In quite the tale of two cities, Bill de Blasio talked in his first year as mayor, after the NYPD had killed Eric Garner, about how he’d “literally had to train” his then 16-year-old son Dante “to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.”
In his final year, de Blasio’s Department of Investigation says he used his NYPD protective detail as “a concierge service, primarily for Dante” as an adult living on his own.
“Intelligence and security experts should decide how to keep the mayor and his family safe, not civilian investigators,” said his spokesperson, complaining that the DOI was “trying to do the NYPD’s job for them, but with none of the relevant expertise.”
A mayor who won office promising to transform police decisions is leaving by arguing civilians have no business judging them.
Speaking of mayors and bookends, Rudy Giuliani was conspicuously absent from Fox News on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and shortly thereafter it was reported that America’s Mayor had been blackballed.
“Rudy is really hurt because he did a big favor for Rupert (Murdoch),” a person close to him told Politico, referring to how Giuliani moved heaven and earth to get Fox News on cable in Manhattan just after the Australian billionaire and GOP campaign veteran Roger Ailes — who’d helped run Giuliani’s 1989 mayoral campaign before crossing over from making TV spots for politicians to making a TV channel about politicians — launched the network 25 years ago this past Thursday.
As Wayne Barrett later recounted, that was a life-or-death matter for the fledgling network at a time when Time Warner’s Manhattan cable franchise could carry just 77 channels, with 30 others in line ahead of Fox News.
But after Rupert called Rudy, the mayor seized two of the city’s legally mandated public access channels and handed them over to Fox News and — presumably to avoid making that seem too nakedly political — future Mayor Mike’s new Bloomberg News, before a judge ruled Giuliani had violated “longstanding First Amendment principles” to “reward a friend” in Murdoch with “content-based favoritism.”
A year later, a new boss at Time Warner, who happened to be Rudy’s former law partner, found a spot on the dial for Fox News, saving the cable company’s franchise from Rudy’s wrath while helping the fledgling news operation gain a foothold in America’s biggest media market.
That happened, Barrett reported, as Fox 5 hired Giuliani’s then-wife and then tripled her salary—and as Giuliani publicly called on WNYC, then housed by the city and in danger of losing its place on the air altogether if it fell out of his good graces, to hire his friend Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder who’d lost his slot on another radio station.
“People assumed that the mayor imposed his ally,” one longtime WNYC hand recalled of the unlikely pairing that lasted for less than a year.
Sliwa was back on WNYC Monday to visit “The Brian Lehrer Show” and talk up his longshot Republican mayoral run in an interview where he said that recent stories about racism in the NYPD and FDNY came down to bad apples rather than rotten barrels.
Adams was on the show the next day and, asked about his rival’s comments, said that “It’s difficult for Curtis to talk about the systemic racism because he has been a leading voice of being a racist.”
Sliwa fired back hours later: “It’s his kneejerk reaction, always. Instead of dealing with the issues…he labels people racist.”
That really hasn’t been true of Adams over his decades in the public eye, but it’s become a pattern over the course of his mayoral run that symbolically began with his call last year for newcomers to “go back to Iowa! Go back to Ohio!”
In the primary’s closing weeks, Adams said rivals Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang were channeling “America’s dark past” and Jim Crow by campaigning together. He said questions about where he lives and what properties he owns, triggered by his own inaccurate and incomplete filings and ambiguous statements, were akin to Donald Trump’s openly racist “birther” campaign targeting then-President Barack Obama.
And he said a New York magazine story about his history of political alliances was “racist,” not long after he’d told the New York Times that their reporting on his aggressive fundraising showed how “Black candidates for office are often held to a higher, unfair standard.”
Adams is a thoughtful person and politician, who knows firsthand about racism in New York City and thumbs on the scales when it comes to Black politicians. Before he becomes New York City’s 110th mayor, he might want to think about the implications of getting into a habit of regularly calling rivals or reporters racists.
“Whereof what’s past is prologue,” some guy once wrote, “what to come (is) in yours and my discharge.”
