What you don't know about Big Bad Real Estate Corrupt Bill de Blasio

Digging deeper into de Blasio's associations

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/don-big-bill-article-1.1448237#ixzz2eIXK1jl6

BY WAYNE BARRETT / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2013, 4:30 AM

Lindsay, Beame, Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg. De Blasio?

It’s a bit incongruous, isn’t it? Think about how much we knew about his predecessors before they became mayor, how large they were, how long all but Bloomberg had been in the political square. Then think about how little we know about Bill de Blasio.

We know he’s tall. We know he’s an anti-Bloomberg icon. We know he ran the public advocate office, with its scant $2 million budget, for four years. We know for eight years before that he chaired one of the lowest-profile City Council committees, the General Welfare Committee, and rarely talks about it.

In recent days, the Daily News published a story about the $54,000 his campaign has taken from slumlords on his own watch list, and the Times one about his ballyhooed but phony push to get Wall Street to sign a pledge not to give to super PACs. Other than these pieces, however, de Blasio has made it to the primary finish line as a virtual blank slate, turning a fresh and forceful presence into the only asset he needs.

Unlike opposing candidates like Christine Quinn and Bill Thompson, who’ve done enough in powerful posts that we have issues with them, de Blasio is the beneficiary of having done so little we only have what he says he’ll do to consider.

Here are three windows into de Blasio that don’t define him, but reveal a bit more about his character and background.

His wife’s employers
No mayoral candidate has featured his wife as a virtual co-candidate like de Blasio has Chirlane McCray. She is everywhere: on the trail, in the ads.

Yet the campaign has refused to provide a complete bio of her, despite repeated emails and requests over the last two weeks. Dan Levitan, de Blasio’s campaign spokesman, has declined to answer basic questions about her work.

Here’s what we know, cobbled together from various sources.

McCray’s brief bio on de Blasio’s campaign website cites her work as a speechwriter ­ for Mayor Dinkins (in 1992), State Controller Carl McCall (1994-1996) and City Controller Bill Thompson (2002-2004).

That bio omits her two-year stint at Citigroup in 2004-2005, where she wrote speeches for CEO Chuck Prince, according to sources that worked there with her.

Identified as one of the 25 people most responsible for the financial crisis, Prince is famous for celebrating the subprime and leveraged-buyout marketplace. He once said, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” He was forced out of Citigroup in late 2007, just before the collapse, and apologized three times in later congressional testimony for what he’d done.

Her most recent job, at the direct mail firm Mack/Crounse, began in 2010, right after the company helped run de Blasio’s campaign for public advocate (she left in February 2013).

One of the partners in the Washington-based company, Jim Crounse, had been a friend of Bill for years, and a predecessor Crounse firm had also steered de Blasio’s first campaign, his 2001 City Council win. Add up everything de Blasio paid Crounse firms over the years, and it totals nearly $3 million.

In early 2010, Mack/Crounse hired McCray as a senior vice president. The company had no office in New York; she worked out of her home.
A review of election expenditures to Mack/Crounse during McCray’s years there failed to turn up a single client McCray could have brought to the firm. Levitan, de Blasio’s campaign spokesman, refused to name one.

Asked specifically about McCray’s work at Citigroup, Levitan declined to answer. Perhaps the man running against Wall Street doesn’t want to let voters know it once helped pay his mortgage.

De Blasio hasn’t always thought that a candidate’s relatives were protected turf. When he ran against Mark Green for Public Advocate, his Mack/Crounse produced mailings again and again launched unbridled attacks on Green’s brother, Stephen, a major developer. There was never a smidgen of evidence that Mark Green had done anything wrong, and no one other than de Blasio ever alleged it.

“Hell hotel” backer
Last year, de Blasio took the unusual step of soliciting a second round of political contributions from a dozen individuals and unions that had already maxed out to his 2013 campaign. He contended this was legal because he was using the latest contributions to pay off debts from his 2009 run for Public Advocate.

(The city’s campaign finance officials permitted it, though in an audit released this summer the agency found that he had commingled the 2009 and 2013 funds and fined him $10,000 for doing so, part of $20,500 in penalties the CFB imposed on de Blasio’s campaign.)

One of the first to make a second maximum donation was Alan Lapes, a man whose name should have set off alarms in the de Blasio camp. With other family members joining, Lapes ultimately gave a total of $14,850.

Lapes was exposed in a 2007 Daily News story about a “hell hotel” he ran for the homeless and pilloried ever since in audits and news accounts as the worst operator of violation-saturated transitional shelters in the city.
The city controller found in 2010 and 2011 audits that Lapes and his associated businesses had 2,250 violations in their private shelter apartments, the latest example of what it called a history of “longstanding, documented, hazardous and unsanitary conditions” in their facilities. The audit said the Lapes’ extended empire owed the city $1.4 million.

As far back as 2006, the New York Post reported that Lapes had worked for the Podolsky family and was “the public face for bona fide bad guys,” since three members of that family had been convicted of waging what Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau called a “campaign of terror” to drive low-paying tenants out of their buildings. Lapes is still associated with the Podolsky family in several of his shelter projects.

The Lapes donations to de Blasio went unnoticed until February 2013, when Lapes’ projects on the West Side and in Carroll Gardens were the subject of a front-page Times story and New York magazine reported his contributions to the public advocate.
In Carroll Gardens, a Brooklyn neighborhood de Blasio had represented for years, the Coalition for Carroll Gardens got an injunction against Lapes’ conversion of a 10-unit building into a shelter for 170 men. Controller John Liu cancelled a Lapes contract and announced a new audit.

Finally, after two weeks of headlines, the Post got de Blasio on the phone. “I’ve just made the decision to return the money,” he said. “That’s all I have to say.” Refusing to answer the question of whether he knew Lapes’ background before taking the contributions, he said he just wanted to “move on.”

In fact, we have learned he never returned $4,950 of the Lapes contributions ­ keeping Lapes’ wife’s donation. Nor did he return $4,950 from Daniel Murphy, Lapes’ security consultant at the “hell hotel,” which the Daily News said was plagued with guns, drugs and hookers. Robert Hess, a former city housing commissioner that is also involved in the Carroll Garden project with Lapes, hosted a 2013 fundraiser for de Blasio and is listed as bundling and giving over $5,000.

News of the contributions stunned de Blasio’s old friends and allies in Carroll Gardens, who’d been talking to him for months about joining the fight against Lapes’ shelter. Elected officials like Councilman Brad Lander, Borough President Marty Markowitz, Assemblywoman Joan Millman and State Sen. Daniel Squadron signed several letters to city agencies. De Blasio didn’t sign any of them, nor did he attend any of the coalition meetings.

The coalition co-chair, Steven Miller, who said he talked to de Blasio with some frequency, told me: “I do think Bill has a long history of accepting money from very pro-development sorts of people. I would say that it would’ve been better if Bill figured out how to return the money on his own. There was pressure to return the money. If de Blasio chooses to continue relationships with slumlords and people who are profiting off housing the homeless, this would be a very negative indicator.”

De Blasio finally signed a letter opposing the project in May, after he returned some of the donations.

The yellow taxi lobby
De Blasio, a beneficiary of significant campaign contributions from the taxi industry, became one of the most prominent supporters of their successful efforts to block state legislation that would’ve allowed 13,000 “borough taxis” to work the streets where yellow cabs barely go, including Northern Manhattan and much of the outer boroughs.

This was popular legislation; the state Assembly and Senate passed it in three days. The black and Latino caucuses of the City Council and Assembly wrote unanimous letters in support. The mayor and governor agreed that the sale of new medallions associated with the bill would mean a billion dollars in additional revenue for the city.

Vito Lopez, the Brooklyn boss and assemblyman who’s since resigned over sex harassments claims, and a Republican state senator were the only elected officials that joined de Blasio in this fight. When the cab industry filed suit to stop implementation of the law, de Blasio submitted an amicus brief in support of the cab owners.

A review of all contributions to de Blasio raised by or made by taxi lawyers, owners and other associates in the 2013 campaign tallies $254,451, making them de Blasio’s biggest backers by far. Fleet owner Ron Sherman is the most powerful taxi leader, just as his father Donald was in the 1980s before he was convicted in a federal felony case, and he orchestrated the de Blasio deluge of support.

Richard Emery, one of the lawyers who argued the case for the taxi industry and became a major bundler for de Blasio contributions, told me that he contacted de Blasio to discuss the taxi case because he “had represented Bill on a police case” and “had a long relationship with him.” Emery asked him about signing on and he “said yes right away.”

Emery said he was either already a member of de Blasio’s finance committee or became one after that conversation, and that Sherman began “responding to [de Blasio] because of his position on this issue.”

Those are three snapshots of the man who would be mayor.

Barrett is an investigative journalist and Nation Institute fellow. This report has research assistance by Calin Brown, Zach Bergson and John Santore.Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/don-big-bill-article-1.1448237#ixzz2eKPdmdlx