Part 1 of 2
Eighteen: Soap Opera Schools
SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR RUDY CREW WAS, FOR A MOMENT, THE PERFECT
match for his namesake and champion.
An imposing bear of a black man, he was lucid and lettered, smoothly comfortable
in a white world, privately engaging and publicly discreet, resolute yet
accommodating. Born in upstate Poughkeepsie, he lost his mother at two and
was raised by an exacting father who played jazz clarinet, worked three jobs,
put him in Catholic school and opened his ears to the sounds of Ellington and
Coltrane.
By the time Crew married his Italian-American high school sweetheart in
his early twenties, he had already adopted her family as his own second family.
Even after their twenty-year marriage ended, he thought of their four children
as half-Italian and himself as part-paisan. Two of his three closest aides as
chancellor were Italian-American women-deputy chancellor Judith Rizzo
and press secretary Chiara Coletti.
Though Crew was hardly the mayor's first choice in October 1995, Giuliani
had helped make him the $245,OOO-a-year chancellor, moving him from the
65,OOO-kidTacoma, Washington system to the pinnacle of his profession, running
schools with 1.1 million young lives on the line. With a Ph.D. from the
University of Massachusetts and a charisma that turned on urban kids, Crew
had the street swagger to go with his shades and black leather jacket and the
sophistication to awe a tuxedo-clad business dinner at the Waldorf.
In addition to Tacoma, the forty-five-year-old, velvet-toned Crew had been
superintendent in Sacramento and deputy superintendent in Boston. He
brought a couple of top aides from Boston to New York, making the schools a
second Bostonian outpost, akin to Bratton's NYPD, in the Giuliani realm.
The seven-member Board of Education actually hired Crew and only two
were Giuliani appointees (the rest were named by borough presidents). But
Giuliani controlled the board's budgetary purse strings. He'd driven Crew's
predecessor, Ramon Cortines, out of town. And when the board temporarily picked
a replacement for Cortines the mayor didn't like, Giuliani used his mayoral clout
to get the appointment rescinded overnight. Crew knew he could only succeed if
Rudy Giuliani let him. He also knew Rudy would only let him if he liked him.
Cortines was an object lesson in what happens to a chancellor Giuliani doesn't
like.
Cortines was named to the job in a four-to-three vote in the summer of 1993,
while Giuliani and Dinkins were in the middle of their second campaign. The socalled
Gang of Four that voted for him was, strangely enough, aligned with
Candidate Rudy. Dinkins's two appointees voted against Cortines. Two of
Cortines's backers-Staten Island's Mike Petrides, an appointee of Guy Molinari,
and Ninfa Segarra-were active in Giuliani's campaign.
The Gang got its name when it forced Chancellor Joseph Fernandez out of his
job, joining Cardinal John O'Connor and Giuliani in blasting Fernandez for introducing
a curriculum designed to teach tolerance for gays to kids as young as first
and second graders. Since the board president in 1989, Robert Wagner Jr., gave
Candidate Giuliani veto power over Fernandez's appointment, he was the first
chancellor hired with Rudy's approval to be forced from office by Rudy or his allies.
Cortines's selection by the same foursome-led by Petrides, who was playing a
managing role in the Giuliani campaign-deflected any criticism that the dismissal
of Fernandez was anti-gay. Cortines came to New York from San Francisco,
where he'd been outed as gay by a local magazine. When Cortines got to New
York, ACT-Up demanded that he announce his sexual orientation. Single and
sixty-two years old, Cortines refused and the issue disappeared.
But after Rudy was elected and intermediary Petrides resigned due to illness,
Cortines could never get comfortable with the Giuliani team at City Hall. He had
an intensely private correctness about him, a stiffness that did not mix well with
the locker-room style of Giuliani's old-boys network. Giuliani's early budget woes
led him to target the Board a month after his 1994 inauguration, demanding cuts
Cortines was institutionally obligated to resist. Rudy took the resistance as personal.
A Mexican-American born in Texas who'd run three substantial school systems
in California, Cortines was offended when the mayor kept insisting he cut
2,500 jobs. Cortines insisted Giuliani did not have the authority to specify what
cuts would have the least damaging effect on the system. That was his right.
So he was summoned alone in April to Gracie Mansion for a late-night emergency
meeting, kept waiting for an hour and then threatened. Surrounded by several
aides, Giuliani demanded Cortines fire his top press and finance staffers. The
mayor said he was going to name Herman Badillo, his former running mate, as a
fiscal monitor over the schools. Cortines waited a day or so and quit. Only the intervention
of Mario Cuomo, who was still in the process of building his relationship
with Giuliani, resolved the dispute. Cortines agreed to stay, Badillo took his
post and an armistice was reached. Within days of Cuomo's defeat, however, war
broke out again.
That December, Rudy began what the Times called "a vitriolic public campaign"
to force Cortines to quit. Some of it was budgetary, with the mayor announcing a
second year of slashing cuts. Some was of it was serious policy differences, with
Rudy pressing to get the NYPD to control school security. But the undercurrent
was decidedly personal.
Cortines "spent yesterday whining," Giuliani told reporters in June, "which he
does all the time and you fall for it." He branded Cortines "the little victim." His
admonition that Cortines should not "be so precious"-a reference to what
Giuliani called Cortines's hypersensitivity to criticism-was a strange choice of
language. It had a gay-baiting tone to it that may not have been intended, but was
widely suspected.
The mayor made several significant gay appointments at the start of his administration,
like Taxi & Limousine chairman Chris Lynn. His policies over the years
became increasingly pro-gay, such as his 1997 extension of medical benefits to the
gay partners of city workers. But there had not been any high-level gay involvement
in his campaign or at City Hall. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Sydney
Schanberg reported top aides to Giuliani were telling reporters that Cortines was
peculiar. "He is not married, they say. He has no children, his lifestyle is reclusive."
The columnist quoted one aide as saying: "This guy is weird. Would you
want him alone with your family?"
When Cortines quit a second time-on June ll,1995-he told the Times that he
believed Giuliani" simply disliked" him. "I won't discuss that"-he said, refusing
to elaborate about the perceived animus-"I will never discuss that." Shortly before
he left town in October, Cortines allowed aNew York magazine reporter to
join him and Ed Koch, a Cortines friend and ally, at a midtown restaurant for
lunch. Asked if the epithets Rudy tossed at him injected sexual orientation into
the debate, Cortines said: "I don't know if that's it. You know, I've dealt with innuendo
all my life." Koch, who'd had his own experience with Giuliani innuendo
and was just beginning to slam him, said that "forcing Ray's resignation" was "the
worst thing Rudy did as mayor."
What happened in the aftermath of Cortines's resignation was also an object
lesson for Crew.
The board began interviewing candidates and settled on a first choice, Bernard
Gifford, a black former vice chancellor with impressive corporate consulting credentials.
Giuliani insisted Gifford support his call for line-item mayoral budget
control and an NYPD takeover of school security. Gifford withdrew.
Then in September, the mayor made his own public pick-Leon Goldstein, the
president of a CUNY community college awash with Democratic patronage hires,
including the wives of two assembly speakers and the spouses of five other powerful
Brooklyn pols. A sixty-three-year-old shmoozer and showman, Goldstein's
academic background was in hotel management. The only CUNY president without
a Ph.D., he had been rejected five prior times in chancellor searches at the
board and CUNY. Goldstein's candidacy was quickly attacked in a swath of scandal
stories, yet Rudy stood by him. The leak of a confidential report to the board-replete
with charges against Goldstein-finally forced him to withdraw.
Rightly or wrongly, Rudy blamed the leak on an aide to board president Carol
Gresser. She had been an ally of his going back to the 1993 dismissal of Fernandez,
but their disagreement on Gifford and Goldstein changed all that. When Gresser
next championed a Long Island Hispanic, Daniel Domenech, getting four votes for
him at a Friday meeting in early October, the mayor leaned on one member of
Gresser's majority, Jerry Cammarata. The Staten Island appointee of Guy Molinari,
Cammarata collapsed after a Gracie Mansion visit and switched his vote twentyfour
hours later, sinking Domenech. "The press will be on me for a couple of days,"
Cammarata explained to Domenech, "but the mayor will be after me forever."
Cammarata was a character right out of the Molinari circus, changing his party
registration four times in eight years. He ran for a district school board on Staten
Island in 1993 on a church-backed slate, proclaiming that he would ensure that
parochial schools, where his three kids went, were safe from gun-toting public
school kids. Then he was ejected on election day from a public school polling site
after police discovered he was carrying a licensed .38 caliber pistol.
He also lay claim to three Guinness Book world records. He sang for forty-eight
straight hours at Nathan's Famous hot dog stand in Coney Island, seventy-five
hours while sitting in a bathtub perched atop a flatbed truck riding all over the city
and ninety-six hours in a subway songfest celebrating Richard Nixon's resignation.
It was unclear if Guinness was keeping track of breakneck conversions by
public officials who couldn't take the heat.
Chancellor for a day, Domenech was actually the third Latino forced from the
post by the Giuliani team in two years. Unlike Fernandez and Cortines, however,
Domenech had not come to power with Giuliani's support. In promoting
Goldstein and blocking Domenech, Giuliani forged an alliance with Brooklyn
board member Bill Thompson, the only black on the board and a supporter of a
candidate waiting in the wings, Rudy Crew.
Gresser had leaned toward Crew before the Goldstein and Domenech battles,
but Crew demurred, only willing to take the job with Giuliani's endorsement. "If
you didn't have both people on board," he said later, "it was going to be near impossible
to do the job, let alone get it." So Crew flew to the city without anyone in
the press knowing, quietly meeting with Giuliani at the mansion. He wanted
Giuliani to hear three things: "I'm a Democrat. I'm a black man. And I'm not
afraid of you. That's what I am about."
Crew wanted to establish from the outset that he "would not work in an atmosphere
of fear" and the Cortines experience taught him that he had to make
that explicit. He and the mayor also talked policy, even getting to the issue that
would be their eventual undoing: vouchers. "I spoke plainly about my history of
opposition to them at our very first meeting," he recalls. "And he said he wasn't
interested in them either." Giuliani and Crew also agreed that the system needed
to be shaken up, reformed, challenged.
With two years to go before re-election, the mayor had what he thought he
needed: a black chancellor with a commanding presence and resume who could
serve as a prophylactic in 1997, protecting him against criticism on school performance.
A professional and personal relationship began at that first meeting and
lasted three years, until the mayor's changing political ambitions killed it. Though
Giuliani would lay claim in the good years to having installed Crew, the truth is
he turned to him only after a series of false starts.
Giuliani was as uncertain about what to do with the school system as he was
about who should head it. He knew he wanted cops in the schools-tackling crime
was always his first instinct. He knew he could rail about administrative bloat day
in and day out, demanding dramatic reductions to the salute of every editorial
page. That was it; that was his education program.
He could count on the fact that no one would notice-while he ranted for six
years about board bureaucracy-that the number of police department managers
grew by 79 percent, and fire department managers by 120 percent between 1993
and 1999. Neither would anyone note a 46 percent jump in administrators and
managers in all the mayoral agencies directly under Giuliani's control, with an astounding
943 percent jump at the city's law department.
As limited as his school repertoire was, he never talked 1'0 Crew or Cortines about
teaching and learning-only governance and budget. "He thought schools were a
series of episodes, Round I, Round II," Crew says now. "He had no pedagogical commitment,
no educational philosophy, no grounding in a belief system." Without any
real ideas about how to make schools work, Giuliani was unsure if he'd ever be able
to conjure statistics out of the system salable in a thirty-second campaign commercial.
He wound up wandering from one side of school issues to the other:
Candidate Rudy championed the breakup of the central board, the establishment
of borough boards and" forceful" actions to "assure that responsibility for
educational policy is established at the community school board level." As mayor,
he dropped the idea of borough boards and backed a new state law that vastly diminished
the powers of community boards, centralizing power.
Candidate Rudy assailed Dinkins for responding to the "chaos" of the system
by simply demanding "that he should have control" of the board. "The truth is
that there is much that a mayor can do with the current arrangement that has not
been done," Giuliani contended in a nineteen-page issue paper. Though he accused
Dinkins of seeking" dictatorial power" over the board, Mayor Rudy adopted the
same position on mayoral control, portraying himself in recent years as an outsider
and critic, unaccountable for its failings.
Candidate Rudy favored "increasing the opportunity for choice" within the
public school system; Mayor Rudy became a champion of private and parochial
school vouchers.
Candidate Rudy bemoaned chancellor turnover, saying the city's only response
to school failings "has been to change centralized leadership." Each new chancellor,
he said, "has been brought to the job with great fanfare and a hope that their
particular style or initiative will be able to turn the system around." But these
leaders" of the slow, overburdened system have not been able to improve the system's
performance in any measurable way." He even objected when Dinkins interceded
in the chancellor selection process in 1993, contending a mayor should
only comment when the board came up with a candidate.
With that much equivocation, and the baggage of Giuliani's two years of school
wars, the mayor needed Crew almost as much as Crew needed him. Crew understood
that and, from the beginning, he demonstrated a political agility in leveraging
their mutual needs that none of Giuliani's other top appointees, including
media master Bratton, could equal.
Crew immediately replaced the finance deputy Giuliani had pushed Cortines to
fire with the analyst in the mayor's office who monitored the board's budget. Crew
set up weekly meetings at City Hall with the mayor. He produced a mind-numbing,
forty-one-volume set of books detailing how the board spent every cent, winning
the mayor's praise for laying bare the labyrinth. He navigated the turbulent NYPDtakeover
waters masterfully, attributing his hesitancy to the board, most of whose
members were opposed. But he kept an open mind and quietly negotiated a deal the
mayor could buy, taking three years to do it.
He also joined Giuliani in a 1996 coup to topple Gresser as board chair. Giuliani
complained about her to Crew, calling her "a housewife who lacked the intellectual
weight to warrant conversations." The mayor put the four board votes together
over the July 4 weekend, while Gresser was in Maine, preparing for her newborn
granddaughter's arrival from the hospital. Crew dropped one negative quote on
her in a June interview and stayed out of the way when the ax fell, letting Giuliani
take center stage alone.
Most importantly, Crew reinforced the critical political alliances Giuliani had
with the United Federation of Teachers and District Council 37, establishing excellent
ties of his own with the two unions that represented most board employees.
Giuliani was particularly conscious of the power of the 90,OOO-member UFT; its
phone bank and field operation had played a key role in his 1989 defeat. Their neutrality
in the 1993 election-combined with their million-dollar "apolitical" ad
campaign assailing Dinkins-helped Giuliani win. Giuliani attempted to ingratiate
himself with UFT president Sandra Feldman early on, going to a rare private dinner
at her home on December 2, 1994, along with Peter Powers and his wife
Kathleen, who worked at the board.
When Ray Cortines suggested reducing such UFT perks as sabbaticals and
preparation periods to close the board's 1995 budget gap, Feldman went ballistic
and Labor Commissioner Randy Levine called Cortines aides to oppose the
workrule savings.
Giuliani simultaneously supported state legislation authorizing early retirement
bonuses for teachers in 1995 and 1996 even though his campaign issue paper
criticized Dinkins's 1991 bonuses for inducing the most experienced teachers
to leave prematurely. The UFT loved the incentives, and 18,000 teachers walked
out of classrooms. Ultimately the union sat out the 1997 election, a boon to a
mayor whose school cuts set records. Neutrality was the best Feldman could do
with a membership that predominantly opposed the mayor. But when Feldman
was the honoree of an American Jewish Congress luncheon in the middle of the
campaign, Giuliani's Democratic foe, Ruth Messinger, was barred from attending.
An AJC member armed with an invitation, the embarrassed Messinger was cornered
by reporters in the lobby while Feldman and Crew chowed down inside.
DC 37's Local 372, which represents 19,000 kitchen workers, school aides and
other paraprofessional staff, was also a significant player in city politics. Their
president, Charlie Hughes, was so anxious to establish an early rapport with the
administration he contributed the maximum permissible under city law to the
Giuliani '97 committee by 1995 ($7,500), and raised thousands more.
He then started contributing to the Liberal Party, donating $17,500 in 1996 and
1997. In the same time period, Hughes bought seven tickets for the Giuliani committee's
$2,500-a-plate Lincoln Center fund-raiser for an identical total of
$17,500. Seven tickets were attributed to him on the committee's seating list for
the event, but no contributions from him or anyone else from the union were filed
for that time period. He now acknowledges that he "made out the checks to the
Liberal Party" to go to the Giuliani committee dinner. "I'm sure that's the way it
was," he said in a recent interview. Since these donations would far exceed city
limits, the solicitation of such end-run contributions by the Giuliani campaign
would be a clear violation of law.
In addition to financial support, Hughes became such a linchpin of the re-election
effort that he anchored a Democrats-for-Rudy television commercial and City Hall
rally. Not only did he deliver the endorsement of his local, he played a pivotal role
in getting DC 37, the largest municipal union with 120,000 members, to back Rudy.
All Rudy Crew remembers is that the mayor made it clear that he "liked Hughes
very much," that he thought Hughes was "a good labor leader."
Hughes backed Rudy primarily because of a sweetheart deal the mayor had
arranged that simultaneously pleased Feldman. In contract negotiations with the
UFT, Giuliani agreed to relieve teachers of cafeteria and hallway monitoring duties,
giving them an extra, free, forty-five-minute, period a day. Teachers were theoretically
supposed to use this period for professional or curriculum development
or tutoring (they already had up to two preparation periods a day). This bonanza
for teachers was widely denounced by business groups and editorial pages as a
productivity loss.
The mayor initially proposed replacing teachers with workfare workers, but he
shifted, with Crew's encouragement, to the increased use of Hughes's 6,600 school
aides as monitors. The decision meant additional hours for the aides, who made
less than $10 an hour and earned an average of $10,000 a year. Giuliani then
upped the ante by agreeing to create a new supervisory title for school aides that
paid as much as $3 an hour more.
The union newspaper reported that "the path" to "the first promotional title
ever created" for school aides "was cleared" in late 1996 "in informal discussions
Hughes held with Giuliani and Crew." Hughes negotiated specific terms with
Crew's counsel in early 1997 and a thousand aides were expected to be upgraded.
Hughes's extra-legal donations to the Liberal Party dovetailed with the timing of
the new title decisions. Hughes says now that the decision to "not use welfare
mothers" and promote school aides was "why I endorsed him." Board officials estimate
that covering the lost teacher-monitoring period costs the school system
$90 million a year.
This double whammy for the unions almost came unglued when the UFT rank
and file voted down the contract in December 1995, shortly after Crew's arrival.
The rejection was inspired by Giuliani's announcement of a $35,000 raise for himself
and substantial raises for his top staff at the same time that he was publicly
celebrating Feldman's agreement to a two-year wage freeze for teachers. (They got
11 percent raises in the final three years of the pact.)
Harry Spence, Crew's deputy who was participating in the second round of negotiations
necessitated by the rejection of the initial deal, says that he and Feldman
agreed to drop the new free-period provision. The union hoped to use the savings
that would accrue from restoring the teacher's cafeteria and hallway assignments to
sweeten nonsalary benefits. But, Spence says, Giuliani "adamantly refused," insisting
on giving teachers a free period their union was no longer demanding.
Spence believes Hughes was the reason. The free period remained in the otherwise
slightly revised contract and the UFT membership ratified the deal in a second
vote in 1996.
Citing the UFT's extra forty-five minutes and similar losses in the new fire
union contract-including the requirement of a fifth man on every truck and an
extra week of vacation-CBC's Ray Horton said Rudy was "bugling a full retreat"
on the labor front. Instead of paying higher wages for more work, Horton pointed
out, these contracts "would pay more for less," giving "new meaning to the concept
of productivity bargaining." The unions were backing Giuliani because they'd
learned "to dance with the highest bidder," Horton charged. While Giuliani's array
of five-year labor contracts counterbalanced double zeroes in the first two years
with substantial raises thereafter, Horton charged that the mayor protected entirely
the fine-print "bureaucratic entitlements," like sabbaticals and wash-up time
for cops, that affect the way services are delivered.
Unbeknownst to Horton or the press, Hughes also won a secret 3 percent raise
in a side agreement. "When everyone else got zero in the first year," says Hughes,
"we got a 3 percent shot out of a severance-related benefit fund."
Crew had again learned from the Cortines example. In his departing interview
with Koch, Cortines blasted Giuliani for caving to the unions. "He obviously
doesn't want to stand up" to them, said the outgoing chancellor, who was forced
out just as contract negotiations with the UFT began. "Instead of educating kids,"
Cortines charged, using the same terminology that would later become a Giuliani
mantra, "we've become an employment agency." Still at his ex-linebacker weight,
Crew was hardly one, like Cortines, to tilt at windmills. Mayors had long dominated
board contract talks, and Crew knew the unions were more important to
the mayor than his own continued tenure.
But facilitating the mayor's labor relationships wasn't the only useful role Crew
played. When reading scores rose 3.6 percent in June 1997, a pleased Giuliani used
it as the focus of his first campaign commercial. The ad was a preemptive strike, designed
to undercut Messinger's core issue. Proclaiming reading scores "up in every
district" and calling it "the highest one-year increase in the past decade," the commercial
showed Giuliani reading to a culturally diverse group of schoolchildren. It
also cited a new $125 million Project Read program Giuliani had just funded in his
new budget and claimed the administration "was rebuilding and renovating our
schools."
The truth was that reading scores were down since Rudy became mayor. The
1996 scores were 5.9 percent lower than in 1995. Even Crew's mini-spurt was partially
attributable to a decision to exclude a large number of non-English-speaking
kids from the reading exam. Project Read was part of the first new infusion of city
funding since Rudy became mayor. But he'd cut the projected school budget by
$1.3 billion in his first three years and was the only mayor to ever go to Albany
and ask for less state operating aid. He'd also just put $275 million in new capital
construction money into the budget, hardly compensating for reductions totaling
$4.8 billion in the capital plans of the first three years.
Newsday's commentary on the ad stated matter-of-factly: "Giuliani restricted
the flow of money to the schools more severely than any mayor since the city's
fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, forcing many schools to reduce services." Crew, understandably,
said nothing. A month later, Giuliani put this radio ad on the air.
"When a mother comes up to me and says, 'Thank you, Rudy, for fighting back to
save our schools,' I tell her you should thank another Rudy-Schools Chancellor
Rudy Crew." With Messinger saying she could work with Crew but remaining
noncommittal about retaining him, the chancellor had become a campaign issue,
one Giuliani thought helped him.
When Messinger finally did her own first media buy in late August, it was, predictably,
an ad aimed at Giuliani's education record. It depicted Messinger as a former
teacher and public school parent and it hammered at the cuts, overcrowding
and lower test scores. The footage was of kids taking class in a school bathroom.
One kid appeared to be sitting on a urinal. Just like Giuliani's commercial, the ad
was staged and shot in a private school, since it is illegal to film one in a public
school. As soon as it hit the screen, the chancellor hit the ceiling.
The letter he wrote Messinger and released to the Times accused her of "denigrating
the public school system for political gain." He called the urinal scene
fraudulent. "I am shocked that you would recruit children to take part in such sordid
duplicity," he wrote. "You seem determined to mislead the public and demoralize
our children with lies about their public schools."
Crew was both angry-offended, recalls an aide, at the picture of "a little black
boy sitting on the loo"-and delighted. He knew he could turn what Messinger
hoped would be her best press day into her worst. Cristyne Lategano, the mayor's
press secretary, called when the letter went public, "mad with glee," according to
Crew's press secretary Chiara Coletti. With 91,000 more kids than classroom
space, the system did, according to Crew's office, put some kids in converted bathrooms,
closets, hallways and locker rooms. "The question," as the Times put it,
"was whether students were learning in operational bathrooms," or ones with the
urinals removed.
As fine a distinction as this was, the Times published an editorial blasting
Messinger for "manufacturing an illustration of school overcrowding that is worse
than anything in the city's system." Crew's tough letter was the obvious hook for
the editorial angst, but a news story a few pages away was headlined "Schools
Often Turn Bathrooms into Classrooms." A television reporter went to a school in
the Bronx and, though barred from entering, interviewed a teacher who said she
had to teach over the sound of flushing toilets in a bathroom classroom. The
Messinger campaign released photos from the UFT newspaper of a classroom with
a table placed against a bank of urinals, students around the table, and the urinal
tops being used as a bookshelf. It accused Crew of "appalling political partisanship."
When Crew orchestrated a relatively smooth school opening in September
(overcrowding had caused a mess in 1996), the mayor declared: "There hasn't been
a chancellor making this kind of progress in at least the last decade."
The Giuliani campaign aired a rebuttal commercial praising Crew and highlighting
Project Read again, as well as $25 million in new school arts funding
Giuliani had put in the '97 budget. From Crew's point of view, these expensive
new initiatives, as well as the first overall increase in the board's budget in years,
more than justified his indirect aid to the Giuliani campaign. "They could call me
an Uncle Tom," he said later. "I'd take all of that for the arts money and the reading
money. If I was going to get blasted for looking appropriately deferential to the
mayor of the city, that's not a problem for me."
In the final weeks of the campaign, Crew's press office barred the media from
Joseph Pulitzer Junior High School, where Messinger was invited to speak to a
seventh grade class. Ironically, Candidate Rudy had appeared at the same school in
1993. Messinger's campaign claimed that Giuliani had been allowed to bring cameras
and reporters to fifteen public school appearances in the prior twelve months;
Crew's office quibbled about the numbers. At the first mayoral debate in mid-
October, each candidate had only a couple of questions they could direct at the
other. In a final bow to the wedge issue Crew had become, Giuliani used one of his
to ask if Messinger would keep him as chancellor. Messinger squirmed and said
she'd have to talk to Crew first.
Polls showed that voters thought the schools were sliding, yet Crew got a fiveto-
one favorable response. Giuliani wanted some of that to rub off on him. Crew's
aggressive advocacy had already turned Giuliani's prime weakness into a mixed
bag at worst.
***
What no one who knew Rudy Giuliani could have anticipated was how well
he and Crew would get along personally.
They became such fast friends Giuliani would call Crew at 2 A.M. just to chat.
They did scotch and cigars together dozens of times, at the mansion and at an East
58th Street cigar bar owned by Elliot Cuker, one of Giuliani's closest friends. They
stunned their respective staffs on April 1, 1997, when they played an April Fool's
joke and switched roles, Crew showing up at City Hall and Giuliani at the Board
of Ed. They went to Yankee games, often with Andrew. They could make each
other roar with laughter-and not just with Messinger swipes-amid serious talk
about futures, families and fears.
Giuliani liked to talk about his great man theories of history, moving from La
Guardia to Roosevelt. Crew said Giuliani read often about great men, and spoke
comfortably about his sense of historic destiny. "Courageous and bold" was
Giuliani's definition of greatness. "His sense of leadership was to take a position
and hold it," recalls Crew. "The tighter and longer and more tenaciously you held
a position, the greater a leader you were."
Crew and he also compared notes "easily and regularly" on "exacting" fathers,
both of whom were dead. Giuliani told Crew that he had worked in his dad's bar
"for a bit of time, maybe a summer, and watched his father and uncle rough a
drunk up and throw him out." The way Giuliani told the story left Crew feeling it
was "a sad commentary" on Giuliani's yen for "bravado."
"Stern" was the fatherly adjective each favored. Crew also told Giuliani about
his longtime Italian father-in-law, also dead: "He was a guy from Brooklyn, in
construction, a World War II vet, who moved to Poughkeepsie but was a real New
Yorker. I told Rudy about how he handled the hard parts of an interracial marriage-
the intimacy, the growth. He understood the strength and the character I
was talking about."
Their love of the Yankees was a bond too. Crew's father had been a fevered
Dodger fan, drawn by Jackie Robinson, but when the club left for L.A., the love
died. A baseball and football player as a teenager, Crew saved boxtops to try to
qualify as a Yankee bat boy. He loved Elston Howard, the first black Yankee. When
his long reach helped him beat eleven-year-old Andrew to a foul ball at a playoff
game, a cop on the security detail said he had to give it to the kid. "No way I'm
giving this up," he laughed, and the mayor, sitting one seat away, laughed approvingly
with him.
"In the core of his being," Crew says, "there's a person who's very easy to get
to know. There's a youngness, a boyishness to him. It got to be a guys-night-out
thing, with gestures of youth. I decided to deal with it as authentically and honestly
as I could. I would give whatever I got. Not just in terms of friendship. If it
was a fight he wanted, which he sometimes did, I gave it back. If it was a hard reform
agenda, I'd give it back."
Since Crew had met Andrew, he wanted to make sure Giuliani met his brood.
"My kids were frightened for me," he remembers. Giuliani's press clips scared
them. "They thought there was a storm hanging over me all the time." So Crew
took his kids to City Hall for pictures with Giuliani, and they got a little more
comfortable.
"I didn't want to cower. It's not in my makeup. So over wine, I would tell him
so-and-so is afraid of you and he would ask why. We had lots of conversations
about the fears he creates. In a moment of vulnerability, he said he really didn't
want to be feared. He had a rationale about why fear was not a good organizational
trait.
"But I came away with the sense that this is a man who really respects power.
He understands it. He loves to use it and deal with those who have it. He loves individual
bravado. He wants to see if anybody else has it in him. It is his emotional
drug of choice. He pushes. He tries to break others. It is as natural as drinking water
to him."
They were dog lovers as well-Giuliani had Goalie as his constant mansion companion
and Crew had Chance. Both were retrievers, one golden and the other
Labrador. Music was another common thread: Crew was as obsessed with jazz as the
mayor was with opera. Crew played his favorites so loudly at the board that aides
had to ask him to lower it, while Giuliani has been known to spontaneously plunge
into an aria. Neither could ever get the other to appreciate their special sounds.
Giuliani called Crew "a regular guy" in press interviews, a clear contrast with
how he felt about Cortines, and wrapped his arm around him warmly when they
met at public events. The mayor also made a big display of giving Crew a box of
Dominican cigars with a red bow on top for his birthday in 1996, and took a trip
with him to the black rodeo.
When an article appeared in Vanity Fair in early 1997 charging that Giuliani
was having an affair with his press aide, Cristyne Lategano, Crew was sympathetic,
deploring the media's preoccupations. He called Giuliani and Lategano, who
had sometimes joined the boys-night-out cavorting, and said "hang on to your
hats, don't let life turn you sour."
Crew had remarried in 1992, and he and his wife Kathy, a forty-five-year-old
mother of three grown children, were living in the Brooklyn brownstone near the
board that chancellors get gratis. He took Kathy to Gracie Mansion for dinner
shortly after his arrival in 1995 and met Donna, who hosted the dinner for ten or
so. When problems later developed in Crew's marriage, he and the mayor quietly
mused over their troubled marriages to California blondes.
"We did talk about these issues," he recalls. "Public life is so different in New
York. You pay an enormous price. I did discuss my own domestic situation."
Giuliani was guarded, but the scene at the mansion spoke volumes. Crew was
there at least twenty times, he estimates, often until the early hours of the morning.
He never saw Donna other than at the first formal dinner, when she and her
husband barely spoke. The Giuliani marriage was, he quickly recognized, "difficult
space" and he "respected" that by staying away from it.
The mayor and he usually sat on the patio or in a small green room off the patio,
where they could open a window and smoke cigars. They were not allowed to
smoke in the more spacious sitting room, what Crew observed as the "only
oblique reference" to the fact that Giuliani was living with someone else and had
to accommodate to her rules. With Giuliani outside the mansion another thirty
times or so, he observed "no cell phone or other contacts with Donna."
***
The underpinning of the Giuliani/Crew relationship, though, was always mutual
need, crystallizing in the 1997 election. Crew was no rubber stamp for
Giuliani-he had, for example, stopped the NYPD from collecting junior high
school and high school yearbooks and using prom photos as if they were
mugshots, banning a practice Giuliani publicly championed.
The mayor tolerated Crew's independence because it worked for him-it was
one of the reasons the Messinger attack was treated with credibility. He also
couldn't afford a confrontation with Crew on the heels of the Cortines, Gresser
and other board messes. But as much as their agendas and personalities meshed
for the first two years, Crew told his top staff he anticipated "big problems" after
the election.