Michael Dowd, a Queens Blvd. attorney, last night told the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan that Donald Manes, the Queens borough president, extorted money from him for a period of 18 months.
This revelation causes the city’s Parking Violations Bureau scandal to detonate . . .
That was how Breslin began his column on Wednesday, January 22, 1986. It would run on Page One of Thursday’s editions. Inside, accompanying it on the page where the column continued, was a news report by Barbara Ross that the editor, Gil Spencer, wanted there because it would stick simply to the facts, with no opinions, conclusions, or characterizations. It would balance the column with reporting and put it in a context.
A year that began with the January 1 inauguration of a euphoric Ed Koch for a third term in office as the mayor of New York, now saw that third term already unraveling, and many of the same honored guests who braved the cold that day to sit on folding chairs in City Hall Plaza and listen to what was reported to be a twenty-minute inaugural address, would now or soon be under investigation. They included Koch appointees and Koch political cronies. They included the political powerhouses of the Democratic machines in the Bronx, Stanley Friedman, and in Queens, Donald Manes. Meade Esposito, the lion of Brooklyn politics, now in his late seventies, stayed in the sunshine of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He too would be subject to an investigation. Another guest was a federal prosecutor. He already was pondering his case.
This, and so much more, is detailed in the comprehensive 1988 book City for Sale by Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield. The investigative team noted that Koch in his first two terms as mayor, beginning just as the city’s fiscal mess was ending, had done much to create wealth, power, and influence for at least one group of New Yorkers, many of whom were Manhattan dwellers for whom the word “more” ought to be attached to the words wealth, power, and influence, while not benefiting others in the working and middle classes. Many of those also were people of color. The third term would not be as lucky for Koch and his cronies.
There was another reason that Barbara Ross’s byline was on that story: Ross had been working on the story since New Year’s Eve, 1985, when she sat, virtually alone, under the white acoustic tiled ceiling of the News city room, poring over transcripts. And it was her knock on Michael Dowd’s door, she said in an interview, that appears to have led the attorney and small collections agency owner to confess to Breslin on Friday, January 17, and to the US Attorney, a man named Rudy Giuliani, who had for months been working on this municipal corruption case. Ross’s work and that of her colleagues at the News would help break open the sprawling case, and soon overlapping public corruption cases would be brought in state and federal court. They would come to include towing contracts; the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which oversaw valuable and scarce cab medallions; cable contracts; junkets; and the exchange of favors. Transportation officials and the head of the city hospital system would resign.
In a case that also had proximity to Ed Koch at its center, though was otherwise unrelated to the other cases, Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, who had played the role of Koch’s campaign spouse, was indicted when she and her lover Andy Capasso, a sewer contractor who was married when their affair began, were investigated by the federal government. A judge’s daughter had been given a job with Myerson. That judge had reportedly reduced Capasso’s alimony payments from $1,500 to $500 per month. The interlocking fiefdoms of Koch’s administration and the pay-for-play Democratic political machine that helped elect Koch and had used their power to award and steer contracts and obtain key city jobs for cronies began to be laid bare in the same cold sunlight of January.
How one probe led to another, one name led to another, and one crime led to another all of this, years later, can be viewed under the same umbrella name that Barrett and Newfield used as their title: City For Sale. The Parking Violations Bureau scandal was a perfect eye to this storm. You take too long eating your lunch. The meter runs out and you get a ticket. You forget to pay the ticket or toss it out. It goes to a collection agency. The agency sends dunning letters, and it gets a percentage of what is squeezed out of the taxpayer. To get these contracts worth millions of dollars, the collection company owners—Dowd for a time among them—pay bribes to politicians. It was a wonderful way to turn unpaid quarters into millions of dollars. This was better than even the best airport heist. You can only rob Lufthansa one time, and if you kill enough witnesses, you might never get caught. Parking meters, someone said, never grow old. They keep on earning.
In 1987, Meade Esposito was convicted in another public corruption case—providing a spa vacation to a Bronx congressman—in federal court in Brooklyn. Asked by reporter Phil Messing of the New York Post about his involvement in patronage, Esposito said, “Hey Phil, I didn’t go into politics to become a poor man.”
When Breslin appeared in the News on January 23, he would introduce the world to major characters in the New York case, which centered around his stretch of Queens Boulevard. that included Borough Hall; the Pastrami King restaurant where everyone who worked in the courts would regularly get something; a couple of bars that until the Lufthansa heist had only local notoriety; and a few second-floor law offices, the kind that always smelled damp with sweat and plea bargain deals and had dented file cabinets, not portraits of esteemed founding partners who went to Groton and Yale.
Overnight this stretch of concrete went from being the Boulevard of Broken Dreams to the Boulevard of Broken Schemes. Until that column, the Breslin stories and the reports by Ross and her colleagues including Brian Kates that had begun appearing on January 12 had been nameless, faceless, filled with hint and suggestion. Now they came to life:
Michael Dowd, a Queens Blvd. attorney, last night told the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan that Donald Manes, the Queens borough president, extorted money from him for a period of 18 months . . .
Dowd, a light-haired, 43-year-old man who has spent his life in Queens, is one of the most important witnesses ever to step out of the crowd that always is silently and frantically shoving for better grabbing room at the junction of politics and crime in the City of New York.
The New York scandal, the pieces of which were there in Barbara Ross’s transcripts and provided the underpinning of Giuliani’s investigation, began with a probe in Chicago. Systematic Recovery Service (SRS), a collection company owned by a man named Bernard Sandow, had been paying bribes to municipal officials in order to win city contracts in Chicago and in New York. The government’s informant and FBI undercover operative in Chicago was a killer named Michael Burnett, who worked for SRS. The audio and video he collected did not provide actionable evidence of a New York City crime, but made it abundantly clear that Sandow was paying off New York City officials. At the behest of the FBI, a reporter named Gaeton Fonzi, of Miami/South Florida magazine, held off publishing the information he had developed about the bribery scheme for nearly a year. In exchange, he had been allowed to sit in on investigative conferences and record government briefings. On December 20, he published. He then called Gil Spencer at the News. Spencer, who respected Fonzi’s work, retained him. And the transcripts of the government briefings were put in the hands of Ross.
That is how she recalls the unraveling of a key element of the largest and most lucrative political corruption scandal in New York since William Magear “Boss” Tweed, who in the 1800s raked off so much city money and controlled so much patronage that his name is now synonymous with municipal corruption. Tweed, while he may not have sold us the Brooklyn Bridge, would not allow it to be built until he had a seat on the board of The Brooklyn Bridge Company.
At the outset, the Daily News owned the story. The discovery that several of Breslin’s people, notably Klein the Lawyer; Borough President Donald Manes; and the small collection agency owner, Michael Dowd, were at the heart of it both pulled the paper ahead, and caused Breslin, in his own mind, embarrassment. He had been betrayed.
“This is the scandal of our times and from now on I will bring it to you first and with the most fury because I am personally aroused. I have been betrayed on my own Boulevard,” he wrote.
During his evening with Dowd, Breslin encouraged him to go and tell his story to the federal prosecutor.
It was a story Giuliani very much needed in order to solidify his case.
Although he had Sandow cooperating, until now, he did not have someone who could place Manes squarely at its center.
In a conversation that took place over bowls of clam chowder, Breslin told Dowd that in the free-for-all that is the process of gathering cooperating witnesses, he’d better get down to the prosecutor’s office and get the first punch in.
This work on the part of Breslin led Guiliani to only a little grudgingly say to the Washington Post that Breslin “deserves a lot of credit for encouraging people to come forward and cooperate . . . at the core, Breslin is an idealistic guy. He holds public officials to a high standard.” Breslin had some praise for the prosecutor as well, though years later he watched Giuliani fail to hold himself to that standard and described him as “a small man in search of a balcony,” a characterization which only an accident will keep from being in one of the first sentences in Giuliani’s obituary.
Ross, who could be mild and friendly as a neighbor or a colleague, was at heart an aggressive reporter who, when she was onto something, needed little sleep, little food, and no one to point her out the door.
She had continued, as she would for months to come, to work late and work through holidays. By the time she was done with her work on the PVB case, which would include sorting through hundreds of tips, fact checking, digging, and calling, she would have accumulated eight months of overtime. If you know newspapers, you know she was never paid.
On New Year’s Day she came to the office and used highlighters to emphasize parts of transcripts she found interesting. She had started working her way through the names and the dollar figures and the hints.
But it only took two of those days to get enough for the first story, one that could say there was a public corruption scandal brewing in New York, and it involved the Parking Violations Bureau (PVB). By Thursday, January 2, she had called Rudy Giuliani. Minutes later, Rudy called her boss, City Editor Arthur Browne, and according to Barrett and Newfield, by the next day Ross and Browne were down at the US Attorney’s office on St. Andrew’s Plaza. Rudy begged for a week in which to keep building his case. Browne pressed for details, and the News finally agreed to hold off on a day-by-day basis, while the government continued its investigation. Browne and Ross knew, based on the transcripts in hand, the paper already had enough for a story. But they would wait.
Meanwhile, Ross and her colleagues, including Brian Kates and the political journalist Lars-Erik Nelson, continued digging.
“So first order of business was trying to put my arms around what we had,” Ross said.
Then on Friday, the Queens Borough President, Donald Manes, “The King of Queens,” was found weaving down the highway at about 1:45 A.M. with his wrist already slashed when he was pulled over by Highway Patrol officers and came to a stop against a wire fence that ran alongside an exit ramp on the Eastbound Grand Central Parkway. The stories published in Chicago and Florida had been enough to alert Manes and his cronies that their scheme was coming unraveled. There were phone calls. There were meetings. Manes plunged into a depression.
“There was blood all over the steering wheel, the seat, and the floor, and it filled the pocket on the door where maps are kept,” Barrett and Newfield wrote.
Later in the day, Ross told an interviewer, she turned to Browne: “So I poke him in the ribs and say, wouldn’t it be funny if this story, the Fonzi story is related to that story, which is the Manes story, which was being done two desks away.” She didn’t have any facts connecting Manes to PVB. But she was still way ahead of any pack.
“Even Barbara Ross did not connect the slashed wrist of Donald Manes to the PVB story she was writing with Brian Kates,” said Barrett and Newfield.
Giuliani honored his agreement and called Browne and told him he had learned another paper was onto the story.
The first story appeared on Sunday: “FBI Investigating Payoffs to City Parking Officials.” It didn’t name names, but it did set the municipal government into a tailspin. Bagmen, including the deputy director of the parking bureau, would soon be talking, big name lawyers were retained, Manes knew he was no longer the King of Queens and the bribes he had collected would soon come to light. His next attempt at suicide came later, and it was successful. He had plunged a kitchen knife into his own heart. There would be no extortion charges.
The parking meter collections contract component of the widening scandal, it would now become clear, had been orchestrated on Queens Boulevard, from the Borough President’s office. Between that office and the bar once owned by the now-deceased city marshal Shelly Chevlowe, all of its players fed their egos and their pockets. Some for seven years or more. Breslin had spoken at Chevlowe’s funeral service. He had cried. Above a nearby bar, where Breslin, rogues, judges and lawyers drank, was the office of Klein the Lawyer, operating under his real name: Mel Lebetkin.
A call came into the newsroom after that first story appeared. Ross was tied up. Her colleague Don Gentile took the call and kept the caller on the line. Ross recalled that Gentile, a rogue even by tabloid standards of the time, was the only person in the newsroom who could convince someone to fall in love with him on a first phone call.
“I mean, that is a totally hilarious story where she I think fell in love with Don Gentile on the call,” Ross said. “That’s the only way to fall in love with him: one call.”
By the time he was done, they had enough to grab their coats and head to the caller’s door, which they would stake out overnight, drinking coffee and staying awake until she came out to walk her dog.
“Gentile and I went running out . . . and then we sat in a McDonald’s . . . until the sun came up waiting for her to walk her dog so that we could grab her.” The information she provided gave Ross fresh insight into the material back in the office on her desk.
“Now I’ve got this rule as a result of this story: all good stories start on napkins. Because I find a piece of paper and I’m writing. I’m writing names of these guys who were earning hundreds of thousands. And it’s all on a napkin. It’s the first thing I saw.”
She showed the napkin to Browne.
“He said, ‘That’s Breslin’s guy.’ ”
“And I said, which one?”
“He said, ‘Lebetkin.’ ”
“I said, what do you mean?”
He said, “Klein the Lawyer.” Then he pointed her in the direction of Breslin’s office.
“I hadn’t met Breslin. I was intimidated by Breslin. I walked in and I said, I am so delighted to meet you.
“Arthur Browne says this guy—and I handed it to him—this guy is, is Klein the Lawyer, is that right?”
At that moment, a colorful character who Breslin had portrayed as representing the guilty, misrepresenting himself to women, and failing to keep the women’s names straight and who had provided delight since first introduced by Breslin was no longer a character. He was a person at the center of a criminal investigation.
In The World According to Jimmy Breslin, the editors reported: “It is Jimmy Breslin’s proudest boast that one of the most successful and enduring of his newspaper column ‘characters,’ a grasping, impecunious counselor-at-law named Klein the Lawyer, first saw the light of print in the pages of The New York Times. . . . The Times was planning a special section of Super Bowl coverage and invited Breslin, who had once been a sportswriter himself, to send in a piece of fan reaction . . . Breslin chose to write about a group of guys watching the game on a television screen . . . the central figure of this little tableau being a person he identified as Klein the Lawyer. . . . ‘Right there in the headline.’ ”
Now he was identified as Lebetkin. Right there on the napkin.
Ross grew up in a middle class household in Elmont, on Long Island, where the suburban County of Nassau kissed the sprawling borough of Queens. Her family got piles of newspapers on the weekend. She would have liked to read Pete Hamill, but her mother said Breslin made her laugh. Barbara Ross can still hear that laugh. She heard something else now. The Klein who could make you laugh was Lebetkin. The Breslin who could make you laugh remained Breslin.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. He said it about sixty times in five minutes.
“I said, well, you know, I’ve been trying to call him and so far he hasn’t called back. I just wondered, you know, what you knew about this? And he picked up the phone.
“You know, Breslin’s style for the phone calls is not to say, hi, this is Jimmy. It’s: ‘They were stealing a fucking million dollars in the fucking city of New York. And you didn’t fucking tell me, idiot. I don’t know. Some c— walked into my office and told me.’
“I’m just like, my God.”
She looked over at two other newsers who were present. They shrugged and told her not to worry: “He’s that way with everybody.”
She had her confirmation that Lebetkin was involved. And she filed Breslin’s characterization of her in a forgiving place. When she later brought it up to him, he was embarrassed, and she now expresses the hope that perhaps it was the tumor already growing in his brain that caused the outburst. (The tumor later became the touchstone for his memoir I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me: A Memoir.)
Lebetkin’s roles as Klein, and as Donald Manes’s secret partner in a collection agency, would be exposed a few weeks after Ross’s visit.
By then, Breslin’s role was one that mixed protagonist and author in a way he had not done since his run with Norman Mailer for city office in their secessionist bid in 1969.
Ross, thwarted in her calls to Lebetkin, was also rebuffed in her call to Michael Dowd a few days later.
She grabbed a cola, got in her car, gulped it down, drove to Queens, and rang his doorbell.
Dowd said he could not let her in. Okay, she said, but I’ve driven all the way here. I’ve drunk a whole bottle of diet soda. Can I use your bathroom? She did. And then standing in Dowd’s living room, they talked, and she was getting enough to inform her reporting. She drove back to Manhattan.
By then Dowd had already called Breslin.
Breslin and Dowd met in Costello’s bar at 225 E. 44th Street. It was one of those places, consigned now to history, which never should be seen in the light of day, but which at night had bottles that sparkled like Christmas presents and the wonder of words in the air.
The column began on Page One. It ran under a four word headline: “Manes Accused of Extortion.”
Four words in thick, bold, black sans-serif Daily News Graphik type proved again why the blue collar tabloid continued to be a powerhouse that could shake government to its roots and why Breslin gave it a voice that no other newspaper could claim.
Under the headline, Breslin’s logo, two columns wide.
Before you judge the scope of this scandal, you might want to know how the politicians steal from you. . . .
The “first placement” firms then keep from 35% to 40% of monies collected. One such firm, called Systematic Recovery Services, which is the long way to say “dun,” owned by Bernard Sandow, who is another important federal witness in this scandal, earned $7 million in the last three years . . .
Dowd entered this scandal as a partner in a collection firm. He now reports that he and Manes stood on a sidewalk after a funeral service at Schwartz Brothers on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills, and Dowd says that Manes at that time told him who to pay and how much to pay. He said Manes told him, “See my friend Geoff.” At first Dowd said he didn’t know who Geoff was. Manes said, “My friend Geoff. Geoff Lindenauer.” He then told Dowd the percentage of earnings that he was to turn over to Geoff. On Manes’ sidewalk directions, Dowd says, the money subsequently was paid to Geoffrey Lindenauer, the deputy commissioner of the city’s Parking Violations Bureau. Lindenauer was last seen in handcuffs in a hallway in federal court as he was being brought in on a charge that he took a $5,000 payment in the men’s room of a restaurant, the traditional loading dock for New York politicians. Lindenauer is from Queens . . .
By the time this column is done, a congressman is named, and that powerful Queens Democrat is connected to Dowd, though not to the scandal; Manes has been put at its center; Sandow’s information is confirmed; and a city official is identified as corrupt. It has all been spelled out very simply. And we are again on the streets of Queens that brought us many of Son of Sam’s crimes, the Lufthansa gang’s score, Jimmy “the Gent” Burke’s nine or ten or twelve directly connected murders, the stun gun case, and Breslin himself. We were in Breslin’s world that ended at the breakers of the Rockaways and the airport runways, and Breslin was angry. The biggest crime of all had been committed: Breslin’s friends, who he drank with, laughed with, and wept with had conducted a years-long scheme under his nose.
“This is the scandal of our times and from now on I will bring it to you first and with the most fury because I am personally aroused. I have been betrayed on my own Boulevard.”
Ross brought us the next installment on January 28 in a report on Page Four: “2d Lawyer Set to Sing,” read the understated headline. No big capital letters here.
Under the headline we learned that Melvin Lebetkin, attorney, and collections agency owner, with a secret partner named Donald Manes, was willing to admit he delivered $100,000 in bribe money to the deputy director of the Parking Violations Bureau. And we learned that while Dowd was viewed by the government as a victim of extortion, and would likely not be prosecuted, Lebetkin, if he could cut a deal, likely would have to cut one that would send him to prison. It did not seem he made any payments out of fear. Greed seemed enough to motivate him.
On February 9, Breslin wrote about Lebetkin, but did not yet identify him as Klein. But he wrote about him with the intimacy that those familiar with his reporting had come to expect.
Melvin Lebetkin arises in winter darkness each morning and like so many people on Queens Blvd., he puts on an all-news radio station, either 1010 or 880. Lebetkin never used to listen, but at this time, Lebetkin is part of the news; in fact some days, Mel Lebetkin is the news.
At six o’clock the other morning, Lebetkin awoke and put on 1010, whose lead item was: “Federal investigators today say that a key figure in the parking violations scandal also has been linked to corruption in judges. Queens attorney Melvin Lebetkin . . .”
“Oh, my God,” Lebetkin said.
He switched to 880 CBS all-news all day. It was only a couple of minutes after six, and CBS was into the world and national news: . . . Lebetkin relaxed as he listened to the world news. What Lebetkin did not realize was that CBS goes from 6 A.M. until 6:06 A.M. with its world and national report. And then at 6:06 A.M., it swings right into metropolitan New York coverage. And at 6:06, at the very instant that Mel Lebetkin was pouring himself coffee, the CBS show zipped from Manila to:
“Federal investigators today, say that a key figure in the parking violations scandal has been linked to corruption in judges. Queens attorney Melvin Lebetkin . . .”
“Oh, my God,” Lebetkin said. He switched back to 1010, where a newscaster soon said: “Repeating the headlines . . .”
“Oh, my God,” Lebetkin said. He called a friend. “Get up right away.”
“What for?”
“They are making me one step below Nixon!”
Probably, in this particular case they were.
As the owner of the Standard Collection company, Lebetkin says he was told to pay, and did, about $100,000 to Geoffrey Lindenauer, the deputy commissioner of the city’s Parking Violations Bureau. But he became the man of the day in the city’s news once the reports came out on the all-news radio. His secretary called him up. “They have a crowd of cameras and reporters out in the hall.” Suddenly these days, news reporting has taken its billion-dollar technology and returned to the oldest methods of covering news: You now see television crews hiding in doorways and staking out hallways and restaurants. Ben Hecht with a microphone.
The Times, where those who once doubted Klein’s existence dwelled, now became the news organization to identify him as Lebetkin. Any hope of keeping Breslin’s character in business—the business of filling his column—was gone.
From late 1975 on, the character Klein the Lawyer was the property of this column and he did wonderfully well. He was a man who had trouble getting paid from the criminals he represented and then he had trouble with women in the bar downstairs from his office. . . .
Klein’s real name never appeared: Melvin M. Lebetkin. He was a charming, popular attorney on Queens Blvd. and he liked the Klein name very much, and so did everybody else. At The Times newspaper, in the low-energy set, the Ivy League people, not knowing their own history, passed remarks about fictitious characters being used in newspapers.
That history, of course, included the doubter, A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor of that newspaper, having had his head berthed in the cleavage of a Lufthansa stewardess, turned believer, while Fat Thomas, whose existence he once had doubted, looked on. This is how Breslin later described the loss of his character:
And so we came to the great New York City scandals, the largest in the nation’s history.
The scandals began right out on Queens Blvd. with the Parking Violations Bureau.
“What do you think of this?” I asked my close friend, Klein the Lawyer, or Lebetkin.
“I don’t think much of it,” he said.
“Know anything?”
“I’m glad I never knew what those guys were doing.”
And then it suddenly was disclosed that attorney Melvin Lebetkin had one of those collections firms that did work for the agency.
“They better not tell any lies about me in the grand jury!” Lebetkin said.
At that time, like everybody else in Queens, you could tell who was in trouble or who wasn’t by background noise. Those in trouble had on the all-news radio, waiting to hear their names, and those with nothing to fear spoke with silence behind them.
And so one morning at 5:45 A.M. the phone rang and I stumbled into the kitchen and picked it up and here was Lebetkin yelling at me over the sound of his all-news radio.
“They are ruining me,” he shouted.
“Who?”
“The Times The Times.”
I grabbed the paper that morning and I found that The Times sure had done a lot of damage.
Not only did they have a major story about Lebetkin on the first page but they went ahead and identified him as being Klein the Lawyer.
“My character got stolen!” I wailed.
He sure did. Lebetkin now was in the flow of news. Which was a terrible thing for me, for in the years in which I must do this column, in the 1970s and ’80s, there are virtually no characters in New York. . . .
Suddenly he was lifted away from me and I was left with only a man Lebetkin, who had to serve as a grubby news source. Klein the Lawyer, at least for the length of the scandals, was dead.