had been from the seat of a stroller.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel performing in Central Park.
For as far as one could see on the level ground, there were people sprawled, surrounded by beach chairs, ice chests and other paraphernalia of a long wait. Midway through the concert, Mr. Garfunkel shaded his eyes and looked out at the multitudes. “I thought it might be somewhat crowded,” the singer said, “but we seem to have filled the place.”
The crowd, called by officials the largest in the history of free concerts in the park, had begun gathering in the morning for the reunion, which began at dusk. A number of people in the front, pressed against the barricades in front of the stage, had to be helped out to get some air.
Mr. Simon said he had originally intended to give a solo concert, then asked Mr. Garfunkel to join him in a few numbers—something the singers have done a few times since they decided to pursue separate careers in 1970. By the time negotiations were completed, it was to be Simon and Garfunkel together for half the program.
“Then I realized I would be the opening act for that show and I didn’t want to be the opening act,” Mr. Simon recalled. “People are always talking about reunions. Now we’ll find out if it’s really satisfying.”
Mr. Garfunkel said he was excited about rejoining Mr. Simon, with whom he first began harmonizing when they were in junior high school in Forest Hills, Queens. “It feels like the biggest show I ever did in my life,” Mr. Garfunkel said. “I’m dying to hit the stage. I feel like a swimmer who’s been on the edge of the pool for weeks. I love the event. Everything about it seems to have a positive energy.”
MAYOR TAKES 75%
Mayor Koch, carrying Democratic and Republican endorsements, won a second term in a landslide yesterday as Democrats swept citywide and boroughwide offices.
The 56-year-old Mayor and his two Democratic running mates, City Council President Carol Bellamy and Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin, overwhelmed their opponents with at least 75 percent of the vote.
The Mayor won every Assembly District in the city, including black and Hispanic districts. During the campaign, minority politicians and some of Mr. Koch’s opponents had charged that he was insensitive to the city’s minorities. Eighty percent of his vote was on the Democratic line and the remainder on the Republican line.
The Mayor’s experience in the 1977 and 1981 election campaigns was a case study in the shifting fortunes of a politician. Four years ago, he started out his mayoral campaign as a decided underdog with no discernible major power base. He was known as a liberal from Manhattan, but that was already being questioned by the so-called reform Democrats with whom he had started his political career.
AUGUST 8, 1982
A DISEASE’S SPREAD PROVOKES ANXIETY
The persistence of a serious disease whose victims are primarily homosexual men has touched off anxiety among homosexuals in New York City, where nearly half of the nation’s cases have been reported.
Doctors treating homosexuals say they are being flooded with telephone calls from old and new patients with minor complaints. Clinics offering testing for the disease are oversubscribed. And homosexual men speak of great confusion over how to adjust their health habits to avoid the disease, which remains largely mysterious in its symptoms and causes.
The disease—called acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or A.I.D.S.—produces a suppression of the body’s natural defenses and sets the stage for the intrusion of several deadly afflictions, including a rare form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma and a rare pneumonia.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta have recorded 505 cases of the syndrome coupled with the cancer, pneumonia or other opportunistic infections since the national facility began gathering data on cases in June of last year. Of those people, 202 have died, or 40 percent. The cases include 243 residents of New York City.
Reports of the disease have not abated. About two new cases a day are recorded at the disease control center. Officials there attribute the increase both to improved reporting and to a real rise in cases. The disease has already killed more people than reported cases of toxic shock syndrome and the original outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, and it has engendered as much fear.
Dr. David J. Sencer, New York City’s Health Commissioner, has termed the immune deficiency syndrome “a major health problem.” He emphasized that groups other than homosexual men were involved. Groups afflicted with the syndrome include more than 60 heterosexual men and women who were drug abusers and used intravenous needles; 30 male and female immigrants from Haiti, all heterosexual, and some hemophiliacs who use blood products to combat their illness.
The National Gay Task Force is coordinating a conference on the disease, and publications for homosexuals, including The Advocate, Christopher Street and New York Native, have been printing extensive articles about it.
“It’s basically frightening because no one knows what’s causing it,” said John Kolman, a 28-year-old law student who went to the St. Mark’s Clinic in Greenwich Village last week complaining of persistent swollen glands, thought to be one early symptom of the disease. “Every week a new theory comes out about how you’re going to spread it.”
Physicians say they are seeing panic-stricken patients who display skin lesions that turn out to be bug bites, poison ivy, black and blue marks or freckles of no medical consequence.
“There’s tremendous anxiety and it translates into panic behavior,” said Dr. Roger W. Enlow, a clinical researcher at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, Beth Israel Medical Center, who helps run the all-volunteer St. Mark’s Clinic.
Dr. Sencer, the Health Commissioner, said: “It’s unfortunate we don’t have anything positive to recommend to people at the present time. We just don’t know.”
4,000 FOLLOWERS OF MOON WED AT THE GARDEN
Four thousand followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, most of them selected for each other by him, were married amid flags and balloons yesterday in a mass ceremony at Madison Square Garden.
The floor of the arena, carpeted in white for the occasion, was a sea of bridegrooms dressed identically in blue suits and brides in identical lace and satin gowns made by the church. Mr. Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, called the “true parents” of mankind by his Unification Church, aspersed the couples with water as they passed in rows to the strains of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.
Some of the couples had met only a few weeks ago at mass ceremonies the church calls “matchings.” A number of couples—particularly those in which Koreans or Japanese were matched with Americans—had no common language and had spoken to each other only through an interpreter.
In the church’s teaching, people matched by the leader must have been members for at least three years and must have practiced chastity. After the marriage, called a “blessing,” there is a 40-day period of “purification” and separation before the union can be consummated. In the Garden seats were 6,000 parents, friends and invited guests who had passed through metal detectors before entering. Some parents waved and smiled at the couples as they marched in. Others seemed bewildered as they searched for their children in the rows of faces. A number were crying. and some conceded that it was not with joy.
Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon presiding over the mass wedding ceremony at Madison Square Garden.
One of those married yesterday was Bruce Burris, 24 years old, of Nebraska. His bride, Sanae Tsuchida, 25, of Japan, was selected for him by Mr. Moon on June 24. The bride had arrived in the United States that day. Mr. Burris said he had talked with her for “a few hours” through an interpreter and both had decided to take the step.
“It was wonderful,” said the bridegroom of the mass ceremony. “The marriage vows were very impressive.” Mr. Burris was asked whether he would live with Mrs. Burris after the 40-day waiting period. “I think so,” he replied. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure.”
My mother can’t even talk about it without crying.
The mass wedding was the first of a series Mr. Moon says he will conduct around the world. Mr. Moon, who was convicted in Federal District Court here last May 18 of conspiracy to defraud the Government and filing false tax returns, faces sentencing in two weeks. He could get five years in prison on the conspiracy charge and three years on each of three tax charges.
The Unification Church has 10,000 “core missionaries,” or full-time workers, and 30,000 “home members.”
Critics of the church say that normal family and sexual relationships are disrupted by fiat of the leader as part of the church’s efforts to control the minds of its members. Several dozen former members and parents demonstrated outside the arena, carrying signs like “Let Our Children Go!” and “Hitler, Jim Jones, Moon.”
“My sister’s been a member nine years and she’s down there somewhere,” said Maryanne Wagner of Memphis, one of the relatives at yesterday’s ceremony.
She pointed at Mr. Moon, robed in white on a crimson dais and said: “That man has caused more heartache in my family and everybody else’s than anybody I can think of. My mother can’t even talk about it without crying.”
BROOKLYN BRIDGE, ‘THE ONLY BRIDGE OF POWER, LIFE AND JOY,’ TURNS 100 TODAY
Tens of thousands of New York City residents and out-of-town New York City buffs will flock into lower Manhattan and Brooklyn this morning and onto the banks of the East River tonight to pay joyful homage to the Brooklyn Bridge, which is 100 years old today.
Tributes and visitors poured in all day yesterday in preparation for the ceremonies.
A 60- by 90-foot American flag was being prepared to be hung today from the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River arriviste that is a mere half-century old.
“What bridge?” wrote Thomas Wolfe. “Great God, the only bridge of power, life and joy, the bridge that was a span, a cry, an ecstasy—that was America.”
In the evening there will be street fairs and formal ceremonies; a harbor craft parade on the East River; a Sound and Light Spectacle on the bridge’s south face, and a half-hour of fireworks billed as one of the biggest pyrotechnic displays in American history.
New Yorkers have a reputation for being cynical about many aspects of the daily life of their city. But when it comes to the celebration of their history and of their monuments, they are as softhearted and as corny as any small-town resident in the rest of the country.
New Yorkers stunned out-of-towners with their old-fashioned good humor and outpourings of enthusiasm on the day of the Bicentennial, and all indications yesterday were that they were eager to do the same again for their beloved Brooklyn Bridge.
Ferry service is being suspended because many boats are expected to mass in the river to toot their horns and set off jets of spray. That, too, will be reminiscent of opening day 100 years ago, when at least 50,000 people came into the city by train and probably an additional 50,000 arrived by boat to see the world’s longest suspension bridge.
“Our most durable monument,” wrote Montgomery Schuyler in the Harper’s Weekly dated May 24, 1883. It is that very durability that is being celebrated today.
Fireworks filling the sky over Brooklyn Bridge during Centennial celebration festivities.
The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump
He made his presence known on the island of Manhattan in the mid-70’s, a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock. Donald John Trump exhibited a flair for self-promotion, grandiose schemes—and, perhaps not surprisingly, for provoking fury along the way.
Donald Trump shown here in the mid-1980s.
Senior realty titans scoffed, believing that braggadocio was the sum and substance of the blond, blue-eyed, six-footer who wore maroon suits and matching loafers, frequented Elaine’s and Regine’s in the company of fashion models, and was not abashed to take his armed bodyguard-chauffeur into a meeting with an investment banker.
The essence of entrepreneurial capitalism, real estate is a business with a tradition of high-rolling megalomania, of master builders striving to erect monuments to their visions. It is also typically dynastic, with businesses being transmitted from fathers to sons and grandsons, and carried on by siblings. In New York, the names of Tishman, Lefrak, Rudin, Fisher, Zeckendorf come to mind.
And now there is Trump, a name that has in the last few years become an internationally recognized symbol of New York City as mecca for the world’s super rich.
“Not many sons have been able to escape their fathers,” said Donald Trump, the president of the Trump Organization, by way of interpreting his accomplishments. Three of them, built since 1976, stand out amidst the crowded midtown landscape: the 68-story Trump Tower, with its six-story Atrium housing some of the world’s most elegant stores; the 1,400-room Grand Hyatt Hotel, and Trump Plaza, a $125 million cooperative apartment. And more is on the way.
“At 37, no one has done more than I in the last seven years,” Mr. Trump asserted.
Fifteen years ago, he joined his father’s business, an empire of middle-class apartment houses in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island then worth roughly $40 million. Today, the Trump Organization controls assets worth about $1 billion.
Mr. Trump assiduously cultivates a more conservative public image now, a gentleman of taste in a navy-blue suit with discreetly striped shirts and blue ties, who weekends with his family in Greenwich, Conn. Last spring he forsook the Hamptons, his former habitat, to buy an estate in the conservative community.
I don’t like to lose
But Mr. Trump prides himself on being street smart and boasted that Brooklyn and Queens, where he was raised, are among “the toughest, smartest places in the world.” Mr. Trump prefers the vocabulary of war and sports to document his exploits, acknowledging “I don’t like to lose.”
His alternating skills of charming some individuals and riding roughshod over others has earned Donald Trump a reputation in some quarters as someone not to be trusted. He reneged, for example, on a promise to donate to a museum the Art Deco bas-reliefs on the facade of Bonwit Teller’s—bulldozed to make way for Trump Tower. It was a sin deemed unforgivable by landmark preservationists. But the only negative comments about Donald Trump these days are given off the record.
Backed initially by his father, Mr. Trump has operated as a lone wolf in Manhattan for nearly the last decade. He acquires properties through Trump Enterprises or Wembly Realty Inc. and has them transferred to Donald J. Trump so that he can personally take the huge tax write-offs from real estate projects rather than having them “wasted,” as he called it, on a corporation. He also said he saves corporate and franchise taxes.
For major deals, he forges a partnership with a single gilt-edged financial institution or hotel chain. Holiday Inns, for example, is his co-venturer in the $200 million Harrah’s hotel casino scheduled to open in Atlantic City next May, the largest gaming palace in the New Jersey resort.
The most striking evidence of Mr. Trump’s entrepreneurship, however, is in New York.
There is the Grand Hyatt Hotel, reconstituted with a facade of mirrored glass on the skeleton of the Commodore Hotel adjoining Grand Central Terminal. Since it opened in 1980, it has been credited with reversing the deterioration of East 42nd Street.
Then, of course, Trump Tower, a skinny bronze and glass skyscraper at 725 Fifth Avenue, atop the former site of Bonwit Teller at the corner of 56th Street. Its Atrium, a vertical shopping mall rendered in peach marble and bronze with an 80-foot cascade, is a showcase for 40 purveyors of super luxury wares such as Loewe of Madrid, Asprey’s of London and the jewelers, Cartier, Harry Winston and Buccellati. Purchasers of condominium apartments—91 are priced above $1 million—will start moving in later this month.
TIMES SQ. ALSO BECKONS WITH LESS SINISTER JOYS
One of the less-publicized al fresco facts of life in Manhattan is that on a sunny spring weekend, the block of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues is likely to attract larger crowds than the most popular pasture in Central Park. And even more surprising is that many of the strollers are ordinary people out for a good time, in search of a cheap double bill, a fast-food dinner and a glimpse of glitter and excitement.
Times Square in the mid-1980’s.
Last Sunday, for example, with the temperature hovering in the 60’s and the sun throwing deep shadows off the block’s 15 hulking movie and peep-show marquees, streams of people eight deep strolled past sex shops, drug dealers and loud and sometimes raunchy displays for movies featuring ax murderers and women touted as “the roughest, toughest, dirtiest babes around.”
For many New Yorkers—particularly those with fond recollections of the Times Square of the 1940’s and 50’s—this block may well be the most foreboding in the city.
“On no other block in the city is crime as prevalent,” says the 880-page draft environmental impact statement for the proposed $1.6 billion plan to rebuild Times Square. “On no other block is there the collection of drug dealers and users, alcoholics and derelicts, prostitutes and other hustlers drawn there by the overall street environment.”
Yet for tens of thousands of others, the block has become what the impact statement defines as the only “regional, low-income entertainment center” in the area. They are drawn by what is probably the densest collection of movie theaters in the world—14 across two 800-foot-long block-fronts—some of the cheapest ticket prices in the city—$2 to $4 for double and triple features with as many as eight consecutive previews thrown in—and the closing of scores of theaters in the last decade in poorer neighborhoods.
If the Times Square plan, sponsored by the city and the state’s Urban Development Corporation, is approved, the theaters, which date to the early years of the century and are of some architectural and historical note, would be restored for use as legitimate and first-run movie theaters. This, proponents of the plan believe, would attract a much different, more middle-class crowd to Times Square and go a long way toward making over the block.
But the owners of the largest theater chain on the block disagree. Terming the project “ill-conceived and not calculated to remedy the problems that the U.D.C. and the city claim to exist,” Robert Brandt, a spokesman for the Brandt Organization, which operates seven of the theaters, said this week that his company “will vigorously oppose the project at every level of proceeding on up through the courts.”
“People go there for the same reasons they did when we were kids,” said William Kornblum, professor of sociology at the City University of New York, who headed a study team that analyzed street life on 42nd Street for the U.D.C. “You come in from another borough or from uptown looking for some fun. You grab a burger and you go to a movie.”
Hope Proctor, 22, a student at Westchester Community College, and her friend Charles Plummer completed a sightseeing tour with a debate over which of three first-run movies to see. Somehow, they wound up at the Selwyn Theater, where “10 Violent Women” was sharing the bill with “Chesty Anderson, U.S.N.” Mr. Plummer’s opinion of the former: “Cheap, sloppily put together, no stars, and there were only three or four violent women.” Of the latter, he observed, “Her chest wasn’t that big.”
Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociology professor who has been retained by the Brandt Organization, has charged that the environmental statement is “full of biases” designed to justify a plan “to move out lower-income citizens and taxpayers and to replace them with more affluent ones.”
Out on 42nd Street, Mr. Plummer weighed the possibilities.
“It could be a plus in that they would attract higher-income people with more money to spend,” he said, “but it could also be a loss, in that if they try to totally clean up this block, they could have a riot on their hands.”
OCTOBER 10, 1984
THE CITY SEES NO SOLUTIONS FOR HOMELESS
A record $100 million will be spent this year to provide food and shelter for the growing numbers of single homeless people in New York, but city officials say they still have no solution for those who live in the street and refuse assistance.
These people, the hard-core homeless, have become one of the city’s most visible social problems.
Once mainly found sleeping in parks and in abandoned buildings, thousands of these destitute men and women now live in doorways or on sidewalks throughout the city, including such affluent areas as Madison Avenue and Park Avenue.
The street people, many of whom are chronically mentally ill, make up only a small percentage of the city’s homeless population. But because they have become an inescapable presence in the lives of most New Yorkers, they are a major concern as city officials prepare to house and feed record numbers of homeless people this winter.
If projections prove correct, there will be nights when nearly 10,000 homeless men and women will be housed in the city’s public shelters and in the 90 churches and synagogues that provide beds and services for the homeless.
“We are in a situation that totally overwhelms us,” said City Council President Carol Bellamy, who refers to the city’s homeless as “this tidal wave of human beings.”
No one knows the total number of homeless people in New York, but officials and advocates agree that the number continues to increase dramatically. In 1978 the city had three shelters that housed 2,000 people. Last year, on peak nights, the city housed 6,500 people in 18 shelters while 1,000 more homeless men and women were given beds in churches and synagogues.
“We see over 30,000 individuals in our shelters in the course of a year,” said Robert Trobe, who heads the Family and Adult Services office of the welfare agency.
These numbers do not include the members of 3,000 homeless families who have been evicted or burned out of their homes and are housed by the city in about 50 hotels.
Of all the homeless, the street people are the most difficult to count. Often they are known to social workers only as “Chanter,” “Poor Hearing” or “Painted Jeans.” Project HELP, a crisis intervention group set up by the city to reach these people, has made a list of 1,200 individuals in Manhattan south of 96th Street, with 30 to 40 people being added every month.
Blind beggar on Fifth Avenue in New York in Christmas 1982.
Many of them are chronically mentally ill. Some are severely psychotic. Their behavior is often bizarre, and even menacing, as they stumble about addressing strangers on the street or unseen deities in the sky, sometimes shouting obscenities or urinating against buildings in view of passers-by.
A woman known as Judy sits under an awning at 63rd Street and Second Avenue, surrounded by her possessions. She sits, docile, all day. At about 11 P.M. she usually starts to scream. Sometimes she continues for hours, screaming obscenities and intimate details about her life.
“At first I felt compassion,” said Jane Kosarin, who lives nearby. “After all, she’s in the street and she needs help. But you can hear her with your windows closed and I haven’t slept for nights because of her. It’s affected my life and I’m on medication as a result.”
The crux of the problem is that little can be done to help someone who needs psychiatric help but refuses assistance. Under New York State’s Mental Hygiene Law, no one can be involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility unless he or she has “a mental illness for which immediate inpatient care and treatment in a hospital is appropriate and which is likely to result in serious harm to himself or to others.”
Under the law, “serious harm” means, in effect, that the person is either homicidal or suicidal.
Officials say that this is a difficult standard to meet and that most street people, mentally disturbed or psychotic as they may be, do not meet it.
Mental health experts say that even if standards for admission were changed, hospitalization would be too extreme a treatment for most mentally-ill street people. They add that mental hospitals remain so overcrowded that beds would not be available.
“We need housing,” Governor Cuomo said in an interview. “We need capital sources. Can we find a way to generate the capital strength we need to build housing for the homeless? President Reagan is saying that the national government does not deal with the homeless problem and he is getting away with it.”
Mayor Koch, describing the dimensions of the problem, said, “You have to understand that there is a limit to what we can do when the Federal Government moves out of low-income housing.”
DECEMBER 23, 1984
A GUNMAN WOUNDS 4 ON IRT TRAIN, THEN ESCAPES
A middle-aged man with a silver-colored pistol strode into a subway car rolling through lower Manhattan yesterday and shot four young men he had apparently singled out from among the passengers, the Transit Authority police reported.
As the victims collapsed, all bleeding profusely from wounds of the upper body, a dozen other passengers, screaming and sobbing, fell on the floor or herded into the next car. The train, a No. 2 Seventh Avenue IRT express, halted just north of the Chambers Street station at about 1:45 P.M.
Then, in a bizarre twist to what transit authorities called one of the worst crimes of the year in the subways, the gunman discussed the shootings briefly with a conductor, according to investigators, one of whom described a colloquy.
“Are you a cop?” the conductor was said to have asked as he approached the man, who had shoved the gun into his waistband and was bending over and saying something to a victim.
“No,” the gunman replied. “They tried to rip me off.”
The gunman, who was described as “calm, cool and collected,” then noticed two trembling women lying on the floor and, along with the conductor, helped them up.
As the women fled into the next car, the conductor, whose name was not released, turned again to the assailant.
“Give me the gun,” he urged.
But the gunman turned without responding and stepped through the door at the end of the car. The conductor tried to grab him, the police said, but he leaped to the tracks from between cars and vanished in the dark tunnel.
“He picked out these four guys and shot every one of them,” said Capt. John Kelly of the Transit Authority police. “He knew what he was doing. He was not just shooting indiscriminately. He was either harassed or robbed by these guys earlier on the train.”
The police said two of the wounded young men, interviewed later in the hospitals, denied robbing or harassing the man who shot them.
JANUARY 6, 1985
GOETZ: A PRIVATE MAN IN A PUBLIC DEBATE
To his admirers, Bernhard Hugo Goetz is a personable, scholarly, self-reliant man who cares about his neighbors and his community, despises hoodlums and has long been frustrated by what he sees as a drift toward criminal anarchy.
To his detractors, he is a captive of naive idealism, a profoundly introverted and secretive man whose friendliness falls short of real friendships and whose outspoken views on crime mask a darker personality obsessed by irrational fears.
The emerging picture of Mr. Goetz is a kaleidoscope of clashing opinions reflecting the harshness, if not the scope, of the debate over vigilantism and public safety that has arisen since he shot four youths who harassed him on a Manhattan subway train Dec. 22.
Subway vigilante Bernard Goetz leaves the Manhattan District Attorney’s office March 26, 1985.
Interviews with relatives, acquaintances, former teachers and others in recent days have drawn the portrait of an inward-looking, socially awkward man who was raised in small-town comfort and educated in private schools, who divorced once, succeeded in his own electronics business, but was frustrated in his efforts to fight drugs, crime and filth in the city.
It is also a picture of a lonely 37-year-old man who has sustained two major traumas in his life—criminal charges against his father, and a 1981 mugging that shattered his faith in the administration of justice.
It happened about 2:30 P.M. on Jan. 26, 1981, in a subway station on Canal Street. Mr. Goetz had just bought equipment valued at $800 to $1,000 at a nearby store and he was taking it home, he recalled at the hearing in 1982 on his application for a pistol permit.
“Three fellows jumped me,” he said, “and I ran. They took—they took the items I was carrying. I ran out of the subway station up the steps. They came after me. Fortunately for myself, a police officer was on the street. He apprehended one of the perpetrators. The other two took the things I was carrying, put them down and ran away. They were very clever.”
Later, he amplified his remarks: “The arresting officer saw him strike me, knock me down, and he ran into me, knocking me into a plate-glass window, which fortunately didn’t break. But the door handle hit me in the chest and it tore cartilage and connecting tissue in my chest.”
Painful as the injury was, it was the aftermath of the mugging that appeared to bother Mr. Goetz most.
The apprehended suspect, 16-year-old Fred Clarke of Brooklyn, was taken to Criminal Court. “He was kept for 2 hours and 35 minutes,” Mr. Goetz recalled. “Now, I was there in the Criminal Court Building for 6 hours and 5 minutes, along with the police officer who made the arrest.
Citing the mugging and his frequent need to carry large sums of cash, Mr. Goetz applied for a pistol permit later in 1981, but was turned down on the ground that he had failed to show sufficient need. His appeal of that decision to Sergeant Charleman also was rejected.
“He was physically hurt,” his neighbor, Mr. Horwitz, recalled. “He was beaten to a certain extent. Then he was hurt a second time when the police did nothing about it.”
The police believe that Mr. Goetz, blocked from owning a legal weapon, went to Florida, where it was not difficult to buy the chrome-plated, .38-caliber revolver used in the subway shootings.
FEBRUARY 27, 1985
U.S. INDICTMENT SAYS 9 GOVERNED NEW YORK MAFIA
Mafia Chief, Paul Castellano (Big Paul) is escorted by FBI Agents after he surrendered himself at his attorneys office in March of 1985.
A Federal racketeering indictment charged nine men yesterday with participating in a “commission” that governs the five organized-crime “families” in New York City.
Five of the defendants were identified in the indictment as the bosses or acting bosses of “the five La Cosa Nostra families.”
The 15-count indictment said the commission regulated a wide range of illegal activities that included narcotics trafficking, loan-sharking, gambling, labor racketeering and extortion against construction companies.
According to the indictment, which was filed in Manhattan, the commission resolved a 1979 dispute in the Bonanno crime group by “authorizing the murder” of the group’s boss, Carmine Galante, and four associates.
The indictment, containing the first Federal charges to focus on the commission, was announced at an elaborate news conference attended by 17 law-enforcement officials, including William H. Webster, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Mr. Webster said the indictment focused on “the symbol of power” in organized crime, striking a significant blow at some notorious figures who were under intensive investigation for a long time.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the United States Attorney in Manhattan, conducted the news conference in the Federal office building, at 26 Federal Plaza, across the street from the United States Court House at Foley Square.
“This case charges more Mafia bosses in one indictment than ever before,” Mr. Giuliani said. He described the commission as “the Mafia’s ruling council here in New York City and other cities.” Following are the nine defendants, identified with the positions that the indictment attributed to them in the five traditional crime families called Gambino, Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese and Bonanno: GAMBINO: Paul Castellano (known to his associates as Big Paul), 69 years old, the boss, and Aniello Dellacroce (Neil), 70, the underboss, both of Staten Island.
GENOVESE: Anthony Salerno (Fat Tony), 73, of Rhinebeck, N.Y., the boss.
COLOMBO: Gennaro Langella (Gerry Lang), 46, of Brooklyn, the acting boss. Also Ralph Scopo, 56, of Queens, a Colombo member and president of the District Council of Cement and Concrete Workers.
LUCCHESE: Anthony Corallo (Tony Ducks), 72, of South Oyster Bay Cove, L.I., the boss; Salvatore Santoro (Tom Mix), 69, of the Bronx, underboss; Christopher Furnari (Christie Tick), 60, of Staten Island, consigliere, or counselor.
BONANNO: Philip Rastelli (Rusty), 67, of Brooklyn, the boss.
There was no mention of Carmine Persico (The Snake), who was in jail during most of the activities described in the indictment and who has been named as the Colombo boss in another indictment. Several of the other defendants were also named in recent indictments.
Recounting a history of organized crime, the indictment said a criminal society called “La Cosa Nostra or the Mafia” operated through groups known as families. It said each family was headed by a boss, an underboss and a consigliere, with capos, or captains, in charge of “soldiers” and associates.
In 1931, the indictment said, the commission was formed as “the council for La Cosa Nostra families.” At times, it added, the commission also included bosses from families in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and New Jersey.
If convicted, they could face up to 20 years in prison on each charge.
NOVEMBER 6, 1985
KOCH WINS A THIRD TERM, 3 TO 1; VOWS TO COMBAT ‘INEQUITIES’
Mayor Koch easily won a third term at City Hall yesterday, leading a Democratic sweep of virtually every city office at stake in the election.
Although he faced two major-party opponents—City Council President Carol Bellamy and Diane McGrath—and six lesser-known rivals, the 60-year-old Mr. Koch was winning by more than three to one and capturing every Assembly District in the city.
With 99 percent of 5,129 districts reporting, the vote was:
Koch 854,048 Bellamy 161,113 McGrath 108,529
Mr. Koch won with 75 percent of the vote, the same vote percentage as his landslide victory in 1981, when he ran on both the Republican and Democratic lines. But he fell short of his 753,000-vote plurality in 1981, largely because of low turnout yesterday.
Mayor Koch told several hundred cheering supporters at the Sheraton Centre hotel that in his next term he would address “the superpriorities of education, housing, transportation and to reduce the inequities caused by poverty.”
“I am committed over the next four years to do what I can, to come as close as I can in that four-year term, to achieve those aspirations for all the people in this town without regard to race, religion, national origin or sexual orientation,” he said.
New York City Mayor Ed Koch during his run for third term.
A NEW, PURIFIED FORM OF COCAINE CAUSES ALARM AS ABUSE INCREASES
A new form of cocaine is for sale on the streets of New York, alarming law-enforcement officials and rehabilitation experts because of its tendency to accelerate abuse of the drug, particularly among adolescents.
The substance, known as crack, is already processed into the purified form that enables cocaine users to smoke, or freebase, the powerful stimulant of the central nervous system.
Previously, free-basers had to reduce cocaine powder themselves to its unadulterated form by combining it with baking soda or ether and evaporating the resulting paste over a flame.
Since crack appeared on the streets of the Bronx last year, spreading throughout the city and its suburbs, new cocaine users have graduated more quickly from inhaling to free-basing, the most addictive form of cocaine abuse.
In addition, dealers in crack have found a ready market in people reluctant to intensify their intake by intravenous injection of cocaine because of the fear of AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a fatal affliction that is spread by contaminated needles.
As the use of crack has increased, Federal drug officials have begun raiding “factories” where the cocaine powder is processed into pure beige crystals known as “rocks” and then packed into transparent vials resembling large vitamin capsules.
Meanwhile, narcotics officers of the New York City Police Department have shut down a few of the so-called crack houses, the rough equivalent of heroin-shooting galleries, where sales are made and users gather for smoking binges that can last for several days.
Two of the crack houses, also known as base houses, were raided recently in the Tremont section of the Bronx, according to Lieut. John Creegan, one of them in an apartment and the other in a rooming house.
“I talked to one of the women there,” Lieutenant Creegan said, “and it was almost like her mind was burned out. She told me all she does is do crack all day.”
“Unlike normal cocaine, people who free-base can’t stop,” said Mr. Hopkins. “They free-base until all their money is used up. The way crack is spreading is almost verification of that. It pays as a distributor to free-base it, because it makes you sell your brand quicker than somebody else.”
“It’s a new, improved product,” said Dr. Arnold M. Washton, the director of addiction research and treatment at Regent Hospital on East 61st Street in Manhattan and Stony Lodge Hospital in Ossining, N.Y. “No mess, no bother, no delay—and addicts have never been any good at delayed gratification.”
Buying crack is safer than making it and often cheaper. A kit of free-base equipment—beaker, bunsen burner and pipe—costs about $14 and the chemicals are volatile, sometimes causing explosions like the one that injured the comedian Richard Pryor in 1980.
The crack sold on the street in New York ranges in cost from $2 to $50 depending on the number of rocks in the vial and, paradoxically, is sometimes less expensive than the amount of powder, currently retailing at $75 to $100 a gram, necessary to produce the equivalent free-base.
DECEMBER 23, 1985
Aids: Bellevue Tries to Cope with Disease it Cannot Cure
The AIDS epidemic has transformed Bellevue Hospital Center to such an extent that the fatal disorder of the immune system is now the municipal hospital’s single most common medical diagnosis.
Although the fear of contagion that initially gripped the hospital has abated in recent months, Bellevue still faces the grim reality of treating a disorder it cannot cure and accommodating itself to large numbers of deaths it cannot prevent.
While soaring costs are a major concern, the numbing realization that nothing can be done to prevent the fatal course of AIDS is inflicting mounting emotional casualties on Bellevue’s medical and nursing staff.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler joins Mayor Koch at bedside of AIDS victim Peter Justice.
The hospital’s elevators, emergency rooms and clinics are as busy and as crowded as usual, and the quiet bustle on the medical and surgical floors seems the same as ever.
But Bellevue’s appearance is misleading, said Dorothy Shayan, the director of nursing.
“We are losing large numbers of young men and children to this disease, and the psychological and emotional stress on everyone is devastating,” she said. “Patients die in hospitals; we know that. But never before like this.”
As a result, AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, is redefining the way Bellevue doctors and nurses confront death and a ravaging terminal illness.
Bellevue, the country’s oldest public hospital and world famous for its 250 years of medical and surgical achievements, is where young doctors are trained to do everything they can to keep life going. Now, however, there is a growing emphasis on allowing AIDS patients to forgo heroic measures and die with as much dignity as possible.
The greatest changes at Bellevue have occurred in the 200-bed department of medicine, where every fourth patient is an AIDS victim. The department accounts for about a fourth of the hospital’s 850 patients, including those in the surgical, obstetric, pediatric and psychiatric departments.
Although there has been no reported case thus far of a nurse, doctor or hospital worker contracting AIDS on the job, there are still certain risks.
For example, 20 staff members at Bellevue have thus far suffered accidental needle punctures from syringes used on AIDS patients. They are being closely monitored to see if any of them contracts the disorder.
Dr. Robert Holzman, a Bellevue specialist in infectious disease and an expert on AIDS, said the chances of contracting AIDS from a needle puncture “are extremely small; the odds are more than a 100 to 1.”
Camille Caracappa, a 23-year-old nurse, knows the odds. But when she stuck her finger accidentally on Dec. 3 with a syringe she had just used on an AIDS patient, she said she quickly forgot the odds favored her.
“In an instant, all I could feel was a wave of fear,” she said in an interview on Bellevue’s 16th floor, where many of the hospital’s AIDS patients are treated.
Health officials estimate that about 300 AIDS patients are hospitalized in New York City—half of them in municipal hospitals and half in the city’s private hospitals.
Before AIDS became epidemic, the most common diagnoses among Bellevue’s 850 patients were psychiatric disorders, asthma and traumatic injuries. All told, Bellevue has treated more than 400 AIDS patients this year, many of whom died either in the hospital or soon after being discharged.
Thus far, 15,403 cases of AIDS have been reported nationally since the disorder was first identified in 1981, almost a third of them here.
Federal health officials say they expect 6,000 new AIDS cases in this country to be reported by the end of this year and twice as many next year.
Thus far, more than half of AIDS patients have died from the diseases and infections that overwhelm the body as a result of a complete breakdown of the immune system. AIDS, a viral disorder, is regarded as ultimately fatal in virtually every case, usually within a year after the first hospitalization.
AUGUST 27, 1986
SLAIN WOMAN FOUND IN PARK; SUSPECT SEIZED
An 18-year-old woman who graduated last spring from the Baldwin School was found slain yesterday morning in Central Park. The police said she had apparently been sexually abused and strangled.
The police said early today that they had arrested a suspect, Robert Chambers, 19, of 11 East 90th Street. They said the suspect, who knew the woman, was charged with second-degree murder.
The body of the victim, Jennifer Dawn Levin of 84 Mercer Street in SoHo, was found by a bicyclist at about 6:15 A.M. off Park Drive East near 81st Street, just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to Capt. Harold J. Wischerth of the Manhattan North Zone No. 4 detective unit.
“She was bubbly and very social—she was just a kid,” said her uncle, Dan Levin, as he stood outside the Mercer Street building where she had lived with her father, Steven Levin, and stepmother, Arlene. “She loved life.”
Detectives on the case said they thought Miss Levin was probably killed elsewhere and dumped in the park. A car was seen on Park Drive East, speeding south on a northbound street. There were tire tracks in the grass by the body, the police said.
The suspect lives in a luxury four-story brick building just off Fifth Avenue and next to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum—less than a half mile from where the body was found.
DARKNESS BENEATH THE GLITTER:
LIFE OF SUSPECT IN PARK SLAYING
Both the victim and the suspect in the strangling death Tuesday of an 18-year-old woman moved in the same Manhattan circle of privileged young people, a circle centered on the Upper East Side singles bar where the two spent the hours before the murder, the police and others close to the case say.
For Jennifer Dawn Levin and Robert E. Chambers Jr., life was private schools, fancy apartments, foreign vacations and underage drinking at a preppy hangout called Dorrian’s Red Hand. But for Mr. Chambers, it was also unemployment, academic futility and signs of cocaine abuse.
The two had known each other for about two months and dated several times, the police said, before they met early Tuesday morning at Dorrian’s Red Hand, at 300 East 84th Street. The owner, Jack Dorrian, said he knew both as regulars.
Mr. Chambers and Miss Levin each had arrived with a separate group of friends, but they left together at 4:30 A.M., exchanging “boy-girl talk” as they walked toward Central Park, the police said. It was there, the police believe, that she was killed.
Less than two hours later, a passer-by found Miss Levin’s body—strangled with her bra and apparently sexually abused, according to the authorities—in the park, just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An autopsy yesterday confirmed that she was strangled, and further tests were to be conducted today.
Early this morning, Mr. Chambers was arraigned on a charge of second-degree murder.
The details of both Mr. Chambers’s life and Miss Levin’s began to emerge yesterday—details that contradicted Mr. Chambers’s golden-boy image and revealed a naivete beneath Miss Levin’s worldly exterior.
Mr. Chambers, in the recollection of friends, possessed charisma and mature good looks rare for a 19-year-old. He stood 6 feet 4 inches tall, weighed 220 pounds and was a gifted athlete, who had played for three years on the soccer team at York Preparatory School, 116 East 85th Street.
“Nothing less than total success,” said the caption beneath Mr. Chambers’s photograph in his yearbook.
But self-discipline, it appears, was something Mr. Chambers lacked. If anything, he seemed to try to coast on his good looks and charm—and, in academic settings, not always with success.
“He was bright, charming and not a particularly good student,” recalled Ronald P. Stewart, the York headmaster, in an interview yesterday.
The bar owner described Mr. Chambers as “the nicest kid you’d want to meet,” someone who would help calm rowdy customers and pick up litter or broken glass from the floor. But he added that Mr. Chambers had “a drug problem” and had gone to treatment program in Michigan about three months ago.
Miss Levin, meanwhile, was a young woman who “was always happy,” said Eric Barger, the manager of Flutie’s Pier 17, the restaurant in the South Street Seaport where she worked as a hostess this summer.
Robert Chambers, accused killer of Jennifer Levin, in court in 1986.
“Never once, from the time I hired her, did I ever see her come to work with anything but a smile,” he said.
This fall Miss Levin was going to enter Chamberlayne Junior College in Boston—an expensive, two-year school that does not require Scholastic Aptitude Tests for admission. Miss Levin’s father, Steven, said yesterday that his daughter was “always the straight kid of her crowd” and that “maybe she was too trusting.”
Still, Mr. Levin acknowledged that his daughter “liked to go out at night.” Mr. Dorrian said she came into his bar two or three times a week. And amid Miss Levin’s belongings at the murder scene, the police found a learner’s driving permit giving her age as 22.
It had been her passport into Dorrian’s Red Hand.
MANES IS A SUICIDE, STABBING HIMSELF AT HOME IN QUEENS
Donald R. Manes, who resigned as Queens Borough President last month after an apparent suicide attempt and widening allegations of corruption against him, died last night of a self-inflicted knife wound of the heart, the police said.
Mr. Manes, who sought the Democratic nomination for Governor in 1974 and until this year was one of the city’s most powerful politicians, was pronounced dead at Booth Memorial Medical Center in Flushing, Queens, at 11 P.M., after an hour of frantic medical efforts to save him.
Despondent for months, facing almost certain indictment in the city’s worst corruption scandals in decades, the 52-year-old former official stabbed himself once in the chest with a 12-inch knife in the kitchen of his home at 80-65 Chevy Chase Street in Jamaica Estates, Queens, the authorities said.
Alice T. McGillion, the Deputy Police Commissioner in charge of public information, said Mr. Manes was found lying face up on the kitchen floor by his wife, Marlene, at 9:52 P.M., after their daughter, Lauren, 25, saw him talking on a telephone and fumbling erratically in a kitchen drawer.
“This is an enormous tragedy,” Mayor Koch said in a statement. “And under these circumstances, and after death, we should also remember the good things Donald Manes did.”
In the early morning hours of Jan. 10, seven hours after he left a function at Queens Borough Hall, Mr. Manes was found dazed and bleeding from slashes of the wrist and ankle and wildly weaving in his car on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.
Rushed by the police to Booth Memorial Medical Center, he also suffered a heart attack that night.
Shortly after Mr. Manes’s first suicide attempt, a longtime friend of Mr. Manes, Geoffrey G. Lindenauer, the deputy director of the city’s Parking Violations Bureau, was arrested and charged with taking a $5,000 bribe from the president of a company hired by the bureau to collect overdue parking fines.
Within a week, an executive of another collection company, Michael G. Dowd, a Queens lawyer, told authorities that he paid bribes to Mr. Lindenauer on instructions from Mr. Manes.
Mr. Manes, under increasing pressure as the scandal spread, took a leave of absence on Jan. 28. Claire Shulman, who was Mr. Manes’s deputy, served as acting borough president for six weeks.
This week, she was selected unanimously in a special vote by the borough’s nine City Council members, to serve as borough president for the remainder of this year.
JULY 4, 1986
NATION REKINDLES STATUE OF LIBERTY AS BEACON OF HOPE; ACROSS U.S., A CEREMONY FOR HISTORY
The Statue of Liberty wreathed in light during fireworks display for Liberty Weekend, to celebrate the statue’s restoration and centenary.
METS GET THE MAGIC BACK, TAKE 7TH GAME IN THE WORLD SERIES
The Mets brought their season of splendor to a stunning finish last night when they rallied twice to defeat the Boston Red Sox, 8-5, and win their first World Series in 17 years.
They did it with all the magic that carried them to 116 victories during the season and beyond, and that revived their fortunes after they had lost the first two games of the Series. And they shook Shea Stadium with roaring cheers, but with no postgame disorder, from the 55,032 people who watched the Mets bring down the curtain on one of the most successful seasons in baseball history.
They won their championship in the seventh game of the 83rd Series and the 175th game of their baseball year, and they won it by sweeping the final two games with rousing rallies in late innings. They were two runs down in the 10th inning Saturday night, and scored three and won. They were three runs down to Bruce Hurst, the Red Sox’s starting pitcher, last night, but stormed back with three runs in the sixth and three more in the seventh, and won it all.
“We were destined to win,” said Ron Darling, the Mets’ pitcher who threw two home-run pitches to the Red Sox in the second inning. “We were destined to win after finishing second the last two years. Somehow, some way, we got it done.”
Bill Buckner’s (of the Boston Red Sox) famous error at the bottom of the 10 inning, in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The New York Mets went on to win that game and Game 7.
“We had to win four out of five going to Boston one week ago,” said Keith Hernandez, who ignited the Mets’ comeback with a two-run single in the sixth inning. “But the ability to bounce back from adversity marks this club. It’s the very symbol of this club.”
“It is unbelievable,” said Roger McDowell, who became the winning pitcher even though he endured one damaging inning. “I have no idea how we kept rallying in the playoff and in the last two games here.”
NOVEMBER 26, 1986
FRIEDMAN IS GUILTY WITH 3 IN SCANDAL
NEW HAVEN, Nov. 25–A jury today returned guilty verdicts against Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader and long one of New York City’s most powerful political figures, on all charges against him in the first Federal trial stemming from New York City’s corruption scandal.
Three other defendants were also found guilty of charges including racketeering, conspiracy and mail fraud for their participation in a “racketeering enterprise” that transformed the city’s Parking Violations Bureau into a tool for their corrupt personal profit.
The 12 jurors, their expressions grim, delivered the verdict at 11:11 A.M. after deliberating for three days on the eight weeks of testimony and argument in the case. The jury found Mr. Friedman and each of his co-defendants guilty of racketeering, conspiracy and mail fraud charges carrying lengthy prison sentences and heavy financial penalties.
In addition to Mr. Friedman, those found guilty were Lester N. Shafran, the former director of the Parking Violations Bureau; Michael J. Lazar, a real-estate developer and former city transportation administrator; and Marvin B. Kaplan, the chairman of Citisource Inc., a company chosen to manufacture handheld computers to issue summonses for the parking bureau. Mr. Kaplan was also found guilty of having perjured himself while testifying before the Securities and Exchange Commission last February.
Mr. Friedman, surrounded by his wife and children and looking drained, said that “to say we were shocked would be an understatement,” and vowed to seek vindication in a higher court. “As far as I’m concerned, the fight is out of you when they close the box,” Mr. Friedman said, “and I have no intention of quitting. I never quit a fight in my life, and this fight is far from over.”
As a convicted felon, Mr. Friedman, a lawyer, faces possible disbarment.
On the counts on which they were found guilty, Mr. Friedman, Mr. Lazar and Mr. Shafran each face a maximum prison sentence of 50 years; Mr. Kaplan faces 52 years.
BLACK MAN DIES AFTER BEATING BY WHITES IN QUEENS
A 23-year-old black man was struck and killed by a car on a Queens highway early yesterday after being severely beaten twice by 9 to 12 white men who chased him and two other black men through the streets of Howard Beach in what the police called a racial attack.
The dead man, Michael Griffith, of 1650 Pacific Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, was found shortly after 1 A.M. lying on the Shore Parkway at Cross Bay Boulevard. He had been struck by a car whose driver, the son of a New York City police officer whose name was not released, apparently had no connection to the assailants, the police said.
When he was struck, Mr. Griffith was fleeing from the beatings—one outside a pizza parlor on Cross Bay Boulevard at 157th Avenue and another at 158th Avenue and 84th Street—by a gang who accosted the black men after their car had broken down.
“Niggers, you don’t belong here!” the white men shouted as they set on the black men with fists and bats outside the pizzeria, according to Cedric Sandiford, a companion of the dead man.
The pizza shop is in the predominately white, middle-class Howard Beach neighborhood, just west of Kennedy International Airport and north of the marshes and waterfowl refuges of Jamaica Bay.
“All crimes are terrible, but crimes involving racial bigotry are the absolute worst,” Mayor Koch said at an afternoon news conference at the 106th Precinct station house. “The survivors were chased like animals through the streets, with one of them being killed on the highway.”
Noting that a $10,000 reward had been posted for the capture of the assailants, the Mayor added, “This incident can only be talked about as rivaling the kind of lynching party that took place in the Deep South—this is the No. 1 case in the city.”
Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward, who assigned 50 investigators to hunt for the attackers, said the beatings had been carried out by “locals” in Howard Beach, a community of 18,000 people where civic pride mingles with an insular spirit and concern over crime has led to the creation of private street patrols that stop and question strangers.
Mr. Ward said the whites responsible for the beatings “lived in the area and frequented the pizza parlor” where the first attack occurred. He called for residents of the area to “come forward and identify” those responsible for the incident.
JANUARY 26, 1987
SUPER BOWL XXI;
GIANTS ROUT BRONCOS IN THE SUPER BOWL
Head coach Bill Parcells of the New York Giants raises his fist in victory as he is carried off the field after winning Super Bowl XXI.
Unwanted, 3,100 Tons of L.I. Garbage Sail into Gulf of Mexico in Search of a Dump
As yet, no one has compared the almost monthlong journey of a barge full of Long Island garbage to the decade-long wanderings of Odysseus so carefully detailed by Homer.
But the similarities are clear. Odysseus’s expedition was marked by unusual changes of fortune. And the barge—laden with 3,100 tons of industrial waste from Islip, Long Island—is meeting a similiar fate in her nearly 1,400-mile search for a dump to call home.
The barge, which has quickly become a symbol of the region’s growing problems with trash, was barred by court order from docking in Morehead City, N.C. She has made front-page headlines in New Orleans, as government officials gathered to insure that the fly-covered craft stayed far from the Louisiana shore.
The barge began her journey March 22 from Long Island City, Queens. She was waiting today in about 18 feet of water in Grand Path, a portion of the Mississippi Delta about two miles south of Venice, La.
Official attention to the barge did not wane today, even though all government offices were closed for Good Friday. A representative of the Plaquemines Parish Port Authority, Ernie Dobson, stood guard over the barge. “If it takes off and leaves, we want to know where it is going,” he said.
On Thursday, Gov. Edwin W. Edwards of Louisiana told reporters in New Orleans, “We certainly have notified the company we do not feel it is the proper use of our facilities, and we suggest it go back from whence they came.
“If we don’t have the legal authority, then we can’t line the National Guard on the banks of the river and shoot at them. That would be an improper and illegal act.”
The trail of trash essentially began last November, when the Islip Town Board voted to bar all industrial waste from its 75-acre landfill in Hauppauge. The dump is almost full. At that point, a company, Waste Alternatives, was formed to remove trash generated by businesses here.
Waste Alternatives, according to the chief engineer of the Islip Resource Recovery Agency, Charles H. Weidner, had been shipping the trash to a large landfill in Dunmore, Pa. But when the dump recently stopped accepting trash from all out-of-state haulers, companies and municipalities across the region were left with no place to put their garbage.
The garbage barge floats by Coney Island in 1987.
That is when, according to Islip officials, Lowell Harrelson took control of the trash, pledging to ship it by barge to North Carolina. There, he hoped to bury the garbage in a landfill, where it would be used to produce methane.
Officials in North Carolina, however, obtained a court order banning the barge, which then set off for Louisiana in hopes of dumping the waste in a private landfill there.
Back on Long Island, the new Islip Supervisor, Frank Jones, is removed enough from the barge to see the problem as a “godsend.” Islip has been involved for years in a battle with the State Department of Environmental Conservation over the 20-year-old landfill in Hauppauge. Although Islip is building an incinerator, the state has refused to allow the town to expand the landfill until the new plant opens.
“They have told us to take our trash out of town,” Mr. Jones said. “Now that idea might just mean that we have to send it to the moon. In my judgment, within a month there will not be a state in the country that will take anybody’s else’s garbage.”
NEW YORK WILL START GIVING OUT CONDOMS IN BARS AND MOVIES
Beginning this summer, a team from the New York City Department of Health will give out free condoms at singles bars, pornographic-movie theaters, massage parlors and sex clubs throughout the city to warn of the dangers of casual sex.
The move is a further attempt to fight the spread of AIDS, which the City Health Commissioner, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, has said has infected as many as 500,000 people in the city.
Dr. Joseph said the team’s efforts will represent a new approach in the department’s educational efforts to stem the spread of the AIDS epidemic. “We want to reach out to heterosexual people before they engage in unsafe sexual practices,” he said.
The department’s initial educational efforts were aimed at sexually active homosexuals and it led to the closing of several homosexual bath houses and nightclubs that the department said permitted unsafe sex.
Other efforts were aimed at intravenous drug users who, with homosexuals, constitute the two major risk groups for the fatal illness. An educational program was also presented in local high schools.
AIDS demonstrators stage a protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989.
The most recent effort is an advertising campaign aimed at heterosexuals warning that casual sex placed them at risk. The television and newspaper advertisements emphasize the use of condoms to prevent infection by the HIV virus, which causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
The city’s assistant health commissioner for AIDS program services, Peggy Clarke, said the team will seek permission from the owners of the singles bars and other places they visit before they distribute AIDS prevention literature and free condoms.
She said she anticipated a positive response.
Ms. Clarke said the department would also try to persuade the managers of escort services and houses of prostitution to distribute free condoms.
AUGUST 25, 1987
Garbage Barge’s 155-Day Odyssey Comes to an End
The barge Mobro was docked yesterday near the Southwest Brooklyn Incinerator in Bensonhurst, ending an epic quest for a place to deposit its contents. The trip began March 22 in Long Island City and included rejections in North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Belize and the Bahamas. The barge is to be unloaded later this week and the trash inspected for infectious waste. It will then be recycled or incinerated and the ash taken to a landfill in Islip, L.I.
OCTOBER 9, 1987
RESTAURANTS:
Le Cirque
After 13 years and 50,000 chivalrous hand pecks to the ladies, Sirio Maccioni is still wowing them. A consummate impresario and choreographer, he is forever refining his international act known as Le Cirque. Like any showman riding a long-run hit, the Italian-born owner brings changes to his production ever so carefully. Those he has added in the past year, including an astonishingly versatile young chef, have boosted the restaurant’s performance to four-star heights—joining the exalted galaxy that includes Le Bernardin, Chanterelle, Lutece and the Quilted Giraffe.
That Le Cirque is the most glamorous and electrifying setting in New York goes without saying. Not the room particularly, a brightly lighted, tightly cramped rococo den with its zany monkey murals and peculiar bouquet sconces that could have come from a suburban lawn-and-garden center. Le Cirque’s unparalleled spirit springs from the staff and customers who fill it. On any evening the celebrity scorecard overflows. There may be Lee Iacocca holding court over a veal chop, Paul Bocuse and Roger Verge sampling everything on the menu, the King of Spain and his retinue marveling at the wine list, Mick Jagger trying to look comfortable—and all, amazingly, appearing inconspicuous amid the glittering colony of habitues.
Late last year, Alain Sailhac, Le Cirque’s chef for eight years, passed the baton to the 32-year-old Lyons native Daniel Boulud, who trained at some of the greatest kitchens in France before doing stints here at Le Regence in the Hotel Plaza-Athenee and at the Polo in the Hotel Westbury. If a generalization can be made about changes on this awesomely varied menu, it is that, on the whole, the approach is lighter, more rustic Provencal than polished Parisian.
One unforgettable dish is called sea scallops fantasy in black tie, an individual silver casserole dish of exquisite sliced sea scallops layered with black truffles, moistened with buttery vermouth and truffle juice. Next to that you can find something as unabashedly earthy as a cold terrine of beef shanks with leeks in a faintly piquant raifort sauce speckled with diced vegetables, or tissue-thin carpaccio of red snapper glossed with truffle oil and under a cover of arugula and fresh chervil. Foie gras comes in no fewer than two dozen costumes, depending on Mr. Boulud’s whim (sauteed with Concord grapes and cranberries was inspired).
Trying to describe Mr. Boulud’s vast lunch and dinner entree repertory in this space would be like itemizing the fall exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a postcard.
Le Cirque’s three-ring performance, like a family trapeze act, has become even more dazzling and sure-handed over time. And Mr. Maccioni seems to do it with the greatest of ease.
Le Cirque: **** 58 East 65th Street.
Atmosphere: Plush, densely packed room done in a rococo style. Good acoustics despite large crowds.
Service: Unflappably seasoned European staff, highly professional and cordial.
Recommended dishes: Sea scallops and truffles, terrine of beef shanks and leeks, carpaccio of snapper, foie gras, escargot in white wine and herbs, roasted sea bass in potato crust, grilled salmon with walnuts, navarin of lamb, magret of duck with plum, venison with three purees, raspberry napoleon, sugar basket with fresh figs, mango curls with mango ice cream, creme brulee.
Price range: Lunch: prix fixe $29.75, a la carte appetizers $8.75 to $27, main courses $17 to $26.50; dinner: appetizers $9.75 to $26.50, main courses $21 to $29.
APRIL 2, 1989
JOHN GOTTI RUNNING THE MOB
Every workday about noon, with ritual pomp, a gleaming limousine glides into the driveway of a modest, split-level house in the Howard Beach section of Queens. Emerging from the house is John Joseph Gotti, a spring to his step, his shoulders squared like a West Point plebe. He is dressed impeccably: muted solid-colored double-breasted suit, creamy white shirt and silk tie with matching breast-pocket handkerchief. Behind the wheel of the waiting Mercedes-Benz or Lincoln is one of three driver-bodyguards who rotate in chauffeuring Gotti around New York.
John Gotti arrives for the funeral of bodyguard Anthony J. (Shorty) Mascuzzlo. On the right is Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano.
The 48-year-old Gotti lists his occupation as a roving salesman for a plumbing contracting company. In court records, however, prosecutors brand him as the reigning head of the Gambino family, the largest Mafia or Cosa Nostra group in the country. Since 1984, convictions obtained under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations—or RICO—Act have dismantled most of the nation’s 24 organized crime families. Now, for law-enforcement officials, Gotti represents the most formidable roadblock left in a campaign to dislodge the Mafia from its remaining stronghold—the New York region.
F.B.I. and local investigators believe Gotti seized control of the Gambino family after he arranged for the previous boss, Paul Castellano, to be gunned down on a Manhattan street in December 1985. At that time, Gotti was an obscure, middle-level capo regime, or captain, in the crime family.
Since taking over an empire that experts estimate grosses at least $500 million yearly from illegal enterprises, Gotti has become organized crime’s most significant symbol of resistance to law-enforcement since Al Capone cavorted in Chicago 60 years ago. As he makes his predictable daily round of meetings from dingy storefront hangouts to elegant restaurants, he boldly displays his contempt of investigators who have been thus far unable to convince a jury that he is engaged in criminal activities. Upon spotting detectives on stakeouts, he has been known to rub one index finger against another at them, mouthing the words: “Naughty, naughty.”
Gotti’s notoriety generates intense and, at times, divisive competition among prosecutors over who will get a crack at convicting him. The next legal battle will be handled jointly by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, which obtained an indictment accusing Gotti of ordering the shooting and wounding of a carpenter’s union official in 1986. Arrested for the shooting in January, Gotti reiterated his disdain. “Three to one I beat this charge,” he joked to the arresting officers. The next day he was freed on $100,000 bail.
Despite his bravado, Federal and local investigators view Gotti’s ascension as a sign of decay within the Mafia. Before he vaulted to the top, his criminal profile, sketched in Federal Bureau of Investigation and New York Police Department records, was that of a thug with a bulky arrest record who had served two prison sentences for bungled crimes. And investigators evaluate him as less capable of running a criminal conglomerate than the cadre of high-ranking mobsters who have been eliminated, in recent years, by prosecution and by death.
Appraising Gotti’s three years at the summit, investigators say he still lacks the skills to resuscitate or expand the mob’s more sophisticated enterprises, such as extorting kickbacks for rigging contracts in the construction and garment industries. Payoffs to Gotti are said to be dwindling. Investigators believe he relies increasingly on what he knows best: strong-armed profits from loan sharking, gambling and narcotics deals.
Jules J. Bonavolonta, the F.B.I. special agent in charge of the organized-crime branch in New York, contends that a vivid clue to Gotti’s character can be gleaned from confidential reports in which Gotti reportedly disclosed that his childhood idol was Albert Anastasia, a founder of Murder Inc. According to Bonavolonta, Gotti is “a former two-bit hijacker and a degenerate gambler who rules right now because he is ruthless and vicious.”
APRIL 21, 1989
Youths Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger
A young woman, jogging on her usual nighttime path in Central Park, was raped, severely beaten and left unconscious in an attack by as many as 12 youths, who roamed the park in a vicious rampage Wednesday night, the police said.
The woman, a 30-year-old investment banker, was found in the early morning wearing only a bra, her hands bound with her sweatshirt and her mouth gagged. Her body temperature, the police said, dropped to 80 degrees while she lay bleeding in a puddle for nearly four hours about 200 yards from where she had been set upon.
The woman, who was found by two passers-by at 1:30 yesterday morning, was listed in critical condition yesterday at Metropolitan Hospital with two skull fractures.
The attack was apparently the last of a burst of random assaults by the youths in the northern reaches of the 840-acre park. That area has not yet seen the vast rehabilitation that has touched many other sections of the park in recent years.
Five youths were arrested in connection with another attack Wednesday evening, and the police said that they were considered suspects in the assault on the jogger.
The teenagers began marauding shortly after 9 P.M., with the robbery of a 52-year-old man at 102d Street on the East Drive. The youths got away with just a sandwich, and the police were unsure how the man, who was walking and carrying a shopping bag, was able to fend them off.
In the next hour, they threw rocks at a taxicab, chased a man and woman riding a tandem bicycle at 100th Street on the East Drive and attacked a 40-year-old jogger, hitting him on the head with a lead pipe, the police said. The jogger told the police that the group turned on him after he came upon them as they attacked a woman on the bridle path about 96th Street, just east of the jogging track around the Reservoir. The man was not seriously injured.
A bouquet of flowers marks the spot in Central Park where a jogger was attacked in 1989.
At 10 o’clock, the police said, the group came upon the female jogger as she was running on a desolate transverse, closed to cars, at 102d Street, adjacent to North Meadow softball fields. The police said that the youths numbered as many as 20 when the attacks began and that as many as 12 assaulted the jogger.
Central Park has been the site of other attacks by groups of youths.
Many of the recent renovations of neglected areas of the park—including the rebuilding of Bethesda Terrace, the reopening of the Wollman Memorial Ice Skaing Rink and the rebuilt Central Park Zoo—have been intended to make the park less forbidding.
But the northern part has not had as many improvements.
A New Generation of Racism Is Seen
The killing of a black teenager Wednesday night in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn is but the most searing example of what sociologists and civil rights groups say is a renewed and rising tide of racial intolerance among teen-agers and young adults across the country.
Why that spirit of prejudice crossed the line from slurs and stereotyping to violence in Bensonhurst remains speculative. But those who have studied race relations and teen-age violence say there are common threads.
The group of 10 to 30 bat-wielding whites who the police said killed Yusef Hawkins in the mistaken belief that he had shown up to date a white girl all apparently came from a white working-class enclave; in this case, Bensonhurst.
Although renewed prejudice has been reported across all income levels and classes in recent years, experts said racism has particularly taken root in white working-class areas wrenched by the economic dislocations of the 1980’s, and among young people with no memory of the civil rights struggles of the 60’s and 70’s.
In addition, most of the Brooklyn attackers were under 20 years of age, reflecting a pattern in New York City in which 70 percent of all bias incidents are committed by people under 19, according to the Police Department.
Growing racial intolerance among the young “is one of the most significant trends of the last few years,” said Janet Caldwell, a program associate at the Center for Democratic Renewal, an Atlanta-based research group that monitors the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.
Justice Department figures show that the number of cases it investigated as “racial incidents” fell slightly between 1986 and 1987, but that racial incidents classified as “school related” rose by almost 50 percent.
Janet Caldwell, at the Center for Democratic Renewal, said she believes the change in attitudes among many young people is rooted in both reality and myth.
The reality, she said, is that young people with no memory of the struggle that led to racial quotas in colleges and in the work place are coming of age in a world where job competition is increasing, where “it is very easy to fall through the cracks if you can’t climb into the technocracy.”
The myth is that those changes have resulted in “a loss of white-skin privilege,” she said.
“Young whites are facing things they never had to face before,” she said. “The high-paying post-industrial jobs are not there for them.”
Another important element, she believes, are the efforts by groups like the neo-Nazis, the Klan and the Skinheads to influence the young through white-power rock and roll, cartoons and other methods. In addition, she said, most schools are not teaching about the evils of racism to counter those efforts.
The question that many say hangs over the Bensonhurst incident is why race relations appear to be worsening in New York City. From 1984, when Bernhard H. Goetz shot four black teenagers on a subway car, through the 1986 death of a black man in Howard Beach, Queens, after he was chased onto a highway by a group of whites, to the Bensonhurst case, tension between the races has risen by almost any measure.
Yet community leaders in Bensonhurst and police investigators also say that cooperation among residents has been better than in some past bias investigations, including that of the Howard Beach attack.
A large crowd attends the funeral of Yusuf Hawkins, the victim of a racially motivated killing.
Dinkins and Friends Exult in Victory
Not long after the image of Mayor Edward I. Koch faded from a giant television screen above the Hotel Penta Grand Ballroom just after midnight, David N. Dinkins mounted the stage to the cheers of several thousand supporters to claim victory in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Mayor-elect David Dinkins gives his victory speech on November 7, 1989 in New York City.
“You voted your hopes and not your fears, and in so doing you said something profound today about the soul and character of this town,” Mr. Dinkins, the first black mayoral nominee of the Democratic Party in New York City, said early today. “You, the people of New York, made history today.”
Mr. Dinkins quickly set about fashioning his approach to running against Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican nominee. A former Federal prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani is expected to emphasize his ability to deal with the city’s drug and crime problems. “With your help,” Mr. Dinkins said, “I intend to restore the rule of law in our streets, in our schools and in our subways.
“There is no excuse for stealing, for violence, for urban terrorism. I intend to be the toughest mayor on crime this city has ever seen.” Before Mr. Dinkins took the stage, the loudest cheers were for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who described Mr. Dinkins’s nomination as squarely in the tradition of the civil rights movement.
“David Dinkins’s victory sends a good message to all of America,” said Mr. Jackson, who noted that Democratic leaders had recently gathered to search for the party’s message for the 1990’s. “The message is in New York,” he said.
Mr. Jackson linked the Dinkins victory to the reaction to the killing last month of a black teenager who was confronted by a gang of young white men in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Mr. Jackson said voters had chosen “to turn pain into power.” He likened Mr. Dinkins’s victory to a resurrection after the trauma of the racial killing.
By the time the polls closed three hours earlier, the crowd was already elated, convinced that their candidate had won.
“It’s the biggest thing since Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling,” said Clementine Pugh, a Dinkins supporter from Harlem, as she rushed to kiss Jim Bell, a Dinkins volunteer from the United Auto Workers Union. “You could feel it—you could feel it all day. The people could smell their own power.”
“I’m rejoicing,” said Ekua Wilson Sampson, a math teacher at Junior High School 145 in the Bronx. “Koch has been in too long.”
Several speakers began laying the groundwork for a polite reception of Mayor Koch—all in the name of party unity in the face of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign for the Nov. 7 election.
OCTOBER 31, 1989
Japanese Buy New York Cachet with Deal for Rockefeller Center
The Rockefeller Group, the owner of Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall and other mid-Manhattan office buildings, said yesterday that it had sold control of the company to the Mitsubishi Estate Company of Tokyo, one of the world’s biggest real estate developers.
The Channel Gardens in Rockefeller Center during the 1989 holiday season.
Richard A. Voell, Rockefeller’s president and chief executive, said Mitsubishi would pay $846 million in cash for a 51 percent interest. The proceeds will go into the family trusts established by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1934 and be used to diversify the family’s holdings.
The deal, which comes almost exactly 50 years after Rockefeller Center opened on Nov. 1, 1939, is only the latest instance of the Japanese buying a vital piece of the American landscape, from Hollywood to Wall Street. In September, the Sony Corporation bought Columbia Pictures for $3.4 billion.
David Rockefeller, the company’s chairman, said in a statement that the agreement “preserves the abiding commitment to Rockefeller Center and New York City which my father made more than 50 years ago, and which present generations of the family continue to feel.” There has been talk that the 88 Rockefeller descendants, all beneficiaries of the 1934 trusts, had wanted to take advantage of high Manhattan property values and turn their stakes into cash.
Jotaro Takagi, president of Mitsubishi Estate, said: “There is no business address in the world that has the same cachet as Rockefeller Center. It is synonymous with excellence. We are making this investment with the objective of continuing this tradition into the 21st century, sharing with the Rockefeller family the vision of the center as a very special place in New York City, and of the city itself as a world capital of business and culture.”
Since the 1930’s, Columbia University had owned the land under the original Rockefeller Center running down the east side of the Avenue of Americas to Fifth Avenue and from 48th Street to 51st Street. But the Rockefeller Group bought it in 1985 for $400 million.
Mr. Rockefeller, who is 74 years old, is one of two surviving children of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had five sons and one daughter. The other is Laurance S. Rockefeller, 79, owner of the Woodstock Inn in Woodstock, Vt., and former chairman of Rock Resorts.
In Rockefeller Center, Mitsubishi will become the landlord of some of the biggest names in the country: General Electric, NBC, Time Warner, Price Waterhouse and Morgan Stanley.
HELMSLEY GETS 4-YEAR TERM FOR TAX FRAUD
Saying that Leona Helmsley had been motivated by “naked greed,” a Federal judge in Manhattan sentenced her yesterday to a four-year prison term and fined her $7.1 million for tax fraud. Mrs. Helmsley, who described herself in advertisements as the queen of the Helmsley hotel chain, would be eligible for parole after 16 months in prison.
Leona Helmsley leaving the New York Federal Court House in 1989.
In imposing what many lawyers viewed as stern sentences on Mrs. Helmsley and two former employees, whose conspiracy trial became national theater last summer, Judge John M. Walker Jr. said, “I trust that the sentences today will make it very clear that no person, no matter how wealthy or prominent, stands above the law.”
Judge Walker pronounced the sentence in a courtroom packed with more than 300 spectators after an emotional plea by the 69-year-old Mrs. Helmsley. It was the first time the woman who was portrayed as a “tough bitch” by her own lawyer during the trial had spoken publicly about the charges of falsifying documents and illicit billing practices.
Her face drawn, Mrs. Helmsley stood at a lectern in Federal District Court in Manhattan and sobbed uncontrollably as she addressed the judge, begging not to be separated from her husband, Harry B. Helmsley, the billionaire real-estate entrepreneur who sat impassively in the third row.
But Mrs. Helmsley did not acknowledge that she had done anything wrong. “I am more humiliated and ashamed than anybody could ever imagine that I have been found guilty of a serious crime,” Mrs. Helmsley said, her voice breaking. “I feel as though I’m in the middle of a nightmare.”
When he spoke later, Judge Walker looked directly at Mrs. Helmsley and said she was fully responsible for the scheme that included billing Helmsley businesses for more than $3 million in furnishings for Dunnellen Hall, the couple’s 26-acre estate in Greenwich, Conn.
In addition to the fine, Judge Walker said Mrs. Helmsley would have to perform 750 hours of community service during her probation. The judge also said she would have to pay $1.2 million in federal taxes and $469,300 in state taxes. He also said she would have to pay the costs of prosecution. Federal prosecutors said that amount had not yet been determined.
Lawyers said the jail term was on the high end of the range of possible sentences, especially considering Mrs. Helmsley’s age and the poor health of Mr. Helmsley, 80 years old, who was also charged in the case but was excused from the case when Judge Walker found that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial.
There was little doubt yesterday in Federal District Court that the sentencing, like the trial in July and August, was being watched carefully all over the country. More than an hour before the scheduled 2 P.M. court session, more than 100 members of the public lined up quietly outside the fifth-floor courtroom with reporters to watch the sentencing of the woman whose faults and foibles were daily headlines in the heat of the summer.
The crowd was made up of people who talked to each other about such details as the $29 Itty-Bitty Book Light that Mrs. Helmsley billed to one of her businesses and the $45,681 clock in the shape of the Helmsley Building that she had made for her husband.
The single bit of testimony that many people have said crystallized the message of the trial came from Elizabeth Baum, a former housekeeper who joined a long line of former employees who testified. Her boss, Mrs. Baum testified, told her: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
When the proceeding was over yesterday, Mrs. Helmsley and her husband descended the 17 front steps of the Foley Square courthouse in lower Manhattan. People in a crowd on the sidewalk taunted them with shouts about jail time. Then the couple’s bodyguards shoved them into a waiting Lincoln and they rode off into a light snow.
DECEMBER 31, 1989
A DECADE ENDS, AND THE NOUVELLES OF NEW YORK ARE NOT INVITED
There was a moment in December 1980, when then Presidentelect Ronald Reagan was kneeling on the floor of Brooke Astor’s Park Avenue apartment after one of her important black-tie dinners. He was looking for a diamond earring she had dropped and together they were laughing. It was an oddly glamorous moment, the philanthropist, the President and the lost diamond.
Soon after that there appeared on the New York social scene the first glints of the gilded era of the 80’s. This was a lavish spectacle of wealth and the props of wealth fueled by the sort of fast money from Wall Street that made the word millionaire obsolete. Parties were the thing in this era, million-dollar birthday parties for the middle-aged.
“In my day, a million was a lot,” said Mrs. Astor, who put the rich-rich on the charity circuit. “Today, a billion is more like it.”
The pace setters of the decade were a handful of financial wizards and their younger second or third wives. Suddenly they were everywhere—in the flesh and in print. One could turn to the business section and read about the deals they did and the money they made and then, flipping to the gossip columns, read about the showy ways in which they spent the money.
Glossy magazines devoted articles and even cover stories to their enchanted life styles. One could be at home—a Rubens in the drawing room, a Renoir in the bath—with Gayfryd and Saul Steinberg. Or John and Susan Gutfreund, who entertain with four kinds of caviar. Or Henry Kravis and Carolyne Roehm, who eats Oreos for breakfast.
In their conspicuous consumption, the Nouvelles were consumed by the public and served up by a press for whom the point of the story increasingly became not how lovely, but how much. The cake for the wedding of Laura Steinberg and Jonathan Tisch reportedly cost $17,000. Ummm, delicious. Taste that money.
Signs that the social spectacle might be souring came in 1986, when Felix and Elizabeth Rohatyn, a couple with social clout, questioned the opulence of charity balls. The biggest balls were run not by the Nouvelles, but by Old Guard figures like Mrs. Astor, Pat Buckley and Annette Reed.
Yet the Nouvelles, with their big-money connections, were selling $100,000 worth of tables and their friends wouldn’t come to dowdy parties. The Rohatyns were squelched.
Then came Oct. 13, 1987, the stock market plunge and Wall Street jitters. Never mind. A week later Nouvelle socialites stepped out in $25,000 poufs to welcome Christian Lacroix, with his couture collection, Luxe, to New York.
In other ways, the Nouvelles seemed the purest expression of the Reagan economic philosophy, which celebrated personal wealth. If this philosophy blurred class distinctions, press agentry buried them.
After all those stories about all those parties, the public could hardly be expected to discern any difference between Pat Buckley of the Old Guard and Ivana Trump of the Nouvelles—not with Mrs. Buckley and friends posing for the paparazzi on the Trump yacht.
Nor did the public really care. But the Old Guard did, and by the summer of 1988 its members were being stung by the Nouvelle excesses.
Everybody agreed it was time to tone down, at least in public.
The Reagans left the White House. Jerry Zipkin, Nancy Reagan’s confidant and permanent representative to New York, though, was still squiring women whose husbands were too busy or too bored to take them to parties. The spring social season was somewhat muted. The Nouvelles had gone underground.
Donald Trump, shown here with his wife Ivana, purchased the Sultan of Brunei Adnan Khashoggi’s yacht, “Nabila,” for 30 million dollars and renamed it “The Princess Trump” in 1988.
Suddenly last summer, back-to-back fantasy parties broke out. The revels were miles from New York, but news of Nouvelles travels. First was the $1 million party Gayfryd Steinberg gave for her husband in Quogue, N.Y. The next week brought reports of the $2 million-plus party Malcolm Forbes gave for himself in Tangier, Morocco.
That did it. More criticism. More satire. In November 1989, Mrs. Astor, again in diamonds, presided at another important black-tie dinner. As the cameras clicked, she covered her necklace with a chiffon scarf. Her photo appeared in Women’s Wear Daily, with those of other women wearing the discreet jewelry of the new Soft Society.
“Forget the hard flash of the Nouvelle Society Eighties,” said an article accompanying the photographs. “People are fed up with opulent excess and social showoffs.”
