Gang Rape of a City

By Laurence I. Barrett

THE ABUSE OF POWER: THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT AND THE FALL OF NEW YORK

by JACK NEWFIELD and PAUL DU BRUL

368 pages. Viking. $12.50.

In the movie Network, a manic anchorman exhorts his listeners to proclaim through open windows that they won't take abuse any more. In real journalism, Jack Newfield screams a similar demand, but he wants his audience to protest in closed voting booths. Rage rather than dementia drives this full-time muckraker--one reason why his novelty value has survived six books and hundreds of articles; few can match the fresh indignation he brings to old scams.

The question of who maimed New York City has become Newfield's obsession. He is concerned not only with immediate injury--the 30-month-long fiscal crisis--but with chronic economic and social ailments. The Abuse of Power is his answer. Though written with Paul Du Brul, a city planner, the book's thesis is pure Newfield: the city was not merely short-shrifted by federal policy, let down by feckless mayors and leeched by the unions. The case was, and remains, an exercise in gang rape with enough perpetrators to fill a penitentiary.

Volunteer Cuckold. Elected and appointed officials make up New York's temporary government. This feeble mechanism is no match for the permanent government: bankers, builders, lawyer-fixers, back-room pols, landlords, union leaders. Larger commercial banks profited merrily for years in the city bond trade, both as underwriters and as holders of securities. When trouble surfaced, they quietly dumped the paper. Savings institutions redlined neighborhood after neighborhood, exporting loans to suburbia instead of reinvesting in the city.

Hundreds of millions in taxes were lost because of inefficiency in collection and favoritism in the assessment process. Construction projects were methodically milked at immense cost. The Lindsay administration, for instance, agreed to renovate Yankee Stadium as the means of keeping the team in New York. In 1972 the cost to the city was pegged at $24 million. Four years later it was $101 million--some $40 million more than the price of a larger and entirely new stadium in Michigan.

Hundreds of millions more have been stolen from assorted health and welfare programs. Virtually every audit turns up new hanky-panky by the entrepreneurs and "community leaders" who are supposed to serve the poor. Newfield recalls a typical 1974 dinner of the Brooklyn Democratic group whose hero was Mayor Abraham Beame. Seven of the guests have since been convicted of felonies (including two Congressmen) and several more are now under judicial and ethical clouds. From such organizations Beame drew much of his management talent.

So goes Newfield's script. He keeps compounding the felons until, surrounded by nothing but villainy, the reader grows weary and even skeptical. Substandard hyperbole ("We realized that behind almost every horror stood a banker") and doctrinaire populism ("They are making a desert and calling it a balanced budget") further reduce the authors' credibility. Invective obscures insight. John Lindsay was not merely an inadequate mayor but "a volunteer cuckold of the permanent government." The clubhouse crowd is condemned as "back-room dreck," though in fact it produces some good administrators.

Jeremiahs Needed. The true outrage of The Abuse of Power, however, rises not from its flaws but from its truths. If many of the specifics have been sporadically reported, if criminals have often been called to account, urban systems still manage to fend off basic reform. They will continue to do so until voters decide otherwise. For that millennium to occur, there need to be more Jeremiahs like Newfield willing to howl their grim, invaluable message over and over again. It cannot be heard by too many citizens, or heeded by too many cities.

Laurence I. Barrett

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