SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Rob Trotta Police Bill (Part II)

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP 

By Karl Grossman

The bill by Suffolk Legislator Rob Trotta—a retired Suffolk Police uniformed officer and detective—to prohibit members of the Suffolk County Police Department from “engaging in political activity” has been described by Newsday as the “Suffolk version of the federal Hatch Act.” It’s the U.S. law that restricts civil service employees in the executive branch of the federal government from engaging in political activity.

Trotta, with the Suffolk County Police Department up to his election to the legislature has been—despite his county police background—highly critical of political activities of Suffolk police unions led by the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association.

This is not just his issue. Newsday has published investigative pieces and editorials on the matter. The New York Times spotlighted the issue in Suffolk with a spread last year that featured a column by Farah Stockman, an editorial board member of The Times, headlined: “The County Where Cops Call the Shots.” It began: “Rob Trotta, a cranky Republican county legislator on Long Island who worked as a cop for 25 years, might be the unlikeliest voice for police reform in America. He’s full of praise for the rank and file….Yet Mr. Trotta has railed for years about the political influence of police unions in Suffolk County, Long Island, a place where the cops are known to wield exceptional clout. He’s a potent messenger, since he can’t be smeared as anti-cop. He wore a badge and walked a beat.”

I know the Suffolk County Police Department well having been hired in 1964 by the daily Long Island Press to cover the department and courts in Suffolk. Every weekday morning I sat with the department’s commissioner, John L. Barry (for whom its headquarters in Yaphank is now named), before walking down the halls of the then headquarters in Hauppauge, dropping in at its various bureaus to gather news.

The Suffolk County Police Department was born in the wake of scandal, known as the “Suffolk Scandals,” which involved a series of special state prosecutors sent here in the 1950s and uncovering corruption in governmental and law enforcement areas.

A top priority of Jack Barry, who had been a detective investigator in the Suffolk district attorney’s office, was keeping the new department scandal-free. It was formed in 1960 after a countywide referendum. That was the commitment of other top commanders in the department with whom I would also connect.

What Legislator Trotta has been challenging is a phenomenon of relatively recent years: police unions in Suffolk with enormous clout endorsing and giving campaign contributions to politicians and, Trotta charges, in return getting lavish contracts.

The issue of the clout of police unions is not unique to Suffolk. Last year in Salon magazine, former U.S Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote a piece headed: “The unchecked power of police unions.” He declared at the start: “Look, I was Secretary of Labor. I’m in favor of unions.” Still, he railed about an “investigation that found police unions spent about $87 million in influencing state and local legislation over the past two decades, and at least $47.4 million on campaign contributions and lobbying at the federal level.” 

I, too, am very much in favor of unions. At the Long Island Press, I was a member of the Newspaper Guild, and as a SUNY Old Westbury professor of journalism for the past 44 years, a member of United University Professions. 

However, as Trotta, of Fort Salonga, began an essay earlier this year in Newsday: “Why have Suffolk County law enforcement unions unethically and in my view illegally spent over two million dollars on the campaigns of former District Attorney Tim Sini and County Executive Steve Bellone? Because they could. The pair, like the overwhelming majority of local politicians from both parties, have eagerly benefited from the expenditures with little regard for their questionable origins. And, as a result, the power and influence of the unions has continued to grow exponentially, evident by contractual raises received…” 

“Law enforcement unions blatantly disregarding the law to garner political favor at taxpayers’ expense is disgraceful, and cannot be allowed to continue,” he said. “My repeated calls for action and pleas to bring an end to these corrupt practices have been continually ignored by virtually every elected official and agency from several police commissioners, Bellone and Sini to the state attorney general, state Board of Elections and many more. While disheartening, their unresponsiveness has come as no surprise, as these individuals and agencies are benefiting from donations and other support directly or indirectly.”

“These actions also violate the Suffolk County Police Department’s own rules and procedures, which cite state election law. While the union’s actions should not reflect negatively on our hardworking rank-and-file police officers, unfortunately, it is hard to escape the stain of such impropriety,” Trotta continued. “Trust in government is paramount in our society. When those entrusted with preserving law and order knowingly break the law to manipulate public policy and enrich themselves, they must be held accountable or that trust will be forever broken.”

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. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Legislator Trotta Wants To Limit Political Activities Of Police

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Legislator Trotta At LegislatureSuffolk County Legislator Rob Trotta—a long-time Suffolk cop now retired—has introduced a bill that would prohibit members of the Suffolk County Police Department from, as its title declares, “engaging in political activity.”

His measure states that the Suffolk County Legislature “determines that legislation is needed in Suffolk County to limit the participation of police officers in the political arena in order to ensure public confidence in the Suffolk County Police Department and for effective maintenance of discipline and the preservation and promotion of the integrity and efficiency of the Police Department and its personnel.”

It also declares that “nothing herein shall a prevent a police officer from: registering and voting in any election; expressing an opinion as individual privately on political issues and candidates; signing political petitions as an individual or personally contribute to a candidate’s campaign, or otherwise participating fully in public affairs.”

It would “prohibit conduct” of a police officer to: “serve as an officer of partisan political parties or clubs in the County of Suffolk; assume an active role in management, organization or financial activities of partisan political clubs, campaigns or parties in the County of Suffolk; contribute any money, directly, or indirectly, to or solicit, collect or receive any money for any political fund or event; become a candidate for a campaign for a partisan elective public office affecting the County of Suffolk; solicit votes in support or in opposition to any partisan candidates within the County of Suffolk; use their official capacity to influence, interfere with or affect the results of any election; serve as a delegate to a political party convention affecting the County of Suffolk.”

And the list of “prohibited conduct” continues: “endorse or oppose a partisan candidate for public office in a political advertisement, broadcast or campaign literature within the County of Suffolk; initiate or circulate a partisan nominating petition within the County of Suffolk; address political gatherings in support of or in opposition to a partisan candidate within the County of Suffolk; serve as a member of a political party committee in the County of Suffolk, or: otherwise engage in prohibited partisan activities on the federal, state, county or municipal level.”

It might seem unlikely that a former Suffolk County Police Department officer would author such legislation. Trotta, of Fort Salonga—he grew up in Commack—for 25 years served as a uniformed officer and then a detective in the department. He retired in 2013 running that year successfully for the Suffolk County Legislature. His tenure as a cop included more than 10 years as a member of the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force. He was named “Cop of the Year” in 1993 and “Detective of the Year” in 2001 by his department superiors. 

As a Suffolk legislator, Trotta, a Republican, has been highly concerned about political activities of Suffolk police unions—led by the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association—endorsing and giving the money as campaign contributions to Suffolk politicians. “The funds are collected illegally,” Trotta said in an interview last week. “Each police officer is forced to give a dollar a day—which comes to a million dollars a year.” Meanwhile, there are “police officers who say they do not want to contribute.” 

They “are essentially bribing politicians,” said Trotta, and in return get lavish contracts. The police unions by intervening in politics “rule by fear and intimidation,” he said.

The Suffolk County Police Department has an unusual structure. The department came into being in 1960 following a countywide referendum in 1958 in which voters were asked whether they wanted to disband their town and village police departments—the long-time police system in all of Suffolk—in favor of a county department. 

A majority of voters in the five East End towns voted no to that, along with voters in several western Suffolk villages, among them the large villages of Amityville and Northport and several smaller villages such as Nissequoque. 

So only in the western Suffolk “police district” where voters opted for the change is the county department the uniformed police force. However, the county still provided that many functions of the new Suffolk County Police Department—its headquarters operation, special units such as the Homicide Squad, Arson Squad, and its Marine Bureau, among others—be financially supported by all county taxpayers. Ostensibly, these components of the new department would provide assistance to the retained town and village departments. They are financed through the “general fund” of the annual county budget into which all Suffolk taxpayers pay.  

More next week on the Trotta legislation.

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. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Robert Moses

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

With Robert Moses having gotten me fired from my first job as a journalist after I wrote about a fierce assault on civil rights protesters by his security force on the opening day of his 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, and after two years of my challenging his plan to build a four-lane highway on Fire Island, I was interested in a show which in recent weeks has been playing in Manhattan. 

Its title: “Straight Line Crazy.” The “straight line,” noted the review in The New Yorker, “is a reference to Moses’ compulsive tendency to draw straight lines on maps and then, implausibly, to gather the resources and marshal the bureaucratic will to make them physical facts as roadways.” Actor Ralph Fiennes plays Moses and “throughout,” says the review by Vinson Cunningham, “ably displays Moses’s faults—his stubbornness, his dishonesty, his bullying, his barely veiled prejudices against people of color and the poor.”

Most of it involves Moses’s activities in New York City—his devastation of neighborhoods by highways he had constructed. Moses was not only crazy about straight lines but also cars although he didn’t have a driver’s license and didn’t drive one. He utilized a chauffeur. Long Island references in the play include how “when Moses is just beginning to wield influence, and planning to open Jones Beach to the public” he made “it possible…to get there by the new Southern State Parkway.” But “not really possible,” Cunningham writes, “for the carless riffraff.”

Add to that: by having bridges on Southern State built low, Moses sought to prevent people of color from New York City traveling by bus to Jones Beach.

Moses was a Suffolk County resident and that’s how I began tangling with him. It was 1962 and I just got a job as a reporter at the Babylon Town Leader, a newspaper which for decades had criticized Moses’s projects. As Robert Caro relates in his award-winning biography of Moses, The Power Broker, Moses had the newspapers of New York City in his pocket. But on Long Island, The Leader was doing what the press is supposed to do: serve as a watchdog, a check on power. 

The week I started at the Leader Moses had just announced his plan to build a four-lane highway on Fire Island (wider than the island at one point). It would, claimed Moses, “anchor” Fire Island from storms. I was assigned to go to Fire Island to do an article about the impacts of the highway on the nature and communities of the 32-mile long roadless barrier beach.

A walk in exquisite Sunken Forest made clear the environmental significance of Fire Island immediately. I learned about the magic of its 17 communities from Fire Islanders who loved this “barefoot paradise.”

I wrote a story, the first of many. What an uphill battle! Hardly any elected officials would say or do anything in opposition to Moses. Meanwhile, we found out how the four-lane highway Moses built to the west, along Jones Beach, rather than being an “anchor,” needed to be regularly bolstered with sand pushed along its sides by bulldozers working furtively at night.

The first call I received the morning the first story appeared was from environmentalist Murray Barbash who, with his brother-in-law, attorney Irving Like, was to go on to organize the Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore. The view was that Moses and his Fire Island highway plan couldn’t be stopped on the state level because of the enormous power of Moses in the state. He had run for governor of New York in 1934 and suffered a huge defeat, so he amassed power by running state commissions and authorities. If Fire Island was to be saved it would have to be through federal action. Also, the National Seashore initiative offered a very positive goal.

Interior Secretary Stewart Udall visited Fire Island and embraced the vision. Conservation-minded Laurance Rockefeller, the brother of then Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who replaced Moses as chairman of the state Council of Parks in 1963, liked the Seashore concept. Moses was furious. He confronted Rockefeller insisting he put a lid on his brother. If Rockefeller wouldn’t, Moses threatened to resign from his many commission and authority posts. (This, according to a Leader source, a staffer at the Long Island State Park Commission which Moses chaired for four decades.) Somehow, Moses thought the state would fall apart without him. Rockefeller wouldn’t be steamrolled. So, Moses quit his government positions.

The bill establishing a Fire Island National Seashore was passed by Congress and signed by President Johnson in 1964. But the Leader was sold that year. I had also covered the early civil rights struggle on Long Island and went to the World’s Fair on its opening day to report on civil rights activists from Suffolk protesting racism in hiring at it. Moses had stayed head of the private corporation which ran the World’s Fair. The attack by his security force on the protesters was intense.     

The chain that had bought the Leader ran my article on what happened as a front-page story with the headline: “Jail Pavilion for Suffolk CORE.” But no longer was I protected by a Moses-critical management. I got a call the morning after the publication of my piece, which also featured my photos, to see the chain’s associate publisher, Wilson Stringer. He told me: “Mr. Moses called and is very upset with you. You’re fired.”

“Straight Line Crazy” is written by David Hare. It runs through December 18th.

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: New Focus On Nazi Center In Suffolk County

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman 

With the opening of a play off-Broadway in Manhattan titled “Camp Siegfried,” what was a major Nazi center for Nazis in the New York area in years before World War II — Camp Siegfried, in the middle of Suffolk County—is receiving renewed attention.

It’s a fitting subject considering the role of Nazi sympathizers in the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the rise of fascist movements in places around the world and also despotic government leaders—from Hungary to Nicaragua and, particularly, Putin in Russia. And there is also the sharp increase of antisemitic talk and incidents. 

Camp Siegfried consisted of a parade ground to which thousands of Nazis came by train and car to march in Nazi uniforms at rallies and listen to hate-filled speeches. It was surrounded by a housing settlement with roads such as Adolph Hitler Street.

The review of the play “Camp Siegfried” by Jesse Green in The New York Times noted how the play “deals with homegrown American Nazism as inculcated at a camp run by the German American Bund in Yaphank, N.Y., from 1936 to 1941. There, in [playright Bess] Wohl’s fact-based fiction, young Aryans are taught Master Race ideology….That there really was a Hitler Street in Yaphank, and roads named for Rommel and Goebells as well, gives ‘Camp Siegfried’ its big clonk of icky relevance….But Wohl…wants to do more than invoke the dread of the evil among us. She wants to expose the emotional roots of fascism that a typically political or social framing…underplays. In this case, that means looking at how right-wing radicalism can be fueled by, and feed into, hysteria…”

A Newsday piece by Verne Gay, headed “When Nazis came to Yaphank: ‘Camp Siegfried’ play explores dark chapter in LI history,” has a subhead, “How Easily Darkness Can Sneak Up On Us.” It cites “the authoritative history of Camp Siegfried by Marvin D. Miller. Miller was a longtime history teacher in Commack. He passed away in 2020. The book is, indeed, the “authoritative history” of the Nazi center and “dark chapter” in Long Island history.

I interviewed Miller after the book was published in 1983. 

Its title is “Wunderlich’s Salute” because that salute was a pivotal event in the saga of Camp Siegfried. It was 1938 and Suffolk County brought charges against six Nazi Bund leaders involved with Camp Siegfried accusing them of violating the New York State Civil Rights Law of 1923 requiring that “oath-bound” organizations file member lists with the state secretary of state. The prosecutor was Assistant Suffolk District Attorney Lindsay Henry.

Martin Wunderlich, a Bundist, was on the stand in Riverhead in a courtroom in which Judge L. Barron Hill of Southold presided.

From the exchange:

Judge Hill: “Stand up and show us how you salute the flag at Camp Siegfried.”

Wunderlich: “I salute the American flag as a member and proud member of the white race.” He then flung up his right arm in the Nazi salute.

Henry: “That is the American salute?”

Wunderlich: “It will be.”

Henry: “It will be? That is what you want to put over the United States, you and your crowd, make us salute that way. That is enough from you.”

After Wunderlich’s Nazi salute, Suffolk County won the case. Camp Siegfried was shut down in 1945. 

Hill and Henry were American patriots.

Hill was a pilot in World War I and Suffolk district attorney from 1932 to 1937 when he became a County Court judge. During World War II he organized the Suffolk County Defense Council which arranged for volunteers to be air-raid spotters and otherwise engage in civil defense. He died in 1985. 

Henry, raised in Babylon, rejoined the U.S. Navy in World War II (he had served in the Navy in World War I) and held the rank of captain. He commanded a landing craft flotilla that hit the shore on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. His actions that day caused President Harry Truman to award him the Silver Star for gallantry in action. He was elected Suffolk DA in 1947 and served until 1953. He died in 1959.

His son, named Patrick Henry, was Suffolk DA from 1978 to 1990. And he was a former Navy officer, too. He died in 2018. Lindsay Henry’s grandson, also named Lindsay Henry, is an attorney in Babylon and previously a member of the Babylon Town Board.

In 2016, the Suffolk County Community College-based Center for Social Justice and Human Understanding: Featuring the Holocaust Collection (I am its vice chairperson) held an exhibit titled: “Goose Stepping on Long Island: Camp Siegfried.” Professor Steven Klipstein, who for decades has taught Holocaust Studies at the college and is the center’s Holocaust scholar, opened the exhibit by declaring: “They chose Long Island because they thought it would be sympathetic to their ideas….I shake my head with incredulity about these people being so close” in proximity. “

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. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Steven Englebright's Loss Is A Loss For The Environment

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A big change resulting from the 2022 election in Suffolk County was the narrow defeat of 30-year (!) New York State Assemblyman Steven Englebright—a surprise upset. 

Steve for decades has been a giant in environmental affairs in Suffolk and the state. He was elected to the Suffolk Legislature in 1983 and in 1992 initially elected to the State Assembly. He has been the leading environmental figure in the New York State Legislature. He’s chair of the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee. He’s been prime sponsor of hundreds of successful measures on the county and state levels on the environment.

“Nobody has made a bigger contribution to the environment,” commented Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. last week. “Steve has been at the forefront of all the major environmental measures. He has made such a big difference,” said Thiele, of Sag Harbor, who has served with Englebright in the county and state legislatures.

Englebright, of Setauket, is especially proud that he helped “shape” the New York State Clean Air, Clean Water, and Green Jobs Bond Act approved overwhelmingly statewide in a referendum this past Election Day. He is equally proud of his labor last year on a “prelude to it,” a “Green Amendment” added to the state constitution. It, too, was approved overwhelmingly in a statewide referendum on Election Day 2021. 

Of the $4.2 billion bond act, he said: “We are an island, after all, and we need to challenge the overheating of the earth’s atmosphere and earth’s oceans. Long Island is at the frontline. It is important to do what we can to set an example to sister states and other nations in the fight against climate change.” The Green Amendment now enshrined into New York law declares that every person has “the right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”

A Democrat, he attributes his reported 23,707 to 22,734 loss to Republican lawyer Edward Flood to a spillover in Brookhaven Town of votes for town favorite son Lee Zeldin for governor, and “at the end of the campaign, dark money mailings full of misinformation and accusations over the bail issue.”

Steve’s love for the environment started early. He grew up in Bayside, Queens and “I saw the last farms in Bayside developed,” he was recalling last week. He spent time in “Bayside Woods—all gone now, built on. All the open space has been lost.” What happened to his boyhood home “left an indelible imprint.” He spent summers at the vegetable farm of his grandparents in Indiana. “I always walked in their shadow.” He spoke of his grandfather “leading me out into the field and showing me how to plant,” working in “my grandma’s garden” and exploring the “stream that ran along the farm. It was a very impactful part of my early life.” 

He went to the University of Tennessee for its “great geology program” and received a Bachelor’s Degree and later a Master’s in paleontology/sedimentology from Stony Brook University. Stony Brook hired him to “curate its geological collection.” Because of his background in museums—including as a junior curator at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and volunteer in the vertebrae and paleontology collection at the American Museum of Natural History—he was asked to launch a museum. He founded the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at the university.

The first exhibit concerned the Long Island Pine Barrens. Steve understood the extraordinary purity of the water beneath the Pine Barrens, how their sandy porous soil allows rainwater to migrate cleanly to the aquifers below on which Long Islanders depend for all their potable water. Underneath the Pine Barrens, Englebright knew, was the finest of our water supply. And, he comprehended the ecological import of Pine Barrens habitat which includes many rare plants, birds and animals. 

In the 1970s and early 80s, hardly anyone else on Long Island understood any of this. The Pine Barrens were considered “scrub,” “wasteland”—not important like the land along the shoreline or farmland—and were designated in government development plans for industrial use.

The first exhibit focused on the Pine Barrens where the Hauppauge Industrial Park had gone—on top of Pine Barrens. “I had watched it, basically a complete ecosystem, wiped away and transformed into buildings and parking lots,” Steve recounted. He decided it “was basically unethical to simply document the passing of the ecosystem.” So, he decided to get into politics—running for the Suffolk Legislature—and through government get environmental action. 

Steve taught me and many others about the huge significance of the Pine Barrens. He would take people, one at a time, up Danger Hill in Manorville. From the top of it, one could see the Long Island Sound to the north, bays and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and to the west and east great stretches of green Pine Barrens. We were looking, said Steve, at “Long Island’s reservoir.” He was critical to the passage of the Long Island Pine Barrens Protection Act of 1993 which has saved more than 100,000 acres of Pine Barrens. 

“I think I have the strongest environmental record in the history of the state legislature,” Steve said last week. What a loss his election defeat is to the state and this county!

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.