31
CANDACE HAD arranged to meet Councilwoman Serran at her East Village office and speak to her on the walk to a school board meeting in the neighborhood. Candace had been as vague as possible about what she wanted to discuss, saying only that she was reporting on the changes to Riis. She figured there was a good chance that Serran already knew about her meeting with Dewberry, but that wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make the councilwoman nervous.
Serran was a short, stocky Hispanic woman in her early forties, dressed in a light cotton business suit. She was wearing tennis shoes and carrying both a formal attaché case and a rumpled shopping bag.
“Hope you don’t mind walking,” Serran said as she shook Candace’s hand. “The school’s about fifteen minutes away.”
Candace was wearing flats, as she usually did when working. “No problem,” she said.
The heat of day was just starting to cool, and although it was too early for the East Village’s nightlife to have kicked in, there were already plenty of people crowding the streets: the teenage punk rockers whose look hadn’t changed since Candace’s own teenage years in the city, the newer yuppies, heading home to their condos in buildings that twenty years ago had been squats, the Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans who still claimed dwindling slices of the neighborhood.
Serran turned out to be a quick walker, Candace having to increase her own pace as they headed up Avenue A. Candace wondered if it was a conscious effort on Serran’s part to make their time as short as possible. “So I understand you’re doing a piece on the changeover to mixed-income at Riis,” Serran said.
Candace nodded. She was planning on doing her best Columbo impression today, not wanting Serran’s guard up. People who spoke with her often failed to realize how much prep she did prior to any interview, all the time on the computer she logged before actually sitting down with someone. Information was power, never more so than when asking someone questions that you knew they weren’t going to want to answer. Candace was confident Serran was going to be pretty unhappy by the time they were done.
“One basic thing I haven’t been able to figure out is why Riis was chosen as the guinea pig, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“First I heard of the proposal, it was already attached to Riis. That’s how it was brought to the council’s housing committee.”
Given that Serran chaired the city council’s committee on public housing, Candace’s guess was that Riis had been chosen to sweeten the pot for Serran, ensure her support for the development. “Was it the mayor who brought it to you?”
“Actually it was Speaker Markowitz.”
David Markowitz, the council’s speaker, was young and preppy and photogenic, widely considered the most promising and ambitious city politician of his generation. Candace guessed, perhaps unfairly, that Serran must hate his guts.
“But you don’t know why the speaker wanted it to be Riis?”
Serran shrugged. “I don’t think he has any public housing in his own district,” she said, before adding quickly: “That’s off the record.”
An interview subject couldn’t place something off the record after saying it, which Candace certainly expected any politician to know. But she wasn’t looking to work up a snarky quote (though perhaps accurate: Markowitz’s district was in the Upper East Side) into anything—she was after bigger game. “How did Roth Properties come to be the developer on the Riis project?”
“There was a bidding process, but that was handled by the Housing Authority. The council didn’t have a direct role.”
“You probably know the Riis project better than anyone else in city politics,” Candace said, intending it as flattery but also thinking it could well be true. “What do you really make of the idea of changing it to mixed-income?”
Serran glanced at her, Candace guessing the politician was gauging how honest she wanted to be. “I had some concerns, sure. I didn’t want it to just end up being an excuse for dispersing poor people out of the neighborhood so that the city could do to the East Village what it just did to Times Square. Tourists own enough of this city as it is. But I’m a realist, and I can’t pretend to much nostalgia for the Jacob Riis I grew up in. Avenue D wasn’t pretty back then. I know some people in the community are opposed to anything that can be called gentrification, but it’s not that simple. My constituents who live or work near the project—the people who own stores over there—I can tell you they supported this one hundred percent.”
They turned onto First Avenue, just a few blocks below P.S. 19. Candace was already running out of time. But she still didn’t think an all-out attack was the way to go. “I assume you’ve been following the recent murder case at Riis?”
Serran’s face went dutifully somber. “The security guard? A terrible thing—not just for the victim, but for the community. But it didn’t have anything to do with the changes to Riis, did it?”
“The family of the accused, the Nazarios, are getting evicted because of the private security guards. Have you heard anything about problems between the private security and residents, or issues concerning evictions?”
Serran shook her head. “There’re always evictions going on at Riis, unfortunately.”
“I’ve got sources telling me that the security guards are setting people up on minor drug charges, then using that to evict the families.”
Candace watched Serran for a reaction, but saw nothing other than surprise. “If people have claims about that, you should have them call my office.”
Candace nodded noncommittally. She was generally reluctant to broker such contacts, not wanting to take an active role in a story she was reporting, even when doing so might help her subjects. She decided instead to throw a curve. “Your brother Antonio hasn’t told you anything about it?”
It worked: Serran’s gaze darted toward Candace, then quickly away. “You mean because of his work at the ACCC,” she said after a moment.
“Right,” Candace said.
“I don’t recall him mentioning it.”
“I assume you follow the ACCC’s work carefully,” Candace said, studying Serran as she spoke. “Not just because of your brother. Most of their funding comes from you, doesn’t it?”
Candace had expected Serran to be on guard for the question, but the councilwoman appeared unnerved. An ambulance with its siren on went screaming by, giving Serran an opportunity to pause for a long moment before answering. “I’ve helped them secure some funding from the city, yes,” Serran said once the noise had died down. “There’s nothing surprising about that. Riis is in my district, and I’m very active with public housing issues through chairing the council’s committee.”
“But aren’t you then essentially helping both sides? I mean in that you’re supporting the redevelopment, while also financing its opposition?”
“The existing community at Riis deserves protection. That’s what the ACCC is doing. My focus was on helping to ensure that the existing residents had a voice.”
Bombs away, Candace thought. She wasn’t getting anywhere interesting playing nice, and she lacked the time for a subtle approach. “What about the fact that you allocated a half million dollars to the ACCC, and a short time later you got a few dozen donations from people who were in some way connected to the organization? It looks to me like in the month or so after they got the city’s money, you must’ve received at least a couple hundred thousand dollars in contributions linked to the ACCC. And that’s just what I’ve been able to track down so far.”
“What are you suggesting?” Serran said. She’d stopped walking right in the middle of the sidewalk, so Candace stopped too, looking the councilwoman in the eye.
“I’m not suggesting anything. But it is a fact that those two things happened in quick succession. You arranged for a lot of city money to go to the ACCC, and people connected to the ACCC then gave a lot of money to your reelection campaign.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Serran protested, but it sounded feeble to Candace. Serran looked thoroughly rattled; she looked, Candace thought, like somebody who’d just been caught. “What’s your agenda here?”
“I’m simply going where the story takes me,” Candace said. “I was just trying to get a handle on the redevelopment, which brought me to the ACCC. That organization appears to consist of a storefront, a telephone number, and a couple of desks. If they’ve made good use of a half million dollars in city funds, it’s not readily apparent. Perhaps that’s because a lot of that money just passed through them on its way to your reelection campaign.”
“Jesus,” Serran said, the councilwoman appearing so shaken that Candace found herself momentarily entertaining the possibility that she really hadn’t known. “To the best of my knowledge, all campaign contributions I’ve received are legitimate. It isn’t illegal for employees of a nonprofit that receives city funding to donate to a city politician.”
“There’s probably something illegal about it if they were simply laundering the city’s payments to the ACCC back to your campaign,” Candace said.
Serran flushed, but held her anger in check. “If they were contributing taxpayer money, I’ll certainly return it. But I don’t know that’s true.”
“Your position is that you had no idea that so many people connected to the ACCC were donating to you?”
“Maybe my brother was encouraging people,” Serran said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Candace wasn’t going to argue the point, though she didn’t find it convincing. “You want me not to focus on you, what you need to do is put the focus somewhere else.”
“And how would I do that?” Serran asked. They were still planted in the middle of the sidewalk, people giving them dirty looks as they walked by.
“You’re the council’s point person on public housing. I’m assuming Simon Roth wanted you on his side in terms of becoming the developer on Riis. Did somebody suggest to you setting up the ACCC, getting it established as the visible opposition to the transition to mixed-income; you could fund it with one hand and take the money for your campaign with the other? Was that your reward for supporting the project?”
“Is that what you want me to say?” Serran said, studying Candace carefully.
Candace realized she’d overplayed her hand. “I want you to tell me the truth,” she replied.
“What you just said would mean I was taking a bribe for my support of Riis.”
“I was speculating is all,” Candace said. “My point is just that if there’s a larger context you want to put this in, I’m listening.”
“Nobody bribed me to support the changes to Riis,” Serran said after a moment. “I believe in what’s happening there.”
Candace was irritated with herself for feeling disappointment; she shouldn’t have come into the interview with preconceptions that Serran would lead her to Simon Roth. “So how did your brother come to be working for the ACCC?”
“Can you keep Antonio out of it?” Serran pleaded, her voice strained. She looked on the verge of tears. “My brother’s not a public figure. I understand that I’m fair game, but my brother’s just a regular guy, trying to get through the day. He doesn’t need you destroying him on the front page of a newspaper.”
“I’m not out to destroy anyone,” Candace protested, a little taken aback. Anger in a subject she could deal with, but pleading was hard, and unexpected from a politician. “But you see how this looks from my angle on it.”
“I see how you can make it look if you choose to,” Serran replied.
Candace didn’t like the sound of that: it wasn’t a matter of her using insinuation to manufacture a scandal. “I think things usually look like what they actually are,” she said. “And this looks like taxpayer money being funneled into your campaign coffers. If you want to get back to me with a different story, by all means, but you have very little time.”
WHEN SHE returned to the newsroom, Candace left a voice mail for Nugent, giving her editor a heads-up that she thought she was well on her way to breaking a significant story. Next she turned to David Markowitz, wanting to see if she could find anything indicating why he would be leading the charge on having Roth Properties transform Jacob Riis. She started by reading through some archived articles from her paper from when Markowitz had been elected speaker, reminding her of his privileged upbringing on the Upper East Side (not so different from her own); college at Princeton followed by law school at Yale, a handful of years as a staffer for Senator Schumer, then a couple of years with the state attorney general’s office before winning a council seat his first time in the race, followed by becoming speaker four years later. Term limits were going to force the current mayor out at the next election, and Markowitz was among the names rumored to be running.
Candace searched for connections between Markowitz and the Riis development. She came across references to his support for the project, but nothing that explained its origins. Next she searched for links between Markowitz and the Roth family. She didn’t find anything other than some passing mentions.
She went on the Secretary of State’s site, printing out a list of Markowitz’s donors. The first thing she noticed going through them was that he had a lot more contributors than Serran, and that they’d generally given a lot more money. Many of his donations were for the maximum allowed, a couple thousand a pop. And while virtually all of Serran’s donors had been individuals, with Markowitz many were companies.
Candace noticed that many of the business donations were from corporations she’d never heard of. She circled a number of them, then searched for their registrations with the Department of State.
On her third try, a limited liability corporation with the unrevealing name MTS LLC, the listed address for the business rang a bell. Candace couldn’t actually place it until she saw that it matched the address of the company’s registered service agent: the law firm Blake and Wolcott.