BY GEORGE, HE QUIT One day, George Martinez was a gung-ho candidate for City Council in Sunset Park and one of the Democratic district leaders trying to reform Brooklyn's judiciary. The next day, he was out of the council race and stepping down as district leader. At just about the same time, he was hired by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Coincidence? Is there such a thing in Brooklyn politics?

We have, of course, nothing to prove that Martinez's hiring was a political payoff. But there is enough circumstantial evidence to convince conspiracy theorists that it was all cleverly arranged by Assemblyman Clarence Norman, the county Democratic leader. Norman supports Martinez's would-be opponent, Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez. Norman is also fending off efforts to reform the way the party selects judicial candidates. Martinez's removal helps Norman on both fronts.

Norman also has the pull to get Martinez a job with Spitzer. Norman initially supported Catherine Abate, one of Spitzer's opponents in his race five years ago, before switching his allegiance to Spitzer. Lo and behold, Norman's close friend Carl Andrews (now a State Senator) got a job on Spitzer's intergovernmental relations staff. Guess where Martinez will be working? That's right-intergovernmental relations.

We called Spitzer's office and got the obligatory denial from spokesman Brad Maione, who said Martinez's withdrawal from the council and district leader races was not a consideration in his hiring, which is pending. Maione said several candidates were considered. Indeed, there's evidence Martinez quit the council race for other reasons. For one, only "about six people" showed up to his recent fundraiser, according to one person who attended.

Also, Martinez reportedly met with Gonzalez and agreed to drop out of the council race and endorse Gonzalez, while she pledged her support for his reelection as district leader, according to Brooklyn Democratic Party executive director Jeff Feldman. Such a deal wouldn't have made sense before Martinez was hired by Spitzer, since that job obligates him to step down as district leader, Feldman noted. "If George indeed imagined himself joining the staff of the attorney general of the state of New York, I don't believe his quest for reelection would have even been on the horizon," Feldman said.

Martinez, normally a talkative fellow, didn't return our call.

COUNCIL RACES TAKING SHAPE The first official glimpse at this year's City Council races came early this month when prospective candidates applied to participate in the Campaign Finance Program, which provides matching funds to campaigns. The filings paint an incomplete picture, because candidates can run without joining the program, as Councilwoman Tracy Boyland plans to, for example. Also, some filers decide not to run or fail to collect enough good signatures to make the ballot. Nonetheless, the filings portend races in the following councilmanic districts:

33rd: Incumbent David Yassky was the only candidate to file. He may face token Republican Stella Harmatiuk in November.

34th: Incumbent Diana Reyna again will face School Board 14 President Juan Martinez, who lost a close race to Reyna in 2001.

35th: Incumbent James Davis will be challenged by Tony Herbert (an aide to several elected officials over the years), perhaps Abraham Wasserman (a Crown Heights resident who ran in 2001), and maybe the unknown Othniel Boaz Askew. "I've never heard of him. Or her," Davis said.

36th: Neither incumbent Al Vann (who is seeking reelection, we're told) nor anyone else filed with the Campaign Finance Program. Without a primary opponent, Vann wouldn't get matching funds for that race anyway.

37th: Incumbent Erik Dilan is opposed by former State Senator Nellie Santiago.

38th: Incumbent Sara Gonzalez and Republican Danniel Maio were the only filers. Would-be challenger George Martinez, a Democratic district leader, landed a job with Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office and abandoned his campaign. "I wish I could take credit for it," one legislator supporting Gonzalez has been telling people, "but I can't." Maio tried to run in the February special election for the City Council seat in Bay Ridge but was knocked off the ballot. His residence is being redistricted into Gonzalez's Sunset Park-based district. He is running not so much to win but to improve the political involvement of the district's sizeable Asian community.

39th: Incumbent Bill deBlasio was the only Democrat to file. He was joined by Gloria Mattera, a labor activist who won 8 percent of the vote in 2001 as a Green Party candidate.

40th: Incumbent Yvette Clarke was the only filer.

41st: Incumbent Tracy Boyland did not file for matching funds, unlike two former candidates running again, Stanley Kinard and David R. Miller. Both are longshots.

42nd: Incumbent Charles Barron and little-known Derek S. Booker both filed.

43rd: Incumbent Vinny Gentile and fellow Democrat Steve Harrison both filed, as did Republicans Stephen M. Maresca and Pasqualino "Pat" Russo. Harrison, the Community Board 10 chairman who ran in the February special election and lost badly, reportedly filed just to keep his options open. But as one legislator told us, if it's June and you're still "keeping your options open," it's already too late to mount a serious campaign. The opinionated Maresca chairs the LaGuardia Republican Club's executive committee, but is not part of the clubby inner circle of Bay Ridge Republicans, which regards him as a loose cannon (i.e., too independent). Russo, a friend of Maresca, may be the favorite since he's the choice of Brooklyn Conservative Party Chairman Jerry Kassar. (Kassar's first choice, Rosemarie O'Keefe, decided not to run.)

44th: Incumbent Simcha Felder was the only filer. His predecessor Noach Dear might have run, but the law preventing him from doing so survived its final court challenge on June 5.

45th: Incumbent Kendall Stewart, who won with just 21 percent of the vote in the 2001 Democratic primary, could face a host of challengers, which for reasons of vote-splitting is usually better than facing just one. Other Democrats who filed with Campaign Finance: Omar Boucher, who finished a distant third in a four-way race for State Senate last year; Erlene King, former district office manager for Councilman Lloyd Henry, who's backing her candidacy; Sam Taitt, who got 15 percent of the vote in the 2001 primary; and Ernest Emmanuel, who claimed just 8 percent in 2001.

46th: Incumbent Lew Fidler figures to fend off Elizabeth Atwood King, who finished fourth in the 2001 primary, and Elias Weir, "who lives in Canarsie and shows up at a meeting every five years," as Fidler disdainfully put it. The Republican sacrifice will be School Board 22 member Susan Goodstein.

47th: Incumbent Domenic Recchia faces a challenge from Anatoly Eisenberg, who used the first name Tony on his Campaign Finance application, perhaps in an attempt to appeal to non-Russian voters in the Bensonhurst end of the district. Joseph Hochhauser also filed, despite getting just 5 percent of the vote in the 2001 Democratic primary.

48th: Incumbent Mike Nelson filed, but his prospective challenger, Allen Herschaft, did not. Herschaft ran as an independent in 2001, collecting just over 1 percent of the vote. Nelson said he's heard that right-wing Rabbi Yehuda Levin, another non-filer, will run again. The anti-choice/pro-life Levin was knocked off the ballot for the 1999 special election won by Nelson. In the general election Nelson figures to face Republican James Sutliff, who ran for City Council in 1997 (losing to Howard Lasher), Assembly in 1998, and State Senate in 2000 (losing to Seymour Lachman).

50th: Republican incumbent Jim Oddo is a heavy favorite against Democrat Frank Fontaino.

COUNCILMAN FINED FOR FUDGING FACTS Did City Councilman Kendall Stewart make an honest mistake or did he try to bamboozle Campaign Finance Board auditors who inquired about $690 his campaign received from Café Omar? A truthful response would likely have resulted in a modest fine. But Stewart's campaign concocted a story that Stewart's opponents are sure to say undermines the councilman's moral fitness to be an elected official.

The story dates back to 2001. Stewart's campaign committee, as a participant in the board's matching-funds program, was not allowed to accept corporate contributions. Yet it received a $90 in-kind contribution from Café Omar plus a $600 loan that it didn't repay before the election, causing it to be reclassified as a contribution.

When the board's auditors came across the donations, they asked the East Flatbush councilman's campaign committee for an explanation. "The committee said that Café Omar is unincorporated and that Café Omar and the candidate have no relationship," reported Campaign Finance Board spokeswoman Molly Watkins. Wrong on both counts. The auditors found that the café has been incorporated for 10 years, the chairman of Café Omar Inc. is none other than Councilman Stewart himself, and the principal executive office is at Stewart's home address on Kings Highway by East 56th Street.

The Campaign Finance Board didn't consider this to be a case of an honest mistake, but a deliberate attempt to mislead. In addition to a $400 fine for a corporate, over-the-limit contribution, it tacked on a $2,500 fine for "misrepresentation," which Watkins called "a very rare penalty assessment." In matters of politics and law enforcement, it is always better to say nothing than the wrong thing. That was certainly true in the case of the Campaign Finance Board vs. Kendall Stewart.

Instead, the councilman apparently took a page from the book of another Stewart, first name Martha, and tried to talk his way out of trouble. It only made matters worse. Stewart's 2001 campaign manager, Asquith Reid, said the campaign received bad information about Café Omar's corporate status from the eatery's manager, Edison Stewart, the councilman's brother. Reid said Stewart's campaign told the Campaign Finance Board that the councilman was not involved with the operation of the café, which is different from him having "no relationship." "Of course he has a relationship," Reid said. In fact, the café is named for Stewart's son Omar.

LEON LETS FLY To be a Republican district leader in northern Brooklyn is to define obscurity, but that hasn't deterred Dr. Leon Nadrowsky from expressing himself. Every couple of weeks, the Williamsburg physician faxes reporters his opinion on his favorite subject of the moment. We have concluded from them that perhaps he should stick to medicine.

"Democrats Plot a Devastating Economic Depression," reads the headline on Nadrowsky's latest missive, in the style of supermarket tabloids. The text explains, "Without an economic tax cut stimulus of $725 billion dollars [sic] as prescribed by President Bush, and his wise economic advisers, the present recession will assuredly be followed by a ruinous depression as blueprinted by deceitful Democratic leaders." Such a depression would assure Bush loses in 2004, he adds.

Forget, for the moment, that the trickle-down economics underpinning Bush's tax cuts has been widely discredited. Even if trickle-down worked, Nadrowsky's claim that the $725 million tax cut would prevent a "ruinous depression" in 2004 rings false, since most of the proposed cuts were slated to take effect after 2004.

Perhaps the good doctor has adopted that old maxim of yellow journalism, "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."

ABSURD QUOTE OF THE WEEK American Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman, a graduate of Madison High School and Brooklyn College, engaged in a bit of wishful thinking (or perhaps disingenuous public relations) when she reacted to a teachers' union scandal in Miami by declaring, "I'm totally sickened by this stuff. We never had anything like this before. We have been for all these years a totally clean union." Translation: this is the first time a major AFT scandal has hit the press. To profess that union funds have never been embezzled or misused is a stretch, to say the least, given the number of such cases to hit other unions in recent years.

In the Miami case, the president of United Teachers of Dade for more than two decades was discovered to have bought jewelry, antiques, groceries, and suits, as well as indulged himself at a California spa and a $2,000-a-night hotel suite just minutes from his apartment.

NURSES OR NICOTINE PATCHES Councilman Jim Oddo has explained his opposition to tax hikes by asserting that the city government's problem isn't too little revenue, it's too much spending. Oddo recently revealed one example of what he considers wasteful spending, as he criticized the city health commissioner for giving away 35,000 nicotine patches to help people stop smoking, at a cost of $2.5 million.

However, Oddo's position wasn't that the money should have been saved, but rather spent on nurses for non-public schools. He reasoned that people could get nicotine patches on their own, but not nurses for their children. It seems to us that parents who send their kids to private or religious schools could also find a way to send them to a pediatrician. Or, here's an even better idea: non-public schools could hire their own nurses.

Borough Politics Archive

2003
June 9 column.
June 2 column.
May 26 column.
May 19 column.
May 12 column.
May 5 column.
April 28 column.
April 21 column.
April 14 column.
April 7 column.
March 31 column.
March 24 column.
March 10 column.
March 3 column.
February 24 column.
February 17 column.
February 10 column.
February 3 column.
January 27 column.
January 20 column.
January 13 column.
January 6 column.

2002
December 30 column.
December 23 column.
December 16 column.
December 9 column.
December 2 column.
Novemer 25 column.
Novemer 18 column.
November 11 column.
November 4 column.
October 28 column.
October 21 column.
October 14 column.
October 7 column.
September 30 column.
September 23 column.
September 16 column.
September 9 column.
September 2 column.
August 26 column.
August 19 column.
August 12 column.
August 5 column.
July 29 column.
July 22 column.
July 8 column.
July 1 column.
June 17 column.
June 10 column.
June 3 column.
May 27 column.
May 20 column.
May 13 column.
May 6 column.
April 29 column.
April 22 column.
April 15 column.
April 8 column.
April 1 column.
March 25 column.
March 18 column.
March 11 column.
March 4 column.
February 25 column.
February 18 column.
February 11 column.
February 4 column.
January 28 column.
January 21 column.
January 7 column.

2001
December 10 column.
December 3 column.
November 19 column.
November 12 column.
November 5 column.
October 22 column.
October 1 column.
September 6 column.
September 4 column.
August 30 column.
July 23 column.
July 2 column.
June 25 column.
June 11 column.
May 28 column.
May 21 column.
May 14 column.
May 7 column.
April 30 column.
April 23 column.
April 9 column.
April 2 column.
March 26 column.
March 19 column.
March 12 column.
March 5 column.
February 26 column.
February 19 column.
February 12 column.
February 5 column.
January 29 column.
January 22 column.
January 15 column.
January 8 column.
January 1 column.

2000
December 25 column.
December 18 column.
December 11 column.
December 4 column.
November 27 column.
November 20 column.
November 13 column.
November 6 column.
October 30 column.
October 23 column.
October 16 column.
October 9 column.
October 2 column.
September 25 column.
September 18 column.
September 11 column.
September 4 column.
August 28 column.
August 21 column.
August 7 column.
July 31 column.
July 24 column.
July 17 column.
July 10 column.
June 26 column.
June 19 column.
June 12 column.
May 15 column.
May 8 column.
April 24 column.
April 10 column.
March 13 column.
March 7 column.
February 21 column.
February 14 column.
February 7 column.
January 31 column.
January 24 column.
January 17 column.

1999
December 16 column.
December 9 column.
December 2 column.
November 25 column.
November 18 column.
November 11 column.
November 4 column.