SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
As the year 2017 comes to an end, three major events stand out in this year in Suffolk County: the indictment and resignation of long-time Suffolk District Attorney Tom Spota, the results of the election here, and the beginnings of offshore wind development.
The indictment of Suffolk DA Spota is a tragedy for the veteran prosecutor. Of the district attorneys in Suffolk over the past 50 years—and I’ve known every one of them—Mr. Spota stands out to me to be among the best. He was no-nonsense when it came to corruption, of which there has been an enormous amount in Suffolk through the years.
His indictment is rooted in a friendship with someone he, in hindsight, should not have trusted. But Mr. Spota got to know James Burke when Mr. Burke was a teenage witness in 1979 in a matter that Mr. Spota, as head of the DA’s Homicide Bureau, was prosecuting: the murder by suffocation of 13-year-old John Pius in Smithtown.
Then 14, the young Burke testified at a series of trials in which classmates were charged with killing John Pius by shoving rocks down his throat.
That experience focused Mr. Burke on becoming a police officer, and police work was in his family already: his father and grandfather were cops in New York City.
Mr. Burke became a city cop, too, for a year, and then joined the Suffolk County Police Department and rose through the ranks. Meanwhile, a friendship between him and Mr. Spota grew, and in 2002 after Mr. Spota, of Mt. Sinai, was elected Suffolk DA, he named Mr. Burke to head the DA’s squad of detectives. Mr. Burke held that post until becoming chief of department in 2011, its highest uniformed position.
In 2015, Mr. Burke was arrested at his Smithtown home on federal charges that in the Fourth Precinct station house in Hauppauge, he beat a man who was handcuffed and manacled, who was suspected of breaking into his police vehicle, and then he coerced fellow officers to cover up what he did.
Mr. Burke pleaded guilty in 2016 and is now imprisoned. Mr. Spota was charged in October by federal authorities, along with Christopher McPartland, the head of his political corruption unit, with obstruction of justice in connection with the cover-up of the assault by Mr. Burke. Mr. Spota then resigned as DA.
Election 2017 was an important election in Suffolk for women and a breakthrough for African-Americans here with Errol Toulon, Jr. of Lake Grove voted in as sheriff and becoming the first black to win a (non-judicial) countywide post.
I recall 1973 when Judith Hope became the first woman to be elected a town supervisor in Suffolk by winning the election for East Hampton supervisor. A good number of women have followed Ms. Hope since as town supervisors in Suffolk, among them Henrietta Acampora in Brookhaven; Barbara Keyser on Shelter Island; Mardythe DiPirro in Southampton; Jean Cochran in Southold; and currently in office, Angie Carpenter in Islip town.
What a contrast to the centuries when the county’s governing body, the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors (replaced by a Suffolk Legislature in 1970) consisted only of men—because there wasn’t a woman town supervisor until Ms. Hope.
Election 2017 in Suffolk resulted in the victory of Laura Jens-Smith as town supervisor of Riverhead—the first woman to be elected supervisor of Riverhead since the town was founded 225 years ago. Elected with her to a town board seat was Catherine Kent. In Southampton, Ann Welker was elected to the Southampton Board of Trustees—the first woman to become a Southampton Trustee since establishment of that panel 331 years ago. In Smithtown, Lynne Nowick was easily re-elected to the town board. And there were other female winners this year in Suffolk—which was a national trend.
The election of Mr. Toulon, former deputy corrections commissioner in New York City, is a milestone in a county with a long history of racism.
When I started as a Suffolk-based journalist in 1962, the leaders of the major parties would not think of running a female for government offices other than for town clerk and town tax receiver—seen as kind of secretarial roles for women back then.
As for running a black person for a countywide office: forget about it!
Meanwhile, 2017 was the first full year of operation for Deepwater Wind’s wind farm off Block Island—14 miles east of Montauk Point. The five-turbine array, America’s first offshore wind farm, heralds what is likely to be the placement of many wind turbines off Long Island.
Indeed, the Long Island Power Authority in 2017 gave its go-ahead to Deepwater Wind to build what the Rhode Island-based company has named its South Fork Wind Farm in the Atlantic Ocean 30 miles southeast of East Hampton. Also in 2017, LIPA gave the OK to Statoil, a Norwegian-headquartered firm, to build a wind farm Statoil has named Empire Wind south of the shores of Nassau County.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is bullish on offshore wind and sees it as a key element in the state’s plan to get half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. As of the new year—that’s only a dozen years away!
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.