NORMAN, GORDON UNDER FIRE Political gadfly Maurice Gumbs reports that in court papers, Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes revealed why he refused to let Assemblywoman Diane Gordon testify with immunity before the grand jury that ultimately indicted Assemblyman Clarence Norman for allegedly stealing a check his own political club sent to his campaign committee: Gordon "may have knowingly and willfully violated provisions of the election law" and "may, therefore, be subject to criminal prosecution in the future." Norman's attorneys claim the grand jury hearing was defective because other witnesses were granted immunity. Sounds like a losing argument to us.

Gordon's refusal to testify assured that Norman would be indicted on the charge. The grand jury never heard Norman's explanation, that Gordon was trying to reimburse him for money he'd personally advanced her campaign committee, but that she made the reimbursement check out incorrectly. That is, instead of making it payable to Clarence Norman, she (or, more accurately, her campaign treasurer) made it out to the Thurgood Marshall Democratic Club. The club, in turn, wrote Norman's campaign committee a check for the same amount ($5,000) and wrote "contribution" on the memo line. Norman then deposited it into his personal account.

No doubt Norman is kicking himself for not ripping up the check and asking Gordon to write a new one. Unless, of course, Norman knew Gordon would not have done so because the whole "reimbursement" story is fiction. We've been unable to document it because Gordon's campaign committee hasn't filed financial disclosures with the Board of Elections for nearly four years, a violation of state law. That's why she wasn't granted immunity by Hynes. Why was Norman expecting to reimbursed by Gordon's campaign? He says he'd asked Gordon's campaign to do some work for Alan Hevesi's 2001 mayoral campaign, but that Gordon complained that Hevesi hadn't paid her. To satisfy her, Norman personally advanced her campaign the money.

Later, when Gordon's campaign was paid by Hevesi, she reimbursed Norman. But there's a problem with the story, Gumbs discovered: Gordon's campaign was not paid by Hevesi. Are we supposed to believe that Gordon repaid Norman without having been paid by Hevesi? After having complained that Hevesi hadn't paid? Nor does this mesh with Gordon's personality, Gumbs wrote in his online column. "Assemblywoman Diane Gordon was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Diane worked hard to get where she is…This lady does not give away her money. She gets money. She hangs on to money," Gumbs wrote.

At least on paper, Norman's story doesn't add up. Until it does, we don't expect Gordon to sacrifice herself in an attempt to sell it to a jury. It wouldn't surprise us if Norman's attorneys were working on Plan B right now.

YASSKY IN NEW YORKER Councilman David Yassky was featured in a November 29 New Yorker item that included an anecdote in which Yassky was addressing a church group in Park Slope and asked, "Why can't all taxis be hybrids?" The pastor interrupted, "Why can't the ambulances turn off their engines while schoolchildren are walking by?" "That's a new one," Yassky replied. "We can call them and ask them not to do that."

We e-mailed Yassky that he must have forgotten our column of December 1, 2003, which read: "Brooklyn members of the City Council may soon vote on a bill to increase the fines for buses that idle for more than three minutes. While they're at it, they might also ask themselves whether police cars and scooters, ambulances, livery cabs, and all other vehicles should be allowed to idle needlessly."

Yassky replied, "Thanks for pointing this out! If I had been faster on my feet, I would have remembered that I actually introduced a bill to make idling violations (for all vehicles) put points on a driver's license."

TIDBITS Councilwoman Tish James was skewered by Daily News columnist Errol Louis for supporting a one-day boycott of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Terminal mall. Louis supports Ratner's Nets arena project; James opposes it, at least in its present form…

The City Council passed a bill introduced by Yvette Clarke to protect endangered species. It applies to all species threatened with extinction, including tigers, rhinos, leopards, musk deer, and Brooklyn Republicans.

Following is a letter from Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes in response to an item in this column on November 22, 2004: Erik Engquist's review of the John O'Hara prosecution asks why my Office would spend time and money "to nail" him for election fraud. As I stated in my October 22, 1996 press release announcing O'Hara's indictment, "Our system of democracy requires that only those who are eligible members of a community vote to elect those who will represent that community.

It is even more troubling that in this case, the defendant sought public office while declaring and using a false residence. Those of us in public office ask and depend on public trust, and it is therefore essential that those who seek public office to maintain and protect the integrity of the electoral process."

Those words were true then, are still true now, and should answer that question.

O'Hara's misfeasance was no secret. His activities were referred to my Office by the State Board of Elections, which is charged with investigating election fraud. O'Hara's perennial election fraud was noted by a Supreme Court judge ruling on his filed election petitions. His pattern of misrepresentation and deceit with reference to the election law was swell established that in 1994 the Village Voice-no apologist for machine politics-awarded him a "lifetime achievement award" for election fraud activities.

Mr. Engquist incorrectly states that "in a narrow technical sense at least, [I] was inadvertently committing the very crime for which [I] prosecuted O'Hara" when-allegedly-I registered to vote from an address other than my "primary address." Mr. Engquist claims this crime is committed "routinely by thousands of New Yorkers." He is completely wrong.

First, O'Hara was convicted of knowingly and intentionally violating the election law. Mr. O'Hara hadn't merely "registered to vote from an address other than his primary residence." As Mr. Engquist understood in earlier columns, see April 14, 2003, O'Hara claimed a sham address for the purposes of remaining in an election district where he was a perennial candidate but from which redistricting had carved away his only residence. It wasn't that O'Hara chose one wrong residence from two choices, he only had one residence and it wasn't the address at which he registered to vote.

Second, Mr. Engquist equates O'Hara's intentional and knowing criminal acts with a simple mail forward request. Granted such requests are routinely done by thousands of New Yorkers every week, but no one can "inadvertently commit" election fraud by making a mail forward request to the Post Office. The law punishes knowing and intentionally false registrations by a voter with the Board of Elections, not clerical notations by Board of Elections employees.

Third, the "buff card" Mr. Engquist refers to in his article shows on its face that it was not an affirmative registration change by me, but a clerical change in address solely as the result of a notification received by the Board of Elections from the Post Office pursuant to the National Change of Address Act. I never took any action to change my voter registration to my office address. If you compare that buff card with the subsequent one I did submit with my new home address, you can see that the latter was signed by me as required by law. These circumstances are far removed from the intentional acts proven at O'Hara's criminal trial and simply are not criminal.

While Mr. Engquist, like other columnists, seems to want to give O'Hara a pass for his crimes, in prior Engquist articles I have been criticized for failing to prosecute other people who allegedly violate the same law. In an October 14, 2002 column, Mr. Engquist stressed that the rundown physical condition of former-State Senator Nellie Santiago's 2689 Pitkin Avenue apartment building was proof that she "quite obviously" did not live there.

Mr. Engquist and others can't have it both ways. Fabricating a residence to fit into a chosen election district is either criminal or it's not. But Ms. Santiago's apartment, according to Engquist, physically existed. O'Hara's basement apartment never existed. Prosecutors should bring cases that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That Mr. O'Hara's case was so blatant a violation of the law was unfortunate for him. But it was not a reason for my Office to ignore willful illegality by one seeking to subvert the electoral process.

Yours truly,

Charles J. Hynes

Dear Mr. Hynes,

As I've written before, I agree that O'Hara was likely guilty because, to satisfy his bizarre obsession with Sunset Park politics, he registered to vote from his ex-girlfriend's building, which was probably not his principal address as defined by state law.

Given that the authorities do not bother with all crimes (no cop has ever stopped me from biking on an empty sidewalk), the question for you was whether to prosecute. You say you did because not only did O'Hara vote from this new address, but sought public office from it. If so, any opponent's campaign could have challenged his residency in court, as commonly occurs in Brooklyn politics. If the address were so clearly fake, O'Hara would have been struck from the ballot without you lifting a finger. You could have used the substantial resources you invested in prosecuting O'Hara to instead pursue or prevent crimes of greater concern to Brooklynites.

To suggest that O'Hara was a threat to "our system of democracy" and the "public trust" on which elected officials depend is absurd-and not only because any political opponent could have knocked O'Hara off the ballot on residency grounds. When your investigation of O'Hara began, he couldn't have been elected dog catcher in Sunset Park. He was the epitome of a hopeless perennial candidate, and thus hardly represented a threat to democracy or the public trust of politicians.

You say I was "completely wrong" when I wrote, "O'Hara was convicted of being registered to vote from an address other than his primary residence. Yes, that's a crime, even though it's done routinely by thousands of New Yorkers." Let me clarify: O'Hara was convicted of voting from a place where he did not reside, which is common in this city. New Yorkers move all the time while remaining registered to vote at an address they've abandoned, and when Election Day comes, they return to their old district to vote. That's a violation of the law under which O'Hara was convicted. He was also convicted of false registration, which is surely less routine. It is also not exactly a crime against humanity.

You also state that I equated O'Hara's actions with your being inadvertently registered at your office. But I did not equate them. I compared them. You state that I "can't have it both ways" because I wrote that after prosecuting O'Hara, you didn't investigate whether then-State Senator Nellie Santiago lived in the run-down apartment above a Bushwick video store she claimed as her voting residence.

Your point about me wanting it "both ways" implies that I wrote you should have left O'Hara alone but prosecuted Santiago. That was not what I wrote in the column you cited (October 14, 2002). I wrote "if Hynes believes in equal application of the law, he would at least send investigators to 2689 Pitkin Avenue and look for any trace of the state Senator who claims to live there." That is, if fake addresses are such a threat to our democracy (as you claimed to justify your huge effort to convict the inconsequential O'Hara), a sitting Senator with a questionable voting address should also get a look.

Or you could have done nothing in both cases and let the political process handle it. But it's worth noting that residency challenges often fail when pursued by an opposing candidate rather than a team of prosecutors. One political aspirant ate and slept at an Albany apartment rented by his law firm once in seven years; the address was ruled legal. Howard Lasher served in the Assembly and City Council and voted for years from an apartment in Brighton Beach that he rented out while living with his family in a big Manhattan Beach house. That, too, was allowed by the court. So, to assure that O'Hara would be taken out, you had to do it yourself.

You try to shoot down my "equal application of the law" argument by noting that the O'Hara and Santiago situations were not equivalent, since "O'Hara's basement apartment never existed" and "Santiago's apartment, according to Engquist, physically existed."

First of all, I never visited Santiago's voting address, and judging from the attribution in your sentence above, neither did you. I simply reported what political activist Maurice Gumbs discovered upon investigating it. I also talked to a friend of Santiago who said Santiago would never live in the dingy apartment Gumbs described.

Second, in noting that prosecutors should pursue cases they can win, you imply that O'Hara's case was easier to prove than Santiago's would have been. Perhaps. But the alleged non-existence of O'Hara's apartment didn't make the case easy at all, judging from the three trials you needed (one conviction tossed out, one hung jury) and the fact that two of the seven Court of Appeals judges voted to overturn the ultimate conviction. Further, address fraud by a sitting legislator would be a greater threat to democracy and public trust of elected officials than fraud by the hapless nobody that O'Hara was when indicted in 1996.

By the way, I should note that in court you argued that O'Hara's claimed apartment was uninhabitable, not that it "never existed." Your letter gives the impression that the apartment was imaginary. You noted that the state Board of Elections referred you to O'Hara's activities. But you don't deny that someone else did as well, or helped get the case referred to you.

O'Hara's longtime residence on 61st Street was drawn out of the district (perhaps not coincidentally) in 1992. O'Hara was eventually convicted of crimes related to his voting address in 1992, when he lost a fairly close race for Assembly to Javier Nieves, and 1993, when he lost a City Council race badly to Joan McCabe. (In both races, candidates could run without residing in the district, so his fake addresses weren't yet a threat to democracy.)

In 1994, running for Assembly again in the race in which Felix Ortiz defeated Nieves, O'Hara was discovered by his enemies (Ortiz, Assemblyman Jim Brennan, and their friends) to have twice changed his address while continuing to pay rent and ordering Cablevision at his 61st Street apartment. They brought a fraud case and O'Hara withdrew from the race on the condition that the court records be sealed. In 1995, O'Hara didn't run, because there was no election. But Ortiz was up for reelection in 1996, and his camp didn't want to be bothered by O'Hara, who was of course planning to run again that summer, and indeed did. Early in 1996 the O'Hara haters pressed the Board of Elections to unseal the records and investigate O'Hara's actions in 1992-4. They probably had something to do with the case being referred to and intensely investigated by your office.

In summary, here's what I think happened. O'Hara committed a crime. A stupid, unimportant crime, but a crime nonetheless. His enemies asked you to act, and you did. But when you offered to let him plead down to a misdemeanor, he stubbornly refused. A seven-year spitting match ensued, utterly disproportionate to the crime itself. In the end, everyone lost.

Thank you for writing.

Erik Engquist

Contact Brooklyn Politics at (718) 399-3693.

Borough Politics Archive

2004
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