New York City

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      A Century Ago, Golf Fans Watched a ‘Do-or-Die’ Moment

      by

      Bobby Jones won the first of his four U.S. Opens at a course near what is now Kennedy Airport. The New York Times was there.Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a moment in the history of golf that will be recreated where it happened 100 years ago tomorrow. We’ll also get details on why there will probably be more squabbling over the maps for New York’s congressional districts.Bobby Jones in 1927, four years after he won the U.S. Open at Inwood Country Club.Fox Photos/Getty ImagesOn July 15, 1923, 100 years ago tomorrow, a 21-year-old golfer named Bobby Jones stood just off the 18th fairway at Inwood Country Club, now just across from Kennedy International Airport. My colleague Corey Kilgannon explains how Jones made history:Jones had squandered a commanding lead in a playoff for the U.S. Open the day before, but he still had a chance to salvage a victory over the Scottish star Bobby Cruickshank — if Jones made a daunting shot. The New York Times described what happened as “truly miraculous.”“Without a moment’s hesitation,” The Times said, “Jones drew his No. 1 iron out of the bag, took a momentary look at the lie, glanced at the flag and swung. The ball flew off the face of his club, rose in the air and carried squarely on the green, 190 yards away.” The ball landed within six feet of the cup.That moment will be memorialized on Saturday at Inwood, where several of Jones’s descendants are expected at a club tournament and dinner. Among them is a grandson, Dr. Bob Jones IV, who said his grandfather had been on a losing streak and was considering quitting championship golf until his “do-or-die moment” in 1923.“When he got to Inwood, he was really considering that this might be his last tournament,” Dr. Jones said. “If he had not executed that shot and won, I think he would have given up tournament golf and become an obscure sports trivia item.”Instead, Jones drilled the ball next to the hole and two-putted to win the first of his four U.S. Opens.It jump-started golf’s most successful amateur career, one that would include Jones’s 13 majors, four of them in a single calendar year (1930) — golf’s Grand Slam. He became a lawyer but later designed the Augusta National Golf Club and co-founded the Masters tournament.Bobby Jones receiving the trophy after winning the U.S. Open in 1923.Edwin LevickHis triumph at Inwood came at a time when golf had assumed a place in the debonair lives of the well-to-do in the Jazz Age, when the New York area was the cradle of golf in America. There’s a reason F. Scott Fitzgerald made the blasé Jordan Baker a golfer in “The Great Gatsby,” published two years after Jones’s Inwood victory. Babe Ruth and the Three Stooges used to frequent Van Cortlandt, a public course in the Bronx.Inwood will try to recapture the old-fashioned vibe on Saturday. On several holes, players will have to use hickory-shafted replicas of Jones’s clubs. For the putting contest, they will have to use a replica of Jones’s favorite putter, which was known as Calamity Jane, and old-fashioned golf balls. For the dinner in the clubhouse, guests are encouraged to wear Jazz Age dress.But first, during the cocktail hour, they will get a chance to replicate Jones’s storied shot from the same spot. If they can. It is still a daunting shot, even with modern high-compression golf balls and titanium-shafted clubs.“With a wooden shaft, it’s a lot harder to get the ball up in the air,” said Kyle Higgins, the club’s head pro, who added that Jones often played in a long-sleeve dress shirt and tie — something Higgins has tried himself, to get the feel of hitting the way Jones did. (“It’s definitely restrictive and makes it pretty tough to swing,” he said.)Jones had wasted a three-shot lead in the final round to let Cruickshank into a playoff. But Jones’ shot on 18 “sealed the fate of the little Scottish gamecock,” The Times reported, and “opened up the portals of fame” to Jones.The celebration, with spectators carrying Jones triumphantly toward the clubhouse as a kilted bagpiper wailed away, is known to many club members even today.“The day is less about competition and more about celebrating the anniversary,” said the club’s golf chairman, Brian Ziegler. “We try to make sure everyone who joins is aware of the club’s history, and we knew we needed to celebrate the 100th anniversary.”WeatherIt’s going to be mostly cloudy, with temperatures in the 80s. There’s a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon persisting into the evening. At night, temps will fall to the mid-70s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).The latest New York newsSeth Harrison/USA Today NetworkPolice fatally shoot man after report of stolen fruit: A 37-year-old man was shot by the police in New Rochelle, N.Y., on July 3 after he was accused of eating grapes and a banana without paying, his family’s lawyer said. The man died a week later.Mayor turns to his religious base: As signs of trouble have arisen in recent weeks, Mayor Eric Adams has leaned heavily on the religious segment of his multiethnic, outer Manhattan base for support.One man’s war on pickleball: “Paddleball Paul” is making his last stand to eradicate pickleball from the handball courts of Central Park. It’s not going very well.More squabbling over mapsCarlos Bernate for The New York TimesA New York appeals court ordered the state’s congressional map redrawn yet again. Or re-re-redrawn.Language aside, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Albany sided with Democrats in a long-running legal fight, saying that the districts drawn last year on orders from the state’s highest court had been only a temporary fix. The justices ordered the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission to restart a process that would effectively give the Democrat-dominated State Legislature final say over the contours of New York’s 26 House seats for the rest of the decade.My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that if that decision is upheld, as many as six Republican-held seats could go the Democrats’ way.The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, will have the final say, because Republican leaders immediately said they would appeal. And it was the Court of Appeals that blocked Democrats’ attempt to gerrymander the maps of the state’s congressional districts last year. The high court said then that the Democrats had violated the state Constitution and ignored the will of voters who approved a 2014 constitutional amendment intended to limit political influence in redistricting.The current district lines were drawn by a court-appointed expert last year to maximize competition. The new map helping Republicans flip four seats on the way to taking control of the House.If Thursday’s ruling stands, both parties believe that Democrats could draw maps that would pass muster legally while making re-election almost impossible for incumbent Republicans, such as Representatives Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro in the Hudson Valley, or Anthony D’Esposito and George Santos on Long Island and in Queens.New Democratic seats in New York could help offset expected Republican gains in North Carolina, where a newly conservative top court is allowing the G.O.P. to replace a more neutral map. Separately, Democrats won an unexpected victory at the U.S. Supreme Court. The court said Alabama had used a map that watered down the power of Black voters in a decision that could affect redistricting in several southern states.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top House Democrat, praised Thursday’s ruling and called the current New York congressional map undemocratic. METROPOLITAN diaryBarefoot on the FDear Diary:It was a hot summer day in the late 1990s. Dressed in a sundress and slide-style sandals, I was about to step onto an arriving F at 14th Street when one of my sandals slipped off and fell between the train and the platform and then down onto the tracks.I sheepishly entered the car and looked for a seat, praying that no one had noticed. Of course, several people had“Well, that’s a first!” said one of them, an older man.With my bare foot tucked behind my sandaled one, I spent the rest of the ride home to Brooklyn pondering what I would do once I got off.Should I walk through the station and the three blocks to my apartment with one sandal and one bare foot? Should I remove the other shoe and go fully barefoot?As we pulled into the station, a woman sitting a few seats away approached me and pulled something from her bag.“Excuse me,” she said, “but I saw what happened when you got on the train, and I wanted to offer you this pair of flip-flops.”— Megan WormanIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Johnna Margalotti and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      From Cell to City Hall: Yusef Salaam’s Win Shows Shift in Politics of Crime

      by

      During New York City’s crack era in the early 1990s, with homicide tallies five times those of today, the authorities resorted to ruthless law enforcement.“The police would pull your car over at will, just because you were Black, and go through the car and your pockets,” said Derrick Hamilton, 57, who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn in the 1980s and was first arrested as a teen. “They’d pull your socks off, pull your pants off.”Crime fell across the country during the ensuing decades in a broad societal shift, and New York become one of America’s safest big cities and a thriving tourist destination. But in its darkest days police and prosecutors had cut corners and used tactics that left untold numbers of innocent people — mostly poor men of color — imprisoned on bogus murder, rape and robbery charges.The prisoners’ dogged legal challenges prompted reinvestigations helped by left-leaning prosecutors, advances in DNA testing, pressure from newly formed advocacy groups and generous government restitution, turning New York into a national hotbed of exoneration. In recent years, one innocent middle-aged man after another has been released, ravaged by years in prison, into a tamer city.There is no more striking personification of the change than Yusef Salaam, 49, who was arrested in the infamous 1989 Central Park jogger rape case, in which detectives coerced false confessions out of five Harlem teenagers. They were exonerated after years in prison.Last month, Mr. Salaam won a Democratic primary for a City Council seat, making him all but certain to become the first exoneree to hold elective office in the city.“It was inconceivable in the 1990s that Yusef Salaam could be elected to the City Council, but all these years later, there’s a change in the public consciousness and there’s now a willingness to put victims from that era in positions of authority,” said Joel Rudin, a lawyer who has handled dozens of wrongful conviction claims. “We’ve come a very long way.”Yusef Salaam said he was wrongly imprisoned by a brutal system of law enforcement working as it was designed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOnce, prosecutors’ offices were invested in defending bad convictions, but now they uncover them with review units in all five boroughs. Progressive district attorneys who campaigned on the issue have dismissed hundreds of lower-level convictions linked to discredited police officers.The cause has attracted wealthy patrons, as well as prestigious law firms now devoting pro bono work. It has become fodder for documentaries, docudramas and podcasts.For the exonerated, compensation cases are being settled for increasing amounts, often totaling well over $10 million. Over the past decade, the city has paid out about $500 million. And payouts for claims against New York State, another source of compensation, are among the country’s highest.Taken together with recoveries from civil rights cases, the more than $1 billion paid out to those wrongly convicted in New York is the highest of any state in the country by far, according to Jeffrey Gutman, a law professor at George Washington University. A small industry of private lawyers has sprung up to help former prisoners get paid, and to get paid themselves.The situation was engendered by a very different New York. For many residents, streets and subways were to be avoided after dark. Bryant Park in Midtown, today a revitalized urban gem, was a drug market. In 1990, there were nearly 2,250 murders, five times today’s totals.For the police, it was a time to crack down on minor offenses, and street crime units operated under the motto “We own the night.”The desperation to catch and convict at any cost fostered “a willingness to bend the rules,” Mr. Rudin said.Emboldened detectives manufactured cases by manipulating witnesses, coercing confessions, using suggestive identification procedures and withholding exonerating evidence, he said. Locking up a certain percentage of innocent people was simply “collateral damage.”Since his release, Derrick Hamilton has used his skills as a paralegal trying to free other inmates from prison.Anthony Lanzilote for The New York TimesMr. Salaam said in an interview last week that he and the other members of the Central Park Five were “run over by the spiked wheels of justice,” thanks to detectives who knew which levers they could pull in 1989.“The system was operating exactly how it was designed,” he said. “These were people who were supposed to be protecting and serving us, but they literally built their careers off the backs of folks just like me.”As the city’s economy improved and unemployment declined throughout the 1990s, murder and other violent crime decreased. Bad arrests continued nonetheless.Rudolph W. Giuliani took office in 1994 with a pledge to crack down on crime through aggressive policing. His administration was plagued by allegations of police brutality and civil rights abuses, as well as wrongdoing like the torture of Abner Louima and killing of Amadou Diallo.The highest totals of bad convictions in the city came in 1997, when there were 22, of which 15 were for murder, as listed on the National Registry of Exonerations. The group lists at least 230 exonerations for New York City since 1989.“Detectives were expected to clear cases, and once they had made up their mind, they’d stop investigating,” said Irving Cohen, 80, who has represented about 15 wrongfully convicted New Yorkers since the late 1980s. He recalled receiving weekly letters from inmates asking for help. “There were a lot of homicides,” he said. “They did whatever they had to do to get the person convicted, whether they believed the person was guilty or not.”Irving Cohen, left, has represented wrongly convicted New Yorkers since the 1980s.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesMr. Salaam’s exoneration in 2002 was a stunning reversal, one of the first cases that showed the pitfalls of New York’s wholesale justice. A convicted murderer and serial rapist admitted that he was responsible for the attack, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office filed court papers clearing Mr. Salaam and the other members of the Central Park Five.But some police officials continued to blame the wrongly convicted men despite D.N.A. evidence. The district attorney at the time, Robert M. Morgenthau, found no coercion by officers or prosecutors.Many dismissed cases involved a relative handful of officers, including Louis Scarcella, a former Brooklyn homicide detective whose conduct has led to the review of dozens of cases and to at least eight murder convictions being overturned. Mr. Scarcella has denied any wrongdoing.One of his cases was that of Mr. Hamilton, who served more than 20 years on a 1991 murder charge. He litigated from prison, with limited access to phones and correspondence materials. He drafted briefs from a cramped cell, researched cases in a meager law library and wrote legal letters longhand from solitary confinement.For Mr. Hamilton, things changed when a key eyewitness came forward years after his conviction to say that Mr. Scarcella had coerced her into lying.Louis Scarcella’s conduct as a Brooklyn homicide detective led to at least eight murder convictions being overturned.John Taggart for The New York TimesThe case was taken up by the Brooklyn district attorney’s conviction integrity unit, which, with more than 30 exonerations since 2014, is one of the most robust units in the nation and one reason the borough has by far the highest number of overturned convictions of any in the city, with 88 on the national registry.In 2019, after the Bronx prosecutors’ conviction integrity unit and the Innocence Project presented new evidence, a judge vacated the 1989 murder conviction of Huwe Burton, who had been coerced by detectives into a false confession at age 16.The Bronx district attorney, Darcel Clark, said that detectives had used the discredited practices of the era.“What they did was not necessarily wrong — that is the way things were done then,” she told The New York Times in 2019. “For 1989, that was standard practice for the N.Y.P.D., but now we know better.”Huwe Burton was wrongly convicted at 16 and spent decades in prison. The district attorney said detectives had followed the norms of 1989.Gregg Vigliotti for The New York TimesSome disagree. Police and prosecutors are almost never disciplined for misconduct, including coercing innocent suspects into confessing, said Rebecca Brown, who for the past eight years was director of policy at the Innocence Project in Manhattan.And police still can lie and make false promises to suspects, including children, to elicit false confessions, she said.“Many of the contributing causes are still alive and well in New York City,” she said. “There’s nothing resembling robust accountability.”Still, changes have been made to interrogations and suspect lineups, and there is more oversight of prosecutors and access to officers’ discipline records.Standards have been improved for obtaining more reliable confessions and identifications, Mr. Rudin said, adding that judges and prosecutors are now generally more skeptical of cases built around jailhouse informants. Defense lawyers, previously stymied by limited access to prosecutors’ case information, are now entitled to more of it, and can prepare a proper defense, he said.And the politics have changed. In Mr. Salaam’s City Council campaign, he spoke often about his conviction and exoneration. In his interview, he urged measures like drug treatment instead of prison for drug offenders and allowing lower-level offenders to avoid Rikers Island.“We don’t want to put innocent people in jail,” he said.As for Mr. Hamilton, he has worked since his release as an activist and paralegal to identify and overturn other wrongful convictions, including numerous ones linked to Mr. Scarcella. He is part of a brotherhood of exonerees who cooperate to prepare legal briefs and continue to visit inmates, donate money and raise awareness about cases.“My loyalty,” he said, “is to those guys still wrongfully in prison.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Six Charged With Organizing Illegal Donations to Adams’s 2021 Campaign

      by

      One defendant knew Mayor Eric Adams when they were police officers. Prosecutors did not accuse the mayor of knowing about what they called a scheme to acquire thousands of dollars in extra public matching funds.A retired inspector who worked and socialized with Mayor Eric Adams when they were both members of the New York Police Department was charged on Friday with conspiring with four construction executives and a bookkeeper to funnel illegal donations to Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign.The 27-count indictment accuses the defendants, some of whom had sophisticated knowledge of campaign finance law, of trying to conceal the source of thousands of dollars in donations by making them in the names of colleagues and relatives. The indictment, announced by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, says the group sought influence and perhaps city contracts, but it does not accuse Mr. Adams or his campaign of misconduct and does not suggest he was aware of the scheme.Mr. Bragg said in a statement that the defendants had concocted “a deliberate scheme to game the system in a blatant attempt to gain power.”In addition to the retired police inspector, Dwayne Montgomery, those charged were Shamsuddin Riza, Millicent Redick, Ronald Peek and the brothers Yahya and Shahid Mushtaq.The indictment describes the Mushtaqs as principals in EcoSafety Consultants, a construction firm that is also charged in the indictment. Mr. Riza, the operator of a second construction firm that was separately charged, has also worked with EcoSafety, the district attorney’s office said. Ms. Redick worked for him as a bookkeeper. Mr. Peek works at another construction safety firm.EcoSafety has been a city subcontractor since April 2021, according to records maintained by the city comptroller’s Office. The city has paid the firm $470,000 in that time.Scott Grauman, a lawyer for Shahid Mushtaq and EcoSafety, noted that his clients had pleaded not guilty pleas at an arraignment on Friday. “We will be vigorously defending against the allegations,” he added. Yahya Mushtaq had not been arraigned, but Mr. Grauman, who represents him as well, said he would also plead not guilty and vigorously fight the charges.Alexei Grosshtern, a lawyer for Ms. Redick, the bookkeeper, said his client knew only one of the other defendants, Mr. Riza. Ms. Redick, Mr. Grosshtern added, was unaware of any scheme and was surprised to be arrested. A lawyer for Mr. Riza could not immediately be reached for comment.Mr. Montgomery is related by marriage to Mr. Riza and is a former colleague of Mr. Adams’s. “Montgomery was a colleague of the mayor in the Police Department whom he knew socially and worked on criminal justice issues with,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for the mayor’s 2021 campaign. “Dozens of former police officers and criminal justice advocates hosted events for the mayor over the course of the campaign.”Mr. Montgomery’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, said his client had no business with the city and had not asked Mr. Adams, a friend of 35 years, to take any action on his behalf. “Dwayne Montgomery is a New York City hero, not a manufactured hero,” Mr. Ricco said, pointing to his client’s three decades of service with the Police Department and his commitment to the Harlem neighborhood where he grew up and where he was respected by the community. After Mr. Montgomery retired from the department in 2009, he was the chief executive of a security company, Overwatch Services, for five years. A City Hall spokesman said Philip Banks III, Mr. Adams’s deputy mayor for public safety, bought the firm from Mr. Montgomery around 2015. Winnie Greco, an adviser to the mayor, served with Mr. Banks on the Overwatch Services management team, according to an archived copy of the company’s website. Ms. Greco declined to comment.Mr. Montgomery’s biography on the archived web page of a separate security company, Public Safety Reimagined, which he co-founded last year, says he is also the director of integrity for Local 237 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents some city workers. New York City’s complex campaign finance law sits at the heart of the conduct detailed in the court papers. To diminish the influence of big donors and to help less-connected candidates get a leg up, New York City matches the first $250 of a resident’s donation eight to one. The defendants are accused of trying to mask large donations by funneling them through so-called straw donors. That enabled the campaign to garner more city funds, and potentially amplified the defendants’ influence with the incoming mayor.It was unclear how much public money was spent as a result of the scheme.On Friday, Mr. Thies thanked prosecutors for “their hard work on behalf of taxpayers.”“The campaign always held itself to the highest standards and we would never tolerate these actions,” Mr. Thies said. “The campaign will of course work with the D.A.’s office, the Campaign Finance Board and any relevant authorities.”The defendants held two fund-raisers for Mr. Adams, one in August 2020 and the other a year later. The second took place after Mr. Adams had won the Democratic primary, effectively ensuring his election as mayor.For each fund-raiser, according to prosecutors, the defendants recruited straw donors and then reimbursed them.“I’ll put the money up for you,” Mr. Riza texted one relative, according to the indictment.The defendants seemed aware that they were engaging in risky behavior.“You gotta be careful cause you gotta make sure you do it through workers they trust, that’s not gonna talk, because remember a guy went to jail for that,” Mr. Peek told Mr. Riza at one point, according to the indictment.The defendants appeared hopeful that their donations would help them win contracts on a development project. In July 2021, Mr. Riza forwarded an email advertising the project to Mr. Montgomery.“FYI! This is the one I want, Safety, Drywall, and Security one project but we all can eat!” Mr. Riza wrote, the indictment says.It was unclear whether Mr. Adams appeared at the fund-raisers. But Mr. Montgomery told Mr. Riza that the mayor would be more likely to do so if they could promise a certain amount of money would be raised, a practice that is not uncommon among politicians.Mr. Adams “doesn’t want to do anything if he doesn’t get 25 Gs,” Mr. Montgomery said, according to the indictment.Mr. Adams’s campaign said Mr. Montgomery appeared to be referring to the standard amount expected of hosts for a general election fund-raiser.In a July 2021 phone call, Mr. Riza told Mr. Peek: “I know what the campaign finance laws is. Make sure it’s $1,000 in your name and $1,000 in another person’s name because the matching funds is eight-to-one, so $2,000 is $16,000.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      For Yusef Salaam, a Landslide Just Might Be the Best Revenge

      by

      After his wrongful conviction as one of the Central Park Five was overturned, Mr. Salaam found it hard to rebuild his life. Now he stands to take office next year.This week, 34 years after he and four other teenage boys who barely knew one another were bound together by notorious failures of justice, Yusef Salaam was officially declared the winner in the Democratic primary for a seat in New York’s City Council, having received almost 64 percent of the vote. Given that more than three-quarters of voters in the district identify as Democrats, we can assume that beginning in January, he will represent Harlem, where he grew up, was arrested and returned after serving nearly seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit.The crime — the rape and near-fatal beating of a 28-year-old investment banker who was jogging in Central Park one night in April 1989 — came to define a late-20th century city plagued by entwined crises of violence, ferocious racial polarization and worsening inequity. The boys, known as the Central Park Five, were convicted on the grounds of coerced false confessions. In Mr. Salaam’s case, there wasn’t even recorded evidence of an admission of guilt. No DNA evidence linked any of the accused assailants to the victim; they were exonerated in 2002 only after the actual offender, an imprisoned serial rapist, came forward and provided forensic evidence that proved his culpability.Mr. Salaam’s electoral victory is as much a poetic correction as it is a political success. It signals not only a triumph over an entrenched political establishment — his rivals were longtime elected officials in their 60s and 70s — but also over an idealistic brand of progressivism embodied by the incumbent councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan, whose popularity fell off quickly. A young Democratic Socialist elected two years ago on a platform of “radical love” and police abolitionism, Ms. Jordan dropped out of the race in May when her defeat seemed certain.From the vantage of middle age — Mr. Salaam is now 49 — he can reflect and say that Harlem has been poorly governed for a long time. “When I look at 125th Street, I see rats, drugs, empty lots, the need for wraparound services,” he said during a conversation a few days before the race was called. “We’ve had legends here, but we have not had the full investment our tax dollars require.”Six years ago, Mr. Salaam moved to Georgia; Harlem had become so expensive. He returned at the end of last year. He sees the lack of affordable housing as the area’s chief concern, and he is committed to working with developers to create more. The problem, as he sees it, is that too often when “developers are coming into a community to develop, we are usually called to the meeting after they have decided to do whatever they are going to do.”Ms. Jordan did not show the same kind of flexibility. One reason she fell into disfavor with Harlemites was that she effectively killed a project on 145th Street that would have delivered hundreds of apartments at below-market rates; she insisted there were not enough for those in the lowest income brackets. Ultimately, the developer used the land for a truck depot.Mr. Salaam’s ascent suggests the political appeal of lived experience over the attraction of outlier ideologies that have been cultivated at a privileged distance. Ms. Jordan is also from Harlem, but she is the daughter of doctors, a graduate of the Calhoun School (a private school on the Upper West Side) and Brown, a poet and an independent publisher focused on the work of literary activists. After the murder of George Floyd, much of the rhetoric around defunding police seemed intentionally hyperbolic, a means to an end of reducing, not eliminating the presence of police. Ms. Jordan, though, held a literal, more absolutist view.“I actually believe in moving toward a world without cops,” she told The Nation in a 2021 interview. Not long after she was elected to the council, two police officers were killed in her district during a domestic violence call, and she found herself widely criticized for expressing sympathy not just for the slain men but also for the person accused of killing them. Despite what he suffered at the hands of a warped system, Mr. Salaam maintains a position on policing that is comparatively moderate, calling for better and more sensitive policing, not a world without it.One of his political supporters is a former corrections officer who first encountered Mr. Salaam in a Lower Manhattan courthouse in the early stages of his long ordeal. The officer, Derrick Taitt, believed in the innocence of the five teenagers from the outset. He recalled seeing them in court for the first time. “It’s just an experience I’ll never forget — going home that day,” he said. “I walked from Centre Street to 14th. I couldn’t get on the train because my head hurt so badly.” As the president of the Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, Mr. Taitt, who is now 68, has witnessed an unsettling resurgence of crack in the area recently, and he maintains that Mr. Salaam could not have built a viable campaign on anti-law-enforcement sentiment.When I spoke with Mr. Salaam, he ended our conversation for afternoon prayer. He has been a practicing Muslim for most of his life, and the notion of a career in political leadership was born, against all odds, not long after he was arrested. He could not help but see uncanny similarities between his own story and that of his namesake, the prophet Yusef, in the Quran who was thrown into a well, sold into slavery, wrongly accused of rape and imprisoned. Ultimately he rose to a position of authority in his kingdom.“I was just blown away,” Mr. Salaam told me. “For me reading that as a young person, it was a seed that was planted.”After his conviction was overturned, he re-entered the world at 23, to endure the predictable indignities common to those who have been incarcerated. One of his first jobs after prison was working construction at a Mitchell-Lama apartment complex on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. When the company he was working for found out who he was, he said, he was fired. The experience provided a terrible insight. “Prison is about continuous punishment,” he said. “But if you survive prison, every single door for success will be shut in your face.”Many people in the community supported him when he was released, Mr. Salaam’s mother, Sharonne, told me. But many others did not. “You still have that boiling sensation as you try to move on with your life,” said Ms. Salaam, who was teaching at the Parsons School of Design when her son was arrested. Exoneration did not bring peace for everyone. “It was easier for Yusef to move on and see a path forward.”After the construction job, Mr. Salaam worked in tech at Weill Cornell, became a motivational speaker, wrote books, received a lifetime achievement award from Barack Obama and helped to raise 10 children — seven of his own and three stepchildren.He would like to bring more public bathrooms to Harlem. He worries about the effects of global warming on people who make their living as outdoor vendors. He wants people to look inward and to look outward, to try to stay positive. Yet to this day he has not had an apology from any of the prosecutors in his case. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Upper Manhattan voters have embraced him overwhelmingly. A landslide can be the best revenge. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Yusef Salaam Is Declared Winner of Harlem City Council Primary Race

      by

      Mr. Salaam was one of the Central Park Five who were wrongly convicted and then exonerated in the rape and assault of a jogger in Central Park in 1989.Yusef Salaam, one of five Black and Latino men whose convictions were overturned in the 1989 rape and assault of a female jogger in Central Park, cemented his victory in a highly contested City Council primary race in Harlem, according to The Associated Press on Wednesday.Mr. Salaam, 49, held a commanding lead on Election Day, with more than twice the number of votes over his closest rival, Inez Dickens, a state assemblywoman. The New York City Board of Elections began tabulating ranked-choice votes on Wednesday, and the new ranked-choice tabulation now shows Mr. Salaam with almost 64 percent of the vote to Ms. Dickens’s 36 percent.“This is a victory for justice, dignity and decency for the Harlem community we love,” Mr. Salaam said in a statement. “It’s a victory in support of not turning our backs on those in need, for saying we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and for saying the only way for all of us to thrive is to believe in the promise we all have.”In addition to Ms. Dickens, Mr. Salaam defeated another sitting member of the Assembly, Al Taylor, who is serving his sixth year in the Legislature. Mr. Salaam is not expected to face a serious challenger, if any, in November.He will succeed Kristin Richardson Jordan, a democratic socialist who was one of the most far-left members of the City Council. She dropped out of the primary in May, but her name still remained on the ballot and she will serve out her term.All three candidates were moderates who sought to distance themselves from Ms. Jordan’s far-left views on issues such as policing. Mr. Salaam cast the election as an opportunity for a generational shift in Harlem, which was once the center of Black political power in New York City but had ceded that title to Brooklyn.During the race, Mr. Salaam spoke frequently about his conviction, exoneration and persecution by former President Donald J. Trump, who in 1989 took out full page ads in The New York Times and other papers calling for the death penalty in the Central Park jogger case. During debates or forums, Mr. Salaam often referenced his conviction and the nearly seven years he spent in prison.In a recent interview, Mr. Salaam said his victory restored his “faith in believing that what happened to me was for this very moment.”Issues in the district include a lack of affordable housing, the loss of Black residents and the saturation of drug treatment and social services facilities. One of the major issues during the election was the fate of a proposed affordable housing project on Lenox Avenue and West 145th Street.Ms. Jordan initially opposed the project and rejected it because it was not affordable enough for Harlem residents. The developer instead opened a truck depot on the site. Mr. Salaam said he supports the development of housing at the intersection and will work with area residents to make sure the project meets their needs.“The problem that we are experiencing in Harlem right now is that we are being pushed out,” Mr. Salaam said. “They’re saying that we’re leaving, but the truth of the matter is that we are being priced out and therefore we are being pushed out.”Mr. Salaam received a warm reception while walking around Harlem recently with passers-by who wanted to shake his hand and take selfies with him, including Janice Marshall, a consultant and lifelong Harlem resident, even though she said Mr. Salaam was not her first choice.“I’m happy because it’s justice for him and I’m happy for the new energy,” Ms. Marshall said. “I’ve heard of his story and I just wish him well.” More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      New York Primary Election 2023: Live Results

      by

      Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Ilana Marcus, Charlie Smart and Isaac White. Editing by Wilson Andrews, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. Reporting contributed by Dana Rubinstein. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      New York’s Primary Elections 2023: What to Know

      by

      Primaries were being contested Tuesday for a range of New York City Council seats, district attorneys in the Bronx and Queens, and offices throughout New York State.Several Democratic incumbents in New York saw unusual challenges from more conservative candidates in Tuesday’s primary, with the opponents hoping to benefit from a demographic change, as an influx of immigrants is shifting some districts to the right.Incumbents easily held off primary challenges in Democratic primaries for district attorney in Queens and the Bronx; further north, a Council race in Buffalo was won by a woman whose son was shot in the Tops supermarket racist massacre.In New York City, just over 149,000 people had cast their ballots as of 6 p.m., according to the City Board of Elections. That includes 44,611 votes that were cast during the nine-day early voting period that began June 17 and ended on Sunday — less than a quarter of the early-voting turnout two years ago, when candidates for mayor were competing in the primary.There were contested primaries in New York City Council contests across the boroughs, with the races for a two-year term instead of the usual four years because of redistricting. Every seat on the City Council is up for re-election, but less than half of the 51 Council seats are being contested in primaries, and of those, 13 races feature more than two candidates — making ranked-choice voting, where voters can rank up to five candidates in order of preference, necessary.Ranked-choice voting will not be used in the races for district attorney.How Ranked-Choice Voting Will Affect the ResultsThe New York City Board of Elections will reveal the first-place vote totals each candidate receives on Tuesday; if one of the candidates in the 13 Council contests where there are three or more contestants draws 50 percent of the vote or more, a winner should be declared.If no candidate hits the 50 percent mark, the board will use the ranked-choice system, but not until July 5. The board usually runs the first ranked-choice calculation seven days after the vote, but because that day falls on the Fourth of July, the tabulation will be delayed a day.If necessary, additional ranked-choice tabulations will be held each week afterward, on July 11 and July 18, said Vincent Ignizio, the deputy executive director of the Board of Elections.About 15,000 absentee ballots have already been filed, but additional absentee ballots can be received a week after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by June 27.Under recent changes to state law, voters will also have an opportunity to cure or fix mistakes on their absentee ballots. The tentative last day to receive absentee ballot cures is July 17.Because of the low turnout, Board of Elections officials don’t expect that more than three rounds of ranked-choice voting tabulations will be required.Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group, said ranked-choice voting gave people more options. “We heard some voters in our 2021 exit polling say that because they knew they had the ability to rank, they actually paid more attention to more candidates,” she said.Some Key Races to WatchNew York City District Attorney RacesThe incumbent district attorneys of the Bronx and Queens both fended off challengers to win their respective Democratic primaries, according to The Associated Press.In the Bronx, Darcel Clark defeated Tess Cohen, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer, who was the first person to challenge Ms. Clark in a primary. With 65 percent of the votes counted, Ms. Clark led Ms. Cohen by more than 12,000 votes.In Queens, Melinda Katz, rebuffed a challenge from her right, defeating George Grasso, a former Police Department first deputy commissioner who attacked Ms. Katz as being soft on crime. Ms. Katz disputed the accusation by pointing to her focus on retail theft, gang takedowns and gun seizures.The challenge from Mr. Grasso came four years after Ms. Katz narrowly defeated a democratic socialist who wanted to abolish the police and end cash bail. Ms. Katz was leading Mr. Grasso and another opponent, Devian Daniels, by 27,000 votes with 71 percent of the vote counted.Ms. Clark, whose tenure began in 2016, was the first Black woman to be elected district attorney in New York. She grew up in the Bronx, was raised in public housing and went to public schools.She said that her biggest accomplishment as district attorney has been “putting humanity into the criminal justice system.”Central Harlem City Council RaceIn Harlem, three moderate Democrats are running in one of the most competitive races in the city to replace Kristin Richardson Jordan, a democratic socialist who dropped out last month.Ms. Jordan faced questions about her belief that the police should be abolished and about her far-left stance on housing development. Her name will remain on the ballot.The three Democrats running to replace her have sought to distance themselves from Ms. Jordan. They are: Inez Dickens, 73, who held the Harlem Council seat for 12 years before joining the State Assembly; Yusef Salaam, 49, one of five men exonerated in the rape of a female jogger in Central Park in 1989; and Al Taylor, 65, who is serving his sixth year in the Assembly.All three candidates gathered at Lenox Avenue and West 134th Street on Tuesday afternoon to try to woo voters. Ms. Dickens’s staff used a bullhorn, while Mr. Salaam’s team rang a bell every time a voter said they had ranked him first.Chantel Jackson, an assemblywoman from the Bronx who grew up in Harlem, came out with her nearly 2-year-old son to hand out fliers for Mr. Taylor. Mr. Salaam and Mr. Taylor had cross-endorsed each other, asking voters to rank them first and second. Ms. Dickens was endorsed by Mayor Eric Adams.The major issues in the historically Black neighborhood include the loss of Black residents, lack of affordable housing and a saturation of drug treatment centers and social service providers.The candidates have struggled to differentiate themselves. All three say they would have supported a new housing development on West 145th Street that Ms. Jordan initially rejected because it was not affordable enough.Ms. Dickens and Mr. Taylor have contended that their experience would make a difference, while Mr. Salaam, who moved back to the city from Georgia to run for the seat, has argued that it is time for a generational shift.“Knowledge is power,” Ms. Dickens said while campaigning. “If you don’t have the knowledge, working in the system is difficult.”Other City Council RacesIn Lower Manhattan, the incumbent Chris Marte, a progressive Democrat, was leading challengers Susan Lee, a consultant; Ursila Jung, a private investor; and Pooi Stewart, a substitute teacher. All the challengers emphasized public safety and education and argued that Mr. Marte was too far to the left.In the Bronx, incumbent, Councilwoman Marjorie Velázquez, was leading her opponents who criticized her because she backed the rezoning of Bruckner Boulevard in Throgs Neck, which will bring affordable housing to the area.In southern Brooklyn, three Asian American Democrats are running in a newly formed district.The candidates are Wai Yee Chan, the executive director at Homecrest Community Services; Stanley Ng, a retired computer programmer; and Susan Zhuang, the chief of staff for Assemblyman William Colton.In a district that has swung to the right in recent years, the winner of the Democratic primary is expected to face a tough general election challenge from the Republican primary winner.Vito J. LaBella, a conservative Republican and former Police Department officer, is facing Ying Tan, who works in senior services, in that primary.Buffalo Common CouncilIn Buffalo, Zeneta Everhart, a political newcomer whose son was a victim of a racist shooting at a Tops supermarket last May, appeared on track to defeat a well-known progressive, India Walton, in a primary race for a seat on the city’s Common Council.The seat represents Masten, an East Side district where the Tops is located and which is a traditional base of Black political power in Buffalo, New York’s second largest city and a Democratic stronghold.Ms. Everhart, a former television news producer who works for State Senator Timothy Kennedy, testified in front of Congress after the shooting, in which her son, Zaire Goodman, was shot in the neck but survived. Ten other people — all Black — were killed by the gunman, who targeted East Buffalo because of its large Black population.Ms. Walton, a democratic socialist, became a liberal star after she defeated Mayor Byron Brown in a primary in 2021, only to lose the general election that fall after Mr. Brown mounted a write-in campaign.In this campaign, Ms. Walton had criticized Ms. Everhart’s connections to the Democratic establishment, which included endorsements from the county Democratic Committee and Senator Chuck Schumer. But returns on Tuesday showed Ms. Everhart leading with about two-thirds of the vote, with about 85 percent of precincts reporting.Jesse McKinley More