Independent Neighborhood Democrats (IND), the local political Club in my area, is currently forming a circular firing squad as it puts itself into civil war footing. At the center of the war is a gregarious but somewhat annoying man I’ve rarely found common cause with who has sometimes behaved despicably, and yet, I find myself feeling that he’s being treated unfairly.
I’m talking about the self-proclaimed Mayor of Carroll Gardens, the Merry Mortician himself, one Salvatore “Buddy” Scotto.
Yesterday, a writer at Daily Gotham who I regard as an ally in this battle made a comment about Buddy which compared him and his followers to the Soprano Family.
Does Mole333 even know that Buddy Scotto stood up against organized crime in Carroll Gardens at a time when doing so was an invitation to a premature funeral (which probably would have been the first mob-related funeral in the Scotto firm’s history–the Wise Guys mostly use Raccuglia, sometimes Cusimano or Guido, but never Scotto), and that Buddy has had, at least once, to go into exile for his efforts?
Everyone knows this story–at least everyone who’s ever had the misfortune to spend ten minutes with Buddy with no polite way to exit. He usually tells it right before the one about Nelson Rockefeller calling him up to convince him to vote for Ford at the 76 Republican Convention.
Buddy goes back a long time. He was born in October of 1928, his birth foreshadowing by a year the great depression to come.
Over the years, Buddy has been the recipient of literally thousands of proclamations, resolutions, citations, commendations, letters of praise, letter of tribute and other multi and various honors, many of them sincere, commending his good works, such as they are; these honors have for many years provided the Scotto Funeral Home with ample wall decorations, insulation and scrap paper which, if burned, could power the Gowanus Canal Flushing Tunnel into the next millennium.
Buddy has lived his entire life in his home neighborhood of “South Brooklyn” (as it was then) leaving only to visit his modest summer home in Bay Ridge. Distressed to learn the area was really in northern Brooklyn, Buddy worked tirelessly to rectify the matter, earning the undying respect of area realtors, including most of his own family, by renaming the neighborhood “Carroll Gardens,” thereby making it safe for Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals who think Sicily is town in Alaska and Naples a place in Florida to which their parents retire.
For decades, Buddy was the leading force in the effort to clean up the Gowanus Canal, Founding the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC), with the twin goals of improving neighborhood conditions and eliminating a major source of cut-rate competition to his funeral business. Now, with the operation of the Flushing Tunnel Buddy is largely responsible for putting back into action, and his other efforts to improve the area, the neighborhood has become far more attractive for development from which Buddy’s family can profit.
There is even a rumor that Buddy is in the process of creating a Gowanus Canal Fishing Fleet, to provide local stores and restaurants with homegrown Brooklyn delicacies, thereby revitalizing the local economy and creating new customers for his family business.
Buddy is also the founder of the Carroll Gardens Association (CGA), another local development corporation. For years, Buddy has solemnly promised that one day, CGA will initiate a project that is actually in Carroll Gardens. For years, CGA ‘s name and Buddy’s talent for smoke and mirrors were responsible for deceiving local elected officials and the press into believing that the area had a functioning civic association. When the pressure to actually create one of those finally became too much, Buddy helped to create one of them as well.
More recently, Buddy has become the leading force in the effort not to clean up the Canal, putting lie to those who claim that Buddy is incapable of embracing new ideas.
Buddy has been an effective political leader, starting out in politics as a Republican who supported Democrats and ending up as a Democrat who supported Republicans (unless those persistent rumors that he‘s become a Republican again are actually true), a man who always remembers his friends, for at least five minutes, if not twice that long.
Buddy’s advocated for such causes as banning waterfront uses from the waterfront, rebuilding the Berlin Wall around Carroll Gardens (and charging admission to enter) and replacing the Gowanus Expressway with a tunnel with an entrance, but no exit, so like the Roach Motel and the Scotto Funeral Home, customers can check in, but they can’t check out [Unlike the joke about the fishing fleet, all of these proposals pretty much reflect Buddy’s actual views].
Buddy is a compassionate man, for whom there is no task so large, or favor so big, that he won’t ask someone else to do it. He’s a proud family man, and a successful businessman who prospers in the face of stiff competition. Buddy is the life of every party, a man who is as comfortable cutting a rug as he is in wearing one.
As Bill Maher would say, I kid Buddy Scotto, but I do it with love. Really. The man is a giant. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, Buddy Scotto saw what was happening to his neighborhood and didn’t like it, and who could blame him? He correctly perceived it was on a downhill slide and he made efforts to preserve and restore its housing stock, assist its local businesses and address other neighborhood ills at a time when the elected hacks from the Regular Democratic Club largely ignored such concerns. His efforts drew a front page Jack Newfield article in the Village Voice entitled “Saving Brooklyn a Block at a Time.”
During this time, Buddy decided that political change was needed and threw in with the local Reform Democrats, embodied by their local club, (IND).
The fit was never very comfortable. The district was dominated by two neighborhoods which were polar opposites, Brooklyn Heights (rich White Anglo Saxon Protestants and Jewish Anglo Saxon Protestants) and Carroll Gardens (working class, socially conservative Italians and Irish). The electeds, folks like Mike Pesce (a native of Italy), Eileen Dugan and Steve Dibrienza (both South Brooklyn natives), all learned to talk the liberal talk ,while walking the ethnic walk. Be for choice and the gays, but don’t go mentioning it south of Degraw Street. Mike, Eileen, Steve and Marty Connor all were passionate liberals, even on social issues; Buddy went along for the ride, and his programs and projects prospered, especially in the 90s, when Dugan and Connor wielded real power.
The IND folks may have started out as reformers, and they never lost their base convictions, but they learned to compromise and play the game. Buddy learned too, but his game was a different one. Never a social liberal, he backed anti-gay Susan Alter for Congress against Ed Towns. Four years ago, when someone at IND proposed sending Marty Markowitz a letter expressing concern over his endorsement of Mike Bloomberg, Buddy not only led the fight to oppose such a letter, but proudly bragged of his support for Bloomberg and other Republicans.
But conservatism didn’t motivate Buddy; he was goal directed. His models have always been other late 1960s-early 1970s vintage community organizers of Italian-American origin, who combined Alinsky-inspired tactics and programs with techniques reminiscent of the old time Italian-American padrones, mixing old-fashioned empire building with a radical world view. These were people like North Newark’s Steve Adubato, the South Bronx’s Father Louis Gigante and the pre-elected official version of Vito Lopez. In their fiefdom’s, these visionary men administered a local, warm and paternal version of democratic socialism and opposed their communities’ reactionary elements, but at the same time, they sometimes seemed ruthless in their methods, and had no qualms about making alliances based solely upon accumulation of power, without regard to ideological principles.
I should note that liberals who excuse the likes of Steve Harrison for endorsing Republicans to further a zoning proposal in middle class Bay Ridge really have no business in criticizing those who do the same to help obtain money for programs to help the poor and working class. Buddy’s neighborhood may have been richer than the North Ward of Newark or Bushwick, but it wasn’t always that much so, and is so today in large measure because of Buddy’s efforts (which also benefited the much more impoverished neighborhood of Red Hook). But Buddy never achieved the power wielded by these other men because, truth be told, he was always too much of a lovable goofball to be ruthless. Still, his politics were only part of IND’s by fiat.
And they sometimes got ugly.
In 2003, a group of lowlife vermin (a description, not a value judgment) got wind of an effort by the Asian-American Women’s Center to locate a Domestic Violence shelter (a facility which requires a secret location) called Rose House in Carroll Gardens. They proceeded to start a campaign to stop it, engaging in veiled racist attacks, while publicizing the facility’s address, and threatening to circulate fliers with the address in Asian neighborhoods.
The one hope we had of putting a stop to such abominable behavior was that someone with Buddy’s standing in the community would take a principled stance. Instead, afraid of losing his constituency, Buddy joined with the Rose House opponents. This was surely not a matter of social conservatism, as Cecile Cacace, another community leader far more socially conservative than Buddy, supported Rose House saying, "in a choice between God and the Devil, I choose God."
Buddy never could be even bothered to call for an end to disseminating the facility’s location (a tactice which only ceased after Joe Hynes threatened prosecution), though he did write a letter to the paper accusing the Rose House’s supporters (I was their leader) of “name calling” which “never further civic discourse,” when all we had done was accurately describe the tactics the opponents had engaged in. I note that when one of the anti-Rose House leaders called me "sub-human," Buddy’s silence was deafening.
Please note that this one-sided call for an end to “name calling” came from a man who once said that Jerry Nadler’s position on waterfront usage stemmed from Nadler's being “either stupid or corrupt,” and who later paternalistically proclaimed that residents of Red Hook Houses who supported a development project Buddy opposed (back in the days when Buddy still opposed development projects) “lacked self-esteem” (hundreds of those residents now work at the Ikea and Fairway Buddy opposed, surely improving their “self esteem” with every paycheck).
These days, there’s not a development project Buddy doesn’t support, and he’s been rewarded in dozens of way. His tiny block of First Place has more members of Community Board Six, per capita, then any in the district–this from a Borough President who, in the same board, has sometimes left unrepresented entire housing projects with thousands of residents (while having his staff tell the press it’s OK, because he’s got the legal power to do so). Buddy’s daughter and her law partner both serve on Board Six, as does the wife of one of Buddy’s employees. That employee also has a part-time job with Borough President Marty Markowitz, and Buddy is running him for City Council.
His name is John Heyer.
Heyer brags of his civic involvement since he was a teenager, but despite four separate efforts through Heyer’s campaign email and his personal Facebook account, I have yet to receive an answer to my question concerning whether Heyer walked in lockstep with the rest of Buddy’s crew in opposing Rose House. There seems only two possibilities. The more likely one is that Heyer stood with Buddy, as he always has. That would make his actions unspeakable. The other is that Heyer did not, but doesn’t want to admit it, because that would alienate his base. That would only make Heyer a cynic, which seems an awful thing to be at 26.
Heyer is an attractive young man, who should really consider running someplace in southern Brooklyn. I might even support him in an area like Bensonhurst or Dyker Heights. But, the facts is, Heyer probably cannot win an election in Brownstone Brooklyn. The gentrification that Buddy Scotto helped to give birth to in order to save his neighborhood for people like himself has pushed people like himself out. When I bought my house by the Gowanus Canal from a former leader of the old Regular Democrats (so he could move to Staten Island, which is like the elephant’s graveyard for such folks) who Buddy had helped to oust, one local elected called it “the story of Carroll Gardens in one real estate transaction.”
But, that would not be accurate. Back in 2003, when I spoke at a meeting on the Domestic Violence facility, one old-timer yelled out and asked me how long I had lived in the area. “Fourteen years” I said proudly.
“A newcomer!” he sneered.
But these days, I am as much an anachronism as old Salvatore Scotto (who once proposed that IND appoint a council of elders to choose its candidate for a vacant Assembly seat).
My State Senator moved to the area just in time to be eligible to run, as did my Councilman. John Heyer brags about being in the area for five generations. The typical voter in his district has lived here five months, and they don‘t care about John’s great-grandma.
The truth is that the Buddy Scotto constituency is no longer a factor in the Democratic politics of Carroll Gardens. Barack Obama crushed Hillary here in the primary. Yes, many old-timers survive, but they are an important constituency mostly at the funeral home, and many of those who still live and breathe have tended so long to vote Republican that they largely ignore Democratic primaries, even if they are still eligible to vote in them. And, even among those who do vote, a good third of them are old time Regulars who've never forgiven Buddy for his trespasses during the 70’s.
In truth, as Marty Connor discovered last year, Buddy has no influence outside of maybe 50 people, not all of whom are enrolled Democrats, but all 50 of whom seemed to have joined IND in time to vote for John Heyer. Heyer is the frontrunner to get the club‘s endorsement Thursday night.
Heyer’s pro-life, anti-same sex marriage views on social issues are so out of touch with the majority of the IND area’s Democratic voters that one must conclude that his endorsement by the club would pose a danger to the club’s future. If one is seen as failing to pass the litmus tests required for admission to consideration, one is doomed from the start. If IND endorses Heyer, its present and future endorsements will be viewed with suspicion by voters who will no longer let its candidates get their foot in the door.
Ask Marty Connor.
Last year, Connor’s opponent Dan Squadron ran a despicable underground effort to successfully and falsely portray Connor as a social conservative. Since Connor presented as an overweight, Irish, sixty-something with a comb-over, these assertions gibed with the cultural stereotypes, and were seen as credible, even though they were repugnant and ridiculous lies. Imagine what further damage Squadron could have done if such falsehoods were linked with the accurate assertion that Connor’s home club had endorsed the likes of Heyer.
Already, just the rumors of the Heyer endorsement are having an effect. Jo Anne Simon, an IND District Leader running in the neighboring 33rd Councilmanic, was attacked by another candidate in the race, over the IND endorsement of Heyer, which has yet to occur. Moreover, there are unverified rumors that there will be a move at CBID, another reform club, to revoke their Simon endorsement, should IND endorses Heyer.
Actually, the concept is pretty funny: Buddy Scotto, a great admirer of Vito Lopez, manages to facilitate an IND endorsement of Heyer, who Lopez is too savvy to ever support, which allows Vito Lopez’s candidate, Steve Levin, the ability to attack Simon from the left, while left purists are encouraged to throw away votes on the likes of Ken Diamondstone (who attacks developers for trying to make their projects more appealing to the public–isn’t that the idea?) and Ken Baer (who attacks his opponents for owning cars).
Dorothy Siegel of the Working Families Party (WFP), still smarting over a Brooklyn Bridge Park Plan that threatens to block the view from her rooftop, has been telling people for some time now that she is looking for a candidate to run in a primary against IND’s Assemblywoman, Joan Millman. WFP has already beaten IND’s Senator, Marty Connor, partially by falsely portraying him as a reactionary.
Why would IND want to give this woman more fuel to put on her fire?