http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/nyregion/02norman.html?ex=1285905600&en=ee18662509840db0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
The New York Times
October 2, 2005
By SAM ROBERTS and JONATHAN P. HICKS
"Let me just make a confession," Clarence Norman
Jr. declared two years ago, as he, while under investigation, celebrated his
birthday with campaign contributors at a catering hall in Brooklyn.
"Clarence Norman and the Democratic Party, we are involved in politics.
And if there is a crime in being involved in politics, then we are indeed
guilty!"
Last week, a racially mixed Brooklyn jury convicted Mr.
Norman, the county's first black Democratic chairman, of violating campaign
finance laws - concluding, in effect, that politics, at least as practiced in
this case, indeed constituted a crime.
The conviction abruptly terminated the political career of
the 54-year-old street-smart son and namesake of a minister. He automatically
forfeited the Assembly seat he has held since 1983 and, with it, the post of
deputy speaker in Albany. He also lost the chairmanship of Brooklyn's fractured
and flagging Democrats, who had all but dominated city and state politics for
much of the 20th century and whose ranks produced a number of black luminaries,
including Representative Shirley Chisholm.
The developments, then, invited verdicts on the nature and
impact of Mr. Norman's more than two decades in state and local politics.
Interviews with an array of current and former elected officials produced the
following judgments:
As an assemblyman, Mr. Norman was a presence in his Crown
Heights district, but was never considered very influential in Albany.
As one of several fledgling black politicians who rebelled
in the 1980's against the iron-fisted leadership of Brooklyn's last real boss,
Meade H. Esposito, he opted to be no firebrand, but rather an organization man
himself.
And as the county chairman, he presided over a largely
vestigial structure that, starved of political appointments from City Hall, has
grown weaker and become increasingly dependent on, and desperate for, judicial
patronage.
In 1990, when his organizational skills finally paid off
with the county Democratic chairmanship, Mr. Norman inherited a dysfunctional,
fragmented party apparatus that no one would dignify by describing as a
machine.
And no formal trial was needed to conclude that - despite
his charm, the fierce loyalty he commanded and returned, and the multiple titles
he held - Mr. Norman in 15 years as county chairman and apparently armed with
power enough to abuse never delivered on Brooklyn's unique political potential
as home to 929,459 enrolled Democrats, more than in any other urban county in
the country.
The party organization's decline was not unique to Brooklyn,
of course. But it was compounded there by infighting and scandal and by wistful
comparisons to its storied past and to the promise of enlightened leadership.
Whether his successor as county chairman does any better may
depend, in part, on what Mr. Norman does next. Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn
district attorney, hopes that Mr. Norman, facing a prison term and trials on
other pending charges, will agree to cooperate with prosecutors investigating the
sale of judgeships, which might prompt a wholesale political housecleaning.
"What has to be crystal clear to those people in the
Democratic organization," Mr. Hynes said, "is that business as usual
has come to an end."
Influence Far and Wide
The chairmanship that Mr. Norman won in 1990 was a mere
shadow even of the smoke-and-mirrors mirage of political power perpetrated by
his recent predecessors.
Brooklyn was rarely politically monolithic, but for much of
the 20th century it produced party leaders worthy of the sobriquet, or epithet,
Boss. When one of those legendary leaders, John H. McCooey, died in 1934,
30,000 mourners thronged his funeral.
In 1974, Meade Esposito was considered so powerful that his
sudden disappearance from the hall during a state political convention roll
call derailed the nomination of a candidate for lieutenant governor. (Mr.
Esposito, as it happened, was merely returning from the men's room at the
time.)
The Brooklyn machine's power was also reflected in Albany,
and often in the city. With rare interruptions, the Democratic leadership of
the State Assembly belonged to Brooklyn - to Irwin Steingut, Anthony J. Travia,
Stanley Steingut, Stanley Fink and Mel Miller.
In the City Council, Brooklyn's Thomas J. Cuite dominated as
majority leader for nearly two decades until 1985. In the last half-century,
the only mayor who hailed from outside Manhattan was a Brooklynite, Abraham D.
Beame.
But even in the mid 1970's, when Mr. Beame served, the
Democratic organizations - they were still organized in those days, if not
always democratic - were already beginning to crumble.
They fractured between regulars and reformers and along
ethnic and then racial lines. Their power was diluted by the abolition of the
Board of Estimate, on which borough presidents voted, and by the imposition of
term limits, public campaign financing and conflict-of-interest rules prompted
by corruption scandals.
One of those rules, which prohibited a borough president
from also serving as the county's political chairman, created the opening for
Mr. Norman in 1990, when he was only 39 years old but was already well known as
the son of Clarence Norman Sr., a prominent Baptist minister in Brooklyn.
"I was raised in the church," Mr. Norman said
then, "and were it not for the religious environment in which I was
raised, I would not be sitting behind this desk; I could be sitting behind
bars."
Two other developments hobbled New York City's political
leaders.
Jobs are the lifeblood of political organizations, and these
have been 12 relatively lean years, at least for Democrats.
The ascendancy of a black as county chairman at the same
time a black candidate, David N. Dinkins, became mayor, raised hopes among the
party faithful in Brooklyn, but Mr. Norman complained of being shortchanged.
(In Albany, as an assemblyman, Mr. Norman won millions of dollars for projects
in his district, including grants for Medgar Evers College and the Jewish
Children's Museum, but as the deputy speaker, he had little real power.)
One fight that spoke to Mr. Norman's hold, or lack of it, on
the politics of Brooklyn was the one he had to wage for his own job. In 2000,
he was afraid of losing his Assembly seat to a candidate who had come within
200 votes in the primary two years earlier.
According to the criminal case against him, that fear
prompted Mr. Norman to bend the rules. He was convicted last week of soliciting
$7,400 in 2000 and $5,400 in 2002 from a lobbyist, knowing that the money
exceeded state limits, and then trying to hide the contributions.
In a way, he became a victim of his own reputation. Henry
Stern, a former city official, wrote in his blog, New York Civic, after the
verdict: "Even though his alleged sins were relatively trivial for a
politician, his plea of ignorance of the law was not credible. He was
considered too smart not to have known what he was doing, the jury felt that
his testimony was not credible. Essentially, he was convicted for personally
lying to them, which made the case a contest between his intelligence and
theirs."
The verdict dispelled any presumption that blacks, who
constituted a majority of the jurors, would be unwilling to convict a black
political leader.
"It blows that myth apart," said Mr. Hynes.
The conviction also challenged the apparent paradox that a
county chairman was being charged with abusing power he does not have.
"That premise is wrong," Mr. Hynes said.
"Clarence Norman Jr., while under indictment, picked a group of people for
the State Supreme Court last year, picked the surrogate who will run without
any serious opposition. He has enormous power, and the misuse was in the
manipulation. He manipulated the system."
Neither Reformer Nor Boss
Meade Esposito used to grouse that when he dispensed a
judgeship (a politician who ascended to the bench was said to have gone to his
final reward), he made five jealous enemies and one ingrate.
Mr. Esposito's strong hold on Brooklyn politics was
eventually challenged by several black assemblymen, Mr. Norman among them. But
in his role of party chairman, Mr. Norman was neither a reformer nor much of a
boss.
"When you're on the outside, you're a reformer;"
he once said. "When you're on the inside, you're a regular. Let's be for
real."
In 1996, then, he engineered the defeat of a protégé of his
archrival and installed Michael H. Feinberg on the Surrogate's Court.
Judge Feinberg was removed from the bench earlier this year
for awarding $8.6 million in legal fees to a longtime friend for handling the
affairs of people who died with no wills. Acts like that hardly pleased those
eager to open, and perhaps cleanse, the political system.
But Mr. Norman did not like the word boss, preferring
"coordinator/mediator." "My approach has been to be, not a
dictator, but a facilitator, bringing people together and building
consensus," he said in an interview. "In the old days, they made a
decision and they whipped everybody into line. That style doesn't work any
more."
Mr. Norman knew that firsthand. In 2001, another candidate,
Marty Markowitz, defeated his candidate for borough president. Last month, an
insurgent appeared to have squeaked past the organization's candidate to
succeed Judge Feinberg.
Mr. Norman's choice for mayor, Gifford Miller, ran fourth in
Brooklyn with a mere 10 percent of the vote. Mr. Norman's nemesis, Mr. Hynes,
was re-elected - if narrowly.
Still, before his conviction, Mr. Norman was actually
sanguine about the party's future, predicting that the City Council speakership
might go to a Brooklynite - not necessarily an organization man, though - and
looking ahead to other successes next year, including electing a successor to
Representative Major Owens, who is retiring
"The truth is," Mr. Norman said philosophically
then, "life goes on."
Others, though, are convinced the life of even the creaky
Brooklyn machine is about fully ended.
According to Grassroots Initiative, a civic group, nearly
half the 10,000 Democratic County Committee seats in Brooklyn are unfilled.
"Party politics have been in a long and steady decline
for years, but the current disarray in Brooklyn merely makes it more
visible," said Kenneth Fisher, a former city councilman.
"I don't know that the county organization, as it's
been known historically, will ever really exist again," said Councilwoman
Yvette D. Clarke. "In terms of what has been demonstrated politically this
year and in past years, I'm not sure what it is accomplishing."
Lewis A. Fidler, another Brooklyn councilman, agreed.
"Brooklyn organization is an oxymoron."
And in Mr. Norman, it had something of an enigma to breathe
its last breaths.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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