Case Turns On Whether Usual Politics Is a Felony (Bklyn Dumbos indicted in judicial corruption)

NY TIMES ^ | November 19, 2003 | ANDY NEWMAN

[Liz]

There is surprisingly little dispute between the prosecution and the defense about most of the facts behind the recent grand larceny charges against the two top Democratic officials in Brooklyn.

Both sides agree that candidates for civil court judge got the endorsement of party leaders last year. That the candidates met with the leaders, and the leaders told the candidates in no uncertain terms that to win, they needed to raise a certain amount of money and hire certain vendors. And that if they did not, the party was not going to be able to work as hard to ensure their victory as it otherwise would.

It is here that interpretations diverge. Sharply.

According to the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, the hardball tactics practiced by the Brooklyn Democratic chairman, Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., and the party's executive director, Jeffrey C. Feldman, constituted a felony.

"If the facts are supported, it is definitional extortion," Mr. Hynes told reporters yesterday after the two men were arraigned. "Because you have a thing of value that they control," he said, namely, the endorsement of the regular Democratic Party, and the leaders were threatening to take it away unless the candidates came up with sufficient money.

Mr. Hynes compared the situation to one where "the family dog is on the operating table. You've given five grand to the doctor to operate. You want this dog saved. And he's just about to take out the critical organ that's going to kill this dog, and he says, by the way, I need another $5,000."

But the defense team sees the same facts differently. "If you take at face value that that is what they did, imposing certain conditions on candidates running on a joint slate," said Mr. Norman's lawyer, Roger Bennet Adler, "there was nothing unreasonable about those conditions. Suggesting that if you don't basically agree to these expenditures we're not going to be as effective for you on primary day, I think, is a statement of the obvious. It's not extortion."

Mr. Adler said that when a candidate accepted the party's endorsement, there was "an implicit acceptance that certain rules of the game will be followed" and that Mr. Norman was simply explaining those time-honored rules, an impression reinforced by interviews yesterday with several former party leaders.

George Friedman, the Democratic leader in the Bronx from 1986 to 1994, said that he had delivered plenty of ultimatums to rebellious candidates in his day. "There are some things that candidates who are putting you on the line have to do," he said, "and if they don't do it, you have the right to be aggravated."

State Senator John D. Sabini, who was brought in to lead the Queens Democratic Party in 1986 after the disgrace and suicide of its former chairman, Donald R. Manes, said that candidates could be infuriatingly unwilling to defer to his wisdom on how to win an election.

"If you tell a candidate he should be using X pollster and they don't do it," he said, "if you tell them to hire printer Y and they don't do it, if you tell them to hire vendor Z and they don't do it, and you see that the campaign is floundering, eventually you're going to start to lose interest in the candidate."

Mr. Adler said that prosecuting this sort of behavior was like "claiming a lion is a killer because it goes after to prey to feed itself; it's the nature of the beast."

But one of the main themes of Mr. Hynes's yearlong investigation of Brooklyn judicial politics is that "this is how it's always been done" is no longer an acceptable defense.

"What I am pushing is the change of culture," he said yesterday, "and that is what they are terrified of. This is a cultural change. This has been around since 1922, and they don't want to give it up. It's about jobs, it's about influence, it's about lawyers getting assignments. What we're really pushing is a cultural change, because quite frankly the current system embarrasses me as a lawyer."

In June and July 2002, both sides agree, Mr. Norman and Mr. Feldman had a series of meetings with the two candidates, Civil Court Judge Karen B. Yellen and Housing Court Judge Marcia J. Sikowitz. The leaders told the candidates, prosecutors have said, that they had to hire a Manhattan company called Branford Communications to design campaign literature for their entire slate and that they had to hire a consultant, William H. Boone III, the treasurer of the party's fund-raising wing, to recruit street workers and get out the vote on Primary Day.

According to investigators, Judge Yellen did as she was instructed against her better judgment, and Judge Sikowitz hired Branford but did not have the money to hire Mr. Boone. In the end, they both lost the primary, to upstarts who ran against the machine.

Bob Liff, a spokesman for the Brooklyn Democratic Party, said yesterday that in a sign of her relative contentment with the party, shortly after her primary loss, Judge Yellen asked Mr. Norman whether she might be considered for a slot on the State Supreme Court. Ms. Yellen declined to comment.

Both candidates spoke to Mr. Hynes's investigators after the arrest of another Supreme Court judge who was eventually charged with taking bribes.

Whether Mr. Hynes can bring about cultural change through the forum of a criminal trial remains to be seen. The defendants have made much of the fact that it took prosecutors two attempts — one last month, one this month — to convince a grand jury to indict Mr. Feldman.

But Mr. Hynes said yesterday that he was confident. "The law as I understand it is very very clear," he said. "If the facts fit with the law, then there should be a successful prosecution."

[Liz]

Norman and Feldman seem so "confident" that they will get off.

Oh, I forgot (/sarcasm).

Guess they got a couple judges ready and willing (for the right price) to assure the two Dumbos "innocence."