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The Liberal Virtues Of Andrew Cuomo

The Liberal Virtues Of Andrew Cuomo

Every day, as the novel coronavirus spreads lethally across the nation, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is conducting a televised master class in government that has drawn a wide and admiring audience. Lauded for his elevated and candid leadership, he is underlining the absence of any such qualities in the president of the United States right when they are needed most.

Where President Donald Trump so often sounds feckless, egomaniacal and terribly uninformed, Cuomo appears serious, determined and fully in command of the facts. While Trump dithers and tries to escape responsibility, Cuomo asserts his authority and then accepts the inevitable blame for wrenching decisions. It is all too obvious which one is the adult in the room. Trump boasts of his phony greatness, while Cuomo can rattle off a long list of real achievements.

But the stark contrast between these politicians goes beyond their personalities.

Trump personifies the right-wing Republican revulsion of government, which is why he enjoys the unquestioning loyalty of his own party’s most extreme elements. Under his father’s tutelage, Trump came to see government as a cynical game that rewarded corruption. If government demanded to collect taxes owed, the Trump Organization found brazen ways to avoid paying. If government enforced an end to housing discrimination, the Trumps fought in court to preserve their racial preferences. And if government forbade the self-serving misuse of the Trump Foundation or the defrauding of Trump University enrollees, then the Trumps would look for a way around those rules, too.

The family that Cuomo grew up in regarded government as an instrument to improve society and, for those who served in office, a public trust. His late father, Mario Cuomo, who ran New York as governor for three terms, became one of the most eloquent advocates of Democratic Party principles. Mario’s rhetoric depicted the state as a family, with mutual support as its watchword and pragmatic progressivism as its guiding philosophy. The point of government was not to grab for oneself — as the Trumps did incessantly — but to achieve betterment for all.

It was a compelling vision, even if his own government sometimes fell short of those aspirations. And his decision not to seek the presidency disappointed an entire generation of admiring liberals.

While Andrew Cuomo too admired his father and reveres his memory, he has never enjoyed the same reputation for intellect and charm. From the time he ran his father’s early campaigns, he seemed to be little more than a tough kid from Queens, smart and effective but more ruthless and less compassionate than his father.

The kinder way to describe him in those days was “an operations guy,” less interested in liberal ideals or the fine points of Catholic social ethics than in getting the job done. Many people disliked him, especially if they got in his way.

Beneath the abrasive exterior, however, there was always something else that only those closest to him would glimpse. He has his father’s buoyant confidence and dry sense of humor — and a surprising capacity to comfort the grieving that emerges on private occasions. Those qualities make a difference now, at a frightening moment when the country needs reassurance so badly.

Andrew Cuomo is still an old-fashioned operations guy, which means that as governor, he insists on science, metrics, data and systems that work. In an era when the news cycle has been dominated by Trump’s lies, fabrications and illusions, Cuomo’s refusal to sugarcoat a dire reality is refreshing. So is his capacity to grapple with the details of governance, which have always been part of his life. These are the time-honored virtues of liberalism. And his service in federal and state positions has trained him for this hour in a way that is true of few other public officials.

We can only hope that his sane and sound approach to the crisis will prevail (and that he continues to succeed in mostly suppressing his true feelings about Trump). We can also hope that even at his age, with all his experience, he is still learning — not only about the world but about himself.

What he has showed us lately is a capacity to transcend his perceived limitations and display the decency, strength, humor and inspiration missing from our government. No matter what happens in this year’s election, a rebuilding America will need such leaders badly. If we still have a bigger and brighter future, then this Andrew Cuomo does, too.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Donald Trump And The Mob: A Patsy Among Punks

Donald Trump And The Mob: A Patsy Among Punks

Author Steve Villano’s remarkable new book is Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo And My Brother(Heliotrope Books 2017), the true story of his life as an aide to the late New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo and the sibling of a longtime Genovese crime family associate sent to prison for tax evasion. The following is drawn from its pages:

Before all the signs and rumors that special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments are about to start tumbling down upon Donald Trump and his associates like a ton of bricks, many of us were baffled as to how long the huge target of the criminal investigation involving the Russians could get away with his lunatic, erratic, fanatical behavior, false claims about “fake” news, and histrionic attacks on the FBI and every federal law enforcement and intelligence agency.

The clues to Trump’s bizarre behavior — and the key to the potential torrent of criminal charges against the hollow man and his mendacious minions—were right in front of us, in plain sight, and have always been Donald Trump’s role models and powerful sources of his life lessons: mobsters.  Unhinged behavior like Trump’s helped keep Genovese crime family boss Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante out of jail for decades, on the theory that he was too crazy to stand trial.

That masquerade worked until members of Robert Mueller’s FBI investigative team induced Sammy “The Bull” Gravano—a man who murdered 19 people—to “flip” and provide evidence to convict John Gotti. After the Boss of the Gambino crime family was put away for life, Mueller’s men enticed the same Gravano to come out of the safety of witness protection and testify again; this time, he said that “The Chin” was totally lucid, and his insane behavior had all been an act.

Gigante, like Gotti, was convicted on Gravano’s testimony, and sentenced to life in prison, where he died.   Mueller and his crack law enforcement professionals — expert in busting up criminal enterprises— were thus responsible for ending the reign of two of the most feared mobsters in the United States. Neither the Gambino nor the Genovese crime organizations (members from both of which married into my family) were ever the same again.

In Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother, I write about the Trump family’s “ incestuous relationship with organized crime,” as the investigative reporter Wayne Barrett described it in his seminal work on the depth of Donald Trump’s lying and corruption, Trump: The Deals & the Downfall, (December, 1991, Harper Collins, NY, NY.) Trump’s ties to the Genovese, Gambino, and Scarfo mob families were of great significance to me, since my brother Michael was convicted of being a bag man for John Gotti, while I worked for Governor Mario M. Cuomo of New York.

My brother knew many of the mob guys Trump did business with, and how they joked that they could make the hair of the heir of Fred Trump’s construction business stand on end, getting whatever they wanted from him. It’s a lesson that was not lost on Russian mobsters, like Felix Sater, Trump’s partner in his SoHo hotel, and a number of his wealthy, well-connected oligarch friends. Nor was it a lesson ever ignored by Mueller and his top team of law enforcement officials. It’s also a lesson that came straight out of New York’s construction industry, where the Trumps made their money.

“I’ve never dealt with an industry that has more pervasive corruption than the construction industry,” James F. McNamara, director of former New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch’s Office of Construction Industry Relations told the New YorkTimes in April 1982.

“When I say corruption I’m using a very broad term. Some of it is labor racketeering. Some of it is political influence. Some of it is bid-rigging; some, extortion,” said McNamara.

In an extensive story detailing the mob’s influence over New York’ss construction industry, the Times reported:

“Organized crime figures have infiltrated many important construction unions, from truck drivers to carpenters to blasters. Sixteen of thirty-one union locals in the city that represent laborers, the backbone of any construction job, are described by law enforcement authorities as being under influence of organized crime.”

Many builders and developers throughout the New York metropolitan area, including the Trump Organization, considered it part of the cost of operating in the construction business, and paid whatever extra charges were exacted through organized crime’s control of the cement and drywall industries, or other aspects of the trades.

In Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, Barrett wrote that Donald Trump met with Genovese crime family boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno in the apartment of attorney Roy Cohn in 1983. Cohn, hired by Trump ten years earlier, when the Trump Organization was sued by the federal government for racially discriminatory practices in housing, represented Trump as well as Salerno. The meeting between Trump and the Genovese boss occurred only a year after the New York Times had detailed organized crime’s stranglehold on New York’s construction industry, denying Trump any alibi that he did not know with whom he was meeting.   Salerno, along with then-Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano, tightly controlled the city’s concrete industry through their company, S & A Concrete. Cohn’s client list— built since he moved to New York from Washington, DC in the mid-1950s, following his work as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) —included celebrities, the Studio 54 club, Salerno, Donald Trump and, later, John Gotti.

Barrett, who died the day before Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States, documented that Cohn also represented Trump in meetings with another key New York construction industry player during the 1980’s, convicted labor racketeer John Cody, who was another former associate of my brother Michael.

Cody, at the peak of his power in the mid-1970s through 1982, when he was dealing with Cohn on Trump’s behalf, was no small operator. As President of Teamster Local 282, Cody controlled 4,000 drivers of delivery trucks in New York City and Long Island. He had the power to bring to a grinding halt the $2.5 billion construction industry, which employed 70,000 people. He could shut down any construction project in New York, including Trump Tower, by pulling out his drivers. Cody told Barrett: “Donald liked to deal with me through Roy Cohn.” Barrett reported that Trump did, however, have to deal directly with John Cody’s girlfriend, Vernia Hixon, to whom Trump gave a sweetheart deal for several apartments, one floor beneath his own penthouse in Trump Tower.

Despite his posturing as a New York power player, Trump cowered in front of John Cody, behaving more like a bagman, than a big man. As recently as last October, Cody’s son Michael told Christopher Dickey and Michael Daly of The Daily Beast  how Donald gave Cody whatever he wanted: “Trump was a guy who would talk tough, but as soon as you confronted him, he would cry like a little girl. He was all talk, no action.”

That’s exactly the opposite of what Trump was telling Billy Bush about how he mistreated women on the now infamous Access Hollywood tape, released the week before Michael Cody’s interview in The Daily Beast and distracting most of the media from Trump’s crime family connections — which went all the way back to his father’s business partnership with Genovese crime family capo Willie Tomasello in the 1950’s. Both Fred Trump and Tomasello were hauled before a Senate committee and questioned about misuse of federal housing funds.

John Cody made sure Trump took good care of his special friend Verina Hixon, who now lived directly under Trump’s penthouse. The mobster funneled some $500,000 to Hixon for renovations of her apartments, while he was in jail for racketeering and income tax evasion. When Trump balked at fulfilling some of his promises to Cody’s girlfriend, Barrett reported that “Cody and Hixon cornered him in a nearby bar and got his agreement.”

“Anything for you, John,” was Hixon’s recollection of Trump’s comments to John Cody. “Anything for you.”

Trump was so terrified of crossing Cody that at one point, when Cody called Trump from prison to complain about construction problems on Hixon’s apartments, Barrett reported that “Trump greeted him nervously on the phone. “Where are you?” Trump asked. “Downstairs?”

“My father walked all over Trump.” Michael Cody told The Daily Beast. “Anytime Trump didn’t do what he was told, my father would shut down his job for the day. No deliveries. 400 guys sittin’ around.”

To John Cody and his colleagues, Donald Trump was just another puffed-up pasty patsy, who did whatever the mob guys asked.

Indicted by a Brooklyn grand jury on charges of racketeering, extortion, and tax evasion, John Cody was sentenced to five years in prison at the end of 1982. His sentencing judge, Jacob Mishler, was the same federal judge who would sentence my brother Michael to federal prison six years after Cody’s conviction. With Cody’s ability to wield such vast economic power and choke off Trump’s flow of cash, there was little wonder that Donald Trump asked Roy Cohn to meet with Cody to keep him happy. They were in business with these guys. They had buildings to complete, and fortunes to make. Cooperating with the FBI or federal and state law enforcement officials to clean up the construction trades industry was not in Donald Trump’s self-interest. Making money was.

“There are no heroes in this industry in terms of helping law enforcement officers,” Jim McNamara told the Times. Many observers believe that Trump, although he holds the nation’s highest elected office, behaves the same way today toward the Russian mob and its international criminal empire. See no evil, speak no evil—especially if your business is dependent upon the mobsters under investigation.

There is something eerily familiar about the attacks on the FBI by Trump and his lackeys at Fox News and in Congress. They sound exactly like my brother did, when he was sentenced to prison as a bagman for John Gotti who had never paid income taxes on the illicit money he collected for the crime boss. They sound like my brother’s former Gambino family associates with their bitter attacks on the “Feds” and the “fuckin’ gov’ment.” They all cursed the government and the FBI more intensely as the charges against them became more real, and their prison sentences became a certainty. My brother continued to curse the FBI and the “fuckin’ gov’ment” after he got out of prison–sent there because of solid FBI evidence against him.

Trump was, and still is, a punk-wannabe among punks: an amoral actor doing business with amoral peers. As John Cody’s son observed, and my brother’s friends demonstrated, they had zero respect for Trump. They knew they could squeeze him for as much as they wanted, since all that mattered to Trump was money. That’s a language understood very well by organized crime—whatever dialect is spoken by the Gambino, Genovese, Scarfo or Russian criminal enterprises. It’s also a way of life that Robert Mueller has developed great expertise—and extraordinary results—in holding accountable to the law.

Steve Villano is a journalist, film producer, educator, and consultant who worked as a speechwriter for New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and headed his New York City press office. He now lives in northern California. 

The Trumps: ‘An Incestuous Intertwining with Organized Crime’

The Trumps: ‘An Incestuous Intertwining with Organized Crime’

As an Italian-American and a former staff member for Mario Cuomo, I’ve been wrestling with how best to express my outrage over the fact that if Donald Trump’s name contained six vowels — like say, Mario Cuomo’s — his Presidential candidacy would be swimming with the fishes; Trump has been in bed with mobsters for his entire professional life.

The list of the Trump family’s — both Fred Trump, who left his son $200 million dollars and a legacy of lying about his wealth and businesses, and Donald’s — ties to organized crime, or “Mob-Nobbing” as Wayne Barrett aptly named it in his book Trump: The Deals & the Downfall, reads like a Who’s Who of Mafioso in the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Areas over the past 45 years. Here are just a few of the law-breaking luminaries or their mob-fronted companies, who can easily be found in Barrett’s book, who either did business with the Trumps, served as their partners (secret or otherwise), or made labor or building problems go away in exchange for cash:

  • Manny Ciminello; construction contractor, racketeer, tied to S & A Concrete;
  • Paul Castellano; head of Gambino Mob; secret owner of S & A Concrete;
  • Fat Tony Salerno; head of Genovese Mob; secret owner of S & A Concrete;
  • S & A Concrete; Mob-front concrete company, run by Nick Auletta; built Trump Tower and Trump Plaza;
  • Willie Tomasello; Fred Trump’s partner on Beach Haven; Genovese associate;
  • Nicky Scarfo; Atlantic City/Philadelphia Crime Boss; Cleveland Wrecking Co;
  • Cleveland Wrecking Company; mob-front demolition co., hired by Trump;
  • Wachtel Plumbing; mob-front co.; hired by Trump in Atlantic City & NYC;
  • Teddy Maritas; mobbed-up head of Carpenters Union; NYC Trump contract;
  • Circle Industries; Maritas’ mobbed up Drywall Co; Trump hired, NYC;
  • John Cody; mobbed-up head of Teamsters Local 282; jailed for racketeering; bragged that “Donald liked to deal with me through Roy Cohn.”
  • Nick Auletta: President of S & A Concrete, mob-controlled cement company;
  • Joe DePaolo; President of Dic Underhill Co; company with alleged mob connections; helped build Trump Village with Fred Trump;
  • Danny Sullivan; partner in SSG, Inc; deal-making arm of Scarfo Mob, negotiated with Trump on land in Atlantic City;
  • Kenny Shapiro; scrap-metal dealer, partner SSG; principle financier for Scarfo’s Philadelphia Crime Organization.

Writing in Politico just last week, David Cay Johnston, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter whose book Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business carefully details Trump’s ties with organized crime, stating:

“No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.”

The torrent of thugs, terrible people, and mob-front businesses Trump and his father were involved with going back more than 45 years permeates every present-day action Donald Trump takes. If Mario Cuomo was in the same room with just one of the mobsters that Donald Trump did business with daily, his political career would have been finished. Instead, Trump shrugs it all off; an amoral actor playing among amoral peers.

Imagine, for a moment, if Cuomo — anytime between 1985-1991 — had gone to a private meeting in a posh New York townhouse with the boss of one of New York’s biggest crime families under investigation by the FBI, the way Wayne Barrett’s book recounts a meeting between Trump and Genovese Crime Boss “Fat Tony” Salerno, who controlled the cement industry in New York. Would the media be silent about such a meeting? Would Cuomo be given a free pass because he was just doing business with New Yorkers?

Even a Mob/Trump meeting broker as unsavory as Roy Cohn, whose long list of organized crime clients were clearly of financial value to Trump, would have been cited as proof that there were Mafia “skeletons” in Cuomo’s closet. The lame argument that “everybody was doing it” in the business would have been no defense for Cuomo, just as it should not be for Trump, especially since other major New York City real estate developers like LeFrak were not doing it, and were, instead, pleading with the FBI to free them of mob’s control of the concrete business. Trump, no friend of law enforcement authorities, just kept quiet and paid his tithe. Such silence would have sentenced Mario Cuomo to political death by insinuation.

Stick a vowel at the end of Trump’s name, and see if his family’s decades-long “incestuous intertwining with organized crime,” as Barrett described the many Trump/Mafia marriages of convenience, would go unnoticed. Does any American who believes in the rule of law and justice really want someone so cozy with Mobsters to have power over the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and every other federal law enforcement entity?

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump poses for a photo after an interview with Reuters in his office in Trump Tower, in the Manhattan borough of New York City, U.S., May 17, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson 

The Conscience Of Mario Cuomo

The Conscience Of Mario Cuomo

NEW YORK — There will never be another politician like Mario Cuomo, a man shaped by a different age. Yet he taught lessons about racial reconciliation, the role of religion in politics, the purposes of politics itself and — oddly for a politician — humility that will always be fresh.

Cuomo, who died New Year’s Day, was brilliant and engaging but also irascible and terribly sensitive. He was tough and calculating but also, in a curious way, innocent. He was an Italian-American Catholic politician from the old neighborhood who refused to sand off all his rough edges. He sought to join his affection for the parochial with an aspiration to the universal.

To be friendly with him could be more challenging than being his enemy. One of my favorite Cuomo moments came during his difficult and ultimately unsuccessful 1994 effort to win a fourth term as governor of New York. Cuomo’s steadfast opposition to the death penalty was hurting him in his campaign against Republican George Pataki, so he suggested a referendum on the issue — as long as voters could support life without parole as an alternative.

Many said his proposal was politically motivated. I wrote a column arguing that while the election was surely on his mind, his approach was useful because many voters would be willing to abolish capital punishment as long as they knew that killers would be put away permanently.

The morning the column ran, I heard from a gruff and agitated Cuomo. “What do you mean I did it for political reasons?” he barked into the phone. Well, I said, it was hard to believe that the politics were irrelevant, and then asked: “But Governor, has anyone else written positively about this idea of yours?” To which he replied, “Of course not, that’s why I called you.” It was Cuomo’s novel way of saying thanks.

I confess that I identified with Cuomo from the time I first began covering him during his unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City in 1977. I liked that he was an unabashed liberal Catholic proud of his neighborhood roots. I also admired his determination to broker peace in a series of disputes where compromise seemed impossible between the city’s white ethnic working class and African-Americans.

He wasn’t even sure about the justice of the deals he arranged but he was certain that groups struggling to rise up should not be at each other’s throats. His personal formula spoke simultaneously to the political calling’s grandeur and its limits. “The purpose of government,” he liked to say, “is to make love real in a sinful world.”

His moving defense of liberalism in his keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention made millions yearn for him to run for president but, unlike a comparably powerful keynoter 20 years later, he disappointed them.

In another 1984 speech at Notre Dame, he defended Catholic politicians who opposed making abortion illegal, arguing that “to assure our freedom, we must allow others the same freedom, even if it occasionally produced conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.”

He did not convince the bishops, but one thing he said might yet help us out of the cul-de-sac of abortion politics: He proposed reducing the incidence of abortion by providing “funds and opportunity for young women to bring their child to term” and by setting out to “teach our young men … their responsibilities in creating and caring for human life.”

I regret that we never got to see a dialogue between Cuomo and Pope Francis, ticket sales to which could have raised a mighty endowment for the Catholic Church’s worthy charitable work. And you wonder how the pope would react to Cuomo’s reference in the keynote to an adage that St. Francis of Assisi was the “world’s most sincere Democrat.”

Since one of Cuomo’s major legacies as governor was massive prison construction and since he drew when necessary on the strategies of another shrewd Italian thinker named Machiavelli, he never pretended to be St. Francis. But his sense of his own limitations may have been his greatest moral asset, even if it impeded his reach for the ultimate prize in American politics.

“I do desperately want to believe in something better than I am,” he once said. “If all there is is me in this society, then I’ve wasted an awful lot of time, because I’m not worth it.” But his time on Earth was worth it, and I’ll miss him.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

AFP Photo/Spencer Platt