FOUR CANDIDATES FOR ANGEL'S SEAT Four Democrats have entered the starting gate for the race to succeed sticky-fingered Councilman Angel Rodriguez, who's headed upstate, and we don't mean Albany. The winner in the 38th Council District (Sunset Park, Red Hook, parts of Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, and Boerum Hill) will be chosen in a November 5 special election. Those who submitted petitions with at least 2,700 signatures to the Board of Elections by September 10 include: School Board 15 President Eddie Rodriguez, Community Board 7 Chairwoman Sara Gonzalez, former Assemblyman Javier Nieves, and new 51st Assembly District co-leader George Martinez.

Another hopeful, Martinez's new co-leader Amanda Bonilla, collected nearly 2,800 signatures but then withdrew from the race on the suggestion of Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, on whose support her candidacy depended. Bonilla asked for Ortiz's advice, and the assemblyman recounted their conversation this way (edited for space): Ortiz: "It's better to (just) be district leader now, learn about the process." Bonilla: "But this is a great opportunity right now, Felix." Ortiz: "Yes, but you have to be realistic." Bonilla got the gist.

To continue our equine motif: You can't blame Ortiz for not wanting to hook his cart to an untested horse. So whom is the assemblyman endorsing? No one. "Not yet," he said, adding, "There's always room for everything. My father used to say, You don't close the door on the first shut." Ortiz said he had a choice of "four wonderful candidates" and would be interviewing them.

With all due respect to Ortiz, in handicapping the quest for his endorsement, we'll follow his advice to Bonilla and "be realistic." Which means Nieves and Martinez have no shot. Nieves was the Sunset Park assemblyman who lost to Ortiz in 1994, just two years after winning, which was all the time Nieves needed to alienate just about everyone in the district and develop a reputation for arrogance. After bragging that he was going to run for City Council against Joan McCabe or for Congress against Rep. Nydia Velazquez, he couldn't even hold his own seat.

Martinez is just too much of an underdog, given that Gonzalez heads the district's dominant community board and is backed by the county Democratic organization, and Eddie Rodriguez heads the district's dominant school board and is being helped (but not yet endorsed) by Councilman Bill deBlasio. Also, Martinez only just became a district leader, and Ortiz's comment about Bonilla could pertain to Martinez as well: "I think it's better to have only one title."

McCALL'S MYSTERIOUS LETTER In addition to his lopsided loss to Assemblyman Roger Green in the 57th A.D.'s Democratic primary (Fort Greene, Prospect Heights), Hakeem Jeffries endured an angry letter from Carl McCall warning Jeffries to stop distributing campaign literature with McCall's photo. But was McCall's letter forged by the Green campaign?

We initially were e-mailed by Green's spokeswoman a Microsoft Word document with McCall's letter-with "Carl H. McCall" at the bottom. But that is not McCall's name. It is H. Carl McCall. We replied that either McCall doesn't know his own name, or that he didn't write, or even read, the letter. The Green people then faxed the letter on McCall campaign letterhead, with McCall's name appearing correctly. That was the same version hand-delivered to Jeffries by Green campaign staffer Tyquana Henderson, deputy chief of staff for Councilman Bill deBlasio. How did Green's spokeswoman even have a Word document of the letter to email us? The logical answer is that the Green campaign wrote it. That would explain the erroneous name "Carl H. McCall" on the file. But what about the version on McCall's campaign letterhead? Curiously, there was no return address on either the version sent to us or the one delivered to Jeffries. "You could see that they were JPEG images cut and pasted off the McCall campaign Web site," said one person who saw the letter.

After we received the fax, and a harried call from Green's spokeswoman making sure we got it, she then called McCall's comptroller's office in Albany and asked someone to call us to verify the legitimacy of the letter. McCall campaign spokesman Steve Greenberg then called us, said he was returning our call, and said we shouldn't call the comptroller's office in order to reach the gubernatorial campaign.

We replied that we had called neither McCall's comptroller's office nor his campaign. Greenberg went on to stress that the letter to Jeffries was legitimate. He could not explain why the first letter we saw had McCall's name wrong. But the reason is obvious enough to supporters of Jeffries. One source said it was reminiscent of McCall's endorsement of Green, which was not announced by any press release that we saw until Green claimed at a public meeting that he had the endorsement. Some Jeffries supporters suspect Green essentially forced McCall to endorse him by announcing it before the fact. McCall then had to choose between destroying Green's credibility or endorsing him, and chose the latter. That's the theory, anyway.

Green maintains that he never even asked for McCall's endorsement, and that it was a pleasant surprise given that McCall endorsed no other Brooklyn candidates. (McCall had even pledged to stay neutral in local races.) As for the Jeffries literature that had Green so upset: it was a year-old photo of Jeffries and McCall. It did not say McCall was endorsing Jeffries. Was it so different from the photo of Roger Green with Hillary Clinton that Green distributed during his 2000 primary against Jeffries? Clinton had not endorsed Green. Deceptive though it may be, such campaign literature is commonplace these days.

NORMAN SAFE, FOR NOW No challenge to Assemblyman Clarence Norman's chairmanship of the county Democratic organization was expected to materialize at county's biannual meeting on September 18. We heard that Rep. Ed Towns, notwithstanding a Crain's report that he was considering a challenge, told Norman himself at a Congressional Black Caucus event in Washington that he wouldn't run.

But district leaders still had a choice-they could vote "yes" or "no" on Norman, similar to the old Soviet system. And the results were expected to be as lopsided as a Soviet election. There's simply no political upside to voting against Norman, and most district leaders are political animals, not rebels. The county committee (read: Norman) was also scheduled to vote on a slate of six Supreme Court judges to fill vacancies. County's candidates were then to be rubber-stamped by the machine's judicial delegates the next day. And they'd be on their way to judgeships with 14-year terms paying $136,700 a year. The average Brooklynite doesn't know what a county committee member is, let alone a judicial delegate. Isn't it comforting to know these people are choosing our judges?

ELECTION ROUND-UP If you somehow missed the results of the September 10 primary, you didn't miss much. All the incumbent legislators won, as usual, with the exception of state Senator Nellie Santiago, who was knocked off by former City Councilman Marty Malave Dilan in Bushwick, 51 percent to 49. A host of insurgent candidates bombed, beginning with Hakeem Jeffries, who actually fared worse against Assemblyman Roger Green than he did in 2000, and Sandra Roper, who hoped to upend a weakened Assemblyman Clarence Norman but managed just 34 percent of the vote.

Wellington Sharpe, who shared a campaign headquarters with Roper, garnered a mere 23 percent of the vote against six-month incumbent state Senator Carl Andrews (63 percent), while Mickey Heller and his New York Times-endorsed candidacy brought up the rear with 14 percent. But before going down, Heller sent some poison-tipped arrows Andrews's way, as voters in Park Slope, Flatbush, and Crown Heights got a mailing September 9 saying the incumbent previously had an "$80,000 patronage job," was a "vital cog in a corrupt machine," was "rejected by CBID," is "joined at the hip to [the] corrupt county organization," and "auctions off dead people's estates."

Whoa. Auctions off dead people's estates? Well, not anymore-but he did until recently. After managing county-backed Michael Feinberg's successful campaign for surrogate judge of Brooklyn in 1996, Andrews, then an $80,000-a-year senate staffer, formed an auction company in February 1997. Brooklyn Public Administrator Marietta Small, a machine-backed party hack appointed by Feinberg to handle the estates of Brooklynites who die without a will, then began funneling business Andrews's way, the Daily News reported on August 18. It was all very seedy. The full story is actually too sickening to be rehashed in this, a family newspaper. (You may request the News article by emailing the address at the end of this column.)

Andrews's own literature ignored his opponents and claimed the senator had written and introduced "over 60 pieces of legislation." Sixty? Since February? That's nearly three bills per week. Memo to self: request list of these five dozen bills from Andrews. But we digress.

The best showing by a challenger September 10 was in the 46th Assembly District (Brighton Beach, Coney Island, Bay Ridge), where Susan Lasher grabbed 48.5 percent of the vote in losing to incumbent Adele Cohen. Unofficially and not including absentee ballots, they were separated by 192 votes out of 6,534 cast. Lasher took full advantage of some bad press generated by the impetuous Cohen, posting photocopies of an article by yours truly about Cohen crashing a training class for poll workers. If Cohen had just had a little longer to campaign, Lasher might have won. Lasher's running mate, Mark Davidovich, owner of Seaside Car Service in Brighton Beach, did defeat's Cohen's sidekick Toby Russo to become the male Democratic district leader.

Lasher's female leader candidate didn't make the ballot, but Cohen, taking no chances, had already yielded her female leadership candidacy to Dilia Schack, knowing from experience that being on the same ballot in different races can confuse voters. That very circumstance likely cost Cohen a City Council race against Anthony Weiner a decade ago.

It may have also cost Nellie Santiago her state senate seat in Bushwick. In that district, the 54th, Rep. Ed Towns won the male leadership and Santiago was reelected female leader over Towns-backed Karen Cherry. But Santiago was unofficially 131 votes short in her senate race.

In other contested races for Democratic state committee, Councilman James Davis upended septuagenarian incumbent Bill Saunders in the 57th A.D. (Fort Greene, Prospect Heights), while in Bay Ridge, Ralph Perfetto and Joanne Seminara won the leaderships, defeating Phyllis O'Neil (Perfetto's wife) and Brian Honan (Seminara's running mate), respectively. Perfetto makes no secret of the bad blood between him and Seminara. Will they make peace and unite under Perfetto's club, or will Seminara form her own, dividing the party's forces in the neighborhood? Bet on the latter. "Democrats are, at this point, fragmented in Bay Ridge," Perfetto said.

In Sunset Park and Red Hook, George Martinez won the male leadership, succeeding former City Councilman Angel Rodriguez, who's off to prison for extortion. Martinez is trying to succeed Rodriguez in the City Council as well. Upstart candidates Ken Evans, Stanley Kinard and Abdur Rahman Farrakhan lost badly to Assemblymembers Diane Gordon in East New York/Brownsville, Annette Robinson in Bed-Stuy, and William Boyland in Ocean Hill/Brownsville, respectively. Those results, plus the failure of a slew of insurgent district leader candidates to even make the ballot, and especially the lopsided losses by Roper and Sharpe were all wonderful news for the county Democratic organization.

But county struck out for the second straight year in the Civil Court races, as both of its countywide candidates-Marcia Sikowitz and incumbent Karen Yellen-each got just 22 percent of the vote in losing to Dolores Thomas (30 percent) and incumbent Margarita Lopez Torres (26 percent) for two seats. The old strategy of running a Jewish woman in Brooklynwide judicial races obviously doesn't guarantee success anymore.

Thomas's campaign strategy-which had been questioned by supporters of two insurgent candidates who were knocked off the ballot on a technicality-obviously worked. We, too, had our doubts, given that the Thomas's mailing a day before the primary was rife with grammatical mistakes, spelling errors, and typos. She couldn't even spell Williamsburg correctly.

County also took a hit in the new state Senate district stretching from Borough Park through Flatbush and East Flatbush to Canarsie, as the organization's candidate, Omar Boucher, collected just 17 percent of the vote and finished a distant third behind winner Kevin Parker (35 percent) and Noach Dear (29 percent). Lori Citron Knipel was fourth with 16 percent, and Harry Kaloshi was last with 3 percent. Parker was a strong candidate, but had a third minority been in the race, further splitting the vote, Dear would likely have won. So Parker may indeed owe his victory to "the process" that he criticized so roundly-the mechanism by which potential minority candidates were pushed to the sidelines and Boucher was deemed the "consensus" choice.

In the smaller Civil Court races, Ellen Spodek topped Ira Cure and Queens resident Barbara Odwak in District 1, while Wavny Toussaint won a nail-biter over three others in District 2. Geraldine Pickett lost unofficially by 138 votes despite being singled out by The New York Times for having "notably thin credentials for the bench." It's worth noting that every judicial candidate endorsed by the Times won.

CARROLL-KALOSHI CLASH We found it strange to hear that attorney Jack Carroll, a former City Council candidate and longtime Democratic reformer, was opposing Flatbush resident Harry Kaloshi's attempt to get back on the ballot in Senate District 21. Kaloshi was challenging in federal court the restrictive ballot access law in New York state, which reformers like Carroll have long agreed overly protects incumbents and is unfair to insurgent candidates. But Carroll hand-wrote (yes, some people still use pens) and faxed us an explanation, noting that he was a plaintiff in the lawsuit that established that signature-gatherers could reside anywhere in the state, rather than only in the district for which they were collecting signatures to put a candidate on the ballot.

Second, he pointed out that his client, candidate Lori Citron Knipel, who objected to Kaloshi's petitions at the Board of Elections and was named as a party in Kaloshi's federal lawsuit. Finally, Carroll wrote that he didn't oppose Kaloshi's argument that non-Democrats should be allowed to collect signatures. He simply told the court that even counting signatures collected by non-Democrats, Kaloshi still didn't have the 1,000 required to get on the ballot. The judge put Kaloshi on the ballot without addressing Carroll's argument. It proved irrelevant, as Knipel finished a distant fourth in the primary and Kaloshi was far behind her, in last.

Borough Politics Archive

2002
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2001
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2000
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1999
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