City Talk; Wayne Barrett And Tom Robbins

How I'm Doug Musio, this is City Talk. They set the standards for investigative reporting. They are the consciences of their generation, detectives for the people, with encyclopedic knowledge of New York City politics. The leaving the village voice is a quote-unquote colossal loss to New Yorkers and a relief to malfactors of all stripes. They are, of course, Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins. Muckrake is extraordinaire, partners in crime, equal opportunity, squolds, journalism, award winners, feared and respected even by their targets.

Wayne and Tom, welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Wayne, I'm reading a post that's on January 4, 2011 and it says it's time for something new. What happened? Why? The next line was, if I didn't recognize it, others did, and I didn't recognize it and I do think I'm going to do some new things and hope I'm not going to walk too far away from that tradition that you just so wonderfully described, but I was called into the office very abruptly by the editor, Tony Artega, and he made a nice offer which was consistent with our union contract, which Tom is the union leader. So Tom was present at the meeting, a nice severance offer. I'd been there for 33 years on a regular basis, but my first piece was in 1973 there before I got the regular column in 1978.

I certainly was completely unprepared for it. In fact, the last cover story that I did, Tony edits my copy, Tony Artega, we had the smoothest run we'd ever had. He loved the piece. I had no indication that there was any dissatisfaction with my work. I still don't. Really, he praised my work as he was in the work, or you're going on the meeting. He said it was a budget decision. I'm an expensive property, he's an expensive property, and so that's all the explanation that I'll probably ever get as to why I was designated to fill the plug this budget gap, but I assume they have a real budget gap, all newspapers are in trouble, and my time had come, so I didn't recognize it. I thought I was still, these fingers were still dancing over those keys, yes, yes, yes. And many of us agree as a reaction show. So then I get to the last line on this, and it says, I never met a corrupt journalist. I even met one, Tom Robbins, so brave that when he heard I was leaving he quit himself

and didn't even tell me he was, I'm going out with the guy who brought me to the dance Robbins, told me after he resigned, crafting a lead with every fiber of his life, talk about it. Why? Well, that's true, Wayne did bring me to the dance. I worked in the voice on two different, oh my second tune, just finishing up, I was there in the night. With the Daily News in between. That's right. Wayne and I did a, I was a freelancer, did a piece together back in the 80s terrific story that we both had a great time reporting, and afterwards, I just sort of hung around and stayed at the voice at that point for a couple years, later leaving with Jack Newfield to go to the Daily News together, and I was there for a dozen years, and one of the issues at the Daily News was always that stories were either too long, or there were targets that we were going after that upset somebody, the one great thing about the village voice and I think this remains consistent is they let you speak with your own voice, and they

go after everybody, that it is open season, and even if it doesn't have the circulation of other papers, I think that's the voice is great tradition, a tradition which continues even without Robbins and Barrett that I think we don't know about that yet. We don't know about that yet. Think of the voice, but really the state of journalism, the state of newspapers, Tom, you wrote a piece in 2009 called the Mayors Press Pass, the unexamined world of Mike Bloomberg, and you talk about the changing news environment. Talk about what that is and what are the political implications of all of that. It's, I think it's economic driven. I mean, the demise of print has caused many editors and newspapers, even in New York, which remains a newspaper rich town, I mean, we've got three dailies here, we're just like, in some cases, three more than other cities there. But they don't follow each other's stories. I mean, Wayne will tell you about it in the 80s when Scandal hit the catch administration, every paper followed every story every day, and you create a news day out there as we

have four. Exactly. It's a very important for us, but it created a critical mass that moved the rock up the hill, forced politicians to be accountable in a way that we don't have now. So we get great stories that are reported in individual papers, but it's someone else's story and it doesn't get picked up. And that's what I meant by Bloomberg's press pass. He didn't have to live in that world. And then, as you say, I mean, we've got some muck rakers and good investigative journalists other than yourself, Jim Dwyer, Juan Gonzalez, but there isn't this, this sort of concentrated connections and cumulativeness to stories. What's going on? Well, you also have to observe the fact that we have a media mogul as a mayor and his best buddies who got all together to decide that he should have a third term, are the other media moguls of New York, you know, Mort Suckerman at the Daily News is one of the mayor's best friends.

He'll tell you that. So, you know, you just have to look at the relationships at the top. We've never experienced that before. So the passivity of the media, until the third time, we're seeing, I think in a weight in the third term, but the passivity of the media is in part a byproduct of the relationships at the very top. I don't think it reflects on the quality of the foot soldiers. I think it's the generals here, or the commander-in-chiefs here, you know, that collude. And you know, it's been a collusion that has really damaged the political fabric of the city. And you know, I'm encouraged by some of the things that have been happening in the recent weeks. If the plows had been this late before the reelection of 2009, would we have seen this kind of coverage? Don't you even still see some distance, especially at the Daily News, between the editorial page and the news reporting at the time, too?

Yeah. So it's been a very unusual, we've had, we do not have even in the best of times. I mean, Ed Koch's three-term mayor was a Paul bearer at Abe Rosenthal's funeral. So that says a whole lot. I mean, you know, I don't think any mayor of the city of New York is going to be a Paul bearer at mine, you know, and so it says a whole lot. But it said really nice things about it. It did indeed. It did indeed. I mean, he said, I'm talking with superb. I don't blame it, but you're tired of being a Paul bearer, I'm saying, what's wrong with Abe Rosenthal that this is one of his best friends when he's in charge of the newspaper that covers him? And Mike Bloomberg is really unique. Both of you guys very recently, in fact, within the last week of written stories, U-Tom hits their third term, Paul Wall, and you, on Sunday, you know, talking about Bloomberg and a cold shoulder, talk about Mike Bloomberg, talk about the reaction to this snow incident.

And it seems like he ain't getting a free piss anymore. And that's the editorial pages, as well as the foot soldiers, that hammering this guy. What is it? I think he did hit a third term, Wall. I mean, I think that the fact that he would not account for his whereabouts, and still to this day will not tell us where he was, is simply a break with the bond, with the constituents of the city. And I think that actually the daily news editorial page has hammered him on this, which is unusual. I don't want to go to go that hard. But I think that he's taken a bridge too far at this point, or a bridge unplowed, whichever is. I think that this mayor misjudged his popularity, his ratings, and believed that he can continue to sort of have this hands-off attitude, have great people working for him, and everything would be taken care of. I mean, if the stories that we're hearing about his screaming at Joe Bruno, the head of operations and emergency management at this guy, Steve Goldsmith, the deputy mayor, that's

all presumably true, he delegated all of that responsibility to him. And even though he defended this decision to not call in a snow emergency, apparently he was never even consulted. We know now, yesterday, from the testimony of the council hearing, that's a stunning failure of management at the very top. Can Humpty Dumpty be put back together again, or is this mythology of Mike Bloomberg been deconstructed, this sublime manager? Well, he's got a hecredic wizard. We know that he's more interested in the U.S. Department of the Treasury than he is the New York Department of Sanitation. We know he's mesmerized by whatever is going on in Gaitner's shop and couldn't care less about what's going on in Daugherty's shop at the Department of Sanitation. So I think we have seen, I believe he ran for reelection because he wanted to keep the dream alive of a national run, either for President or Vice President of my inkling as he's done.

He thinks realistically in that they might have been a chance for him to be a Veep candidate in the coming race. And that's really what he was thinking about. But he has been so mesmerized since re-elected by national politics that he's lost some of that. I still believe that his first term as mayor was the best term of any chief executive state or local that I covered. I think he was an excellent first term. Yeah, they explained that. I mean, I agree. But yeah, I think he still owes us a second term and somehow he managed to run for a third term. I think driven really by the boredom of the alternatives, you know, I'm going to be, but he's not been really engaged in this job since he was re-elected in 2005, that engagement that he had, you know, and I would sit just as an example and there are lots of examples. When I sat with Joel Klein, who I have a lot of respect for at the Department of Education, and he would give me the minute detail when they restructured the Department of Education in the school system, he would give me the minute detail of Mike Bloomberg's involvement. There wasn't a piece of that puzzle that he did not personally vet and really look at

in study. He was involved at the foundation of the education reforms, many of which I think have contributed to a better school system. But then when I did a story in the second term about the big innovation of the second term was Plan NYC 2030 and Plan NYC 2030 is where we know what climate change is, we're going to adapt to it. Well, the single most important department was the Department of Environmental Protection in that plan and I spoke to the Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, she'd never had a conversation with him. He'd never had so much as one email exchanged with him about this plan, about the details of this plan. So he kind of pulled back, turned that over to Dan Doctor off, who's now running his company, you know, and there was a level of disengagement about the detail of the big innovation of the second term that was very present in the first term. And I just think he likes the ceremony, he likes the attention, but I don't think

he's engaged, you have to really be a detailed guy to be a great mayor, you have to be a detailed guy too. Well, what about Rudy Giuliani? Rudy Giuliani was a detailed guy, I mean, does that make him great, I mean, at one point the mayor said he wanted to be the greatest mayor of New York City, what makes a great mayor? You know, when Wayne talks about the first term and what made that a great person think what I think of is that he came in an incredible budget crunch, almost a bit of the one we're looking at right now. And he did something which today, which would probably be politically impossible for him to even think about, which was that he imposed a new tax and his poll suffered for it. People didn't like it, but he did it because of the fact that I think at that point he believed that he had a bond with people who needed city services. And he basically looked at his budget and he said, I am not going to leave the poorest out of this budget, I'm not going to leave working people out of this budget, I'm going to try to make it work.

And he did. He took a hit in the polls and he built his way back. The economy improved at post-9-11 tourism started to, we started to come back. But to me, when Wayne says that was a great first term, I don't disagree with them. I mean, there were things in that term that I didn't like that the mayor did. But to me, that was the profile and courage. That was the moment when he said, okay, you know, I'm going to take a political hit. You know, he came in the office saying, I'm not a politician, you know, I'm a businessman. It's been his selling point. And I think every time we get to one of these points where we realize that like he is making a political decision, you know, his value goes down and his esteem goes down with voters and with the public. And we keep seeing them one after another. Doug, could I add one? Go ahead. He didn't do one tax. He did two taxes in the aftermath of 9-11. He didn't just do the largest property tax increase in the history of the city. He imposed a surcharge on the wealthiest. That's what she got a Republican Senate to approve. Now he says, this is the new mic one where you can't tax rich people. He opposes it in every form.

So that's a completely reversible for us. He said at the time, he said at the time, oh, and this is in 2003, he said rich people won't leave because they have to pay some temporary surcharge that increases their taxes in a miniscule way. They're not going to leave town. Now he says, the little vanish, the little vanish. It's ludicrous. What is it about third terms? Is there something inherent in third terms or is it just that part of the problem is we're finding out is that there's a declining gene pool. Where is that? Can I start out with a cadre, a really smart, dedicated, tough folks who are looking to do the deed. And then they start falling away and you end up with folks who, clearly he's tried to recruit people who he thinks have done it very well. But as near as I can tell, Howard Wilson is there because he's trying to ready whatever that future is. And that's his main assignment. A goldsmith is supposed to be there to be able to do the new politics of it. But if the guy doesn't know when to call us no emergency, I don't know what good he is. So part of what happens, and I think apparently this has happened to every mayor in a third

term, Wagner, LaGuardia, Cach, we've seen this happen over and over again. You start losing those good people and you start losing that kind of force of power that you had on the way. Yeah. And also the intensity moving from an Ed Skyler, wherever you think about Ed, Ed was a maniac. He was constantly worried about operations and he's all over the place. He's tackling, you know, muggers in the street, goldsmiths in Virginia during a snowstorm. So I mean, and I think that goldsmith was a good pick because I think, you know, being an academic and a political scientist, I mean, some of that rethinking is important. Okay. Let's move on a little bit. What are you working on now? Well, the last piece, I didn't know it was my last piece, but I was doing a cover when I got that call from Tony. In fact, I had just gotten off the phone with a long interview with Al Sharpton. I'm doing a feature, an investigator for the story on Al Sharpton. Oh, what is this coming out?

We're waiting. We're waiting. Now I have to find a place to, you know, to print it, but I'm sure I will. And I, you know, I still have a few loose ends to tie together. It's a, I looked at the business side of him in a way that I never have before. And he stopped talking to me in 2004. I have known him since he was 16 or something. And so he stopped talking to me in 2004 when I wrote a series about his phony presidential campaign, which was run by Roger Stone, the dirty tricks bastard of the Republican party. For some reason, he didn't like that copy. So he stopped talking to me. So it's pretty good indication that I've got some good stuff that he was talking to me this time. I don't know, no, no, wait a second, you've done Trump. You've done, you've done, you've done Giuliani twice. Yeah. Come on. What they're talking about. This is a book. There's no book. They're complex people. Al Sharpton is simple hustler. It's a very simple story. Nice. Nice. What are you up to? Well, you're still at the voice until the end of the month. I got, I filed a copy for my column for today's paper, I got tonight, which is about Andrew Cuomo and the issue where he says the new mantras to be jobs, jobs, jobs.

And I went and met with a friend of mine who runs a small company up in the South Bronx who could certainly use some help and talk about the problems of getting that pledge made reality. And for next week, I'm working on a police related story. I'm not going to say what it is. No, no, no, we don't want to, we don't want you to scoop yourself. But I, you know, look, I'm a New Yorker. I'm going to keep writing about New York at some place and it'll be some venue. And, you know, this is the city I love. I'll stay here. You, you're at, you're going to be at the nation Institute. Does that mean that now your targets are on national targets? Oh, pity those folks. Yes, I will. I think I probably will be doing some more national copy. But when you write about Al Sharpton, you're right about a national figure who happened to be, I mean, I think the Obama embrace of Al Sharpton is ludicrous. It's all just Chicago politics. He can't stand Jesse Jackson. So he's wrapped his arms around Al Sharpton. But when, when he announced the extension of the Bush tax cuts there on the front row was Al Sharpton sitting right next to Larry Summers. So, you know, I guess he's now possibly a great economic advisor to the president of the

United States. So, you know, he's a national figure. So some of the stuff that I do will have a national flavor. But the nation Institute is a place to hang my hat. They've been almost instantly supportive by letting me come over there. And it's a thing I need. And the crew of interns. Yes, it's a think tank. Yes, my army. I hope my army hopefully will be coming with me. Yes. So you guys ready to join us in the academy of do a little teaching, maybe even a little bit TV? No. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And sort of the saga of David Patterson. It's a sad saga, isn't it?

I wrote it. I tell you, I wrote it because I was hopeful that he was going to do in his last hours even more than he had done in the few weeks before that. Which is I started the piece by talking about these very worthy prison sentence commutation that he had done one for this fellow who would already done six months in prison for having having this incident as long and long island. Black guy who had shot a white kid who was threatening him and his son, a terrible story. But I thought that the governor had shown tremendous heart and smart. And smart. And so, it was a tough one to do. And then he had appointed this panel to look at all of these immigration partners, because in fact, the Department of Justice is now going back and looking at even minor past convictions for people who do not work, not the permanent residents. They're tossing people out of the country. And he did two dozen of those. And again, I thought that he showed the kind of courage in those instances that we wanted from him when he first became governor.

He got sidetracked by the Clinton Senate seat. You know, it took him down. He got sidetracked by his own problems. But you know, at the end of the day, when he started counting up some of the things that happened on his watch, there were a lot of achievements, I thought. And I just wanted the point of finger to, you know, he increased the welfare grant. No one had done that in 20 years, right? He did pass a million air stacks, which he didn't want to do it. Did it? The drug laws got mild to the drug code drug. I wanted to give him a pat on the back for that. Talk about the joy of your profession. You love doing what you're doing. What is it that attracts you? What captivates you? What makes you smile, Tom? Go ahead. You get paid to talk to people. It doesn't get any better than that. And you wrote in your final voice blog that it's the only profession that's paid to tell the truth. Now, I think I take some issue with that because I think college professors also are a profession that, but it's talk about being an investigative journalist. What is, try to give us a feel of what it's like

to grab onto a story? What gets you? The sharpened story that I'm working on. It's like, there's so many pieces to a puzzle. And the way a story builds over time if you're doing a deep investigative story, even if you're doing, and I try to always report out the blogs I write, I report them out, it's like a series of building blocks. It's a series of revelations. You know what kind of, how you can feel. Where every day on a serious subject that matters to you and you think matters to a large number of people that every day you find something new about that story. And you get up in the morning, I can't wait to get to the phones, I can't wait to get to the databases. You know, I get up in the middle of the night, I do this all the time, drives my wife crazy, I get up in the middle of the morning. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But I get up in the middle of the night and I make notes in the middle of the night because stuff occurs to me in the night and in the next thing I do,

I start the morning just chasing this new trail. And so, so many jobs just don't have that, like I thought I'd be a lawyer, right? I was a national champion debater. I went to college on a debating scholarship. And so everybody was a debater and my day became a lawyer. And I thought I'd be a lawyer. And when you look at the choices where you wind up representing sleaze balls, whereas now I can take everyone down and then I can find out something about, I mean, if you had that choice, which would you choose? Obviously, Tom, you wake up in the middle of night and take notes, are you as rabid as someone? I turn, and I turn over, I go back to sleep. Look, I mean, we both have, I think a lot of things in common in terms of the way we work. And one of them is that I have been trying to keep faith with readers and people that I've known either as sources or just people around the city, going back 30 years.

And since I've restarted in the business, there's folks when I was at City Limits Magazine reporting on neighborhoods, tenant issues that I still talk to you today and call me up and pull my code and say, you gotta look at this. And that's held true whether or not it's like a rank and file carpenter in the city. Yeah, you've done a lot of work on private corruption as well as public corruption, particularly unions and construction. And the corporate is union in particular. And I would say that the continuing thread there is keeping faith with readers. In other words, if there are people who are not getting, the story that goes untold someplace else is the one that attracts me the most. The one that is not getting attention, the wrongdoing, which is not being redressed, these are the great things that you get to do on our job. One of your aha moments, this joy of discovery, I mean, we read parts of Rudy and this stuff that you found that that Rudy didn't know. Or Rudy didn't tell anybody. Or Rudy didn't tell anybody. Well, you know, he, when he was, when he first went down to Washington,

he was an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District here in New York. And when they gave him his first big job down in Washington, which he was like the number six guy in the Justice Department, he had to go through an FBI background or for the first time. And he didn't tell them anything about his family, right? At that time, he'd never made a mob case in his life. So now we know he's a great mob prosecutor, but this is a totally legitimate question when you are going through it. And so he never told them that his father was a semi-wise guy that his uncle was a full-fledged wise guy that the FBI had killed his cousin. So you find that about? Yes, yeah. So I found that all about that, but whether or not, when it all came out in the book, Rudy was answered, well, I knew some of it, some of it I didn't know, you know, this kind of thing, he has to be very careful about what he says, because that's all a sworn FBI question there, which he had to go through, and I interviewed Harold Tyler who's now dead, but was the deputy attorney generally in the United States who hired him and who certainly reviewed the FBI questionnaire,

which is confidential, and he said none of this was in the questionnaire. Tom, one of my favorite series of pieces was one that you wanted to award for on Russell Harding and the absolute corruption in and around the agency and personally, what got you to that story and what was your moment that made you say, this is it? I don't know about this is it, but that story came from what I was talking about before, it was simply keeping faith with readers, anonymous people called me and said, it already written a story about Russell Harding, the son of Ray Harding, the head of the liberal party, the guy that Rudy Giuliani called his political mentor, who had gotten this job running one of the cities sort of smaller but very lucrative and important housing agencies, a housing development corporation, and somebody called me and said, this guy's spending money like crazy and you should try to get the records on it, I didn't know who it was, but I thought there's a good tip,

and I tried, that was in 2000, and it wasn't until me two years to get the records, they tried to hide them from me, in fact they insisted that they were lost, none of that turned out to be true, but that was one of those episodes I thought which opened a window on the Giuliani administration that people understood, Rudy had always told us that he was gonna give us the highest caliber of people in judge, and yet here he was hiring the son of his political mentor who didn't have a college degree to run a very complicated financial institution for the city, and the kid wasn't even in town, he was gallivanting all around the country and the nation and the world, spending money like a drunken sailor. We're gonna have to continue this because time's up, I mean it really flies when I'm talking to you two guys. My thanks to the Muckraig is extraordinaire Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins for being on the show. Next week I'll talk with James Parrot, Deputy Director and Chief Economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute,

see you then, gentlemen, wonderful, thank you. Thank you. MUSIC PLAYING Hello, I'm Doug Musio. Let us know what you think about this show. You can reach us at cuny.tv. When you get there, click on the board that says contact us and send your email, whatever it is. Thanks, no thanks of notches to it. Send it.