Free land? What's the catch?

As a Long Island homeowner fed up with my high taxes and postage-stamp-size lot, I’m thinking of taking the city of Anderson, Alaska (population 820), up on its offer of free land.
An ordinance passed by that fair city provides anyone above age 18 with a $500 deposit the right to claim 1.3 acres of pristine frontier land in the Northern Lights subdivision. In exchange, the buyer must build an occupied single-family house within two years. The land grab began on Monday, so get online now.
There are drawbacks, of course, not least of which is that the deal is only valid in Anderson, Alaska. Google Maps, God bless it, depicted it as a sheet of roadless white; the alternate satellite view gave hints that there might be civilization, but going in for a closer look gets you, “We are sorry, but we don’t have imagery at this zoom level for this region. Try zooming out for a broader look.” Zoomed out, Anderson just looks green and gray.
The city’s Web site describes it as “located in Interior Alaska, about 55 air miles (76 driving miles) southwest of Fairbanks. The six-mile access road runs west from the George Park’s Highway at Mile Post 283.5.
“Climate: Anderson has a cold continental climate with maritime influences in the summer. Temperatures range from 60 degrees below to 90 degrees above. Average annual precipitation is 12.7 inches, with annual snowfall of 49.3 inches.
“History: The settlement began in 1962 with the construction of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) at Clear Air Force Station. The developed portion of the city, less than a one-half square mile area, lies six miles north of the Clear Air Force Station. About 600 people live in our city and on Clear AFB, with another 1,500 to 2,000 spread on the George Park’s Highway from the town of Nenana, 26 miles north to Healy, 40 miles south.”
South of Healy is Cantwell. According to the Internet, “In the winter Cantwell becomes a fantasyland for snowmachiners and ice fisherman alike. The wide-open tundra covered with deep snow makes this a winter playground.” There were no mentions of the region's golf options. But while Anderson is 55 air miles from Fairbanks, it’s only about 40 from Denali National Park, which is larger than New Jersey and considerably nicer.
Of course, anyone that close to something called the BMEWS should probably read up on the nation’s DEFCON level at all times, since North Korea and whoever controls the Soviets’ old nukes almost certainly has Anderson circled on its maps somewhere.
Reading over the ordinance creating the land grab, the Anderson City Council tried to think of everything: no multiple-family dwellings without a variance, commercial and industrial uses prohibited, no further subdivisions, no utility rebates. This clause is cute: “The City Council may require such information from time to time as it deems appropriate, including but not limited to, plans for the house to be constructed.”
But are they really ready for us Lower 48 types? Nowhere on the Web site is there evidence of a zoning board. Nowhere, in fact, is there evidence of zoning codes at all. The city lies within the Borough of Denali, which does have a planning commission, an extensive code of ordinances and, presumably, the mechanism to enforce them.
But the Denali borough government is responsible for 1,893 residents spread out over 12,000 square miles. How can it possibly keep an eye on each of them? It’s a developer’s dream. Certainly it’s a Long Island developer’s dream. Imagine: More than an acre of free land to do with as you choose in a part of the country where lumber is plentiful.
Sure, the developer would have to dig deep to provide an Alaskan home the type of amenities we Long Island home buyers demand: marble countertops, waterfall Jacuzzis that don’t freeze when it hits minus 60, fiber-optic Internet (to reach, say, Vancouver), a gated, circular, brick-paver driveway with an intercom, Doric columns and hand-crafted roof tiles. Plus at least two chimneys, two satellite dishes and a four-car garage.
But now the developer has room to build the seven-bedroom home we Long Islanders need for our three children. And there’s still room for 300 square feet of open space, to be done, of course, in blond gravel and banana trees.
All in a state with no income tax, where the average per capita property tax is $1,163 and where a fourth of the municipalities collect no property tax at all.
Heating such a home through an Alaskan winter will be expensive, but imagine the warmth generated by the neighbors when we expats inevitably spend a weekend in Anchorage, away from our unsupervised teenagers, our unlocked liquor cabinet . . . and 200 of the kids’ closest friends.

When Danny Ocean apologizes

In a New York Times feature on the lawyers for Martin Heidgen, published in October, columnist Robin Finn concluded with this observation:
"Whatever the final conviction, two people died because he drank and drove. A bigger mistake is hard to conjure, impossible to repair. According to his lawyers, he is genuinely sorry about that."
Perhaps Heidgen should have hired Finn to write his pre-sentencing statement. It might have been as direct and effective as that column. Instead, Heidgen, who was convicted of killing 7-year-old flower girl Katie Flynn and the man driving her family's limousine, Stanley Rabinowitz, delivered a speech obviously crafted by amateurs. It certainly didn't demonstrate that Heidgen was watching the same trial as the rest of us.
"There is really no easy way to begin this," he told Judge Alan Honorof's courtroom last Wednesday, before receiving a sentence of about-a-decade-'til-parole.
OK, young spindoctors out there, what was wrong with his opening? Well, it sounds like he made the assumption that when a child is murdered, the surviving family will find comfort in the fact that the killer was modest and self-effacing. Perhaps we should be grateful he didn't open with a joke...
"I've wanted to take responsibility for this from the moment it happened," he continued.
Better. Make your lawyers the bad guys. That works. It's certainly believable...
Although... That statement doesn't jive with the incident where he tampered with evidence, ingesting a fellow jail inmate's bodily fluids (gag) in order to beat a DNA test...
Nor does it explain his not guilty plea...
And it sure doesn't explain his use of that "Ocean's Eleven" defense.
For those who didn't hear, Marty -- he prefers Marty -- told investigators he was operating in "self-destruct mode" when he ingested 14 drinks and drove his pickup the wrong way up the Meadowbrook Parkway head-on into the limousine carrying Flynn, 7 of Lido Beach and her family after a wedding in 2005. Apparently, he told the police, he was upset by some drama involving his fiancé.
It turns out -- as Marty confided to friends in a letter from jail that was intercepted by the DA's office -- he got the idea for this defense from the George Clooney movie. In the opening scene, a not-terribly-remorseful Danny Ocean, played by Clooney, tells a parole board that he had committed upscale robberies while wearing dinner attire as a way of acting out because he was upset his marriage to Julia Roberts had ended (I hope I didn't just ruin the movie for anyone). Later Clooney smirks and enjoys lighthearted banter with Brad Pitt as the jail doors close behind him. One wonders if perhaps this is the ending Marty has envisioned for himself when this all blows over...
"First and foremost, I am very sorry every minute, every hour, every day for the deaths of Katie Flynn and Stanley Rabinowitz," Marty added. "Your anger towards me is justified and understandable."
This could pass without comment, except that Neil Flynn, Katie's father, has made several statements to the media during the past 20 months that demonstrate, when it comes to the murder of his daughter he doesn't wait for permission to express anger. In this space two weeks ago he said he wanted to see Marty dead.
In fact, about an hour before Marty made his statement, Flynn, addressing the court, pointed to Marty and vowed, "You and I aren't finished." If Marty weren't under the protection and care of the New York state penal system, he might worry, on top of his other troubles, that his life had just been threatened.
And as a bonus, Flynn, an attorney and member of the New York state bar, later stood on the courthouse steps and called Judge Honorof a "gutless coward" because he knocked a few years of Marty's prison sentence. That sounds like he's skating close to contempt, which for a man in Flynn's profession can be criminal. (Presumably Honorof, like all judges, possesses certain political instincts and will let this go.)
So no, it's not likely Flynn was moved by Marty's offer to validate his feelings...
Finally, Marty's self-deluding apology arrived at its big finish.
"I did not mean or intend for this to happen," he said. "I was just trying to go home."
And what? And your damn limousine got in my way?
Maybe Marty veered from the script at this point. Maybe he truly sees himself as a victim in all this. Maybe if he really were a celebrity he would have gotten away with just a trip to rehab and a half-assed apology.
Over the next decade, his cellmates will disabuse him of that. He'll figure out, eventually, that he got what he deserved, and he can use this down time to construct a better apology. And maybe in that time he'll figure out that when he does finally get to tell it to the parole board, it will be Neil Flynn, and not Brad Pitt, who is waiting for him outside, looking for a smirk.

Can hating the sinner mean fewer sinners?

In 2001, back when I was a real estate reporter, a colleague and I went up to Fishkill to interview Abe Hirschfeld, the developer, former New York Post owner and one of the great flakes of New York City, who at the time was an inmate in the state prison there, having been convicted of trying to hire someone to kill his business partner, Stanley Stahl.
Abe was always a great interview, and the setting — the visiting room at the state pen — is unmatched for important Journalism-with-a-capital-J. In truth, the interview was hardly a coup: Hirschfeld’s publicist had set the whole thing up. But a month later, The New York Times conducted its own prison interview with him, and the reporter snarkily wrote that Abe cited our trade journal story as evidence of his continuing importance. I was the office hero for a day.
Sitting across from this smelly and half-insane 81-year-old man, I wondered if prison was the right place for him, for here was someone who had long since gone to sea. At one point he claimed credit for President Bush’s victory in Florida, and he shared with us his idea for his next condo tower, which he hoped to build in Midtown Manhattan and that would feature retractable outside walls, you know, for fresh air. I remember wondering if he wasn’t too kooky to be truly evil.
At the time, I was sorry that the interview took place across a table in what looked like a middle school cafeteria: no cubicle, window and telephones; no iron bars in sight. But that gave us the opportunity to observe the other visitors. It was as you’d expect: some little kids, some lawyers, lots of wives. One middle-aged couple near us sat across from each other, she in cheap leisure clothes, he in prison blues, and said nothing to each other for the entire hour. They just cried softly and avoided eye contact.
Back at the office, I read the transcript of Hirschfeld’s trial. Stahl’s widow testified that the stress of the ordeal with Hirschfeld had led to his fatal heart attack. That cast the interview in a different light. Further, since Hirsch-feld had turned his prison’s visiting hour into a press gaggle, he couldn’t have spent a lot of time learning his lesson, and nobody who read our story, or the one in the Times, would have gotten the idea that he was having anything but a splendid time in prison. (He was released after serving two years, and died in August of 2005.)
It was how unrepentant Abe seemed to be — in contrast, perhaps, to the man at the next table — that I kept thinking about as I read the Feb. 11 Times Magazine story about lethal injection. It was a typical Times story: slanted toward abolition, it cited the usual horror stories of convulsing convicts and how valiant doctors now refuse to take part. But the token contrarian, a New York Law School professor named Robert Blecker, argued that the problem with lethal injection, which he compared to the process used to euthanize cancer patients and sick pets, is it’s too kind. “How we kill the people we hate should never resemble easing excruciating pain for those we love,” he argued.
Hate? That’s a word whose meaning has changed significantly. It’s now mostly reserved for racial issues, so it’s a sentiment we’re afraid to express and an emotion we don’t like to confess to feeling. But in hindsight, I imagine it summed up what Mrs. Stahl felt for Abe, and I doubt that reading his jailhouse interviews lessened the feeling.
Last week I asked an expert on both grief and the law about his feelings on deterrence. Neil Flynn, the father of Katie Flynn, the little girl murdered by a drunk driver two summers ago, happens to be a litigator. He said his views on the law and punishment had not changed since he became a victim of one of the region’s most notorious crimes. “There are three philosophies of penology: retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation,” Flynn said last Friday. “We know from years of experience that rehabilitation doesn’t work. Even before I became a crime victim I knew it was nonsense.”
For near-at-hand evidence, Flynn pointed to the man he would be forgiven for hating, Martin Heidgen, who is awaiting sentencing for his drunk-driving murder. As the Herald’s Mike Schnitzel reported in some editions last week, Heidgen’s mother claimed that the case’s notoriety made it impossible for her son to get a fair trial, an idea that, in wrenching testimony, Flynn called insulting.
On Friday, he said that if Heidgen received the maximum sentence — life in prison — it would act as a deterrent that would save lives. “People still drive drunk because they know that for the first offense they’re just going to pay a small fine,” Flynn said.
But while he conceded that he wanted Heidgen’s remaining days to be uncomfortable and few, Flynn said he was not comfortable with calling his feelings toward Heidgen hatred, exactly. “I do want to see Heidgen dead...” he said. “He’s not a candidate for rehabilitation as long as he thinks of himself as a victim, and from everything we’ve heard he’s still complaining that he’s a scapegoat for an overzealous prosecutor … But hatred isn’t appropriate. We’re better than that. Scorn, instead. All good people should turn their backs on people like him.”

Doug Miller is editor of the Long Beach Herald. Comments? DMiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.

Consultants face the wrath of a new, new thing

n old friend of mine is an elected county Democratic committeeman in one of those distant upstate counties that people from the South Shore should not try to pronounce.
He told me a cautionary tale a few years ago about his candidate’s race for county clerk or district attorney or some similar office. This being a small county whose population grows more Democratic every campaign cycle, the candidate planned a low-key race and imagined a budget in the very low five figures.
Turns out she was way off. As soon as she had the nomination, my friend said, the campaign was told that the state party would withhold all support unless the campaign hired a certain Albany-based polling firm that was favored by certain Albany-based people.
The cost to the campaign was several thousand dollars, and in return they got information that my friend said included nothing they didn’t already know. They spent the rest of the campaign scrambling to make up the money by using up resources and favors that would have been better expended elsewhere.
This is not to pick on Democrats — I’m quite sure the GOP is just as ruthless — but to point out that, while money continues to ruin politics, it is doing it in new and increasingly useless ways.
I was trolling for information on campaign financing the other night, and a Google ad pointed me to a remarkable Web site called Politically-e.com, which touts itself as “The Single-Source Campaign and Incumbency Manager.” It aspires to be for grass-roots politics what Web-MD, which the writer Michael Lewis once dubbed “The New, New Thing,” is for health care: a way to use the Internet to break the experts’ grip on an industry.
According to the site, “The Politically-e Campaign Planner is an interactive process that will help you understand all of the fine points of successful campaigning while guiding you through the process of planning and preparing every facet including the detailed budget and timeline. All you have to do is answer a series of questions and the Politically-e Campaign Planner does the rest.”
I checked out some of the sample material. Sign-up costs vary based on the size of your hoped-for constituency, but start at $700. The site promises to help candidates write position papers and plan neighborhood canvassing, and will even sell them palm cards, lawn signs (which require something else they sell called QuickStakesTM), opposition research, speech training, voter lists and image consulting. Politically-e also offers pre-recorded, customizable radio and television ads. I almost spent the $700 just to hear them.
It all felt like a peek behind the Wizard’s curtain. We think we’re sending Josiah Bartlett to sit on our sanitation commissions and library boards; who knew there was a tool kit that could teach anyone with $700 how to make eye contact, use Binaca and remember the name of the VFW commander’s wife?
But wait, there’s more. Like most campaign workers, the site wants a job after Election Day, so it also offers an incumbency management program in the form of “a 33-step training and planning process that helps an office holder make multiple decisions regarding how he or she will manage their public affairs as an elected official.”
Presumably, the site isn’t going to teach an elected official how to balance a budget, twist an arm or cut a municipality’s work force — although it might. (You can find out for $700.) More likely, it will teach an elected official things like the importance of standing in the middle of group pictures to avoid being cropped out by photo editors, or, I hope, the importance of confiding all of one’s ambitions and strategies to a community newspaper reporter, you know, for safe keeping.
The only thing the site is missing is a testimonials page, to give us an idea of how many, or at least what percentage, of its customers actually got themselves elected (“Hi, I’m Hillary Clinton, and I owe it all to Politically-e …”).
It’s impossible to say whether this stuff works. In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that for the average Joe it doesn’t work, since it’s next to impossible for the average Joe to get himself elected.
It requires an unhealthily large ego to believe that you have a chance to win a popularity contest among thousands of people you could never possibly meet. To then dedicate a year of your life to work toward winning that popularity contest is just as unnatural. And once that contest is won, it is very difficult for most people to maintain a normal relationship with the world around them: Officeholders, like ballplayers and rock stars, tend to believe what’s written about them, and their behavior changes accordingly.
This is why pollsters and political consultants were created to begin with, to speak truth to power, as they say. Consultants are also the people whose job it is to keep the Joe Bidens and Trent Lotts of the world from strangling themselves with their own tongues.
It’s when consultants become part of the bargain, as in my friend’s campaign upstate, that they become unhealthy, and a tool like this Politically-e site could be helpful.
In the state Senate campaign between Maureen O’Connell and Craig Johnson, whose winner was decided after this column’s deadline, I heard radio attack ads from both sides accusing the other of “voting to raise taxes,” because, like almost everyone else who’s ever served in a legislative body long enough to vote on a budget, both had voted to raise taxes. Consultants are paid to say these ads are effective, and whichever candidate can afford the most of them will win.
It’s probably a safe bet that if these candidates told their party bosses at the outset that they were going to do it their own way, ditch the consultants and subscribe to a site like Politically-e, they would immediately have been laughed right off the tickets.
But, once safely returned to civilian life after losing, if Johnson or O’Connell decided that his or her talents could serve the children of a local school district, and they had $700 left over, perhaps he or she would find Internet campaign management to be the new, new thing.

It’s the self-inflicted headaches that are the worst

My Charles Osgood viewing on Sunday morning was interrupted by a commercial starring Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was stumping for Nassau Legislator Craig Johnson, who is hoping to fill the state Senate seat vacated by our new Homeland Security czar, Republican Mike Balboni.
I read an interesting twist on the story in the Albany Times-Union, which reported that Spitzer told Balboni he wasn’t allowed to get involved in the race to succeed him. Not that Balboni listened. His wife, Stephanie, appears in an ad for the Republican candidate, Maureen O’Connell, so all’s fair.
With a win, Johnson, a Democrat, would take a seat in the mostly impotent Democratic minority in the Senate, but more important, he would leave a vacancy in the county Legislature. The Democrats and Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi will appoint a successor, but that Democrat will have all of six months of incumbency — which Long Island voters seem to view as the sole measure of a candidate’s worth — when he runs for a full term in November.
Assuming the rest of the Legislature is re-elected — again — the winner of this seat will give control of the Legislature to his or her party.
Suozzi can thank Spitzer for his latest headache. Several of his other headaches, alas, are self-inflicted.
On Sunday afternoon, some friends and I attended the golf expo at Queens College. Hidden in the back, next to the Koreans offering massages (no kidding), was the booth sponsored by Commerce Bank, title sponsor of the Commerce Bank Championship, played on Eisenhower Park’s Red Course.
Not that the people manning the booth knew anything about the golf tournament. For starters, they couldn’t tell me when it would be played. “June, I think. It’s too soon to tell,” said one guy, sounding like a sixth-grader who hadn’t done his homework.
The Commerce Bank Championship is supposed to be the big payoff for all the tax dollars pumped into the Nassau County parks department. In a year with no New York-area U.S. Open, this event on the PGA’s over-50 Champions Tour — played the last weekend in June — is the biggest thing around. Yet it’s remarkable in that it fails to create any buzz beyond the community of golf addicts. This is the nation’s largest media market, and the Commerce Bank event has only the Barclays in Westchester, on the PGA Tour (which Tiger typically skips), to compete with.
Few senior tour events draw much interest in terms of who’s winning. It’s all about the personalities of the players, and last year the Commerce Bank had a pretty decent field, including Gary McCord, who is on the CBS broadcasting team at the Masters and a total hoot, and Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion who delighted the fans by making the cut last year at Augusta at age 54. They were joined by such Champions Tour headliners as Hale Irwin and Curtis Strange, who have five U.S. Open titles between them, and Rick Rhoden, the former Yankees pitcher.
Yet the publicity pictures we at the Herald receive leading up to the event inevitably feature Tom Suozzi, Commerce Bank executives and Parks Department commissioners. No word on when they’d be signing autographs.
It’s not fair to talk about attendance or TV ratings, since it poured rain all weekend last year. A better gauge is all the Eisenhower Red Course swag you see. We’ll cut to the chase: It barely exists.
Since Bethpage State Park hosted the U.S. Open in 2002, everyone who’s ever hoisted a golf bag owns at least one (and usually several) Bethpage Black Course hat, shirt, towel, visor and jacket. Those goodies, for sale in the Bethpage pro shop and online at fantastic markups, bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, which funds not only Bethpage’s upkeep but the other parks under the state’s control. The other golf courses at Bethpage — the ones for the rest of us — are kept in peak condition despite maximum use, thanks to the dollars Bethpage Black merchandise brings in.
Golfers are addicted to labels and are notorious showoffs. Offer us stuff and we’ll buy it.
But Eisenhower’s Red Course, which once hosted the PGA Championship, doesn’t even have a logo, let alone a clothing line. This unclaimed revenue costs everyone. Improvements to the other courses at Eisenhower, the Blue and the White, have been steady but slow. The greens are smooth and the fairways pristine, but last summer the sand traps on the Blue Course still felt like gravel.
I asked Suozzi about this during his re-election bid, but he dismissed the issue as unimportant. With all the issues he has to deal with, I suppose, it probably would seem like it.
But for people like me who pay a fortune in taxes and ask little in return in services — my child is not yet in school, my wife and I pay for our own health insurance and we’re rarely arrested — public parks are the only government service we use.
The county can do us a solid by promoting the famous players who will be at the Commerce — Hello! Seve turns 50 this year! — and coming up with some kind of a merchandising plan.
The extra revenue could offset whatever other self-inflicted headaches that are on the horizon.

The tree that wouldn't let go

Walking off the 18th green at the Lido Golf Club last Sunday, stripped down to shorts and a short-sleeved shirt on an average 60-degree January afternoon, I had another typically brilliant idea. Since it was throw-out-the-Christmas-tree day, I would douse it in hair spray, nail polish remover, lead paint and bug spray and set it on fire in our driveway. If Al Gore is as right about global warming as he insists, the Viking funeral I imagined would not only honor our departed tree but also extend Long Island’s golf season to 12 months.
I didn’t, of course.
Instead I spent 45 minutes and burned through two Sawzall batteries trying to get the bottom four inches of the stump off. Collecting and decorating our Christmas tree stumps is a family tradition that goes back to the 1970s. I don’t know how my father had the patience to do it every year with a hand saw. I guess people just did it that way.
This year it was especially slow going, since the stump — and the tree growing out of it — was still very much alive, even after a month of standing in our living room next to a radiator. At one point I switched to a circular saw — at almost 9 at night, so I hereby apologize to my neighbors — and then hammered a flathead screwdriver into the cut. No good. The handle shattered and the metal shaft bent at a right angle. This tree wasn’t ready to let go.
Finally, using the claw end of the hammer, I managed to free the screwdriver and pry the stump off. It had been held on by a defiant knot that was reinforced by several ounces of sap.
I told my wife about the fight the tree had put up. She looked sad, and I knew why. She felt sad for the tree, and I did, too, and I wondered, science and logic aside, about what the tree had gone through. After all, it was a living organism with circulatory and respiratory systems. It responded to external stimuli. It gave off an aroma.
But it did not have a central nervous system, at least not as I understand the term. It had no consciousness or opinions. It knew nothing of species or class or jealousy. It had no phobias or mood swings or estrangements.
The tree had — has — a spirit, which is just as eternal but not as corruptible as a soul. Nothing could have given so much and not been a part of God. My little daughter loved the tree, almost as much as her grandfather’s trains, which ran almost constantly for a month in an oval around the tree. She liked the smell of the branches and that there were candy canes hidden within. She told everyone at school on Monday about her tree leaving.
The tree, by now certainly headed for tree heaven, such as it is, will continue to give once it gets there. I imagine it decorated with red bows and tinsel, in the nurseries of young children who left their families too early, providing shade to dogs who served faithfully and memories of home for dead soldiers.
It represented a great month in the life of my daughter, and I hope they appreciate it as much as we did.
This Christmas we visited some of my cousins, who I see far too rarely. Eight years ago, one cousin gave birth to a son with Down syndrome, and after a few hectic years of almost monthly surgeries, her husband told me that life has become more serene.
Their son was born with two holes in his heart, which continues to murmur, but now his visits to the doctor are mostly for routine maintenance. Today he is completely vocal, attends public schools in Pennsylvania full-time and, like every other 8-year-old, loves Disney movies. (His mother was dressing him one morning when he folded his arms, scowled and said, “Don’t you turn your back on me, Scar!” It’s a line from “The Lion King,” they later realized.)
The boy’s also got a gun for an arm, as I learned when we played catch. His father said his specialty is carnival games. “You know those ring tosses?” he said. “He’s money. And I think I know why: They’re pure luck, and at this point he doesn’t have just one guardian angel, he’s got a whole team of them. He must.”
And now that team has a tree.

Johnny G. goes down

Some late election news broke over the Thanksgiving weekend. “Did you hear Gregorio lost?” my brother asked me. That sounded absurd. I told him he must have read it wrong. But there it was on the Internet.
The Hon. John T. Gregorio, the Democrat who has served on and off as the mayor of Linden, N.J., since 1968, lost his bid for a ninth term on Nov. 7. He lost by 74 votes out of some 9,000 cast, to a city councilman and former ally who ran as an independent.
Linden is a city of about 35,000 in Union County, just south of Newark International Airport, with about as many Navajo as Republicans. During the opening credits of “The Sopranos,” Tony drives down the New Jersey Turnpike past several huge oil tanks. That’s Linden. It’s working-class Jersey all the way, largely Polish and Italian. The city is proud of its petroleum industry, less so of its hazardous-waste disposal facilities. It was at one time home to Safety-Kleen and GAF and a huge General Motors plant. It rivals Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for good Polish delis.
My first job as a reporter was covering Linden in the mid-1990s, and dealing with Gregorio was always a guilty pleasure, so much so that I used to entertain my family with retellings of our conversations. He would call me every week and holler, “Ducklisss! Tiss is Johnny Gee!” He looked like a chiseled Ernest Borgnine. Kids and old people loved him, and everyone else kind of put up with him. Nobody serious challenged him.
His first stint as mayor lasted 15 years, until, as the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “he was convicted for hiding a financial interest in two Linden go-go bars.” It was a felony, and the mayor, who was also the region’s state senator, was given a time-out. He paid a fine and spent two years on probation, until 1990, when then-Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, pardoned him. Why? Don’t ask. Kean never discussed it publicly. There were all kinds of rumors.
So Gregorio ran again and won again and served another 15 years, uninterrupted and unindicted — a raid of his office by the feds here and there notwithstanding, it proved invaluable to have nothing but Democratic attorneys general in the Garden State — until this year, when he was finally bested by Richard Gerbounka, a retired Linden police captain.
I remembered Gerbounka’s name but not my impression of him. (It’s been more than 10 years, after all. By 2016, God willing, I’ll have forgotten everything I know about Dorothy Goosby.) I read that he was part of the Gregorio team until they had a falling out.
With his victory, Gerbounka promised sweeping reforms. On his Web site, www.richformayor.com, he listed some of Gregorio’s more exotic schemes while pledging, if elected, to institute a hiring freeze, cut the mayor’s salary and “Eliminate the practice of providing the Mayor with a new Cadillac every 2 years as we do now.”
Times must be good. When I was there it was a Buick Park Avenue.
“I will never order the staff of our Public Works Department to snow plow personal driveways,” Gerbounka further vowed. “They will be dedicated to keeping the streets of Linden clear and safe for the public, not wasting time and tax dollars at the Mayor’s home.”
Well, I’m glad for the people of Linden. Gerbounka may be the real deal, but he owes his career to Gregorio, and there’s no reason to believe this election will change the political culture there or even that this election was any mandate for change: Gregorio is now 80, and he barely campaigned and still almost won.
But I think what happened in Linden is what could someday happen to Long Island: the machines finally got older than the population. Gregorio certainly wasn't self-made, and the political infrastructure a hack like him needed was crumbling. People were tired of being embarrassed by their government.
We on the South Shore, on the other hand, remain contented to be embarrassed. Who was the last incumbent around here to lose an election? On Nov. 7 we re-elected all of our assemblymen, state senators and congresspeople, including a couple of true boneheads. Last year we returned to office the entire county Legislature and Hempstead Town Council. The Long Beach Demo-crats, on the outs for two years after ruling for 40, easily took back power in 2005, and Tom Suozzi’s Democrats now have the same hold on Nassau County that Kate Murray’s Republicans have on the Town of Hempstead. The margins of victory in each election remain vast, largely because the improbability of an upset scares away qualified challengers.
Eventually those young families who aren’t taxed right off Long Island will decide not to put up with what their parents put up with. They’ll see the guy mowing a town park while wearing a GOP T-shirt and not just chalk it up to the way things are. They’ll see a staff photographer follow an elected official to church the same week they get their tax bill and decide they’ve had enough.
History will decide whether Linden gets the reformer its voters think they elected. Someday a slate of real reformers will courageously present themselves to the voters of Nassau County. Perhaps the voters, just as courageously, might give them a shot.