IN SOME WAYS, Michael Bloomberg was tailor-made to earn Wayne Barrett’s admiration. Here was a mayor inoculated against the grubby give-and-take of campaign fund-raising, who had bypassed the ethical minefield of party apparatus and stood apart from the White-ethnic power base that Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani had manipulated at the city’s peril. Bloomberg and his aides must have sensed that Wayne was a potentially valuable ally, for in the early days of his tenure, the billionaire mayor regularly held an off-the-record dinner with Wayne and a select group of other journalists; no previous sitting mayor had thought to cultivate him so. And Wayne did admire much about Bloomberg’s first years. In particular, he saw Bloomberg’s taking control of the schools as a gutsy, overdue effort to shatter the ossified alliance between the Board of Ed bureaucracy and a teachers’ union that Wayne had despised for decades.
Eventually, however, Wayne realized that Bloomberg’s ability to transcend the pitfalls of typical politicians presented its own kind of danger. By casting himself above politics, Bloomberg escaped scrutiny from a press corps trained to scan only for the most venal sins. Bloomberg’s tightly trained marketing team pumped a narrative of managerial competence as newsrooms cut the number of metro reporters who might sniff out the truth. Good-government groups allied themselves with the mayor, even though his massive election spending had turned the city’s pioneering campaign-finance law on its head. Many Black and Latino leaders swung to his side despite Bloomberg having a remarkably White administration and amid swelling stop-and-frisk numbers. Nonprofits wrestled with how to criticize a mayor who, as one of the country’s most active philanthropists, donated generously. Captains of industry and titans of wealth—who had for decades worked to wrest control of New York’s unruly democracy from the masses—celebrated a City Hall instinctively aligned with their class.
After serving as an intern for Wayne in the spring of 1998, when I was witness to his weekly battle against Giuliani, I joined the Voice as a writer in late 2004, just in time for Bloomberg’s first reelection campaign. It often felt as though the Voice newsroom on Cooper Square was the only one in town with the freedom and appetite to hold the mayor accountable. At first, Wayne did not throw an abundance of punches at Bloomberg, but the ones he launched were powerful. These included an article that etched out the many sexual harassment and gender discrimination complaints female employees brought against the mayor during his time as CEO of Bloomberg LP. I don’t know that anyone before Wayne had dared brave the minefield of nondisclosure agreements cluttering that story.
Over Bloomberg’s second term, Wayne’s criticism mounted, especially after Bloomberg’s cynical move to lift term limits. The article included here about the Deutsche Bank building fire, which killed two firefighters and nearly led to criminal charges against the city, is a superb counterpoint to the myth that Bloomberg was a peerless manager in City Hall. It also embodies the best of Wayne’s reportage—muscled with fact, steered with exacting intellect, and driven by outrage at the price paid by those whom leaders fail.
Jarrett Murphy is the executive editor of City Limits and the cohost of Max & Murphy, a Voice staff writer from 2004 to 2007, he has written for The Nation and Huffington Post and teaches investigative reporting at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.