Green’s real troubles began during the rough Democratic brawl of a primary season that really started when he had to compete with Ferrer in a runoff. One incident during that runoff probably lost Green the election. A Jewish lawyer in Brooklyn printed and passed out flyers showing a cartoon of Ferrer kissing an enlarged behind of black activist Al Sharpton. The idea was to scare whites into the Green camp,49 but the flyer infuriated Ferrer and Sharpton as well as their followers in the Hispanic and black communities. Green never really apologized for the flyer. Instead, he denied knowing about it, and, in a debate with Bloomberg that year, said, “How can I apologize for something that we weren’t responsible for?”50
The Bloomberg people enjoyed contrasting that pettiness to Bloomberg’s reaction when a Staten Island Republican printed a brochure featuring Green and former mayor David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor. The brochure was printed and distributed by the Republican Party chairwoman of Staten Island at the time, and it was clearly what politicos call a “dog-whistle” to racists in the borough. The Bloomberg coordinator in Staten Island apparently knew about the printing but did not tell those running the campaign.
When reporters began calling, Bill Cunningham, who often dealt with the media, remembered that Bloomberg was so upset he fired the campaign coordinator on the spot and called the chairwoman, demanding that she withdraw and shred every copy. When Bloomberg arrived at the campaign office a short time later, he was as red-faced and angry as some of his advisers had ever seen him. “He slammed the table when we explained what was going on, just slammed his hands on the table,” said Cunningham. Bloomberg then went on the radio that night and told a mostly African American audience what had happened. And he apologized. He called former mayor Dinkins and apologized. And when anybody asked over the next few days, he apologized again and again. That was ten days before the general election, and Bloomberg had been earnestly courting black and Hispanic voters. He needed them to know he had not weaseled out of the responsibility for a mistake that had his campaign’s name on it.51
In the final days of the campaign, Bloomberg and his team realized that they desperately needed one particular man’s help—the mayor he wanted to replace, Rudy Giuliani. After September 11, Giuliani had become a national hero, and he became so buoyed by his newfound fame that he tried to get the legislature to extend his term ninety days to deal with the damage to the city. Both Bloomberg and Green agreed, a mistake for Green because it infuriated many of his old liberal allies. But when the legislature failed to sanction such an undemocratic move even for “America’s Mayor,” as he was being called at the time, Rudy had to go.
Even so, Giuliani resisted sharing his glory with Bloomberg. Twice, the newly sainted Rudy had failed to appear for the endorsement taping.52 Finally, on October 27, the outgoing mayor appeared, but when he finally gave Bloomberg his blessing, his commanding voice had died to a near-whisper, and his endorsement had the lifeless feel of a man reading his own warrant.
“I am very, very confident that the city would be in absolutely excellent hands in the hands of Mike Bloomberg,” he mumbled. “If he can have half the success with New York City that he has had in business, New York is going to have an even greater future.”53
With only ten days to go, the Bloomberg squad had Giuliani’s endorsement on the air in twenty-four hours. Public polling still showed Green ahead, but Bloomberg was almost even with Green in the candidates’ private polling. The Green team became more frantic as they saw their Republican opponent inching up to the finish line.
In the last days of the campaign, Green launched what his campaign saw as their blockbuster: they ran a television commercial charging a sinister-looking Bloomberg with advising a pregnant employee to “kill it.” Bloomberg once again denied he’d ever said such a thing, and his aides also began feverishly selling the idea that Green had gotten what one member of the Bloomberg team called “a bad case of the flop sweats.”54
Green’s desperation became even more obvious during a kind of French farce that occurred the night before the election. At the last minute, then Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein and a few other seasoned Democrats tried to engineer a peace mission between Ferrer and Green in order to get much-needed votes from the black and Hispanic communities. DePlasco, who said “everyone was freelancing at that point,”55 recalled that Al Sharpton, who saw himself as the key to the black Democratic vote, suddenly seemed to be the arbiter of the whole plan. It was supposed to be a last-minute lovefest with Green, Sharpton, Ferrer, and former president Bill Clinton. What newspaper would be able to resist a front-page photo of that foursome on the next morning, on Election Day?
Clinton drove to the Four Seasons Hotel to meet Weinstein, then still a friend, but as his limousine inched closer to the hotel and the news crews turned their lights toward the former president, his limo suddenly sped away. Some said Clinton was furious about the media attention. That doesn’t seem likely. Green said years later that the presence of Sharpton in any group photo was “a deal breaker” for him and that he believed Clinton felt the same way.56
“At that point, it looked like Mark Green’s campaign was a sandcastle with the tide coming in,” Bloomberg’s Bill Cunningham recalled gleefully.57
The next day Green and his friends were preparing for a celebration, and exit polls were showing him ahead.58 What Green’s supporters failed to notice was that the unions had endorsed him and done little else. No real ground troops. The unions were suddenly busy elsewhere. No calling in the dependable voters, helping them get to the polls. Democrats sat on their hands in the Bronx.59
While Green was preparing to celebrate, Mike Bloomberg and his friends were planning an election night party at B. B. King’s Blues Club and Grill on West Forty-second Street to savor the evening, even if they could not stomach the night’s news. Bloomberg began promising his workers that he would get them good jobs in the private sector—he still had plenty of friends in business, he kept saying. The public polls showed Bloomberg gaining votes, but Green was still ahead. It did not look like a happy night.
The vote count came in slowly, but as the numbers started coming in from Staten Island and Queens, Pataki and Giuliani began smiling and nodding over the results. The excitement in the room grew minute by minute, and at one point, Garth grabbed Kevin Sheekey’s arm and said, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe we did it. I can’t believe we did it.” A stunned Sheekey replied, “Whattya mean? You always told us we could do it.” Garth answered, “Yeah, yeah, yeah but I lied.”60
The final election tally would eventually show that Bloomberg had lost in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. But Queens and Staten Island voters, plus those pulling the levers on the Independence Party line, would grant him a narrow win with 744,757 votes compared to 709,268 for Green.61
As returns became more obvious that night, Mark Green called Bloomberg to concede. Then he went out to tell his distraught followers shortly after midnight, even before most of the crowd or the media knew he had lost. “Apparently, they’re not kidding when they sing, ‘It’s not easy being Green,’ ” he told the stunned and silent crowd, most of whom were young enough to get the reference to Sesame Street’s beloved Kermit the Frog.62
Before the campaign, Bloomberg had said that he would not spend more than $30 million because “At some point, you start to look obscene.”63 But even Bloomberg did not know how far beyond obscene the bill would be. A final tally turned out to be $73,391,461. For 744,757 votes, or $98.54 per ballot.64 The $16.5 million that the Green campaign said they spent looked paltry by comparison.65
The campaign budget looked like one for a presidential race more than a contest for mayor. David Garth earned $1,020,318. Pollsters Penn, Schoen, and Berland came away with more than $12 million, as did the Baughman Company, which specialized in direct mailing and did a lot of direct mailing for Bloomberg that year. The political team got bonuses ($300,000 for Cunningham and $100,000 each for Harris, Sheekey, and press spokesman Ed Skyler
). And the big winners were ad makers Squier Knapp Dunn, the firm led by advertising guru Bill Knapp. Bloomberg paid at least $34 million to the company for ads, which so dominated the airwaves that Times columnist Gail Collins once worried that the city had “a hologram running for chief executive.”66 Still, if that was the cost of being mayor, it was cheap at the price for a man then worth $4 billion.67
9
FIRST HUNDRED DAYS
“And, Don’t Fuck It Up.”
—Mike Bloomberg to many a new hire1
Michael Bloomberg wanted to send a signal that he would be a different kind of mayor, a man of his word. One way to do that, as some on his political team realized, was to make good on a campaign promise to Tony of Bensonhurst. During the campaign, Anthony SantaMaria, a sixty-two-year-old building security officer, had confronted Bloomberg at a Brooklyn stop to say that he was just like all candidates. Bloomberg, the candidate, would forget about guys like him once he was Bloomberg, the mayor. Not me, Bloomberg had promised. He would be different.
So on day one as mayor-elect and with only minutes of sleep, Bloomberg headed out to that same New Utrecht subway station in Brooklyn where he had met Tony of Bensonhurst. A media crowd had already gathered—media from around the world had been alerted that the strange billionaire mayor was making his first public appearance.
Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg’s political strategist, loves to tell what happened next. Into all the madness, suddenly, along comes Tony. Tony SantaMaria, who lived nearby. “He says, ‘Hey, he’s here to see me’ and some cop says, ‘Yea, yea, buddy, he’s here to see all of us. Keep moving.’ ” An aide hears the rising voices and yells, “He’s our guy.” Tony, who had clearly been alerted to this event, goes up to Mike and hugs him. (Mike winced a little; he was not a natural hugger.) Tony puts an arm around him and tells the cameras, “See this guy. This guy is different.”2
Sheekey and Bloomberg liked this event so much that the mayor returned to Bensonhurst the morning after every win—in 2005 and again in 2009 for smaller and smaller crowds that nevertheless included Tony SantaMaria.
Bloomberg insisted in other ways that he wanted to break old rules, and he spent his time in those early days in unexpected places for a Republican, even one in name only. After Tony of Bensonhurst, he had a very public post–Election Day breakfast in the Bronx with Democrat Fernando Ferrer, who sat with the mayor-elect at the Court Deli in the Bronx and said, pointedly, “Welcome to ‘the Other New York.’ ”3 It was a reference to Ferrer’s slogan in his failed primary campaign against the Manhattanite Mark Green.
Bloomberg made other rounds that had been off-limits for a Republican. He visited union leaders and liberal Democrats like Randi Weingarten, head of the teachers union, and he recognized Al Sharpton with a well-staged handshake, all moves that separated him from the public seething and snarling Rudy Giuliani, who would reluctantly hand over the office almost two months later. Again and again in those first days, Bloomberg kept sending the message that he would be different.
* * *
Officially, Mike Bloomberg, Wall Street billionaire, became Mayor Michael Bloomberg amid the raucous New Year’s Eve celebration to end the year 2001 in Times Square. It was a scene to remind New Yorkers that even after the devastation of 9/11, they could still celebrate and hope for a better 2002. In those first cold minutes of January 1, 2002, the usual taut face of Michael Rubens Bloomberg seemed to soften for a moment as the power passed to him from Giuliani. As he waved to the crowd on the street below, couples kissed and tooted their plastic horns, some even celebrating a new mayor.4
Bloomberg had already paid his fifteen pennies as his official filing fee to the city clerk, a requirement established by law in 1898 when the city’s five boroughs were consolidated. And at his public inauguration later that day, he strolled out of city hall as a massive American flag unfurled with a gentle thump behind him. New York’s divine Bette Midler sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Al Leiter, famed pitcher for the New York Mets, was the emcee. New York’s chief judge Judith Kaye, a friend, did the swearing-in ceremony. (He would ask her a few days later if she wanted to be his new schools chancellor. She said she had laughed and refused.)5 His family was there, including his slight mother, Charlotte “Lottie” Bloomberg, who beamed as she stood in a long fur coat to witness her only son take his first oath of public office.
In a dreary monotone that would become the nasal voice of New York City for the next twelve years, Bloomberg read his first inaugural address. The audience applauded when he thanked people—especially his predecessor—but there were scattered boos when he warned that he would be “asking all parts of my city government to do more with less.”
He advised his friends in the corporate suites nearby, “This is no time to leave the Big Apple.” He promised New Yorkers that after suffering a temporary loss of confidence that was out of the city’s robust character, “We will rebuild, renew and remain the capital of the free world.”
It was a dutiful speech, touching all the right bases, thanking all the right people. Elegant? No. Rousing? No. Memorable? Not really. But it suited the cold weather and the dark mood of the city. “We are the toughest, most resilient and most determined people on the planet,” he told an audience of those worrying that their city was slipping quickly into a post-9/11 despond, and perhaps even a return to the bleak 1970s.6
A few blocks from city hall, workers at the still-smoldering World Trade Center site were carting away what would be nearly two million tons of debris and human remains to Staten Island.7, 8 The sixteen acres destroyed in the attacks would soon have the look of an untended construction site with the wind stirring dust in slow circles as politicians, business leaders, architects, engineers, and families of the victims endlessly debated what should replace the Twin Towers.
The losses from 9/11 were estimated at $83 billion by the city’s prime business organization, the Partnership for New York City.9 Nearly 430,000 jobs would disappear after 9/11. Nearly 18,000 small businesses were either destroyed or forced to move elsewhere to survive. The financial industry, one of the pillars of New York’s economy, reeled, not only from the loss of so many lives in the Twin Towers, but also as the nervous company executives considered plans to relocate outside the city.
The other pillar of the city economy—tourism—also took a hit. Tourists from around the world canceled trips to the broken city. Hotel occupancy suddenly dropped below 40 percent.10 And the city budget was now $4.76 billion in the hole.
Where to start?
Bloomberg had that long list of promises he had made in the campaign, plus he wanted to make the city simply work better. Advisers repeatedly said that he wanted to fix the government, not abolish it. To do that, he started the way he would always start a major project. He would find the best people who would sacrifice their time and often their lush salaries and even their privacy to work for him—seven days a week. There is no way to dismiss as too obvious this key part of the Bloomberg strategy for running things—from his business to his campaigns to his city hall to his philanthropy. Over and over, Bloomberg would make this point. First, hire the best people who will work for you. Pay them what you can (not much of an option in the city). Tell them to come up with the best ideas, make them accountable, and then promise to protect them even if they try their hardest and fail and the boss gets a call from the New York Post.11
It did not always work, of course. And those bare bones left out a lot of detail—like the private calls from the mayor at 6:00 a.m. “What WERE you thinking or were you thinking?”12 He could be surprised when he made demands, and employees would decide something should be done differently. If they made it work, he would say, “I wouldn’t have done it that way, but it looks right.” And, of course, there were the mistakes—a social friend who couldn’t run the schools, a former mayor of Indianapolis who couldn’t step into the big time as deputy mayor, a few who stayed too safely inside the box. But mostly, the people who worked for Bloomberg star
ting in 2002 turned out to be smart, loyal, enthusiastic, and available by phone or email at virtually any hour of the day.
Years later, when Donald Trump had been president for a full eleven months, Bloomberg’s main public criticism of him was that he had not hired the best people to do such a massive job. “The bottom line is, this president, as all presidents, needs a team and let them make decisions. You have got to hire people and give them authority to go along with responsibility. And you have got to hire people who are experts in each facet of government, rather than people who just happen to agree with your political point of view,” Bloomberg said, in what turned out to be a classic understatement. “And he’s not separated out the politics from the knowledge that we need.”13
* * *
As Bloomberg prepared to move into city hall in the winter of 2002, he really had only his political team, and they were better at winning than actually governing. A few had gone off to spend their considerable pay packets, courtesy of the billionaire candidate for mayor. Patti Harris was always there, of course. She would be the first woman to become the city’s first deputy mayor and she would stay there, at the top, all twelve years. Ed Skyler, a key campaign adviser, would be a key press strategist, eventually rising to the position of deputy mayor. Sheekey would remain in city hall as an all-purpose adviser, then deputy mayor in the later years, and Bill Cunningham would wrestle with the media as communications director. But the city had more than 300,000 workers and 50 departments. He needed help.
Harris knew just the man, Nathan Leventhal, an expert in transitions from one mayor’s team in the city to the next. Leventhal was the former president of Lincoln Center, and he turned out to be a good match for Bloomberg. Brainy, meticulous, and tough, the new transition guru had been chief of staff to former mayor John Lindsay and deputy mayor for operations under former mayor Ed Koch. He had also helped with the transition for former mayor David Dinkins.14
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 12