Suffer Little Children

Mattingly Leaves ACS,

Presided Over Tragedies

But Reformed the Agency.

Judge Richter Is Successor.

John B. Mattingly is retiring as Commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) after seven years in the trenches. At the age of 66, he will return to the child welfare foundation he headed in Baltimore.

His departure is in striking contrast to Jay Walder's jumping ship after 21 months at the MTA to take a far more lucrative position running a railroad in the Orient. Yet Walder may have performed a service by his surprise exit. His manner had alienated many of the people he had to deal with, and the financial chasm between receipts and expenditures had only widened, although through no fault of Walder's.

John Mattingly stayed for the long haul in what is probably the most thankless position in city government. You get into the news only when a child under your protection is murdered, usually by the mother's boyfriend, or when the child starves to death after months or years of neglect and abuse. The more grotesque the death, the more attention it receives in the media, and the more people are shocked by the tragedy, which can often be traced to the negligence or incompetence of employees of the Administration for Children's Services.

The nadir in this agency came five and one half years ago, when the police found the lifeless and emaciated body of Nixzmary Brown in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. We reported on the case on January 13, 2006, and you can read our analysis of the situation by clicking here. We reproduce the headline over the story.

TORTURE AND MURDER OF A 7-YEAR OLD GIRL
LIVING WITH FAMILY UNDER ACS SUPERVISION
LEADS TO DEMANDS FOR FULL INVESTIGATION
AND REVIEW OF ACS' FAMILY-FIRST ATTITUDE.

With additional information, we wrote another article five days later, which you can read here. By January 18, similar horror stories were coming to light. This was the headline on the second article:

OBSERVATIONS ON THE DEATH OF AN AMIABLE CHILD,
TORTURED BY ADULTS AND IGNORED BY AUTHORITIES.

The reference to an amiable child is from the caption on a small statue in Riverside Park, just west of Grant's Tomb, which commemorates the life of St. Claire Pollock, a young boy who, on July 15, 1797, fell to his death from the edge of a cliff overlooking the Hudson River. We feel sadness over the centuries at the loss of an innocent child. When the tragedy is caused in part by official misconduct, people feel anger as well as sorrow.

A roster of murdered children appeared in a third story, which was published on January 23. Compare the unusual, hopeful names their mothers gave them with their sordid and pitiful deaths. Click here to read the article headlined:

SIERRA, DAHQUAY, JOZIAH, NIXZMARY;
FOUR CHILDREN DIE IN FOUR MONTHS
WHILE UNDER THE CARE OF CITY ACS.

That column, which is almost lyrical in tone, begins with the poem, "Who killed Cock Robin". It continues with a contemporary version of the children's rhyme. I strongly recommend that you read it; you will not be disappointed.

AFTER THE TRAGEDIES

With the support of Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Mattingly survived these disasters and went on to institute numerous reforms in the beleaguered agency. More caseworkers were hired, and their training improved. Supervision was increased, and supervisors were held responsible for their employees' misconduct. Child welfare advocates, generally critical of public agencies, gave Mattingly good marks on the whole upon his departure.

However, since no one can entirely believe the words of public officials, (look, for example, at the hosannahs which exalted Joel I. Klein upon his departure from the Department of Education to enter the service of Rupert Murdoch) we cannot say for certain what, if any, skeletons remain in the closet at ACS.

We commend Commissioner Mattingly for his service and dedication over seven long and arduous years. Mayor Bloomberg was courageous for not yielding to those demanding Mattingly's immediate dismissal after the tragedies.

We have just learned that the mayor has appointed Ronald E. Richter, a Family Court judge, to succeed Mattingly. Richter was formerly a Deputy Commissioner at ACS, in charge of Family Court cases involving child abuse, neglect and custodial rights. He is married to Franklin Cogliano, and they have a 14-month daughter, Maya.

Mayor Bloomberg said that the Commissioner's sexual preference had no relevance to his appointment.

The Last Muckraker

Ace Investigative Journalists,

Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins,

Are Leaving the Village Voice

On rare occasions, someone writes an article which I believe is so significant that I want to share it with you, our readers, without delay and with no need for linkage.

This morning we received the following column from Wayne Barrett, announcing that after 33 years as a columnist for the Village Voice, he was leaving the weekly paper, which is now a throwaway (distributed free). This unexpected news is a great loss for the City of New York.

The New York Times blog reported later this morning that Barrett had been let go by the Voice to save money and that Tom Robbins, the only other name reporter in New York City coverage, had resigned in protest at the management decision to fire Barrett. The Voice has been bought and resold by many owners in the last thirty years. Barrett was its lead investigative journalist, but previous managers, including Rupert Murdoch, Clay Felker and Carter Burden, did not interfere with his column. Barrett had won many honors in his years at the Voice, and was responsible for uncovering numerous municipal scandals.

The Voice is now owned by a Phoenix, Arizona-based conglomerate of 17 weeklies around the country. The executive editor is Michael Lacey and the CEO of Village Voice Media is James Larkin. Neither man is widely known in New York. The founders of the Voice in 1955 included Daniel Wolf, the paper's editor, Edwin Fancher, a Greenwich Village psychologist, and Norman Mailer.

Over the years, Barrett has produced a remarkable body of work which should be made readily available to the general public. In my judgment, as far as New York politics and ethics are concerned, he is and has been the conscience of his generation. Although we do not always agree, and I think some of his judgments are too harsh, his fact-collecting abilities and those of his interns at the Columbia School of Journalism, where he teaches, are unsurpassed.

If this dogged and painstaking reporter did not possess that unique combination of integrity, industry and intensity, he would not have been able to do the work that he has done so consistently and so capably for a third of a century. If the three levels of government had acted on more of the information he collected and presented, this city, state and nation would be better served. If other journalists had followed up on more of his stories, instead of ignoring them because they appeared first in the Voice, the results would have been beneficial to honest public officials and harmful to those who betrayed their trust. Nonetheless, his impact over the years has been substantial, and who can tell what wrongful conduct his columns deterred?

Barrett and Tom Robbins are two of the most knowledgeable writers about what really goes on inside New York's multi-layered cosmos of government, politics, real estate and big business.

The articles they wrote are part of a great legacy of reform journalism, initiated at the Village Voice by Daniel Wolf (1915-1996), and carried on by Mary Perot Nichols (1926-1996) and Jack Newfield (1938-2004). We hope that Wayne and Tom continue to write, that New Yorkers continue to read, and authorities begin to take action on the events and issues that they have so courageously and unhesitatingly called to their attention over the years.

This is the column we received today. We are proud to send it to you.

TIME FOR SOMETHING NEW
by Wayne Barrett

January 4, 2011

Ed Koch and I were inaugurated on the same day in 1978. He became mayor and I became his weekly tormentor.

I had written a few pieces for the Voice before I took over the Runnin' Scared column that January, going back as far as 1973.

But I was now inheriting a column that Mary Nichols, the Voice's editor-in-chief, had made famous, and that had been written by greats like Jack Newfield, Ken Auletta, and Joe Conason. A country kid out of Lynchburg, Virginia, where I'd founded the Teenage Republicans, I was suddenly occupying the first two pages of New York's counter-cultural crier.

Since then, I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of the Voice. These will be my last.

I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new.

If I didn't see that, others did.

The paper has always been more than an employer to me. I turned down other jobs that paid better three times to stay here. Though my mentor Newfield used to say we got our owners "from office temporaries," and though I worked for 14 different editors, the Voice was always a place where I could express my voice. And that meant more to me than larger circulations or greater influence or bigger paychecks.

It is called a writer's paper because we decide what we will write. That is not a license to spout and I never took it as such. Across all these years, I almost never wrote in the first person and, even when I did, the piece was still packed with reportage. In my extended family, I have become the go-to guy for eulogies and I report every one of them, learning more about my mother, for example, by interviewing her sisters than she ever told me when she was alive.

When I was asked in recent years to blog frequently, I wouldn't do it unless I had something new to tell a reader, not just a clever regurgitation of someone else's reporting.

My credo has always been that the only reason readers come back to you again and again over decades is because of what you unearth for them, and that the joy of our profession is discovery, not dissertation.

There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth. Other professionals do sometimes tell the truth, but it's ancillary to what they do, not the purpose of their job. I was asked years ago to address the elementary school that my son attended and tell them what a reporter did and I went to the auditorium in a trenchcoat with the collar up and a notebook in a my pocket, baring it to announce that "we are detectives for the people."

When the Voice celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2005, I said "we thought a deadline meant we had to kill somebody by closing time," and that, as a liberal Democratic paper, we were "better at goring one of our own." It never mattered to me what the party or ideology was of the subject of an investigative piece; the reporting was as nonpartisan as the wrongdoing itself. I never looked past the wrist of any hand in the public till. It was the grabbing that bothered me, and there was no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the loot.

The greatest prize I've ever won for the work I've done in these pages was when Al D'Amato called me a "viper" in his memoir. Chuck Schumer, who ended D'Amato's reign after 18 years, ascribed his victory in a 2007 memoir to a story I'd written a decade earlier that devastated the incumbent Republican. What Schumer didn't say was that as soon as Hank Morris, Schumer's media guru, went up with an ad based on my revelations about D'Amato, Arthur Finkelstein, who was running D'Amato's 1998 campaign, aired a commercial about Schumer's near-indictment and flashed my nearly two-decade-old clips breaking that scandal on the screen as well. I was the maestro of a commercial duel.

Even as my scandal stories skewered David Dinkins in the 1989 and 1993 mayoral campaigns, I chronicled the devolution of his nemesis, Rudy Giuliani, from hero prosecutor to used 9/11 memorabilia salesman.

As awkwardly as I felt about it, Carl Paladino's toughest shots at Andrew Cuomo this fall were garbled renditions of two 6000-word exposes I'd done here about Cuomo's HUD record. For a week in the 2009 mayoral campaign, I couldn't turn on the TV without seeing a Bloomberg commercial drawn from my expose of Bill Thompson's conflict-ridden home mortgage. But I'd delivered one cover-story blow after another throughout the cycle about everything from the mayor's culpability in the Deutsche Bank fire debacle to his own governmental incest with Bloomberg L.P.

It was always the conduct that prodded me to write, not the person. And that is what I lived for, a chance to say something that revealed and mattered. To me, the story will always be the thing. It is all I can see.

I believe I have much left to learn, still armed with my notebook, and thus much left to tell you. It may be books or blogs or something in between. I hope to bring my trademark interns with me because they have, for more than 30 years, helped me think young, especially when it comes to the climate and water crises. The city and state beat are precious to me, but what is happening to our nation is also a frightening pull on me, so I don't know what I will wind up writing in this new life.

I have loved my bond with you and have never traded an inch of truth for a moment, or even a season, of access. I tell the young people still drawn to this duty that it is the most honorable one in America, and that I have never met a corrupt journalist. I even met one, Tom Robbins, so brave that when he heard I was leaving, he quit himself and didn't even tell me he was. "I'm going out with the guy who brought me to the dance," Robbins told me after he resigned, crafting a lede with the very fiber of his life.

"If a newspaper writes the story of its city without compromise or calculation," I wrote in that 50th anniversary piece, "it is as breathtaking as a ballet, each detail another artful step. Put us together as bound volumes in the memory of this grandest of cities and the Voice reads like a classic, ever passionate and principled."

I will pray it always does.

- 30 -

Wayne and Tom, we salute you. The city is in your debt, more than most New Yorkers know.

Annus Horribilis

Bloomberg Beleaguered

By Medley of Mishaps.

Third Term Troubles?

The flood of personal criticism leveled at Mayor Bloomberg because of the city's poor response to the December 26 blizzard is somewhat over the top.

Many factors contributed to the city's failure to clean the streets, and there is likely to be at least one investigation to explore the sequence of events and offer proposals to prevent or mitigate a recurrence. Actually, the last two major snowfalls had been well handled, which led to the public's expectation that this storm would be dealt with promptly and professionally. That turned out not to be the case.

Of course, the Mayor had the responsibility of command. You take credit for the good things that happen on your watch, and get blamed for the bad things that happen. People know at some level that the chief executive does not usually make immediate decisions which affect the outcome of these crises, but, nonetheless, success or failure are attributed to the king, chieftain, or the leader of the tribe.

The Mayor attracted criticism because of his initial attitude toward the storm, treating it as a nuisance rather than as a serious blow to others, whose homes could not be reached by ambulances or were unable to get to work. As of today, we have not had reports of fatal heart attacks caused by people shoveling the snow that blocks their automobiles that are parked in the street. That is fortunate, but the situation is still risky.

As the crisis continued, the Mayor changed his stance and took the situation much more seriously. He did not repeat his suggestion that they attend a Broadway theater, which had a Marie Antoinette quality when addressed to people trapped in their homes by snowdrifts, or unable to travel owing to blocked streets or subway and elevated lines which were not running.

Actually, the MTA response to the storm appears to have been far worse than the Department of Sanitation’s, judging from the length of time that lines were out of service, but chief Jay Walder maintained a low profile. We have not previously associated the unpopular MTA with failure to respond to snowstorms which blocked the tracks, but they sure messed up this time.

The MTA’s low point came when they held a trainload of passengers during a very chilly night at Howard Beach, the station closest to JFK airport. When one thinks about it, the failure to retrieve their own passengers from a frozen stalled train for seven hours is a remarkable example of incompetence, and the investigations that will follow should not ignore that episode. We assume that the passengers who had cell phones used them, otherwise the situation would have been far worse as citizens searched for relatives missing in the tundra.

With all the city’s faults, we believe that the concentration of blame on Mayor Bloomberg is unjustified in this instance. It seems to us as if the media and the people finally have found a plausible reason to express their dissatisfaction at a number of unpopular decisions made by the Mayor over the last few years.

First, and most important, was the 2008 reversal of his long-held public position on his own tenure, when he decided to seek re-election by using his puppets on the City Council to rush through a law extending eligibility from two to three terms. The public, when polled, objected to this change by a margin of 89 per cent to 7 per cent. The unfairness of changing the rules in the middle of a conflict was widely perceived; it basically runs up against people’s ideas of fair play.

What the Mayor did, however, was clever and wise. He personally sought, and received the support of, his fellow billionaires who owned newspapers. His alliance with Rupert Murdoch of the Post, Mort Zuckerman of the News, and Arthur Sulzberger of the Times (who may no longer be a billionaire) secured the success of his scheme.

Actually, there is nothing wrong with seeking support from one’s peers, especially when one has so few peers. The reporters hated the switch to three terms, and expressed that view in their columns and articles to the extent that they could, but the owners control the editorial pages, and they lose enough money on their papers that they have all paid for the privilege of expressing their opinions. It is also an underlying fact that Mayor Bloomberg has so far been a generally good mayor, and, having seen seven relatively closely and three at a distance, I know that some were much better than others, and some were far worse.

A number of other matters have chewed at the Mayor’s reputation. The repeated indications of pre-Presidential activities, travels and speeches and the formation of nation-wide organizations and coalitions for various good causes, coupled with the same denials Bloomberg made repeatedly when he was asked whether he would run for a third term, tug a bit at the credibility of the non-candidate. Of course he is not running today, but if circumstances a year or two from now warrant a change of heart, there is no reason why he should not run.

It was once seen as possible that he would be a more moderate and effective President than either Mr. Obama or Ms. Palin, assuming they were to be the major parties’ nominees. Recent events have taken the bloom off that rose, just as Mayor Giuliani’s support for Bernie Kerik as Secretary of Homeland Security doomed his hopes in 2012, although it was not immediately realized that that was the case.

The Kerik situation illustrated one of the parables of politics: how many years of relatively good work can be canceled out by a single error in judgment. The public can be forgiving, but it usually takes time for outrage to dissipate, and in this country, unlike England, elections come on a fixed schedule.

On November 9, Mayor Bloomberg suddenly announced the appointment of Cathie Black, recently kicked upstairs to be chair of Hearst magazines, as Schools Chancellor, and Joel Klein was tossed to Rupert Murdoch to do something or other. Ms. Black had absolutely no experience in education, but is an engaging and attractive member of the mayor’s circle of acquaintances. She required a waiver of State legal requirements, which was obligingly granted by the State Education Commissioner, a decision so far upheld in court.

The justification for approval here is that the Education Mayor is responsible for the school system, and should be allowed to appoint his own choice as long as she can read and write.

Basically, no one who was not in on the plot takes Ms. Black seriously. What can she contribute to a professional field so difficult to manage that experts are sharply divided and statistics are notoriously suspect? The Black episode took its toll on the Mayor’s earned reputation for excellent, well-vetted appointments.

Then, on December 12, the Mayor’s confessed on NBC’s Meet the Press that “I want to go out being, having a reputation as a very good, maybe the greatest mayor ever.” Although the context of the statement may have been a denial of Presidential ambitions, the words were criticized as overly self-referential.

As luck would have it, on December 15, the first (and hopefully the last) major scandal of the administration broke, with $80 million reported stolen and uncounted millions wasted in a computer fraud. Juan Gonzalez of the News had written a year of stories about City Time, naming the bad guy who ran the agency (Bondy) while completely under the thumb of a his buddy (Mazer), a worse guy who, with the aid of his relatives, stole all he could gets his hands on, which came to eight or nine figures.

The case became public when six people were indicted by the United States Attorney for the Southern District (an office previously held by Mayor Giuliani), who worked with the NYC Department of Investigation. This was the largest depredation of public funds in a century, comparable to Boss Tweed’s profits from the construction of the New York County Courthouse in the 1860’s and 1870’s.

Although the Mayor was obviously unaware of the thievery going on, and expressed “zero tolerance” for such behavior, the question at once arises as to who, under him, was in charge of the CityTime project. There must be a chain of command and responsibility here. Who oversaw the thoroughly corrupt Office of Payroll Management?

Note that former Comptroller William Thompson shared control of this agency with the Mayor, and reported nothing. The new Comptroller, John Liu, sounded the alarm in 2010, but the horse was long gone from the stable. The series of frauds, which continued for six years, was not helpful to the Mayor’s reputation as a professional manager with particular expertise in computers.

The timing of this descending series of incidents created an unfortunate karma before the December 26 blizzard. The latest report, posted on the Daily News website today, is about Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith’s tweet at 11:06 p.m. Sunday night: “Good snow work by Sanitation.” Needless to say, and fair or unfair, this tweet will be remembered as the local equivalent of former President Bush’s memorable words on September 2, 2005: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

The good news is that all this is happening toward the end of 2010, which may be comparable to the year 1992, which Queen Elizabeth II described in a speech to Guildhall on November 24, as an “annus horribilis”. For a list of the misfortunes that Her Majesty endured eighteen years ago, click here. You see, it can happen to anyone.

We hope that the curse of the third term worked itself out this year, and that the remaining three years will be happy and peaceful ones for the city and for its Mayor. The problem is that substantial budget cuts lie ahead, which will lead to reduced services and increased unemployment.

These are hard times for anyone who governs. Mayor Bloomberg knew that. In fact, he said on October 2, 2008 at the press conference announcing his intention to seek a third term that “handling this financial crisis while strengthening the essential services such as education and public safety is a challenge I want to take on for the people of New York.” He has that responsibility and that obligation.

As the year 2010 comes to a merciful end, we hope that 2011 will be as good as it can be under the circumstances. Rough times lie ahead for all governments, but out of the three sovereignties: federal, state and local, it is the City of New York that has been most financially responsible for the last decade.

We have a decent, honorable and intelligent mayor. His personality appeals to some, and not to others.

A problem he will face in his tenth year in office is that after a while the people get tired of you. It happened to LaGuardia, Wagner and Koch, all now highly regarded mayors.

The Mayor should try to do as much good as he can in a climate of reduced sustenance for the city and lowering clouds for himself. We particularly recommend that he follow Rule 19: "Be kind to man and beast."

We wish all of you good health and good will in the new year.