The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  It was filled with colors and shapes.

  7

  The name of the horse was New Day Dawning, and out at Aqueduct, it has probably finished by now. In the Park Place OTB, I tore my betting stub three times lengthwise, three times across, then scattered the confetti. The stout party with the flushed face and the black suspenders to my left regarded me sourly. ‘New Day Dawning? What kind of fool bet was that?’ he said. His stomach growled. ‘What you get for backing a reformer,’ he said.

  The party’s name was Matthew Joseph Troy; Matty Troy. In the sixties and early seventies, he had been both a city councillor and the Democratic chairman of Queens County: ‘The biggest liar and most honest man in New York politics,’ wrote Richard Reeves in a New York magazine profile. Soon afterwards, Troy went to jail.

  At his peak, nobody elected had cut a wider swathe. There was hardly a day, it seemed, when his mugshot wasn’t splattered all over the Daily News. He went charging through the city like a wounded bull elephant, with his minions and pet scribes at his elbow, TV crews and photographers in panic pursuit, and as he rampaged, spooling out quotes like a ticker tape, flinging insults and shooting lines, he did not give one good tinker’s fart what was said, or what dread power was offended, just so long as the press kept spelling his name right.

  The quotes were verbal firebombs. ‘The media is 99 percent of a political career in this town. You get them by being controversial. You’ve got to tell them the truth, but it helps to embellish it a little,’ Troy believed. ‘Lying is an essential part of the political process.’

  It wasn’t these home truths themselves that shocked. Everybody who could read and most who couldn’t already knew them. What made Matty Troy unique was simply that he spoke them out loud. Shouted them, in fact. ‘Only egomaniacs are in politics,’ he’d snap in his belly-deep rasp. ‘I love the guys who talk about serving the public. This business is about men kissing your ass and girls who screw.’

  The man in the OTB parlor, sweating over his form sheets, was twenty years older, a tad less incendiary. He now worked for the Long Island Gasoline Retailers Association as a publicist and lobbyist. Mostly he worked out by Roosevelt Racetrack, but his duties also took him to Albany and Washington, to the World Trade Center, and, sometimes, back to City Hall, just a stretch-run up Broadway from the betting shop. He’d used to have his own office there; these days he required an appointment. For the first few years, the comedown had distressed him, but no longer. He was sixty; he had a hernia. No more grandstand plays for Matty Troy, and no more grief: ‘Suits me,’ he said.

  The truth was, he had no choice. Power, once lost, was not refundable. So here he stood, figurating, a hulking and rumpled figure of the type once called Black Irish. In this equine bucket-shop, he cast no shadow, drew no stares. To one side of him was Juan Rosario, a messenger on his break; to the other, Eula Mae Beales, an off-duty cleaner at the Woolworth Building. Post time for the fourth race was eight minutes off and counting. ‘So who do you like?’ Matty asked.

  Nobody seemed sure. Juan Rosario was chasing the Pick Six, Eula Mae leaned towards a Trifecta, I myself was flat busted. Matty liked Buckshot Behave. He also fancied Just Be Just, but that was sentiment speaking: ‘Reminds me of my father,’ he said, and he backed Buckshot Behave.

  His father had been a special sessions judge. Before that, he’d been Fiorello La Guardia’s personal attorney. Matthew Troy, Sr, whom no man ever called Matty. There were people who still remembered him, his gentleness and grace, his chivalry, his toughness at root. He was a West Meath man who’d settled in Bay Ridge, in the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, and his ruling passion was Irish unification. In Matty’s childhood, his home was always full of Fenian activists planning campaigns, raising funds. Paul O’Dwyer, the dean of New York Nationalists, was a household fixture. Then the movement was taken over by Sinn Fein and the IRA, the bombings started, the murders of women and children, and Judge Troy didn’t speak of One Ireland again.

  In New York, judges were elected. Each county leader had a certain number of judgeships tucked in his back pocket. Some were purchased with bribes, some with favors; just a few were earned on merit. Matthew Troy was one of these last, a political maverick, neither Democrat nor Republican, who ran for Brooklyn borough president and Brooklyn County Court on a Fusion ticket and lost both races handily. Afterwards, he retired from active politics, confined himself to the Ancient Order of Hibernians. But by then it was too late: Matty, aged twelve, had been fatally infected.

  What hooked him first was scurrility. In that pre-computer age, votes were still cast at the push of a lever. A well-greased election inspector could spike it by sticking gum or wax or a toothpick to the underside. Or else, the standard dodge, he’d simply slip a sliver of lead beneath his thumbnail and shift the Xs to the line where his money lay. When Matty spotted this, and the Xs did not line up next to Troy, he started punching heads.

  His first arrest followed.

  Eula Mae Beales, hearing this, pantomimed dismay: ‘Only just a baby and already in jail,’ she said. ‘And your poor momma, too, just conceive how you make her grieve.’

  ‘My mother? She beat the living hell out of me. My father, till his dying day, he never once laid his hand on me. But my mother, God rest her, she wore out the strap.’ Matty shook his head, pleasantly borne back. ‘Wore out the strap,’ he said.

  Not that it bothered him. Getting whaled on was action, getting into fights was action, and action, any action, always made his motor purr. He was a pistol, a brawling, big-mouth Harp with solid-brass balls. Mouth flapping, fists flying, he roared his way out of Brooklyn into Queens County, through two years in the army, then through Georgetown and Fordham Law School, and when he surfaced at the far bank, miraculously intact, he found himself a career politician.

  In the army, he’d gone through basic training in the bunk next to Edward Kennedy. The apprenticeship was not in combat alone: ‘Teddy’s like me. A put-on artist. He knows it’s all bullshit. His father fixed it up so that we would both be assigned to NATO Headquarters in Paris. Then we took our physicals and I lost out because I was an inch under six feet. I spent a week trying to stretch myself with braces and racks and hanging upside down from the horizontal bars but I just couldn’t make it. So I went off to Korea, and Teddy went to the Crazy Horse.’

  That was all the practical politics he needed to know. Demobilized and back in New York, he joined the Queens Village Democratic Club, worked his way up to campaign manager, and by 1964, aged thirty-five, he was city councilman for the Sixteenth District. His best friend and first lieutenant was Donald Manes, who would, some thirty years afterwards, be exposed as a massive bribe-taker and fixer, Mr Big, and thus set off the worst municipal scandal to hit the city since Mayor William O’Dwyer in the late forties.

  Buckshot Behave came in nowhere. Kissing off the OTB, we crossed Broadway into City Hall Park. It was the lunch hour; the pathways and benches were jammed. Under the trees, a string quartet was playing Schubert for the sandwich crowd, but the only spots free for Matty and myself were over towards the Brooklyn Bridge, among the derelicts. Matty sat down heavily, eyes dull. Two men wrapped in newspapers lay rolled up beneath the bench. Behind our heads, the quartet switched to Smetana.

  We stared out on the gridlocked traffic inching out of Manhattan. ‘I have to eat,’ Matty said. Absentminded, he belched. ‘Gas,’ he said. ‘It kills you.’

  He hardly looked a demagogue. Passing him by, one would have guessed Irish cop, retired. Nassau Street, right across from us, was full of private eyes, stolid and weary men with paunches and high blood pressure, who had traded in their badges for licenses and now played out their string in tracing missing persons and twenty-four-hour surveillance, parked outside hot-mattress motels. Matty Troy, burping, fitted in seamlessly.

  It was not ever thus. When he looked behind him at City Hall, he started laughing, a serious belly laugh, deep and ripe as rolling thunder. ‘The numbers we did. The scams we pul
led,’ he rumbled. But the small eyes in the big face did not laugh along. ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ he said, ‘the numbers we did back then.’

  He seemed to speak of a bygone age. And he did. New York politics in the 1960s, more or less, had been the New York politics of the 1880s. Its constituency might have grown more polyglot, its leaders a little more polished, and there had been a few new cant phrases to master, civil rights, the Great Society, Afro-American, freedom. Otherwise, the system had survived untouched.

  It had its own secret bible. In 1905, a Tammany Hall ward boss from the West Side, name of George Washington Plunkitt, had sat in his office, Graziano’s bootblack stand in the old County Courthouse, and dictated A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics. His conclusions? ‘Honesty doesn’t matter; efficiency doesn’t matter; progressive vision doesn’t matter. What matters is the chance of a better job, a better price for wheat, better business conditions.’

  Plunkitt’s musings boiled down to a single deathless phrase, ‘I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.’ In his view, city government was about one thing only, and that thing was looking after those who looked after you. To do so, you walked the tightrope between opportunism and illegality: ‘Honest graft and dishonest graft,’ he wrote. ‘Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn’t isn’t likely to be popular.’

  It was very much a Hibernian world, and why not? ‘The Irish was born to rule, and they’re the honestest people in the world. Show me the Irishman that would steal a roof off an almhouse! He don’t exist. Of course, if an Irishman had the political pull and the roof was much worn, he might get the city authorities to put on a new one and get the contract for it himself, and buy the old roof at a bargain – but that’s honest graft. It’s going about the thing like a gentleman.’

  By 1964, it was true, Tammany Hall itself was defunct. In its latter years, Jews and Italians had been let in to rub shoulders with the old-guard Irish. The last high sachem was Carmine DeSapio: ‘A gentleman, a fashion plate, and absolutely lethal,’ said Matty Troy. ‘The kind of political surgeon that would slit your throat with a smile, and you wouldn’t even know it till you turned around and your head fell off in your lap.’

  When DeSapio went to jail for a construction fraud, Tammany Hall fell with him. But the Democratic clubhouse continued to dispense the spoils of the city – contracts, favors, patronage – howsoever it thought fit. Reform movements rose up, reform movements sank: ‘Morning glories,’ George Washington Plunkitt had called them. ‘Looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.’

  Matty Troy might have been Plunkitt’s second coming. Gasconading into the Queens Village clubhouse, he found a roomful of old men, the geriatric irregulars, content to play pinochle and organize dinner dances. He also found a tutor, Lew Wallach, the Democratic leader for Glen Oaks: ‘You could call him my sponsor,’ Matty said. ‘Or maybe my wet nurse.’

  Temperamentally, Wallach was Troy’s polar opposite – a born chess player, close-mouthed and canny, who always saw five moves ahead: ‘A master of the game.’ Under his tutelage, Matty learned how to work a room, build up a power base. Within a few years, he’d made the Queens Village machine his own.

  Already Donald Manes was his closest friend and ally. ‘No two brothers were ever closer,’ Matty said. It was as if they were the two halves of a pantomime horse, Matty the head and Donnie the back legs. Donnie’s father had committed suicide, had gone down in his basement and put a gun in his mouth. Donnie was a child then, he’d come home from school and found him dead. Afterwards, for the rest of his life, he’d never dared descend an unlit stairway. Someone always had to precede him, light the way. ‘I guess,’ said Matty, ‘I held the damn light.’

  Back then, he had wattage to spare: ‘I’m not saying I was a knight in shining armor, which I wasn’t. It was just I saw a lot of things that needed doing, and I was the one had the balls to get them done. Back then, I did.’

  Things that needed doing did not include social upheaval. Irish pols had never been bothered by an overview. They dealt strictly in particulars. And Matty Troy, above all things, was an Irish pol. ‘Compromise and quid pro quo were the bulwarks of my thought. I’m not an opinionated man, I swing with the tide,’ he growled. But he spat on double-talk and evasions, dishonest graft. ‘I might be a liar myself. At least I admitted it,’ he said. ‘What I couldn’t stand was the mealy-mouths and muckety-mucks, the creeping Jesuses, the smooth men.’

  His platform then was built on seeming candor, the voter’s right to know. In its name, he declared war on hugger-mugger and conspiracy, clandestine deals sealed in backroom booths. Matty too made deals, but openly, his enemies said wantonly. In 1971, for instance, he had traded three State Supreme Court judgeships to the Republicans in return for two judgeships, a district attorney, a counsel to the public administrator, and a state investigation commissioner to be named later. Not only that, but he put it in writing and wanted Nelson Rockefeller to sign it.

  All of this caused sorrow, grave concern. ‘He was a rolling hand grenade, the Bugsy Siegel of New York politics, and as such he had to go,’ wrote Sidney Zion.

  Hand grenade or no, by the seventies he was a major populist leader, carrying 85 percent in his own Queens district, Our Lady of Lourdes, and widely tipped as a future mayor. He himself had his eye on becoming a senator, so that he might eventually be reunited with Teddy Kennedy. To that end, in his national debut, he went out campaigning with George McGovern: ‘A sweet, sweet man, and absolutely hopeless.’

  And his policies? What policies? ‘The way I worked out where I stood on any question, I’d find out where John Lindsay stood, then take the opposite,’ he said. ‘Some of my positions I believed in, too.’

  What he understood, first and last, was the formula for turning waverers into voters. ‘You can’t be patriotic on a wage that just keeps the wolf from the door,’ George Washington Plunkitt had said. ‘Any man who pretends he can will bear watchin’. Keep your hand on your watch and your pocketbook when he’s around. But, when a man has a good fat salary, he finds himself hummin’ Hail Columbia, all unconscious and he fancies, when he’s ridin’ in a trolley car, that the wheels are always sayin’ Yankee Doodle Came to Town.’

  In this grand tradition, Matty Troy found no ploy too demeaning, no chore too small. He took care of jury notices, had wayward trees trimmed, paid off fines for garbage violations, fixed potholes. He was strong on patronage jobs, on schools and affordable housing. He also had Mayor Lindsay’s doorman arrested for walking his dog unleashed. ‘Isn’t there any level you wouldn’t sink to?’ Lindsay demanded.

  ‘Absolutely not. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do.’

  ‘That’s a double negative.’

  ‘Well, you’ve been a double negative to the city ever since you took office,’ Matty would snap back, with a roll of drums in back, a vaudeville clarinet bleat, and then he’d be off again, on another crazed tear around the town, Chairman Matt, seven functions a night, six nights a week, with his half-blind driver Charlie Gilvary, and his red face sweating, his paunch belled out ahead of him like a foresail before a fair wind, Jimmy Breslin to the left of him, Pete Hamill to the right, and Donald Manes, always Donnie, half a step to his rear.

  He’d thought himself untouchable. All the people around him, he’d made them, they owed him. ‘Oh, I was full of it. Full of it. I acted like I had a full house, when I was holding a couple of deuces,’ he said now, coughing hard. ‘My hat got away from my head.’

  In skimming his Plunkitt, he’d overlooked one critical passage: ‘The men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them. So you want to drop the orator act unless you mean to go into politics just to perform the skyrocket act.’ And this oversight proved fatal.

  His fall was sudden, very steep. In 1973, Matty backed the wrong horse for mayor, got boondoggled by his own man, and wou
nd up running afoul of Abe Beame, the new incumbent. Richard Reeves’s New York article that March proved the clincher. ‘I worked all my life to get into a position of power and I’m not about to play it down,’ Matty was quoted. ‘The one thing more important than power is fear of power. I get things because people are afraid of what I might do. I lived for weeks off a picture of me on the front page of the Daily News with McGovern and Ted Kennedy at the airport. What no one knows is that all I said to them that day is, “The car’s over here.”’

  And: ‘One of my problems with the other [county] leaders – the four gravediggers – is they take themselves so damn seriously… . When we get together, you’d think a grand jury was after us with everyone whispering and looking over his shoulder. The first thing we always do is make a pledge that no one will speak to the press. Then, when it’s over, we all race like hell for the nearest telephone to call reporters and get our side in first.’

  And: ‘Patronage is why people love me so much.’

  And: ‘Making deals is what a leader does.’

  And: ‘I’ve learned that you can get away with anything with bluff and saber-rattling.’

  Only this time the bluff was called. Every line, so sweet in the speaking, so juicy to savor in print, came back on him redoubled. Within months, Abe Beame had contrived his ouster as Queens County leader and placed Donald Manes in his stead.

  It was a classical betrayal. In all their years together, Donnie was the one person he’d ever taken for granted. ‘Of course, it was my own dumb fault. In politics, you don’t trust anyone. If you do, you got no gripe coming,’ Matty said. Even so, his temper had frayed as he watched Donnie rise: borough president, the king of Queens, unofficial mayor in waiting.

  ‘As for me, I didn’t do so hot,’ he said. At a stroke, stripped of his power base, he’d lost all heft, was reduced to a sound effect. ‘Wind outta burst balloon. I dropped so fast I was dizzy,’ he said. The indictments followed.