-Caveat Lector-
You think the Clinton Administration is unique for its corruption? You
think wrong. It's exactly the same LOCALLY, in ANY place controlled by a
"Democrat machine."
(You think the Nixon-Reagan-Bush Administration was unique for its
corruption?
Ditto what I've just said, in ANY place controlled by a ":Republican
machine.")
The problem with politics is "politics," and the "politicians" who breed
within it.
Hey, It's Only the FBI
John Mecklin
SF Weekly, July 21-27, 1999
Because San Francisco's daily newspapers so seldom employ
significant resources to investigate anything that might produce
any story that might offend anyone of any conceivable influence
anywhere in the Bay Area (or Northern California, really), it's
worth noting when real journalism does show up.
If you missed the [San Francisco] Examiner's June 27 package
on Charlie Walker, the so-called Mayor of Hunters Point, you
ought to trot down to the library and settle down to a good,
unsettling, realistic read. The main story in the package,
headlined "FBI scrutinizes mayor's contractor pal," reports that
federal agents have been questioning the locals about how Walker
has managed to land large trucking subcontracts at San Francisco
International Airport since Mayor Willie Brown took office.
But this is much more than a story about a governmental
investigation. Based on what appears to have been exhaustive
research, Examiner reporters Chuck Finnie and Lance Williams
describe a series of city-related deals from which Walker, a
friend and former law client of Brown, apparently has profited
handsomely. Exhibit A: Walker reportedly was convicted in 1984 of
grand theft, attempted extortion, perjury, and tax evasion for
bilking the city's minority-contracting programs -- and now,
according to the Examiner report, his trucking firm has been
certified to participate in the same programs he once (as the
Examiner so politely terms it) abused.
Among the many interestingly unsavory deals mentioned in the
Examiner report is one involving the Lennar Corp., which won the
rights to develop the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard earlier
this year. Before the Redevelopment Commission awarded those
potentially (amazingly) lucrative rights, Lennar just happened to
hire one of Walker's firms as a "jobs broker." The commission
voted to give Lennar the rights, even though a consultant had
recommended another firm get the deal. And then-Redevelopment
Commission President Lynette Sweet, treasurer of a nonprofit
connected to Walker, was one of the commissioners voting to give
the contract to Lennar. (The vote was 4-3, so Sweet's "aye" seems
really to have been on the ball.)
My motives for praising the Examiner are not entirely
unmixed. Energetic readers might combine its findings about the
Hunters Point deal with a few facts contained in a piece the
Weekly published on May 12, and teach themselves something about
how this city REALLY works.
Must one hire "friends" of Willie Brown to qualify for major
city contracts?
The Weekly story (headlined "W.L. Brown: A Public/Private
Partnership" and co-authored by staff writer Peter Byrne and me)
focuses on a 1,000-acre golf course development north of
Sacramento known as Whitney Oaks. The majority owner of Whitney
Oaks is the state public employees retirement system. But a
partnership in which Willie Brown has long held a stake is also
an owner. And one of the firms paying millions of dollars to the
owners of Whitney Oaks (including Willie Brown & associates) for
the right to build out a section of Whitney Oaks is --drum roll
please-- Renaissance Homes, a subsidiary of the Lennar Corp.
Taken together, these two stories raise several questions
with heavily documented specificity: Must one hire "friends" of
Willie Brown to qualify for major city contracts? Hire Willie's
friends AND do business with his associates (and perhaps Willie
himself)? Or could the exceedingly strong appearance that
obtaining city contracts requires relations with mayoral friends
and/or associates be merely that, an (amazingly) unfortunate
appearance?
The questions are out there. The Examiner has established
beyond any reasonable doubt that the FBI is investigating. And
here it is weeks later, and not a word in the [OTHER local daily,
the San Francisco] Chronicle about anything so frivolous and
declasse as a serious federal investigation of City Hall.
____________________________________________________________
What You Get When You Cross
"Night of the Living Dead" With "Being There"
George Cothran
SF Weekly, July 21-27, 1999
So I read in the papers that people are really going to run
Frank Jordan for mayor, which just confirms something I've long
suspected about this town:
When it comes to political leadership, San Francisco is like
that small, cursed town in "Night of the Living Dead." We're
damned with some form of radiation that reanimates political
hacks, even after we've killed and buried them.
It really is like a low-budget horror movie, isn't it? We
spend the good portion of a decade trying to find the right
weapon to dispatch Angela Alioto, only to see her rise and rise
again from the grave, a little more gamy each time. And now, when
we've finally succeeded in placing her in a permanent sarcophagus
and banishing (thank God) her harpy scream from the city skies,
the corpse of Frank Jordan punches through the earth and starts
walking around in daylight, scaring children and small animals.
The reason our political landscape has become a George
Romero nightmare is easy to figure: The bright young people in
town are too busy making scads of imaginary millions to care much
about government --or the fact that the dead are walking the
Earth!-- so the leadership pool has gotten small and become
clotted with muck.
One can hope that district elections will change this
situation, drawing all sorts of new blood into the local
political arena. But for the time being ... hey, did I mention
that THE DEAD ARE WALKING THE EARTH?!!!
The reason our political landscape has become a George
Romero nightmare is easy to figure: The bright young people in
town are too busy making scads of imaginary millions to care much
about government.
Sometimes I think we deserve our zombie curse. We so happily
indulge in nostalgia and willful amnesia, rotted corpses begin to
look to us like statesmen.
So it will be with Frank Jordan. The mad scientists who are
reanimating Frank's corpus --failed candidates and failed police
chiefs among them-- will tell us that Frank is the everyman
fighting against the arrogance of power, the regular Joe fighting
the evil insider, the man of the people against the elitist
bully.
This spin will itself be a reanimation of sorts. It's the
same line Jordan used when he beat Art Agnos nearly a decade ago.
It was a partial lie then, and it will be again. You see, Frank
is generally right about his opponents: They usually are
arrogant, power-mad pricks. He will be especially right if he
uses this line vis-a-vis Willie Brown.
But there is a bitter truth about Frank Jordan, too, and it
is rarely told widely and clearly enough. I have three stories
that will, I hope, illuminate a bit of that truth, and if not
stop, at the very least slow, the zombie madness.
Story 1 takes place in an airport, on an evening in 1992. I
boarded a flight for New York to cover the Democratic National
Convention. By happenstance I was on the same plane as then-Mayor
Frank Jordan, his wife, wheeler-dealer investment banker Wendy
Paskin, and several of his aides, some of whom have since
reanimated themselves as loyal Brownites.
Upon landing in New York, I headed for the baggage carousel.
Nearby, the Jordan party was gathered in a knot laughing, joking,
talking policy, and deciding which fetes to go to during the
convention. Being an irrepressible reporter, I headed over to see
if I could get some "color" for my story. As I got to the crowd,
I noticed that Paskin was leading the revelry. The aides were
basking in her light, talking policy and parties. The mayor was
nowhere to be seen.
If this town had any sense to it, before he was allowed to
place his name on the mayoral ballot, Clint Reilly should have
been made to pay back every dollar the city spent needlessly as a
result of the Hongisto nightmare.
I looked around and finally spied him, all by himself,
standing by the luggage carousel, a silly smile on his face and
his gaze fixed on the circling bags. He just stood there, frozen,
watching the bags go around and around like some autistic child.
As his wife and his aides yukked it up 15 or so yards away,
Jordan, that silly smile pasted to his face, contentedly watched
the bags circle until his and his wife's came out. He then picked
them up and, looking all the world like a butler and not the
mayor of a major American city, followed behind his wife and his
aides as they walked outside, still laughing and joking and
paying him no mind.
Story 2 takes place in the Mayor's Office. To understand it
correctly requires a little context.
The budget battles during Jordan's tenure as mayor were
nasty. The recession was on, money was tight, deficits were
mounting, and some measure of tax increases and/or service
reductions (that is, staff cuts) would be needed to close the
deficit. The acrimony between labor (which wanted no layoffs of
city workers) and downtown (which wanted no new taxes) was
pitched.
Amid this heated budget-wrangling, Jordan called a meeting
in his office between union leaders and representatives of the
city's largest corporations. Jordan greeted his guests at a
conference table, thanked them for coming, and then, to the
complete surprise of every participant at the meeting, left the
table, and strolled over to his desk, where he began placidly
opening his mail. The stunned corporate and labor leaders just
stared at him for several seconds before realizing that the mayor
had no intention of actually taking part in perhaps the most
important policy discussion under way in the city at the time. He
was simply going to open his mail.
Story 3 takes place in a bar, circa 1993. It was well into
the second full year of Mayor Jordan's term, and I was taking
some of his top aides out for beers at my then-favorite bar, Mad
Dog in the Fog. At the table with me were two high-level aides,
whose names I will not mention so as not to embarrass them,
because they too have now reanimated themselves into posts of
importance in San Francisco.
Newcastle was the lubricant of choice that night, and we
drank far too much of it for our own good. As the night wore on,
and we all got drunker, the two aides began to speak more and
more openly about Frank Jordan. Their boss, according to the two
ambitious young pols, was dumb as a rock, thick as a plank --
stupid! stupid! stupid!
The aides opened a debate with me that night.
Why, they asked, didn't the press simply say that the mayor
of the City and County of San Francisco was an incredibly and
thoroughly dumb man, incapable of grasping even the basic
concepts such as how a toaster worked?
I told them I was sympathetic to their argument. I had once
sat in Jordan's office talking to our boy-mayor for a startling
45 minutes, discussing city affairs with him, and I had decided
that yes, indeed, it was true, the mayor was simple.
Still, I told the aides, it is the job of journalists to
show and not tell, and the sum total of coverage of the mayor
showed, without a doubt, that he was a remarkably stupid man with
the intellectual capacity of, say, a 10-year-old boy.
Both aides dismissed my argument and said what was needed
was a story that just reported the fact --the indisputable fact
-- that the mayor of San Francisco was mentally challenged.
One aide grew animated in her inebriation. "He doesn't have
any books in his house!" she yelled, banging her fists on the
table. "He has a big-screen TV, but not a single book!"
Frank Jordan spent the rest of his time in office letting
others run the city, while he gathered luggage and opened mail.
Willie Brown, not to anyone's great surprise, won the mayor's
race in 1995.
Now that Frank Jordan is talking about running for mayor
again and the press is treating him like a viable candidate, I
will do what I should have done after my drunken night with the
two Jordan aides.
I will opine that Frank Jordan is an incredibly and
thoroughly stupid man. I don't know if he has ever had his IQ
tested, but if he did, I would not be surprised if the result
showed up somewhere in the negative range. On second thought,
they may have to use the negative exponents known as imaginary
numbers in mathematics to measure his lack of intelligence.
So, at the risk of repeating myself, let me just say once
and for all time:
Frank Jordan is dumb, stupid, backward, an idiot, a schlub,
a moron, a dink, a mouth breather, a slack jaw, a drooler, a
knuckle dragger, a nitwit, a nincompoop, an imbecile, an
ignoramus, a dimwit, a booby, a jerk, a fool, a simpleton, an
eighteenth wit, a dullard, a numskull, an oaf, a bungler, a dolt,
a blockhead, a dunce, a dunderhead, a ninny, a lummox, a yahoo, a
bozo, a goofball, a bonehead. He's just plain dumb.
So a question arises: Why did and why do some people want
such a putz as mayor? The answer brings us around, by happy
circumstance, to another political zombie who, I wish, were
appropriately entombed, the only declared and viable mayoral
candidate, one Clint Reilly.
Before Reilly reanimated himself as a candidate, he was a
political consultant. As such, he successfully ran Jordan for
mayor in 1991. Like a lot of other slimeballs (among them Jack
Davis, who has reanimated himself as a Brown adviser), Reilly
manipulated the moron mayor into doing some of the most
galactically stupid things imaginable.
That's why Jordan was such a disaster as mayor, and why his
corpse is such a frightful sight today.
Jordan, in sum, was a front man for the personal agendas of
others. Those agendas, as it happened, were thoroughly
detrimental to the city, and no one ever saw clearly who was
behind them because those people were, by design, hidden behind
Frank Jordan's idiot smile.
In a manner of speaking, many San Franciscans were too busy
watching Jordan watch the luggage to understand until it was too
late what was really going on.
For his part, Reilly was responsible for manipulating the
mayor into conducting one of the most disastrous political events
in recent memory, the appointment of Dick Hongisto as police
chief. Always a little nutty as a member of the Board of
Supervisors, Hongisto put on his chief's uniform and suddenly and
inexorably, to my eyes at least, and to those of many others,
went completely mad.
As people began demonstrating against the 1993 verdict that
cleared the cops who beat Rodney King, Hongisto accomplished a
truly remarkable feat. He moved reality so far toward the realm
of the insane that it finally matched the idiotic rhetoric of the
far left. He turned San Francisco into an armed camp. We, indeed,
were living in a police state.
Demonstrators were arrested in the hundreds for no legal
reason. The entire command structure of the Police Department hid
as Dick ran amok. The city was forced to pay out $1 million to
settle a lawsuit. Dick went even madder, sending officers out to
steal hundreds of copies of a newspaper that criticized his
tactics. Over the objections of Jordan and Reilly, the Police
Commission finally fired the nut case.
If this town had any sense to it, before he was allowed to
place his name on the mayoral ballot, Clint Reilly should have
been made to pay back every dollar the city spent needlessly as a
result of the Hongisto nightmare.
But in the Town of the Living Dead we allow the evil dead to
continue to crawl out of their graves as often as they like.
I've been saying for a long time that the political culture
in San Francisco is deeply sick. Everywhere you look shows decay,
disease, and the evil dead.
The Brown machine is sick with arrogance and blindness.
Many of those who oppose the machine are even sicker, a
weird and dangerous lot who would make Hongisto look like Winston
Churchill if any of them ever got into power.
The press that covers the game is sickest of all, run by men
and women of shallow imagination and brittle backbone.
When exciting new leaders step forward, as in the case of
district attorney candidate Matt Gonzalez, no one pays attention.
Instead, those opposed to District Attorney Terence Hallinan
would, apparently, rather follow the reanimated corpse of Bill
Fazio, who, at the very moment I am writing these words, stands
on the steps of the Hall of Justice announcing his second
candidacy for the job of district attorney amid the Gothic stench
of decay.
We are very sick, indeed. And here is the surest sign of
sickness: my endorsement for mayor of San Francisco.
Barring the entry of, say, a Gavin Newsom or a Tom Ammiano
into the race for mayor this year, if all we have to vote on is
the reanimated corpses of Clint Reilly and Frank Jordan and the
rotting hide of Willie Lewis Brown Jr., all evils being what they
are, I will vote for Brown.
Reilly knows nothing about government, and his political
judgment is worse than Brown's. Jordan, well, I've told you about
him.
The only one I would feel even remotely comfortable voting
for in that scenario, I am profoundly sad to say, is a man who
typifies just about everything wrong with San Francisco politics.
That, my dears, is sick.
Copyright (c) 1999 New Times Inc
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