The remarkable story about a large sum of money lent to the liberal Air America radio network by a Bronx nonprofit group, largely financed by government grants to provide services to poor children, has those on the right celebrating the embarrassing situation Air America finds itself in.

The city’s Department of Investigation is examining the channeling of the money to the liberal network, and the network’s current management has been less than forthcoming in explaining the bizarre transaction.

Beyond this national story, the affair has put back in the news the name of Charles Rosen, the executive director of the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, who resigned after news of the loans began circulating.

In 1970, Mr. Rosen was a typographer for the New York Post, one of the union members whose frequent strikes resulted in the closing of many of New York’s dailies. In a certain regard, Mr. Rosen had no choice but to be a union activist. His skill was in a field that was quickly being phased out, a victim of technical innovation.

That year, Mr. Rosen, who is now 62, moved to Co-op City in the northeast Bronx, a project sponsored by the union-led United Housing Foundation.

Co-op City was built on what was then perhaps the largest single empty building site in the city. Once it was proposed as the site of an airport, but in the 1950s the land was developed as a huge amusement park, called Freedomland. The park was laid out as a map of the United States, with such exhibits as a Chicago fire that would ignite several times a day. The park never caught on, though, and went out of business.

The site caught the attention of the foundation, which had built thousands of quality “affordable housing” units throughout the city. These projects, such as the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, had long waiting lists of families eager to live in the well-maintained buildings. The foundation was controlled by unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.

Although the projects were organized as cooperatives, there was no opportunity for individual profit. Shareholders had to come up with a modest payment for their apartments, which would be refunded to them without profit when they moved, at which time the deposit would be replaced by a similar payment from the new tenant. Maintenance fees were minimal, just enough to pay expenses. Families waited as long as a decade for apartments.

The United Housing Foundation was one of the great shining successes of New York’s liberal establishment.

With their track record of success, the foundation’s leaders looked to build the world’s biggest housing development, 15,372 apartments, at Eastchester Bay. They called it Co-op City.

They bit off more than they could chew. As construction proceeded, costs rose. At the same time, inflation greatly jacked up mortgage rates, and the price of oil multiplied by a factor of six in a few short years. The initial promise of apartments renting for as little as an astounding $23 per room per month had to be shelved, and residents balked at paying the difference.

Most of the new tenants had moved from rent-controlled apartments on the Grand Concourse or, like Mr. Rosen, from Washington Heights in northern Manhattan. Accustomed to low rents, they gave up that financial security for the amenities Co-op City offered: central air conditioning, parking garages, terraces, and high-rise buildings with spectacular views. But they weren’t ready to pay the bill.

Perhaps if cooler heads prevailed, an accommodation might have been reached. After all, the United Housing Foundation was not a greedy landlord. It could be said that the foundation’s motives were pure, even if it overreached in conceiving that project.

But cooler heads did not prevail. Charles Rosen did.

Faced with a 25% rent increase, the cooperators followed the charismatic, radical Mr. Rosen – who would exhort crowds in English, Spanish, and Yiddish – and embarked on a disastrous 13-month rent strike. By the time it was over, everyone lost. The residents never paid what was needed to keep the development on a sound financial footing. That resulted in cutbacks in repairs and routine maintenance, which exacerbated the construction defects of a too-large project built on a swampy site. The effects of that are still felt to the present day.

More significantly, the foundation and the earnest labor-union liberals who ran it, folks who actually delivered on the promise of affordable housing, were put out of the housing business forever. They were undone by a man more radical than they were, a man these unreconstructed liberals came to describe as a Maoist, Charles Rosen.

Instead of exerting leadership, public officials feared the power of the angry mob. Mr. Rosen appointed himself as the moral enforcer of the community.

Working with the then-special prosecutor for nursing homes, Charles Hynes, who now is Brooklyn district attorney, Mr. Rosen suggested that he might be interested in replacing the area’s affable but weak-willed assemblyman, Alan Hochberg. A panicked Hochberg offered to put Mr. Rosen and others on his payroll if the rent strike leaders would back off – unaware as they were sitting over coffee at the Thruway Diner in New Rochelle that Mr. Rosen was secretly tape-recording the exchange. Hochberg would end up in jail and his political career came to an abrupt end.

Once Mr. Rosen seized control of Coop City, he found that he had taught his people the anti-landlord message too well. He and his allies were unceremoniously tossed out a few short years later as well.

Retiring from the Post, Mr. Rosen reinvented himself as the moving force behind a social-service group, the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club. When he left the job last month, he was earning a handsome salary – in 2003, the club paid him $148,000 for a 23-hour week. It pays to be a radical.