Three

The Advocate

Consumer Cop and Democracy Czar

For the first half of the 19th century, a Bostonian named John Chapman planted apple seeds in wilderness areas. Tens of thousands of trees made up his environmental legacy . . . He became widely known as Johnny Appleseed.

—Ralph Nader, column, In the Public Interest, 1987

As through this world I’ve wandered, I’ve met lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun. And some with a fountain pen.

—Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”

Mark’s an elected Public Advocate. I don’t know if there’s another city in America that has an elected public advocate. But think about what that means. Someone who is standing up for people at large, right? . . . I’m sort of the country’s public advocate.

—President Bill Clinton, April 15, 1997

I hang up with Ralph late on the night I lose my 1980 congressional race, conflicted but knowing that I’ll be staying in my native New York. Could I now become one of Ralph’s apple seeds replanted here?

Until I can realize my dream of combining outside advocacy with inside public office, I decide to set up my own shop called “The Democracy Project.” Based on a decade with Ralph, I push my theme of “tugboat liberals”—how small groups can steer big policies through the smart application of pressure—especially now that Reagan runs the White House and Republicans the Senate.

Recalling Bernard Baruch’s axiom that he got rich “by buying when everyone was selling and selling when everyone was buying,” it seems like a good time to try to update liberalism from my new venue. It was only a few years earlier that the Heritage Foundation brought together different disciplines under one conservative umbrella to affect policy, but there was next to nothing like that on our side. I conscript Harry Chapin, the dynamic folk singer and storyteller (“Taxi,” “Cat’s in the Cradle”), a pal from Long Island and Democratic politics and founder of WHY (World Hunger Year). At the level of a Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, he’s a “citizen-artist” who tells me, “I can provide you something rare—intellectual risk capital. My theory of life is that I do one concert for me, then one for the other guy.”

He commits to perform once a month to kick-start this smaller version of Heritage while I put together other funding, a mission statement, and a strong board of directors (which will include Ramsey Clark, Sidney Harman, Norman Lear, and Stanley Sheinbaum).

Then tragedy. On July 20, 1981, Harry is killed in a freak car accident at exit 40 of the Long Island Expressway en route to a concert. His loss staggers his family, his fans, and our nascent effort. I find a plaintiff’s lawyer for his widow, Sandy, who eventually recovers several million dollars for the family due to a car defect. Our Democracy Project plunges ahead, though it stays undercapitalized for years to come.

Our time is spent trying to formulate a progressive agenda on the economy, regulation, and crime via, again, public events, books, and television.

Democracy Project forums engage clashing Left and Right luminaries, from John Kenneth Galbraith, Bill Moyers, and I. F. Stone to Bill Buckley, Pat Buchanan, and Kevin Phillips. They also put presidential candidates in front of large audiences of NYC political and money “machers.” In 1984, they include Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and John Glenn; in 1988, Michael Dukakis, Jesse Jackson, and Al Gore; in 2004, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and John Edwards.

Senator Glenn makes news in February 1984 when I ask him before an audience of 500, “Do you think a person’s sexual orientation is a matter of biology or choice?” This American hero immediately and sincerely answers, “It’s a matter of personal choice,” presumably reflecting his small-town views of gay Americans. The audience starts murmuring and, standing on the platform next to him, I can see he has no idea why. Did I just screw over John Glenn? Should I step in and somehow bail him out? No, I decide. I’m the referee, not a coach. Until then he’s a top-tier candidate, but his New York support soon evaporates.

After Dukakis’s workman-like appearance four years later at our forum at the Ethical Culture Society, he pulls me aside to ask my opinion how Mayor Ed Koch’s typically loud endorsement of Senator Al Gore will affect his chances in New York. When I tell him that “Gore may survive it,” he can’t stop laughing and we begin a mutual admiration society.

But no one on our side is in a laughing mood after George Herbert Walker Bush’s victory. Early the next year, I host a “Retreat to Advance” at a hotel near DuPont Circle in D.C. where 100 leading Democrats convene to discuss how to reorganize and rethink. As keynote speaker focusing on education, we invite the young southern governor, Bill Clinton of Arkansas. He’s policy heavy and impressive as hell.

Also in early 1989, I contact my friend, actor Ron Silver, with an idea—since NYC has so many talented progressive actors/celebrities each going off in their own directions on public affairs, why not harness them into one focused group pushing for various causes and candidates? Ron and I then co-host a three-hour organizational meeting at my apartment a block from Gracie Mansion on 90th Street to discuss whether and how to do it. Among the 30 in attendance are Wendy Wasserstein, Blythe Danner, Mandy Patinkin, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Peter Yarrow, and Olympia Dukakis. Out of that emerges a 501c3 “Creative Coalition” that is still going strong in 2016 and that hosts forums and lobbying campaigns around specific issues. (I withdrew shortly after formation since it had to be for and run by performers and not merely the subsidiary of a think tank, and Ron had the skills to do it. Later, after 9/11, he became a Bush conservative though he voted for Obama before sadly dying at only age 62 of cancer.)

Over these same years, Democracy Project books attempt to reframe issues to keep Reagan from inaugurating a conservative era based on personal charm wedded to stories he read in the reactionary Human Events magazine. In 1982 Bantam Books publishes my Winning Back America, a liberal manifesto laying out alternative ideas in 31 policy areas. While nominated for a National Book Award, it’s no Silent Spring in terms of changing America. Reagan’s Reign of Error in 1985 documents several hundred examples when Dutch says something that’s either false, misleading, ignorant, or all three—like saying that some nuclear missiles are recallable. As I promote the book on Good Morning America, Reagan’s chief of staff James Baker is watching in the Green Room and says out loud in the presence of my aide, “No, no, he doesn’t know what he’s saying is wrong.”

In 1986, we publish two volumes that, in my view, add value to the debate over regulation. On assignment, Joan Claybrook and journalist/historian David Bollier write the best book I’ve ever read on the benefits of federal regulations: Freedom from Harm: The Civilizing Influence of Health, Safety and Environmental Regulation. Then we go further to scrutinize not the federal but the corporate bureaucracy, which I call “corpocracy” in The Challenge of Hidden Profits. Coauthor John Berry and I conclude that “corporate bloat erodes efficiency, reduces profits and weakens our ability to compete internationally.” Adding up the documented waste due to uncompetitive, polluting, worker-injuring, consumer-abusing corporations, we calculate that it comes to roughly $862 billion a year. That’s the result of real-world corporations that ignore market theory and prefer to fatten their own bureaucracies and pockets. Fortune lauds “a new kind of Naderism” that concerns itself with making business both more efficient and accountable. And the term “corpocracy” enters popular parlance after Reagan’s deputy treasury secretary, Richard Darman, appropriates and spreads, literally, the word. No longer is “bureaucracy” exclusively an epithet hurled at Washington.

Then in 1988 and 1992, we gather some of the best liberal scholars and advocates to produce citizen transition books in the tradition of the 1980 Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership for Reagan. The 1988 version is slender and, obviously, not much used by presidential winner Bush. The 1992 version, however, comes out of a conversation with Governor Bill Clinton in October 1991 as he and I linger late one night after a DNC event at the Tavern on the Green. When I explain my idea for the project, this policy-prone candidate brightens, pulls me toward him, and says, “Do it. Sure hope I’m the one who benefits.”

Weighing in at 781 pages, Changing America comes out in November 1992. This anthology by 50 progressive leaders—Jamie Galbraith, Bob Kuttner, Aryeh Neier, Marian Wright Edelman, Henry Louis Gates, among others—explains agency by agency how to shift gears from Reagan-Bush to Clinton-Gore (turns out that Al does survive Koch’s endorsement). My stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day strategy for transition policy books finally succeeds when the candidate who inspires the volume then enthusiastically uses it as president-elect, according to him.

I also appear increasingly on TV, including scores of times on Firing Line or sitting “on the left” on Crossfire. Yes, it’s fun tangling with Buckley, Buchanan, Bob Novak, Newt Gingrich, Edward Teller, Alexander Haig . . . but ultimately unfulfilling. Family and friends watch and applaud as my ego is tickled. But the events, books, and debates are essentially academic, reflecting policy rather than making it.

The decade’s end arrives awash in frustration: Reagan dominates public discourse, Hart self-immolates, and Dukakis flounders, while I win a U.S. Senate nomination in 1986 (see next chapter) but not a Senate seat.

Then something happens to shift my course.

An underestimated David Dinkins, the Manhattan borough president, handily defeats a battle- and scandal-scarred Mayor Koch in 1989 to be elected the first African American mayor of the city. As an early and vigorous supporter, I’m on a short list being considered by Dinkins’s transition team to lead his Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), a post made famous 20 years before when former Miss America Bess Myerson held it. Some on the panel are enthusiastic because of my history as a consumer advocate, others worried at my headstrong public reputation.

But Dave’s vote is the only one that counts. When he makes the offer, I initially hesitate, wondering whether I want to be “just” a local commissioner. Then I recall an experience from 1977 when I accompany my friend Linda Blitz to buy shoes at a store on upper Connecticut Ave. When she asks if there’s a cash discount since the store saves money by avoiding a fee to the credit card company, she’s told no by a baffled clerk. “Why not?” I ask a manager. “Because the credit card companies won’t let us in their contracts with us.” Bingo! Yale law professor Paul Gewirtz sues the store and AmEx in a case that successfully ends such anticompetitive clauses. The idea that I could make law like this regularly as a public official becomes tantalizing.

Then too, Ralph encourages me: “You can be a prototype on how to enforce consumer protection laws.” Soon I shake off my national hubris, realizing that there are truly worse things than having a staff of 300 licensing 50,000 companies in 82 lines of commerce and the legal authority to prosecute fraud and enact reforms. Believing it’s put-up or shut-up time, I say yes and am sworn in on February 20, 1990.

“I, Mark Green, do solemnly swear . . .” I hear myself saying in City Hall, full of excess adrenaline and surrounded by my beaming family. Dinkins—a politician whose external mildness sheaths a tough, sometimes prickly persona—talks up my consumer cred as a “Nader Raider.” My son Jonah, then six, can’t resist grabbing the mic to say a few words. Then he allows me my turn to declare that I want to “especially protect seniors, children, women, the disabled, and minorities who most need government help.”

“Go get ’em, Dad,” my 11-year-old daughter Jenya stage-whispers when I conclude.

So I do, in the spirit of Alexander Hamilton, who shrewdly understood that “in politics as in war, the first blow is half the battle.” An hour later and three blocks north at the frayed offices of the DCA, I hold a press conference denouncing R. J. Reynolds for “commercial child abuse” because of the way it uses the cartoon figure Joe Camel to addict 13-year-olds—the average age of a first-time smoker—to a lifelong if not life-ending habit.

Tumult! The mayor’s office understandably feels blindsided since, in my enthusiasm, I hadn’t checked in with them beforehand. During an angry phone call, City Hall press secretary Albert Scardino expresses amazement that I would do that in my first hour on my first day in office. In the future, he insists, “you have to clear such press conferences and statements with my office.” “Sorry, can’t do that,” I reply, worried that waiting for permission could compromise my law enforcement judgments and inevitably bog down my file full of ready-to-go initiatives in his press bureaucracy. I assume, or rather hope, that it would be untenable to fire me so early for this impertinence.

Scardino grudgingly backs off while Dinkins is too busy juggling bigger crises than this small contretemps. From a mayoral perspective, of course, Dinkins-Scardino were probably managerially right. CEOs like to know about and coordinate what their subordinates are doing. But I win this round simply because I cared far more than they on a matter so essential to my plans, which I’m confident will bring credit to City Hall. As a result, I have lots of leeway to investigate bad actors and reform bad laws on behalf of powerless, screwed consumers.

Four years later, I get elected—and in 1997 reelected—the city’s first public advocate. It’s an office that traces back to 1831, is one-fifth the size of DCA, lacks law enforcement authority, and has been a perennial underachiever.* But since it’s elected citywide and constitutionally next in line to the mayor, I see the potential to elevate it from lapdog to watchdog . . . as long as I stay alert to likely efforts to eliminate it by hostile tabloids and mayors unenthusiastic about such an institutional critic.

Except for occasional attacks on the office’s very existence, from 1990 to 2001, the political planets are in alignment for someone who believes in aggressive government and progressive values. Or to quote President Clinton, as we ride in his limousine across 45th Street after a March 1994 speech to the United Nations, “Do you feel like you died and went to heaven?”

Eleven Years in Advocate Heaven

I make several private vows at the start of my public service: to structure my office as a Nader-like public interest law firm; put into practice the liberal ideas I’ve been advocating for 20 years; work every day with NBA-playoff intensity since I can’t know how long I’ll be able to merge advocacy and office; and go big not small—“if St. George had slain a dragonfly rather than a dragon,” it’s said in the screenplay Inherit the Wind, “who would remember him?”

That approach and the leverage of the world’s premiere city enable me from 1990 to 2001 to churn out some 320 reports, lawsuits, and laws—first under the Democratic Dinkins as an appointed official, then under the Republican Rudy Giuliani as an elected one.

Here are six areas that describe how progressive values from the Sixties are adapted and enacted by Nineties activist government.†

1. Kicking Joe Camel’s Butt

I’m thinking hard about an opening initiative in January 1990, recalling the wisdom of Ronald Reagan, who said to an aide in 1966, “Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening . . . [and] a hell of a close.” Over the course of one day I see the Joe Camel “smooth character” at a newsstand, in an ad on my crosstown 86th Street bus, in my subway car, and finally in the February 8 issue of Rolling Stone. Then it hits me—who the hell relates to a cartoon figure extolling the coolness of smoking in a hip cultural magazine except teens and preteens? How is this possible more than 25 years since the groundbreaking exposé of the lethality of smoking in the surgeon general’s report?

Now, I have never smoked and I obsessively lectured my two children that they can never, never light up. But what about everyone else’s children? I resolve to use my government perch both to warn about tobacco ads targeting kids and to use the law to do something about it.

But I can’t persuade City Corporation counsel, the talented Victor Kovner, to pursue legal action to take down Joe Camel ads on public transit, on billboards in sports stadiums, and in the minority communities where they especially proliferate since fewer kids of color smoke. We respectfully disagree: after numerous legal memoranda go back and forth, Kovner sees it more as a speech than a health issue, and a federal one rather than a local one; I consider it misleading under existing “false and misleading advertising” laws to imply that smoking is more likely to enhance than end your life.

As commissioner, however, I pursue several alternate steps to publicize rather than romanticize such products.

First, Mayor Dinkins, who’s both personally proud that he quit smoking in 1961 and adores all children, enthusiastically agrees to push for a ban on the distribution of free samples and on cigarette vending machines in all public venues like movies, bars, and restaurants. “It would be considered crazy to have vending machines for liquor,” I testify to the city council. “Why do we have vending machines for a product considered more dangerous? Two hundred city children on average per day start a habit, usually at a vending machine, that a third of them will die from.” It passes easily, making our ban the first of its kind in a major American city.

Second, the mayor and I lean on the Yankees and Mets, and, with stars like Billie Jean King, on the Virginia Slims tennis tournament to stop their tobacco sponsorships since children go to games or see the billboards prominently displayed on TV screens. When a representative from Philip Morris threatens to pull their offices out of the city if we keep pushing our campaign, Dinkins tells me, “Send them a token.” A few years later, the billboards and ads come down. Teams that lease their stadiums from the city rationally don’t want to aggravate their landlords.

Third, I file a petition with the Federal Trade Commission in 1990 to bar cartoons in tobacco ads as “inherently misleading” under the FTC act. Despite enormous legal opposition from tobacco interests, seven years later the FTC staff agrees and urges the full five-member commission to move forward with such a rule. Two months later, on July 10, 1997, and before the agency can formally act, R.J. Reynolds “voluntarily” ends its ad campaign and thereby kills off the second-most-famous advertising brand in the country (the Marlboro Man being number one).

Last, I develop an idea for Kick Butts Day, modeled on the 1970 Earth Day and our 1980 Big Business Day. What better way for targeted children to learn about the lethality of tobacco than to enlist their participation in their own school in a fun day of poster contests, skits, rap performances, local essays, undercover surveys of stores that sell to minors, and letters to legislators? Appreciating the branding brilliance of Joe Camel, I persuade Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau to design our own memorable logo for the day and then woo President Clinton—with White House lawyer Elena Kagan as our enthusiastic contact—to sign on.

Our first Kick Butts Day takes place in May 1996 when the president speaks from Woodbridge High in New Jersey to our event at P.S. 10 in Queens and then is hooked up to student audiences in ten other venues. Ciara Pack, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at I.S. 10, tells her awed classmates and an impressed president that “tobacco firms say they are not trying to target kids—but we’re not stupid. They are trying to get us to smoke now so we add to their profits later.”

The next year, President Clinton travels to the Andries Hudde Junior High School in Brooklyn, in crutches because of a bad spill at a golf club, to personally address a throng of children, parents, school and public officials, plus now 100 linked cities. Local congressman Chuck Schumer warmly welcomes the president since it’s the first time in memory that a U.S. president has visited a Brooklyn public school (not to mention that Schumer’s daughter is a student there). Clinton is typically overgenerous, saying that “Mark’s Kick Butts Day involves about 2 million students [via closed circuit TV]. And he was the first official to ask to ban cartoon figures in tobacco ads” . . . then musing in this chapter’s opening quote about how he’s the real “Public Advocate.”

In April 2001, first lady and Senate candidate Hillary Clinton—she also being a famously doting mother interested in health issues—joins me for that year’s Kick Butts Day at the Salk School of Science on Manhattan’s East Side. While she always has a genuine big smile at public appearances, the senator appears to really get into a program where children take responsibility for protecting themselves while displaying their artistic and dramatic skills. “Standing up with students,” she tells an overflowing crowd, “we today send a clear message to the tobacco industry—stop targeting our children with your deadly products.” Then as we watch students rapping their anti-smoking lyrics, she whispers, “This is such a great idea—you’ve got to continue it.”

But since this idea has now gone national—we reach 4,000 schools by 2001—it’s not something for one local official to oversee. I formally turn it over to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids headquartered in Washington, D.C., which has capably run the Kick Butts Day every April from then to 2016, engaging many millions of participating students.

This tobacco work begins a three-administration crusade—Dinkins, Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg each making major strides—so that by 2015 the rate of smoking in NYC has fallen two-thirds among youth and nearly as much among adults.

2. What Do Women Want? Equality

Sanger, Steinem, and Friedan help deliver women into the twentieth century medically, politically, and legally. Now, in its last decade, is there anything a local official can do to build on their genius and enhance the quality of life for women? Relying especially on our female professional staff, we make specific progress in the courts, marketplace, workplace, and health care.

When a group of divorced women from Westchester ask to see me in 1990, at first I decline since they’re not in my geographic jurisdiction. But they’re insistent that their problems affect thousands of “unmonied spouses” in the city. At my meeting with a dozen of them, led by Monica Getz, a graceful and forceful advocate who had once been married to jazz legend Stan Getz, they describe a stacked system of “justice” under which well-off husbands hire top legal talent to coerce wives who lack the resources to navigate a complicated system.

Can the DCA help?

We spend a year interviewing 150 divorce lawyers and litigants, documenting this de facto gender discrimination in Women in Divorce: Lawyers, Ethics, Fees & Fairness, a report written by research assistant Karen Winner. (She goes on to devote much of her professional life to this cause.) It documents numerous cases where middle-aged women tragically lose almost everything—homes, children—because of a one-sided process that, like the old Soviet constitution, works fine on paper but not so well in practice.

This turns out to be a real fight with two well-matched sides. Divorce lawyers are plentiful and powerful, vigorously arguing that the status quo is fine (i.e., profitable) and that I’m biased against them. But we have on our side Monica’s group—the Coalition for Family Justice—as well as Gloria Steinem and Judith Kaye.

Gloria, as high-minded and engaged as ever, helps host meetings to expand our array of women’s groups and to appear when her star luster is needed. Judith Kaye is the chief judge in New York State, the successor to Chief Judge Sol Wachtler. He had gained fame first by ruling that marriage is not justification for marital rape and then by resigning in 1993 after admitting that he had physically threatened a former lover and her daughter. Oh, and Judge Kaye is then the decider over the rules of matrimonial law since they’re drafted by the court system.

Women in Divorce and its subsequent publicity prod the Court of Appeals to convene its own blue ribbon panel of judges to independently investigate our criticisms and proposals. Seventeen months later, Judge Kaye and the panel, according to the New York Law Journal, “announce sweeping changes in the matrimonial law system, banning non-refundable retainers, requiring binding arbitration of fee disputes and—in the strictest regulation of lawyer conduct in the nation—prohibiting sexual relations between attorney and client during the course of representation.” Also, a “Client’s Bill of Rights” must now be handed to all potential clients that specifically lays out their rights, including “You are under no legal obligation . . . to agree to a lien or mortgage on your home to cover legal fees.” According to Judge Leo Milonas, who heads the group of jurists, our DCA report “was the catalyst for the changes that we adopted.”

Monica and Gloria are ecstatic at our success, which spans both my consumer affairs and public advocate roles. Our PA general counsel, Laurel Eisner, who has worked with me on this issue, then walks into my office not just to celebrate but with another long-ignored gender-based pathology—women being fired at work because of abusive partners. We gather the grim data: a third of American women report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend in their lifetimes; 70 percent of employed battered women say that their abusers harassed them at work; and a quarter of such women report losing a job at least in part due to domestic violence.

Among others, I sit down with Rosa Schirripa from Staten Island, who shares with me her grief at trying to keep her family together and stay employed despite an abusive husband, only to lose her job when he harasses her at work and her employer doesn’t want to put up with any hassle. This is both heartbreaking and little discussed in an era before domestic violence became a big issue.

Laurel and I organize the public-private Safe@Work coalition with a dozen women’s, labor, and corporate organizations—including NOW, the Communications Workers of America, and Verizon, Liz Claiborne, and Philip Morris. Over the course of a couple of years, we hold hearings, organize the city’s first march against domestic violence with 3,000 participating, and exchange strategies about how to protect women like Rosa when traditional corporate law allows employers to fire employees at will (unless unionized).

Because of business opposition within our broad group, we can’t unite behind a proposal to affirmatively provide special protection in workplaces. We do, however, craft a bill that forbids firms from firing women because they merely asked for accommodations—like some time off for court appearances, desks away from doors—or because of “their actual or perceived status as domestic violence victims.” This anti-discrimination protection, we believe, can encourage women in the shadows to come forward, knowing they at least won’t suffer retaliatory firing.

With half the city council as cosponsors, I introduce the first-of-its-kind bill in 1998—it’s soon after adopted by California, Maine, and then, finally, by NYC in January 2001. Mayor Giuliani signs it at a smiley-face bill ceremony, one of the very few that we two share in our eight-year relationship. New York State, under Governor David Paterson, enacts it as well in 2009.

Separately, Nancy Youman, my executive assistant, shares her annoyance about the double indignity of women underpaid at work yet then overcharged in the marketplace. “Every place I’ve had my hair cut charged women more than men,” she says. “I asked the guy who cuts my hair why and he said things like ‘Women are more temperamental. They want to talk to you. They just take longer.’”

In 1992, we publish Gypped by Gender: A Study of Price Bias Against Women in the Marketplace, which documents how women pay 25 to 30 percent more than men for the same dry cleaning and haircuts; they are even charged more by car dealers two-fifths of the time. While many men dismiss our findings, most women get it and are grateful.

As with Women in Divorce, our empirical report garners national attention, local headlines, and council support. Again, as public advocate with council cosponsors, I introduce a bill that bans both the posting of differential prices and the charging of them. It passes and becomes law.

Last are two health initiatives, involving reproductive rights.

When it comes to reproductive rights, New York State is a leader, legalizing abortion in 1970 three years before Roe v. Wade. But continuing right-to-life political pressure in the early Nineties scares off Roussel Uclaf, the French manufacturer of RU-486, a nonsurgical “abortifacient,” from testing or selling it in the United States. The company doesn’t want its American subsidiary to be picketed and boycotted. Yet hundreds of thousands of women in Great Britain, France, and China are safely using this chemical procedure that stops fertilized eggs from lodging in uterine walls.

As consumer commissioner, I get Mayor Dinkins’s approval to organize a 30-mayor national coalition to let the firm know that officials representing millions of women want the company to allow it to be tested and then sold in the United States. Based on this effort, I encourage Bill Clinton to talk up RU-486 in his presidential campaign; he does and then, in his first month as president, issues an executive order to the Health and Human Services Department to figure out how to get the drug imported for testing. His administration persuades Roussel Uclaf to transfer its patent for mifepristone, the chemical name, to the Population Council to begin testing. In 1996, the FDA clears it as safe and finally, in 2000, it becomes available for sale under the trade name of Mifeprex. This puts reproductive choice where it ideally belongs, in the privacy of a physician’s office rather than in what can be the public gauntlet of an abortion clinic.

As public advocate, I read a squib in the Daily News in October 1994 about the ordeal of a Brooklyn art teacher who is raped and then sits for hours at Woodhull Hospital in a flimsy examination smock in a general waiting room near handcuffed prisoners. It’s astounding to allow the re-victimization of someone who has suffered such physical and psychological trauma.

We launch an investigation into how the 11 municipal hospitals treat women in these fraught circumstances. With 20 rapes a day in the city and only 5 percent of rapists ever prosecuted, the very least hospitals can do is ensure the emotional and physical well-being of rape survivors. Based on site visits and 100 interviews with hospital officials, workers, advocates, and counselors, a year later we release a report that documents how women in this situation lack separate rooms, special showers, and psychological and social welfare aides. Naming the top and worst hospitals, we create a kind of competition among facilities to see which can respond best. Two years later, we re-investigate and find that every municipal hospital now has special rape treatment and counseling protocols.

3. Poor Pay More? The “Sunlight” of Disclosure

To stressed seniors and families, nickels and dimes add up. In my first few months as consumer commissioner, one senior on a fixed income writes a long, anguished, handwritten letter about paying a nickel more for a drug he needed—a nickel! Another woman on a phone call starts sobbing about a fly-by-night contractor who had taken several hundred dollars for kitchen repair but then departed, leaving her stranded with a nonfunctioning kitchen, normally the center of her family life.

These and thousands of other examples reflect both an earlier consumer classic as well as my own research. In his seminal 1963 The Poor Pay More: Consumer Practices of Low-Income Families, Columbia professor David Caplovitz analyzed how, without any businessman waking up wanting to screw the poor, cultural and market failures produced that perverse result. The Closed Enterprise System in 1971 documented how anti-competitive practices worsen inequality by transferring billions of dollars from average consumers to the wealthier shareholders and managers of large companies.

A moralist could make an argument for progressive pricing as we have progressive taxation, but no one can reasonably justify regressive pricing where poverty compounds itself. How and why does this happen? I decide to update Caplovitz.

Our counterintuitive findings come out in a series of four major studies called The Poor Pay More . . . For Less: in food, banking, auto insurance, and home improvement contracting. The food problem is that big supermarket chains often shun low-income, minority communities, citing pilferage and culture. “It would be difficult for an Anglo-Saxon store like Sloan’s to do business [in a Hispanic community],” says the CEO of Sloan’s. “They would view our presence as impersonal.”

These areas are served largely by small bodegas and convenience stories that lack healthy, fresh foods and can’t compete with lower prices and bulk buying. There are an average of 17,232 people per supermarket in Harlem versus 6,580 residents per supermarket in Manhattan’s middle-income and wealthier neighborhoods. On average, economically distressed ZIP codes pay 8.8 percent more—or $350 a year—for the same 21 items as shoppers in more affluent ones, as tallied by a human calculator who, fortunately for me, is our Director of Research Glenn von Nostitz. At the release of our findings in 1993 on 161st Street in the Bronx, Congressman José Serrano complains with cheeky humor, “I don’t think that I [should] have to pay and dust at the same time.”

DCA uses our study to urge city development agencies to provide various tax credits to lure supermarkets back in. The Dinkins administration proposes to encourage the construction of a first supermarket in East Harlem. But by the time formal approval is required, the Giuliani administration is balking, largely because it doesn’t want to do anything associated with Dinkins and also because local bodegas are complaining. Finally, a Pathmark supermarket is narrowly approved in 1995 under the leadership of Democratic city councilman Guillermo Linares and Manhattan borough president Ruth Messenger.

This pathology of poverty is also true for low-income, under-banked communities. Because of fewer branches and ATM machines and the red-lining of entire neighborhoods, the financial industry—commercial and savings banks—is forcing working and poor families into check-cashing outlets that charge $500 a year for what would otherwise cost $60 at a typical bank.‡ We use this data to pressure Citibank into opening more branches since there are depositors in East New York and the South Bronx with money to save and fees to pay. Indeed, when Citi wants to merge with Travelers in 1998, I protest with Gloria Steinem at the Travelers Building downtown to urge the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to reject the proposed merger until Citi performs better under Community Reinvestment Act criteria.§

Following up this financial services report, we produce an annual survey called Ranking Banking with state senator Franz Leichter. It gathers information about bounced check fees, minimum balance requirements, and interest paid on various accounts of some 50 banks and then ranks their consumer-friendliness. As expected, top-ranked banks—usually smaller ones lacking big-name market power—brag about it in their ads while lower-rated ones bark at us, but we get thousands of requests from interested customers to mail them our price surveys (this being pre-Internet).

Beyond these specific sectoral studies, we come up with a way to vividly convey how growing inequality is taxing us. Our study, The New Poverty, shows that in 1972, it took 2.8 years of work, on average, to purchase a house, and 6.9 years in 1990; college tuition, 14.2 weeks in 1972, 23.9 weeks in 1990; a Chevy sedan, 18.4 weeks in 1972, 24.5 weeks in 1990; a doctor’s visit, 1.7 hours in 1972, 4.7 hours in 1992. That is, because real wages are falling for most New Yorkers, average families have to run faster even to stay in place.

Of course, with some exceptions like natural monopolies and utility rates, government doesn’t set prices in a capitalist economy. But it can publicize prices and ingredients. In the spirit of Louis Brandeis’s famous axiom that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—and looking to tar and nicotine labeling on cigarettes as an example—we pursue a disclosure model that facilitates comparison shopping so that economically stressed families can get more for their money.

Too much fat and calories in fast food? Neither the FDA nor I can dictate exactly what to put in a hamburger (though no E. coli bacteria or salmonella!). But as the consumer commissioner, I introduce a bill in August 1991 to require fast food chains, which feed one in five Americans daily, to list their fat and caloric content for each meal. (We’re years away from a national campaign against obesity.) Joining me in front of a brightly colored poster with this information is CEO Barry J. Gibbons of Burger King, the country’s second-largest fast food chain, in one of his 80 NYC restaurants. That’s gutsy in one sense since his most popular offering—a Whopper with cheese, fries, and a Coke—has 80 percent of a day’s fat allowance as well as 1,342 calories. But he announces that he wants his brand to take the lead “in the passage of this historic law.” A few years later, the city and then many cities mandate such postings for the billions of fast food meals served annually.

We also conduct periodic surveys of drug stores and gas stations to compare prices of the same drugs and grades, attracting enormous media coverage because of reader and viewer interest. An average person does not want to pay $400 more for a basket of drugs at the most expensive drug stores as compared to the least expensive, with spreads of 30 percent on the most popular drugs. Nor does anyone, neither Bentley nor Buick owners, want to pay 30 percent more for the same-octane gas.

My favorite price disclosure project is the Passover Pledge. There is a religious tradition, passed along for generations, that I first encounter as a boy in Elmont: kosher-for-Passover foodstuffs rise in price before the Seders. Though almost no one seems to know or even wonder why this happens, to me it smacks of price-gouging based on religious necessity, akin to electric generators spiking in price during a blackout.

In 1990, we inaugurate our annual Passover price survey: first, we print and distribute thousands of handheld cards listing the high, low, and average prices for various Seder-related foods by borough (matzo, gefilte fish, cheeses, chicken, canned fruits, etc.); second, stores that jack up prices the most are publicized in our “Hall of Shonda” (shame) press release; and third, we organize 82 Jewish groups into a “Kosher Coalition” to petition hundreds of stores to take the Passover Pledge not to increase prices during the holiday. Ninety-seven stores agree. My son calls me “Knish-ener Green.”

While all this sounds like good, clean fun, in fact, for the first time in memory prices do not jump for the Seders. And Jewish families, especially large Orthodox ones on modest incomes, do not overspend by hundreds of dollars in order to observe their religion.

Rudy and Me

Rudy’s father, Harold Giuliani, teaches him how to box at just two years old to toughen him up for the world outside their insular Flatbush environs. In high school, Rudy—encouraged by his doting mother—spends hours in his room listening to operas and imagining a world of a never-ending battle between good and evil.

After attending NYU law school, in 1970 he joins the office of the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District where he meets Harold Tyler, the deputy U.S. attorney general, who’s struck by Giuliani’s sharp intelligence and prodigious work ethic. It’s there as a 30-year-old prosecutor that he wins a fearsome reputation with a withering cross-examination of Democratic congressman Bertram Podell, charged with bribery and who, in Rudy’s retelling, breaks down on the stand, then confesses. Very Perry Mason, very operatic. Except those present say that the congressman already planned to make his guilty plea and kept his composure. Nonetheless, this story enhances Giuliani’s legend and reflects a lifelong habit of blending hyperbole and ferocity.

Becoming a mentor for life, Tyler plucks Giuliani from his Manhattan office and brings him to Washington. After serving as Reagan’s number three at the Justice Department (and after getting an annulment claiming he didn’t know that his wife was his second cousin), his new fiancée’s promotion to a New York television station proves fortuitous. Senator Alfonse D’Amato has been seeking to nominate just such a candidate who could tackle New York’s mushrooming drug-fueled crime wave.

It takes just three days into Giuliani’s work as U.S. attorney for him to announce his initial indictment, the first in a series of high-profile cases against Mafia dons and tax evaders while slapping handcuffs on trembling brokers on the trading floor. His crusades earn him a national profile. But his style also rankles—an insatiable appetite for publicly leaking charges to reporters, pioneering use of the “perp walk,” timing announcements of his office’s work for the six o’clock news. When Rudy Giuliani announces in early 1989 that he’s quitting his post—after an unusual standoff with Senator D’Amato, who Giuliani implies might appoint a successor who’d kill his big cases—the New York Times editorializes that “New Yorkers have seen enough to hope that one day he’ll return to public office.”

They don’t have to wait long. That spring, Giuliani launches his race for mayor, losing to David Dinkins by a three-point margin. It is a bruising campaign that, like the rematch that followed four years later, is inflected by the ethnic tensions that roiled New York in the 1980s and 1990s . . . and hints at Rudy’s racial edge that would bluntly emerge in 2015.

Before our elections on the same day in November 1993, Giuliani and I have only a glancing relationship. We debate once in 1992 on CNN on the topic of white-collar crime, when he doesn’t seem to appreciate my on-air criticism that he wasn’t tough enough in seeking penalties on business crooks. Also, bizarrely, we reside several dozen feet from each for a few years in the late Eighties when he and his wife live on the 35th floor of 420 East 86th Street while Deni and I live on the 34th floor of the same building, though our interactions are limited to nods as we hurry by each other in the lobby.

At one level, we have certain traits in common: two publicly spirited lawyers originating from Long Island who enjoy giving as much as getting, and we respect each other’s combat skills. But coming from very different places politically, we end up fighting monthly for the eight years that we’re the ranking Republican and Democratic elected officials in NYC.

He proves to be a formidable adversary, displaying the smarts and drive that so impressed Tyler. Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota recalls admiringly how he would hand Mayor Giuliani pages of budget documents to read and how he’d then return rather than file them, yet would recall them with enough specificity months later to question Lhota if something seemed awry. During the 1997 State of the City address, which all leading city officials dutifully attend, he does something unusual—instead of reading from a text or a prompter, he delivers 40 minutes of remarks from memory. Our top counsel Laurel Eisner, no fan, seems stunned. “My god,” she blurts out, “he could be president!”

As for Rudy and me, we get off on the wrong foot on the day of our swearings-in and, frankly, never recover. He speaks for 22 minutes about his hopes for the city to the 2,000 people packed in to City Hall Park. But nearly all the attention is grabbed by his seven-year-old son Andrew, who stands next to him the whole time mouthing the words that he learned during Rudy’s rehearsals, and that is famously mocked by Chris Farley on SNL that week. I’m allotted and speak ten minutes by City Hall, which I fill with my aspirations as the first public advocate.

Two hours later, I take a phone call from Peter Powers, the first deputy mayor, informing me, “The mayor didn’t like your remarks.” Huh? Why not?

“He thought they were too mayoral.”

“Well, Peter, always happy to talk to you about the mayor’s editorial views but I don’t work for him and thought I gave a speech about Public Advocate, it never occurring to me it was in any way mayoral.” But they truly believe that it was. In an interview for this book years later, Randy Mastro, Giuliani’s top City Hall lawyer, tells me, “When we heard it, we were taken aback.”¶

Two months later, I release my second investigation of a municipal service, suggesting that auto maintenance and repair at the NYPD should be contracted out to car repair shops to free up an estimated $11 million for street policing. Commissioner Bratton confides that he thinks it’s a good idea. The report and press release nowhere mentions the mayor’s name.

About four o’clock the day of its release, I start getting calls from journalists reporting that they just got off the phone not with the mayor’s press secretary, not with a NYPD person, but with the mayor, who attacks my “stupid idea—what happens if a terrorist is able to plant a bomb under the police vehicle while it’s in their shop?” I’m amazed at his punching down on a simple, nonpartisan, reinventing government idea. We quickly find out that the FBI outsources auto repair, as does the NYC Housing Authority. QED.

These two unpleasant interactions, however, presage what’s to come. As Bette Davis famously said in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night.”

A month later on March 1, my car gets off the FDR Drive onto the ramp to City Hall at about 10:20. But 15 minutes later, there’s a shooting at that exact spot, which turns out to be an actual terrorist attack. A crazed Arab gunman, later admitting that “I only shot them because they were Jewish,” fired rounds into a van of Hasidic students, striking 16-year-old Yeshiva student Ari Halberstam. He’s rushed to nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital in critical condition. I decide to go over to the hospital but en route get a call from mayoral aide Mastro telling me the mayor doesn’t want me to go.

“Why not?”

“It would cause a media circus.”

“What am I, Mick Jagger? I’m going and won’t disrupt anything.”

I’m escorted by police to a waiting room where I try to console Devorah Halberstam, Ari’s distraught mother. An hour later, we get the news that he’d been shot in the head and is in critical condition; he dies four days later. (Through this ordeal, Devorah and I subsequently become friends—and I’m able to deliver to her at the Shiva a handwritten condolence letter that I get President Clinton to write.)

In our opening months, the mayor and Speaker Peter Vallone shake hands on the city’s $31.6 billion budget, but Giuliani then almost immediately calls him back. Here’s what happens next, according to Vallone in his memoir, Learning to Govern:

“I forgot something,” [Rudy] began. “We have to de-fund the Public Advocate’s office.”

“What are you talking about? Every agency has already taken a cut.”

“Well, cut Mark Green more—don’t you realize he’s going to run against you? This is a good time to get rid of him.”

Hearing about his effort, I speak to all living former mayors—Lindsay, Beame, Dinkins, even Koch, a Rudy supporter and no fan of mine—who send him a joint letter protesting that “none of us ever used the budget to retaliate against our next-in-line city council presidents when we may have had disagreements with them.” I also line up friend and super-lawyer David Boies to represent me if the mayor actually gets to the brink of illegally eliminating a charter-mandated office via the backdoor of the budget without a required public vote.

Speaker Vallone honorably rejects the proposed axing but does go along with an additional 13 percent reduction on top of a 27 percent one the prior year.

My friend John LoCicero calls out of concern. Few know City Hall politics like John since he was a close Koch advisor for his 12 years as mayor. “Are you crazy taking on Rudy like this? He’s the mayor. He can kill you!” He calls my brother to urge him to get me to pull my throttle back, to which Steve says, affectionately, “You know Mark.” I appreciate John’s wise and sincere counsel but think I really have no choice when I’m in a cage match with a world-class kickboxer.

Giuliani’s not done with me and my office.

In early 1999, I hear rumors that he may create a special Charter Commission to alter the rules of succession. He wants to be sure that if he defeated Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate seat of the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 2000, I’d serve only 60 days, not the remainder of his term, which had been the charter precedent for over a century. At a cocktail party with city officials, I spot Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota, one of Rudy’s best appointees (and later the GOP mayoral nominee in 2013). “Joe, don’t do it. It’ll look like a vendetta, and he’ll lose. Can’t any of you reason with him? Personally I’d rather not have to waste the time.” When Lhota murmurs something inaudible, which is the language used when Yes-Rudys are put on the spot, I reasonably suspect something’s up.

A couple months later, he announces a commission of 12 hand-picked appointees, chaired by the pugnacious Mastro. While Randy knows to only talk about their good government intentions—and indeed there is a plausible general argument about who should succeed a chief executive in case of a vacancy and for how long—Rudy to his credit is unsubtle. He’s quoted in the New York Times Magazine saying “This is politics. That’s what I do . . . I can’t imagine there is anyone in the city that doesn’t know my opinion of Mark Green.”

I start organizing a large citywide coalition of civic, labor, and elected leaders to denounce, in my words, his “power grab to change the rules in the middle of the game because of political vengeance.” Again, all the former mayors criticize him. Editorial opinion is nearly unanimously hostile. I particularly enjoy the Jewish Press, an orthodox, right-wing paper that’s always supported Rudy: “While we may share his disdain for Mr. Green’s politics,” concludes the paper’s editorial, “we Jews have an important stake in a government of laws rather than personalities. We are simply horrified that the law of the land might be altered . . . to accommodate one powerful individual’s disdain for another.”

Since the integrity of my office is at risk and his personalization of the contest is on the record, I do not hold back in my 1999 testimony before his commission at a packed cheering and jeering crowd of 300 in a Queens Borough Hall basement:

I’d like to thank Mayor Giuliani and Chair Mastro for launching an unprincipled and unprecedented attack on [this office] because it’s given me an opportunity to explain (a) why no prior Charter Commission this century saw a problem with the current system of mayoral succession and (b) why the Mayor is using you as a Show Trial to satisfy a political vendetta . . . Either withdraw your proposal [or] suffer an historic defeat. If you don’t like these choices, don’t blame me. Blame a mayor who governs by enemies-list and who’s using you as political pawns.

I don’t stop there, going on to school a politician who prefers only to dish it out:

The Mayor should heed the words of Fiorello LaGuardia, one of my predecessors as President of the Board of Aldermen: “If they disagree with me, I understand it. If they agree with me, I appreciate it. If they abuse me, I take it. And I still believe in a democracy.”

They alter their proposal under public pressure so that any approved succession changes would only be for after the next election, not for 2000. But like trying to rub mustard out of your clothing, it’s too late. Since my narrative that this is more about Rudy’s ruthlessness than the order of succession, we win the November vote 76 percent to 24 percent. “The controversy Rudy’s fixation engendered,” writes Peter Vallone in his memoirs, “was a political bonanza for Mark Green in his campaign for mayor.”

This prosecutor-mayor, however, cannot easily abandon a menacing MO that’s gotten him to the mayoralty and who knows where else. True, Giuliani says after his reelection that he wants to establish “a tone of civility throughout the city” and will later write in his best-selling book Leadership that he lived by his father’s credo: “Never pick on someone smaller than yourself, never be a bully.” Of course, to me, his guiding ethic is more of reverse Lincoln: “with malice for all and charity to none.” His terrorizing persona—“better to be feared than loved,” wrote Machiavelli in The Prince—helps keep both enemies and friends off-balance and in line. Or as one holdover Dinkins appointee, Marilyn Gelber, later reports, “There were constant loyalty tests [like] will you shoot your brother . . . People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”

The number of incidents over his eight years in office when Giuliani is a bully in his pulpit could fill a separate book. Here are just three:

In order to tamp down a damaging story about his Youth Services commissioner near the start of his term, Giuliani leaks shocking allegations that Dinkins’s Youth Services head, Richard Murphy, had signed off on millions in contracts to Dinkins’s political supporters and that someone had destroyed hard drives to cover it up. It works—the media run after this newer shiny object instead of Rudy’s. Although Giuliani’s own Department of Investigations later exonerates Murphy, the damage is done. In an interview shortly before his death in 2013, Murphy says, “I was soiled merchandise—the taint just lingers.”

A 49-year-old chauffeur and amateur photographer, James Schillaci, videotapes police setting a speed trap on Fordham Road in front of the Bronx Zoo by triggering a quick light change in order to ticket otherwise innocent drivers. When his complaints to the NYPD go nowhere, my office shows the videotape to the Daily News, which plasters it on its August 26, 1997, front page with the headline “gotcha!” Then, that same day, Schillaci is arrested and handcuffed at his home for a 13-year-old outstanding traffic warrant (which is dismissed as dated); the NYPD releases his rap sheet of arrests going back 14 years, saying he had been convicted of sodomy, which is false; and the mayor dismisses criticism of his department’s handling of this matter as “police bashing,” adding, “Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower [but] maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”

According to a New York Times account, “Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the City.” Remember, he is not some political opponent of Giuliani’s but merely a private citizen reporting abuse. “This isn’t police brutality,” writes columnist Jim Dwyer of the Daily News, “it is mayoral brutality.”

Then there’s Mark Berkowitz, the seven-year-old son of an observant Jew in my office, who wonders why there isn’t kosher food at Shea and Yankee stadiums when he goes to ball games. He asks his mom, Adena, to get me to look into it. Can’t say no to that.

I organize a group of Rabbis and Jewish groups in 1997 and we eventually persuade both teams to open small Glatt Kosher stands there for the 1998 season. We plan an announcement at Shea Stadium at noon on May 19 before a Mets-Cincinnati double-header. On radio at 10 a.m., I proudly note that this will be happening later that day . . . but at 11 a.m., I’m called by the office of Mets owner Fred Wilpon to say that the event is being called off—seems that the mayor’s office is not happy about it. I leave this message for Wilpon, who is a good guy and no doubt unhappy at his predicament: “Fred, you may want to cancel but I’m still showing up at noon with the excited children, their parents, their Rabbis, and the media to laud the Mets and cut a ribbon or be escorted out in front of the media. Up to you. Be there in 40 minutes.”

It works perfectly. We walk in without incident as I applaud the Mets’ community spirit—and the Yankees’ two weeks later—because now “Jewish children can nosh and cheer at the same time.” Rudy’s choice of political payback over children goes unmentioned since I strive to maintain the “tone of civility” that the mayor is urging for others.

But Giuliani apparently does not forget setbacks. And at a vulnerable time in my 2001 mayoral campaign, he seeks timely revenge, as we shall see.

4. Police and Race

Predating the Ferguson and Baltimore riots of 2015, police relations with minority communities have often been tense, sometime explosive. Harlem, 1935. Detroit, 1943. Watts, 1965. Newark and Detroit, 1967. This tension is especially palpable during Giuliani’s tenure.

Accelerating a reduction in crime that began under predecessor David Dinkins, Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Bratton preside over record declines in their first two years in office. While no one seems to know exactly why crime falls so precipitously around the country, their policies of “broken windows” and CompStat in NYC—i.e., aggressively policing quality-of-life violations and targeting crime increases by computer mapping—are widely given credit.

But at the same time, my Public Advocate office hears numerous complaints about police mistreatment of minority youth, who appear to be stopped, frisked, and insulted in large numbers. Is that the inevitable price we pay to reduce crime?

Since I have never personally been pulled over for “driving while Jewish,” I sit down in 1995 with several minority Public Advocate staff to hear their experiences. Michael Gaspard, Philip Cooke, and Cleon Jones, reflecting the common experience of their friends, tell me how routine and infuriating these interactions are. I then also visit the local precinct commander whenever I hold a monthly community town hall to better familiarize myself with cop-community issues.

Beginning an investigation of the police disciplinary process in January 1997, we request internal records (with officer names blacked out) to determine whether documented Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) cases of police abuse lead to NYPD sanctions, from lost vacation days to severance. But Commissioner Howard Safir refuses to cooperate, despite what I think is our obvious authority under the City Charter. I file suit in the New York State Supreme Court, where I’m represented by civil rights lawyer Richard Emery, who had brought the historic lawsuit that led the U.S. Supreme Court to abolish the Board of Estimate in 1988 and would himself become head of the CCRB under Mayor Bill de Blasio 20 years later.

During this year, the 70th Precinct torture of Abner Louima attracts more public attention to the issue of police abuse. I also formally petition Attorney General Janet Reno in August to investigate whether the NYPD engages in a “pattern and practice” of misconduct under federal civil rights law to justify the appointment of an independent monitor over the department; shortly thereafter, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Loretta Lynch launches an investigation.**

In October, we win a convincing victory in Green v. Safir. According to State Supreme Court judge Edward Lehner, the intent of the Charter Commission was to make the Public Advocate a “watchdog” over city government and a counterweight to the powers of the mayor. The vision of the office was an independent public official to monitor the operations of city agencies with the view to publicizing any inadequacies, inefficiencies, mismanagement, and misfeasance, with the end goal of pointing the way to right the wrongs of government.

Lehner’s opinion, upheld 4–0 on appeal, is the most important judicial decision in the history of the Public Advocate office, clearly articulating our authority and responsibility as well as allowing our probe to go forward. Given this context and Giuliani’s hostility, we understand that we have to do our investigation in the most thorough way possible; I raise $300,000 in supplemental funds from foundations and assign a dream team of talent to oversee the effort, led by experts David Eichenthal and Richard Aborn.

Analyzing 760 substantiated cases of misconduct involving 1,084 officers between 1998 and 2000, our massive Public Advocate report—Disciplining Police: Solving the Problem of Police Misconduct—finds that only 5 percent of all CCRB complaints result in a “substantiated complaint” being sent to the NYPD for further action; that only 30 percent of this 5 percent lead to charges filed against the officers. That is, less than 2 percent of all civilian complaints lead to any disciplinary action. Here’s one typical example from our report:

The Victim was told by the police officer to stop holding the back of a truck as he was riding his bike. The Victim complied but says the officer later intentionally opened his car door in the bike’s path. When the victim requested the officer’s badge number, the officer allegedly slammed him into the window of a restaurant, handcuffed him, punched him and made racial and other remarks such as “nigger” and “your mother is a 50 cent bitch.” Officer pled guilty, accepted five lost vacation days, and charges were then dismissed and did not become part of his record.

Our conclusion:

This is a systemic failure that neither punishes nor deters substantiated cases of police [abuse] . . . Widespread resentment in minority communities against police misconduct imposes huge costs on our City. Consider the anger felt and multiplied when a public official behind a badge racially slurs, punches or hospitalizes a victim and is then “punished” by a reprimand in a file or two lost vacation days, before the next promotion . . . [But] since effective policing needs residents to report crimes and provide evidence, the NYPD must now adopt reforms to rebuild the trust between cops and communities of color as a crime-fighting measure.

We propose 24 changes to repair this broken system, especially increasing the severity and likelihood of individual sanctions after a complaint is substantiated.

Guiliani has two responses. First he calls me “pro-crime,” which is an odd accusation against someone who’s raising his two children in this city; second, he otherwise appears to blithely ignore our effort, the first entirely independent, outside investigation of the police disciplinary process in the context of racial grievances. But the New York Times editorially backs us up: “Mark Green’s interim report gives disturbing evidence of how lax New York City’s Police Department has been in past years on following through on citizen complaints.”

While we cannot determine what, if anything, the mayor and commissioner specifically do in response, our final report in my last month in office documents some good news: the percentage of substantiated CCRB cases investigated by the NYPD rises from 5 percent to over 20 percent, and the percentage of those cases that lead to some punishment jumps from 30 percent to 70 percent. Now not 2 percent but 15+ percent of civilian complaints lead to some kind of punishment. It appears that City Hall has without acknowledgment reacted positively, fulfilling Judge Lehner’s description of the Public Advocate as being a “watchdog over City Hall . . . right[ing] the wrongs of government.”

During this lengthy process, there are other horrible racial incidents that roil the city and dominate the news. After an unarmed Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old immigrant from Guinea, is shot 19 times on his Bronx doorstep by four police officers in a special Street Crimes Unit in March 1999, there are mass protests and criminal indictments but no convictions.

This time I don’t wait years for data. I suggest on a Friday in late March that Safir resign because “tripling a street crime unit with officers of less experience pursuing fewer criminals, yet with the same unspoken quotas, foolishly created a powder keg waiting for a spark . . . There’s nothing more pro-police than weeding out bad cops who tarnish the reputation of the vast majority of the police force.” He should accept responsibility for failed police-community relations, in my view, and allow the mayor to rebuild a more accountable NYPD.

While Rudy is angry at my public slap, Safir doesn’t help his cause when he tries to bow out of important city council testimony on this topic that coming Monday because of his schedule . . . and then is spotted on the red carpet on Sunday at the Oscars in California! (He takes a red-eye to get to the testimony.) I suspect that my call for him to be fired gave him immediate job security but did change his travel plans.

When Safir finally leaves two years later and is replaced by Giuliani’s former driver and bodyguard (and future felon) Bernard Kerik, I ask for departmental memos on why there has been no internal discipline even though the officers who shot Diallo were all forced to surrender their firearms. Our surmise is that Giuliani had simply tanked the case because of Giuliani’s early, prejudicial comments that the officers involved had done nothing wrong. When Kerik refuses, I remind him of the Green v. Safir precedent and that we’ll again go to court unless he turns over the requested material by five o’clock on May 8, 2000. He does, with a few hours to spare, and confirms our suspicion that, in the view of Arnie Kriss, a former NYPD ranking official and advisor on our CCRB study, “it was a dump job. The cops should have been disciplined with the standard of proof not the criminal one of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ but rather the ‘preponderance of evidence.’”

Then as final evidence of why Giuliani is so widely disliked by the African American community, exactly a year later an innocent, unarmed black vendor, 26-year-old Patrick Dorismond, is shot and killed on West 28th Street by police who mistake him for a drug dealer. The next day, the mayor releases Dorismond’s juvenile records and contends that “he wasn’t an altar boy.” Other than the fact that he literally was an altar boy (at Giuliani’s own Catholic boys’ school), this breach of confidentiality rules strikes me as disgraceful—and unlawful. But since the files are now public and no apology can be expected, I sue the mayor—supported by most of the black political leadership of the city, led by the “dean” of the congressional delegation, Charles Rangel—under a never-before-used provision of the City Charter established in 1873, Section 1109. It allows a citywide official to seek a “summary judicial inquiry” to investigate whether a mayor has violated or neglected his duty. Or according to my affidavit to the court: “No Mayor can put himself above the law by unilaterally releasing confidential information to vilify a victim.”

Judge Louise Gruner Gans rules in our favor in Green v. Giuliani on November 21, 2000, ordering that an inquiry go forward within no later than 21 days to answer my questions of how the mayor obtained the sealed records and whether his release was illegal. Giuliani appeals her ruling, but our terms expire before the inquiry can be conducted. Her decision, however, still stands as precedent against mayoral abuse. It is also yet another in a series of judicial rebukes—involving protests on the steps of City Hall, legality of the Independent Budget Office, retaliation against the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the attempted privatization of the city’s public access channel for Rupert Murdoch—all driven by the antipathies of this lawyer-mayor rather than by the law.

The fires next time between cops and communities of color are not played out in reports and courts but, in an era of cell phones and body cameras 15 years later, seen around the world.

5. The Mob Tax

In June 1990 Forrest Smith visits me in my commissioner’s office at 80 Lafayette Street. He’s in his mid-40s, silver-haired, intense, with a stocky, athletic physique—indeed, he once held the world speed record for power watercraft. And a big pair of brass balls, it turns out.

“Commissioner, I’m a small businessman who runs several McDonald’s franchises in the city. I’ve long thought that carters were overcharging me, so I measured my refuse before they picked it up and now know that they overestimate my waste by a third. But when I told them that I would complain unless they lowered their charges, one said, ‘If you do, we’ll kill you.’ Can you help?”

The DCA licenses and sets the rates of commercial garbage haulers because of the industry’s long history of being dominated by organized crime. During my sit-downs with predecessors, the venerable Commissioner-of-Everything Elinor Guggenheimer tells me at a Regency Hotel breakfast, “Of course, the one industry you really can’t do much about is carting”—which of course piques my interest.

Now comes Forrest Smith. As he’s speaking, I’m thinking two things: it’s very, very unlikely that the mob would kill a public grunt like me and, in any event, I’ve taken an oath of office to enforce the law without fear or favor. “Sure,” I say to his request for help, beginning a beautiful relationship with this hardscrabble guy—who grew up in Ithaca and never went to college—that’d last 12 years until his death in 2003, when I’d deliver the eulogy.

That meeting spurs an agency task force, led by Deputy Commissioner Rich Schrader, to figure out how to reduce what I call the “$500 million mob tax.” Paid by our 250,000 New York City small businesses and private organizations, that number is based on the 40 to 100 percent price differentials between what carters charge in the city as compared to other metropolitan areas: a maximum $14.70 per cubic yard here versus $9 in LA, $5.30 in Boston, $5 in Chicago. Why is New York City so high? Because once a carter has a route, no one tries to underbid it for fear of retaliation by organized crime. It’s all run by a 72-year-old James Failla, a former boss in the Gambino crime family, nicknamed Jimmy Brown for his brown suits. He hobbles on two canes into weekly meetings at the downtown offices of the Association of Trade Waste Removers, where he carves up and enforces routes for scores of carters . . . for 30 years! DCA has been, in effect, a “useful idiot” providing legal cover by going along with the exorbitant rates.

We then spend months lowering the rates, imposing significant fines and withdrawing licenses from carters that fail to provide us with adequate information on routes and fees or are convicted of various crimes. The Dinkins administration introduces my bill in the city council to establish “Competition Zones” within which the city would competitively bid out routes and impose an innovative law enforcement technique called IPSIGs—“independent private sector inspector generals”—to police and report back everything a carter does. Most significantly, I meet several times with William Ruckelshaus, the chairman of Browning-Ferris Industries—and the former EPA commissioner and Nixon attorney general of “Saturday Night Massacre” fame—to convince him to enter the NYC market and provide some competition. Working with law enforcement, we promise protection, which essentially works, except for that time that a German shepherd’s head is found on the Westchester lawn of a BFI executive with this note in the dog’s mouth: “Welcome to New York.” Also, there is another time when someone calls my apartment and tells my daughter Jenya that they are going to kill me. (They don’t.)

Initially, the results of our anti-mob campaign are mixed. Ruckelshaus and BFI do help bring down rates where the firm operates by 40 percent. Later, overlapping with our efforts and bolstering them, Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau indicts 44 individuals, companies, and trade groups on racketeering charges. But our lowered maximum rate is thrown out in court on technical grounds. Interrupting everything is the election of Giuliani as mayor and me as public advocate. When Rudy and I have a courtesy meeting in early December 1993 before our terms begin, we swap campaign stories, but I also emphasize how we can work together on at least one issue: as the ranking Republican and Democrat in the city, a famous mob-busting U.S. attorney and the citywide official with experience regulating carting firms, we should collaborate on breaking up this mob cartel. He agrees, proudly talking up his big cases and the cost of such economic terrorism.

For several months in 1995, City Hall chief of staff Mastro, Brooklyn city councilman Ken Fisher, and I negotiate a joint bill that would restructure the industry. On behalf of the mayor, Mastro prefers a new agency tightly auditing and overseeing every aspect of the entire industry rather than our Competition Zones/IPSIG approach. We hammer out one bill that combines both ideas, leaning toward a new agency because, well, he’s the mayor and his could be the better approach.

We plan a big announcement on November 30 at City Hall. But that morning I’m surprised to read a front-page New York Times article by its organized crime reporter, Selwyn Raab, laying out how Mayor “Eliot Ness” would be tackling mob carters. So much for team play. I make a few mental notes: that it’s “good to be king,” that Mastro is one shrewd operator, and that this mayor is indeed especially credible on this issue. But mostly, I feel the satisfaction of getting something big done governmentally. The tableau that day—eight of us speaking and arrayed around the mayor, including DA Morgenthau and the FBI Organized Crime Task Force—impressively conveys our united front.

The city council then passes the “Giuliani-Green” bill and the mayor signs it, creating a new Trade Waste Commission that takes jurisdiction away from DCA and more strictly oversees the industry. Rates soon fall 50 percent as city businesses save a half-billion dollars annually. Forrest Smith invites my family to join his family power-boating around Cayuga’s waters—not at world-record speeds—and pronounces himself “proud as hell.” Me too, actually.

6. A Democracy Czar

“All of the ills of democracy can be cured,” said Governor Al Smith, “by more democracy.” I always liked his tautology until discovering that, by the mid-Nineties, the state with the forty-seventh worst voter turnout was Smith’s own New York.

Now, “democracy” is in my bones, both as a big D and small d Democrat; as author of a book on how the legislature of the world’s greatest democracy isn’t very democratic; and as an admirer of Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminal speech at the Washington Monument in 1957 beseeching Congress, “Give us the ballot! Give us the ballot!” Which it did in the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act.††

In my Public Advocate campaign, I said that I wanted to be a “Democracy Czar” “plugging people into the socket of government.” How to do that?

One opportunity is to fix NYC’s pioneering 1989 campaign finance law to make it “more perfect.” While it usefully provides matching public funds of 1:1 for the first $1,000 contributed from a city resident, that does little to effectively counter the still-huge contributions from individual donors and special interests to candidates who choose not to opt in. In my 1997 reelection-night victory speech, I announce that the top goal of my second term will be to change the law to reduce by half the maximum contribution ($8,500 to $4,500), prohibit matching funds to candidates who accept corporate contributions (banned federally since 1907), and raise the match to 4:1 for gifts under $250 to motivate more people to donate because of their increased leverage.

The bill proves to be an easy lift. I repeatedly cite my earlier Democracy Project study showing that public financing is cheaper than the existing corporate financing of elections due to fewer expensive loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and preferences. No doubt members also realize that the proposed changes will facilitate their fund-raising toward the spending cap. Most significantly, I convince Speaker Peter Vallone, who controls the city council, to put his name first on our bill. Giuliani, however, vetoes it in September on spending grounds. With me as a very pleased presiding officer wielding the council gavel a month later, we easily override him 44–4.

By the next decade, the percentage of funds coming from small donors rises from 20 to 40 percent in NYC, while it stays the same at only 15 percent statewide. With spending caps, bigger matches, and term limits, far more minorities and working people begin running and winning office in the city. The New York Times now frequently refers to it as “the best municipal campaign finance law in the country.”

Voter registration, however, is still proving to be an extra hurdle for many people. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven develop a model of “agency-based registration.” Instead of hoping that busy people will each individually figure out how to register at their Board of Elections, the husband-wife team of Cloward and Piven believe it far better to register people already interacting with government when, for example, they’re obtaining driver’s licenses, food stamps, or welfare checks. It’s included in the National Voter Registration Act for federal agencies that President Clinton signs in 1993, gaining the catchy moniker, “Motor Voter.” Two years later, New York State follows suit.

But the Republican mayor doesn’t appear to be making it a priority to enfranchise such (likely Democratic) citizens when they visit municipal agencies dispensing federal and state benefits. So in 1995, we conduct an undercover investigation showing that agencies are complying only about 50 percent of the time with the requirement that voter registration forms and assistance be affirmatively offered. Properly embarrassed, the fingered agencies promise to retrain their workers and do better.

This failure and a city turnout rate in 1996 that’s seven points lower than the national average (42 percent to 49 percent) leads me to launch the “Shop & Vote” campaign in 1997 because “registering to vote should be as easy as shopping for bread or a book.” Our public-private coalition—including the Board of Elections, Food Industry Alliance, UFCW, 21 supermarkets, and Barnes & Noble—place forms in attractive kiosks in 600 supermarkets and bookstores. Also, I collaborate with Councilman Gifford Miller to enact a Voter Assistance Commission that is supposed to propose structural reforms to boost registration and voting. To help somewhat even the playing field against wealthier opponents, it requires the mailing of a brochure to every voter where each candidate summarizes her/his story and the videotaping of a voter appeal available on the city’s cable TV channel (and later e-mail lists).

Unfortunately, all these worthy, labor-intensive efforts do little to boost registration and voting. By the time that I run for a third term as public advocate in 2009 (after sitting out eight years), a pathetic 12 percent of Democratic voters turn out to choose nominees who are effectively the winners in a 5–1 Democratic city.

To restore our democracy—so that, per a century-plus ago, an 80 percent turnout chooses public officials, not 12 percent—means junking the current system that elevates money over voters. Chapter 8 summarizes such a Democracy Agenda, the twin cornerstones being universal voter enrollment and overturning the pernicious 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.

Finally, a more responsive bureaucracy is another way to restore faith in our democratic public sector. In 2001, I see that the city of Baltimore has a 311 system allowing residents to call one dedicated number to be connected to complaint handlers and ombudsmen to cut red tape and provide essential information or services. I propose and run on it in my 2001 mayoral campaign. A few months later, Mayor Bloomberg, a bottom-line businessman and efficiency maven, does implement it with much fanfare. At a Citizen’s Budget Commission dinner the next June at the majestic Cipriani downtown, he spots me in the large audience and thoughtfully says, “I want to thank Mark for giving me the idea for 311.” I happen to be sitting at the same table as Peter Powers, Mayor Giuliani’s former deputy mayor and the person who chided my “too mayoral” swearing-in remarks. “Peter, can you imagine Rudy crediting someone else for one of his successes?” We smile together at the improbability.

From 2003 to 2015, 200 million calls—about 15 million a year—are made to the 311 “socket of government.”

Notes

* Originally called the “president of the Board of Aldermen,” the 162-year-old office has been held by such luminaries as Al Smith (1917) and Fiorello La Guardia (1920), as well as four others who rose to the mayoralty. It became “City Council President” in 1937 and acquired ombudsman authority in the 1970s—a reform supported by both William Buckley Jr. and socialist Michael Harrington—to handle citizen complaints and monitor city agencies. Finally, the city council changed the name once more in 1993 to “Public Advocate” because the Speaker of the council, who really ran it, resented being confused with the presiding officer, the president of the City Council, who didn’t.

† For reasons of space and theme, the following section omits nearly all actions involving general consumer law enforcement and Public Advocate ombudsman work.

‡ It’s the same deal with auto insurers: black and Latino drivers with the same safety records as white drivers can pay three times more if they live in minority areas.

§ I propose one other idea: given that low-income communities pay more for access to their money, suffer more crime, and often endure tense relationships with the police, let’s locate ATM machines within or next to police precinct buildings. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton loves it but Giuliani doesn’t—and it goes nowhere . . . until Bratton proposes it again 20 years later in his second tour as PC under Mayor de Blasio. He tells me in late 2015 that this time it’ll happen.

¶ Here are a few key sentences: “I accept your strong mandate to be a watchdog for the working families of all five boroughs who feel shut out, left out, let down and ripped off by the government they pay for. This new Public Advocate office will be a quality-of-life cop patrolling the bureaucracy beat—without fear or favor or flinching, and no matter whose toes we may have to step on.” To me, that was me being me. To them, it was a threat.

** At the end of successor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure, such a federal monitor is imposed on the NYPD by Attorney General Eric Holder, which his successor, the same Loretta Lynch, is now monitoring.

†† Approaching the fortieth anniversary of President Johnson signing that landmark law, Rev. Jesse Jackson asks me to join him, Rep. John Lewis, a score of other leaders, and thousands of activists on August 6, 2005, to again march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge to pressure Bush 43 into renewing the law. My assignment is to contact and bring any Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner family members and then speak on their behalf at the march. Which I do on a sweltering, moving day in Selma. Bush later signs the extension.