A Beginning in Brooklyn

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Somewhere, Jack Newfield is smiling. The verdict brought in yesterday by a Brooklyn jury convicting state Assemblyman Clarence Norman, the county Democratic Party boss, of four felony counts vindicates the reporting that the crusading columnist did for The New York Sun and that helped illuminate the drama in Brooklyn for all New Yorkers. Newfield, who died last year, worked closely with a reporter of the Sun, Colin Miner; another Sun columnist, Errol Louis, and the Sun’s news editor at the time, Stuart Marques. Newfield would have underlined a point made to us last night by the district attorney of Kings County, Charles “Joe” Hynes, who stressed that the verdict was but the beginning of the investigation.


“Clarence Norman Jr.,” Mr. Hynes said, “has got to see the handwriting on the wall. His option is to cooperate with what amounts to 12 separate investigations and with the understanding that there are still three other indictments pending against him that will be followed up. He faces significant jail time. So really it’s up to him to figure out or understand that he’d better cooperate with these investigations or go to jail for a very long time.”


The case just decided was about election law violations and involved what Mr. Hynes outlined as a simple story. Mr. Norman, he said, “was worried about James Davis, who had come within 200 votes of beating him for the Assembly seat in 1998.” The D.A. said, “When Davis announced that he was going to run again, I think Clarence panicked. He was trying to raise as much money as he could.” But Mr. Norman faced a problem, a cap under the law. So, according to the D.A., what Mr. Norman decided was to get help from some of his friends, including a lobbyist, to start paying for things like Mr. Norman’s campaign literature.


“What has to be crystal clear to those people in the Democratic organization is that business as usual has come to an end,” Mr. Hynes said, making it clear that more than campaign law violations are involved, though those violations are felonies. “The thrust of this investigation is how and how much and how often money is paid to buy a judgeship. It has been an open secret for years that people have had to pay money to be judges in the state. The real question is how many people have been involved in that activity.”


One of the investigations that Mr. Hynes is conducting, the D.A. told us, concerns “why, after someone wins the Democratic nomination for civil court in Brooklyn in a county that has never elected a Republican for civil court, why would someone raise money after they won the nomination. Where is that money going?” And “after someone has been nominated by the convention system, has been given the Democratic nomination for the supreme court in a county that has never elected a Republican to the state supreme court without a cross-endorsement by the Democrats, why are they raising money for the general election?” Said the prosecutor: “I believe these are things that Clarence Norman Jr. can answer.”


We don’t mind saying that we take a good bit of pride in Mr. Newfield’s work on this story. “Jack Newfield,” Mr. Hynes said, “was to me one of the great journalists of all time.” He wrote over the years for the Village Voice, New York Post, and Daily News. The prosecutor remarked on Mr. Newfield’s columns going back years, when he wrote about what he called the 10 worst judges. “They were invariably products of a Democratic or Republican machine that took away the right to vote,” Mr. Hynes said, noting that the problem exists wherever those machines are in control and involves a process “that is repeated across the 12 judicial districts of New York State.” He credited Mr. Newfield for understanding “the pervasiveness of this corrupt activity.”


More broadly, our own view is that this verdict is a defeat not only for Norman but for such allies as State Senator Carl Andrews, Rep. Major Owens, Assemblyman Vito Lopez, City Council Members Albert Vann, David Weprin, and Dominic Recchia, and Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, who showed up at a pre-trial campaign-style rally called by Norman where it was alleged that the charges the grand jury handed up were motivated by racism. Tell that to the jury that comprised seven blacks, one Hispanic, and four whites and that, in order to convict Norman, had to do so unanimously.


Jack Newfield, in column issued on the front page of the Sun on October 13, 2003, under the headline “Norman’s Worst Days Are Ahead,” wrote, “For the last five months, I have tried to place the investigation into Brooklyn’s machine politics in the larger historical picture of a way of governance and a culture of corruption.” He wrote that he crime rate among Brooklyn judges was “higher than the crime rate in the Marcy Projects. “And he pointed out that a judge convicted in Brooklyn, another judge indicted in Brooklyn and another judge removed in Brooklyn “were all put on the bench by Mr. Norman.” The larger issue, he wrote, was the “rule of law,” a point underlined yesterday in inspiring fashion by 12 ordinary men and woman of Brooklyn.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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