SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Jan 2023 Thoughts Turn To Bellone's Replacement

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone is finishing his 12th year of officeThis new year is the last year as county executive for Steve Bellone. The eighth Suffolk County executive (H. Lee Dennison was the first, taking office in 1960), Bellone, a Democrat from North Babylon, is term-limited after 12 years in office. 

He was a member of the Babylon Town Board and that town’s supervisor before his election in 2011 as county executive—the top job in Suffolk County government. He is a lawyer.

Dave Calone of Setauket, a lawyer, too, and a former federal and state prosecutor, announced this summer that he is seeking to be the Democratic candidate for county executive in 2023. Calone has also held several positions on Long Island among them being a trustee of the Long Island Power Authority and a board member of the Community Development Corp., an affordable housing nonprofit. In launching his campaign, he noted he already had $1 million in campaign contributions. 

Democrat Jay Schneiderman said in November that he is considering a run for the position. “I’ll be a good candidate,” declared Schneiderman, who is the only person to ever serve as a supervisor of two Suffolk towns—first East Hampton and then, after 12 years as a Suffolk County legislator, supervisor of the Town of Southampton. He resides in Southampton and has western Suffolk roots: he grew up in Hauppauge.

No Republican has announced her or his candidacy yet for county executive. But Suffolk Republican Chairman Jesse Garcia says his party has a “deep bench” of potential GOP nominees and he is optimistic that the Republican candidate will win. 

There has not been a Republican Suffolk County executive since Robert Gaffney, an attorney and former FBI agent, who served three terms from 1991 to 2003. Previously, Gaffney, who then lived in Miller Place, had been a state assemblyman.

But 2023 could be a good year for a GOP candidate for county executive considering Republican wins in Suffolk this past year and the year before. In 2021, a Republican majority took control of the Suffolk County Legislature. And last year, in what was described as a the “red wave” that moved across Long Island, Suffolk GOP wins included Nick LaLota, former chief of staff of the legislature and a trustee of the Village of Amityville, to the U.S. House of Representatives in the lst C.D. 

Republican sources, meanwhile, say that Brookhaven Town Supervisor Edward Romaine of Center Moriches might become the GOP candidate for county executive this year. 

Brookhaven Town’s 70th supervisor, Romaine was elected to that office in a special election in 2012. He left the Suffolk County Legislature to run for town supervisor following the tragic death of his son, Keith, a town councilman. Keith, of Moriches, died at 36 after being struck with pneumonia. Ed left the legislature committed to do what Keith would have pursued in Brookhaven Town.

Ed was a history teacher in the Hauppauge School District, where he taught for 10 years. In 1980, he entered public service as the Brookhaven’s first commissioner of Housing and Community Development and was later appointed its director of Economic Development. 

He was a member of the Suffolk Legislature from 1986 through 1989 when he was elected Suffolk County clerk, a position he held for 16 years. In 2005, he returned to the legislature and was re-elected three times—leaving to run for Brookhaven Town supervisor. In 2003 he ran for county executive but lost to then Democrat, since a Republican, Steve Levy.

Said Calone in a statement in July: “I’m running for county executive to make sure everyone benefits from the same kind of opportunities that I have enjoyed growing up in Suffolk County. I’m eager to get to work for the people of Suffolk, to enable everyone to have the chance to get a good paying job, to protect our clean air and water, to help families afford to live here, and to create safe, thriving communities.”

Calone co-founded the Suffolk County Forward program, an effort to provide support to county businesses and workers when COVID-19 struck, served as chairman of the county’s Superstorm Sandy Review Task Force, and created the Long Island Emerging Technologies Fund.

He tried to be the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016 in the lst C.D. but was defeated in a Democratic primary by Anna Throne-Holst, then the Southampton Town supervisor. She lost to Republican Lee Zeldin in the general election.

Schneiderman, after graduating from Hauppauge High School—where his history teacher was Ed Romaine—attended Ithaca College and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry. He then was awarded two Masters of Arts degrees, one in education from the State University of New York at Cortland, and one in administration from Long Island University-C.W. Post.

He was a teacher of science, mathematics—and also music. Schneiderman is an accomplished drummer. Meanwhile, he also managed his family’s motel in Montauk and subsequently formed his own property management company.

Schneiderman’s first position in government came in 1991 when he was appointed a member of the Town of East Hampton Zoning Board of Appeals. He became its chairman in 1996. He served in that capacity until 1999 when he was elected to the first of two terms as the supervisor of the Town of East Hampton.

In 2003, he was elected a member of the Suffolk County Legislature, serving as its deputy presiding officer from 2014 to the end of his term in 2015. He was term-limited as a county legislator but having moved to Southampton was eligible to run for the supervisor’s job in that town. In 2018, he ran for Suffolk County comptroller but lost to the incumbent, GOPer John M. Kennedy, Jr. of Nesconset. First elected Southampton Town supervisor in 2015, Schneiderman is term-limited from running for Southampton supervisor this year.

Of running for county executive, he says: “I have the right resume for the job.”

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: 2022 Overshadowed By Russia

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It’s far from Suffolk County, but I’ve been to Russia many times. And the year 2022 was overshadowed for me—and I’m sure many others in Suffolk and the United States, in fact the world—by what Russia has been doing.

“Russian Missiles Plunge Millions Into Frigid Dark,” was the headline of the lead story on the front page of The New York Times two weeks ago. The subhead: “Ukrainians Ask for Relief as Fears About Fresh Offensive Grow.” Another subhead: “Huddling For Warmth.”

The next day in The Times there was a large photo covering the upper left of its front page with the caption “Moments of Unspeakable Grief.” It depicted two elderly people at the door of their bombed home—the man crouching, holding his head, the woman in tears. The caption continued, “In the aftermath of an attack in Kherson, the horrors of war in Ukraine take on a deeper meaning when seen close up.” It directed readers to an inside page of photos and narrative that included: “At another badly damaged house, paramedics carried out a bedridden 85-year-old woman, Lyudmila…”

How can a nation of intelligent people with a love for poetry, music, dance and literature be involved in a murderous, barbarous attack on the population of its neighbor? 

The reason is Vladimir Putin, the former KGB colonel drunk with power, aiming to reconstitute a “Greater Russia”—whether the people of the nations he seeks to annex and dominate like it or not.  

And this is, despite Russia, after World War II and losing 20 million people and itself invaded by Germany, being a founding member of the United Nations and joining in a basic tenet of the new organization prohibiting member states from the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” 

The savage invasion of Ukraine which Putin initiated and has been directing is a flat-out violation of that principle. The brutality of Russia’s invasion, its killing of innocent people, its war crimes—horrendous!

At our synagogue, Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor, a “Welcome Circle,” working with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, has brought a Ukrainian family to the safety of the United States. They are not Jewish; they are Ukrainian Orthodox. The family consists of a 37 year-old mother, Viktoriia, and her two sons, 15 year-old Yaroslav and 10 year-old Nikita. They are living in a house in Sag Harbor provided by a congregant. The boys are happily matriculated in Sag Harbor schools. 

Ron Klausner, the synagogue’s co-president, related the scene at Kennedy Airport: “We welcomed them into our outstretched arms, all of us crying with relief. Their luggage—life savings—consisted of one medium and one carry-on luggage, two guitars, three small knapsacks, a small dog and a cat. They wore their only set of clothes.”

The family is from a town in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. The Russians invaded it in 2014 and have held siege ever since. Viktoriia’s parents remain in a town still occupied by Russian soldiers. 

Klausner related that with her sons (and their dog and cat) “Viktoriia escaped and managed to travel from Slovyansk to Piensk, Poland and then, after connecting with us through HIAS, to Posnan, Poland, Berlin and finally to Frankfurt to board the plane to the United States. It was not the same as boarding a ship in steerage to cross the Atlantic like so many of our ancestors did but the trip was nevertheless long, grueling and traumatic.”

“Thanks to a most generous donor the family is now living in a fully furnished house in the Village of Sag Harbor until Spring. They can easily walk to town, school, shopping, the beach, the library and the food pantry. The house is a dream come true for them. The family all started crying when they first walked into the house…after living in a mold infested basement in Poland,” said Klausner. “One of the most important values of our faith is to welcome the stranger among us, just as we were once strangers in a new land. I can tell you that each member of the Welcome Circle has been moved to tears by the courage of this family and the awareness of the life altering impact of our actions.”

I went to Russia seven times invited by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, environmental advisor to Russian Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin, to give presentations on environmental and energy issues, all over the huge nation. Yablokov, who died in 2017, was regarded as the father of the environmental movement in Russia, the country’s most eminent environmental scientist. 

The last trip I made to Russia was exactly 20 years ago—in 2002. I gave the keynote address at a conference in Tomsk in Siberia, and also a presentation at Tomsk Polytechnic University. Putin had been in power for three years and already things were changing. As Dr. Yablokov stated in 1999: “The result of Putin’s politics is fascism.”

I would not return to Russia under any condition now with Putin having hijacked the country. In 2002, as the Delta jet was a half-hour out of Moscow, heading to New York, I breathed a sigh of relief being outside Russian airspace. Putin and his vicious, illegal war must be stopped. What he is doing and the resulting devastation is indeed causing unspeakable grief. 

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: 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.