The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

by Eleanor Randolph

  More pointedly, when the city’s police and firefighters scrambled into the World Trade Center towers to help people on 9/11, more than four hundred of those first responders died trying to save people. “Not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ ” Bloomberg said. “ ‘What beliefs do you hold?’ ”20

  * * *

  As an unseasoned politician, Michael Bloomberg had an unexpectedly rough introduction to the gun control issue. At one campaign stop early in his 2001 campaign, a potential voter asked Bloomberg about the Second Amendment. He paused. “And that one is?” he asked before aides frantically whisked him away for a quick reminder about the constitutional amendment that gives “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”21

  Then, as mayor, the first time an off-duty police detective was stabbed and died in the hospital, it was a weekend (March 31, 2002) when Bloomberg was out of town. His aides crassly suggested to reporters that he did not go to the hospital or meet the family right away because this was some of the mayor’s well-deserved and fiercely protected private time. And, they added, that he had only been out of pocket three of the last thirteen weekends. Ed Skyler, his communications honcho, then compounded the error. “Mayor Bloomberg agrees with the 80 percent of New Yorkers who feel he’s entitled to a personal life.”22

  But with each later trip to the hospital, each wrenching call to the family, each visit to people keening over police officers who were shot or a youth shot by police officers, Bloomberg grew steadily more concerned about the deadly abuse of guns in America. He learned that the illegal guns killing his New Yorkers came from states where anybody with the money could buy a deadly weapon. By the time he was reelected to his second term, Bloomberg had declared the lax gun culture “our most urgent challenge,” adding that “we will not rest until we secure all of the tools we need to protect New Yorkers from the scourge of illegal guns.”23

  Guns were a health issue, he would argue. Yes, smoking killed people. Fat and sugar killed people. But guns, which were protected by the zealous lobbyists from the National Rifle Association, killed thirty thousand people a year. Nobody bucked the NRA then and got away with it, Bloomberg was told. They proudly killed off political careers like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery. Go against the NRA and somebody would almost always mention Jack Brooks. Brooks, a Texas Democrat, had been an NRA stalwart for forty years until he voted for a crime bill that included an assault weapons ban. The NRA defeated him a few months later. When members of Congress considered gun control measures, somebody would quietly whisper the name of Jack Brooks.

  Bloomberg was more than ready to fight this political Goliath that most in Washington were too scared to challenge. And he would increasingly call on mayors in other cities in the next decades to tackle such problems that Washington couldn’t manage to solve.

  On a fine April day in 2006, Bloomberg gathered fourteen other mayors at Gracie Mansion to support a simple, straightforward message: “Stand up to fight against illegal guns.” Inside the historic mayor’s home and against a backdrop of American flags, Bloomberg had seemed subdued that morning as he read prepared remarks to begin the conference. Then the mayors moved outside onto the lush front lawn to meet the press and sign their proclamation.

  Before the cameras and the microphones, Bloomberg suddenly shifted from dutiful administrator to passionate advocate. He was no longer reading a script; he was a man on a mission. Squinting into the full April sun and a nest of cameras, he reminded reporters that while Washington dawdled, the mayors had to make “that terrible call that a member of your family was killed by guns. And what do you say?” he asked. “That we didn’t have the courage to stand up and do something about it?” His face was hard and he shook his head slightly, signaling a barely contained anger as he raised his voice for the cameras. Finally, he offered what sometimes served as his strongest admonition against a public wrong: “Shame on us if we don’t do something about it.”

  A lot of that shame belonged in Washington, of course. Congress was throwing up roadblocks, writing NRA-friendly laws that made it harder to track down illegal guns or even analyze the gun data. “One of these laws goes so far as to say that the only ways that data can be shared in this day and age is on microfiche,” Bloomberg fumed. “I don’t know if anybody makes a microfiche reader anymore,” said the billionaire mayor from the data industry. “That is deliberately designed to keep the police departments of this country from getting the information they need to protect the police officers, to protect the public, to get guns off the streets.”24

  One statistic kept driving the issue home to the mayor: 82 percent of the illegal guns recovered on the streets of New York were sold from outside the state. For the “iron pipeline,” as law enforcement experts called it, guns could be easily bought in, say, Georgia or Virginia, and driven up I-95 to be sold at a hefty profit on the streets of New York.

  One way to clog the pipeline, the mayor and his legal team figured, was to sue the people who were selling these guns to people who had not passed the background checks. But how to find out where people were buying these guns and bringing them into the state illegally? Bloomberg’s anti-gun squad decided to run their own sting operation—so secret that they slipped across state borders without telling state officials or the federal government.

  Bloomberg and Kelly dispatched private investigators in teams of two, to see if they could make purchases illegally. One undercover officer about the gun, how it worked, what it could be used for. The gun was clearly for that buyer. But his partner was the one who filled out the required forms in order to pass the background check.

  In May 2006, Bloomberg filed a federal lawsuit against fifteen “rogue gun dealers” in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. Over a six-year period—1994 to 2001—more than five hundred guns recovered after crimes in New York City had been traced to these fifteen dealers.25 Within a few months, six of the fifteen dealers agreed to settle with the city and allow a special monitor to oversee their records and inspect their inventories. Then, in December 2006, the Bloomberg team sued twelve more gun dealers in the same five states.26 (Some of the dealers countersued, but those cases ended in settlements or losses on appeal.)27

  There was another side to the story, of course—the dealers who bought those guns and sold them illegally in the city. One such merchant was an aspiring rapper named Matthew Best. If a good rapper raps about the real life around him, Best couldn’t help boasting about his sideline business. At one point on Instagram, he bragged about “packing more guns than the Air Force.” And he couldn’t resist crowing about his illicit loot. He flashed one picture of his own hand clutching a wad of $100 bills. As it turned out, others besides his rap fans were watching.

  One of the rapper’s collaborators brought guns in from North and South Carolina, packing as many as fourteen at a time in an old zebra-striped suitcase. The middleman transported the cache by “Chinatown bus,” for years the cheapest way to travel from the South to New York City. Then, out of his makeshift recording studio, Best sold his contraband guns. Eventually Best and eighteen others were nabbed and the NYPD brought in a total of 254 illegal weapons, many of them courtesy of Best’s Instagram account.28, 29 Bloomberg exulted in what he called the largest gun seizure in city history.

  These stings and subsequent arrests and lawsuits infuriated some state officials who had failed to catch the gunrunners. After Bloomberg accused Virginia’s then attorney general Robert McDonnell of defending “rogue gun dealers,” McDonnell warned the mayor that any more sub-rosa operations in Virginia would be violating a new state law enacted by his legislature precisely to combat Bloomberg’s meddling in the local gun business. “It’s not the job of the mayor of New York to enforce the criminal laws of Virginia,” said McDonnell (who eventually became governor, then was convicted of corruption for taking lavish vacations, a costly Rolex watch, and other goodies from a businessman selling dietary supplements, and finally was given a reprieve b
y the U.S. Supreme Court).30

  Lawyers at the federal Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were also miffed at Bloomberg’s unorthodox methods. When the city sent its findings to the bureau, the result was not only an investigation of the dealers. Federal officers and a few state officials began to investigate Bloomberg’s operatives, who had essentially broken the law to prove it was so easily breakable. The result was little more than a scolding by government lawyers. But the Justice Department offered a stern reminder that there are “potential legal liabilities” when private investigators break the law, even to prove their point publicly.31

  This was the kind of political fight that would have most elected officials cowering in fear of the backlash from donors, the NRA, and a few rabid gun owners, if not the actual voters. Instead, it energized Michael Bloomberg. He presided at press briefings trumpeting his team’s interstate successes like the proud father of a revolution.

  * * *

  Kelly’s third promise—to improve the department’s relations with local communities, especially blacks and Hispanics—would start off well as he visited churches or mosques to erase the anger over the Giuliani years. He marched in the West Indian Day Parade and the Puerto Rican Day Parade, among others.32 The police sponsored cricket and soccer leagues. He had a new unit that reported directly to him about issues, especially in rougher areas or in ethic enclaves. And he worked to increase the number of police officers who came from these diverse communities.33

  That goodwill began to sour, especially in black and Hispanic communities, as Kelly’s officers increasingly misused and overused an established police tactic officially called “stop, question, and frisk.” In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled in Terry v. Ohio that if a police officer sees unusual conduct, which leads that officer to reasonably conclude there may be criminal activity, the person may be stopped. And if the officer has reason to fear the suspect may pose a danger, then the officer is allowed to frisk, or pat down, the suspect. And if that frisk suggests a weapon is present, then a full search is allowed. These Terry Stops, as they were known, were soon adopted widely as a policing tool. But the standard was a “reasonable suspicion” or “specific reasonable inferences,” not merely “inarticulate hunches.”34

  The practice was “a basic tool” for police work, according to Giuliani’s police commissioner, William Bratton,35 but it had to be done by the book. Under Kelly, the number of “street stops,” as he called them, rose from 97,296 in 2002 to a high of 685,724 in 2011, down to 191,851 as he left in 2013.36 The stops occurred in higher-crime neighborhoods, and most of those affected—by both the crime and the police actions—were blacks and Hispanics. More than half of the people who were stopped were also frisked,37 and yet, overall, 88 percent resulted in no further action. In only 1.5 percent of the stops did police find an illegal weapon (including about 4,400 guns that were then taken off the streets).38

  For Bloomberg, the policy made sense. It was not about race, he argued; it was about behavior. It was about identifying offenders in high- crime areas. Reduce the number of illegal guns on the streets and a reduction in the number of shootings and murders would follow. At one point, Bloomberg argued that anybody in America “has a right to walk down the street without being targeted by the police because of his or her race or ethnicity. At the same time, every American has a right to walk down the street without getting mugged or killed. Both are civil liberties,” he wrote in 2013.39 Despite such arguments, the mayor failed to recognize the power of the complaints or realize that the phrase “stop-and-frisk” would become shorthand for the biggest hole in an otherwise imposing record at city hall.

  The tactic had moved over the Bloomberg years from “a necessary tool,” as Kelly once described the standard, Supreme Court–approved practice, to a disturbing overreach in the name of crime prevention. And the numbers of these frisks only dropped after criticism became intense and a detailed federal lawsuit began gaining power through the courts.

  In June 2012, Bloomberg made an important visit to the First Baptist Church of Brownsville, in one of the higher-crime areas of Brooklyn, to list the ways his administration had worked, and often succeeded, in trying to lower crime in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Bloomberg said that many of those young men who felt abused by police were right to be angry. “I would be angry as well,” he told parishioners.40

  Bloomberg acknowledged that morning that many in the black and Hispanic communities wanted him to end stop-and-frisk (one of the few lines that day that drew applause from his mostly African American audience), but he borrowed a well-worn phrase from President Clinton and promised to mend stop-and-frisk, not end it in high-crime areas. He outlined ways police would be retrained and how details of the frisks would be shared more widely at the police department and city hall. “As long as I’m mayor, we will not choose between safety and civility,” he promised.41

  Bloomberg publicly defended Kelly time and again, but “after much internal discussion,” as one aide described a few meetings between the mayor and the commissioner without elaboration, Bloomberg told Kelly his people needed to do a better job on the city’s roughest streets. Indeed, the stops went down slightly to 532,000 for the year 2012.

  Still, Bloomberg continued to support Kelly publicly; that kind of loyalty was a key tenet in the Bloomberg code. One particularly unapologetic version of Bloomberg’s defense of stop-and-frisk came when he had been out of office more than a year. Bloomberg was speaking at a forum in Aspen, Colorado. The Aspen Institute refused to release the transcript or video of the speech, insisting that Bloomberg’s people wanted it kept private. A young journalist, Karl Herchenroeder, then of the Aspen Times, had taped the event, and here is how the former mayor described his record on stop-and-frisk that evening:

  He began by explaining why he felt stop-and-frisk was necessary.

  “It’s controversial,” he said, “but the first thing is all of your—95 percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims—fit one MO. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops.”

  The perpetrators and victims are mostly male—blacks and Hispanics, aged fifteen to thirty-five, he said. And that profile was true in “virtually every American city.” The idea, he explained, was that to keep this group alive, you needed to take away their guns.

  “The psychologists say that they think they are going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed. So they just don’t have any long-term focus. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull the trigger,” he told the Colorado audience.

  While he was being criticized for stopping and frisking these young people, he emphasized that they were also trying to keep them out of jail. “We brought down the incarceration rate by a third,” he said. “You send a young kid to jail. We don’t correct them, although we call it a correction department. We teach them how to be a worse person. And [after] about two or three times, he really does have a gun and starts killing people.”

  Instead of jail, he said, he put more cops in those neighborhoods where the crime is, “and the first thing you can do for people is stop them getting killed.

  “And the way you get the guns off the street is you throw them up against the wall and you frisk them. And these kids don’t wanna get caught so they don’t bring the gun,” he concluded. “They may still have a gun but they leave it at home.”42

  Kelly would make much the same case, although far less dramatically. Their argument, bared to its essence, was this: Stop-and-frisk was not about racial profiling. It was about looking at the data and going to the places where the crimes were being committed—in black and Hispanic neighborhoods—and trying to stop crimes before they happened. It was about public health, saving lives.

  * * *

  U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin would see it altogether differently. In 2008,43 a group of black and Hispanic residents charged Bloomberg and Kelly with unreasonable searches and seizures and the right
to due process. The case—Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al.—was amended and challenged and updated over the years. Eventually Judge Scheindlin issued a searing, 198-page ruling in mid-August 2013.44 She wrote that the Bloomberg administration’s version of stop-and-frisk violated the constitutional rights of minorities because police targeted black and Hispanic youths. She made the point that between 2004 and mid-2012, city police stopped 4.4 million people—about 83 percent of them black or Hispanic. About half of those who were stopped were also frisked, but weapons were found on only 1.5 percent, she noted. Supporters of Bloomberg responded that even using her numbers, that meant the city police had found 33,000 weapons.

  The court record included details that Bloomberg and Kelly should have dealt with years earlier. In 2009, for example, one NYPD officer was so disturbed by the increase in harassment of these mostly young males that he wrote a letter to his commanding officer. The letter said, in part, that the police were “handcuffing kids for no reason. They [superiors] would just tell us handcuff them. And boss, why are we handcuffing them? Just handcuff them. We’ll make up a charge later. Some of those kids weren’t doing anything. Some of those kids were just walking home (from school).”45 Judge Scheindlin’s opinion was full of such painful stories—some from innocent people standing outside or really doing nothing extraordinary. Yet they were stopped, frisked, and demeaned, she wrote. The judge made it clear that “universal suspicion,” especially about blacks and Hispanics, was destructive of the society and the individual. As she put it, borrowing a phrase from columnist Charles Blow, “It’s like burning down a house to rid it of mice.”46