News
The Bully's Pulpit
by Geoff Kelly
Today Judy Einach announced that she was dropping out of the race for the Niagara District Common Council seat being vacated by Nick Bonifacio, who is retiring. Or possibly making himself available for a new job, should Jim Keane become the next county executive. That’s a different story, to be explored in these pages soon enough.
This story is about why Einach dropped out—and, more particularly, how Deputy Mayor Steve Casey, the mayor’s chief political officer, is waging a no-holds-barred war to win a rubberstamp Common Council for the Brown administration. That war is being fought most fiercely in the Niagara District, because Bonifacio represents a swing vote separating administration allies (Bonifacio is generally one of five) and the somewhat independents (of whom there are four).
Einach’s departure leaves Buffalo policeman David Rivera, who won the endorsement of the Niagara District’s Democratic committee, and assistant corporation counsel Peter Savage III, who didn’t, despite the worst efforts of Casey. As reported in the Buffalo Rocket last month, Niagara District committee people who were leaning toward Rivera—the candidate advanced by Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, who has substantial influence in the district and is a rival to Brown in party politics—began to receive less-than-subtle messages, supposedly emanating from the second floor of City Hall, that they should stay away from the committee’s June 7 endorsement meeting. Or, if they insisted on attending, that they had better vote for Savage.
Threats like these are illegal but not unusual in Buffalo politics. They are delivered second or third hand, in somewhat vague language, but in such a way that the recipient knows the threat’s provenance and its consequences. The consequences of backing Rivera? Well, say you’re a committee person in the Niagara District, and you or a relative works for the city—not unlikely, given the city’s patronage structure. Maybe you or that relative will lose an office, or a computer, or a phone. Maybe you’ll both wind up working in the basement. Maybe you’ll lose your job, or your relative’s job will be made so unpleasant she’ll quit.
Jonathan Rivera, who resigned his staff position with Congressman Brian Higgins in order to run his father’s campaign, told Einach about these threats in advance of the June 7 meeting, according to the Rocket. Einach, who had announced her intention to run for the seat, initially had asked her supporters on the committee to abstain. But that evening, when she saw that many Rivera supporters had failed to show up, and that others seemed poised to vote for Savage, she realized that Jonathan Rivera was correct: Hoyt’s committee people had been strong-armed to abandon their candidate. Disgusted, she told her supporters to cast their votes for David Rivera—who thus squeaked by Savage to win the committee’s endorsement, a step toward winning the Democratic primary, which is tantamount to winning the general election.
Casey was said to be furious at the setback. He reportedly tried to apply pressure on Jonathan Rivera, through another staffer in Higgins’ office, to recant the story the Rocket had reported. Jonathan Rivera refused. Casey began spreading stories about Einach, according to sources in City Hall, suggesting that Einach had made a deal with Sam Hoyt: that he had promised her a job, which would be illegal, and that she was a political pawn and not the independent voice she portrayed herself to be.
To suggest Einach is in Hoyt’s pocket is absurd. In a conversation with Artvoice a week after that June 7 meeting, Hoyt was reluctant to give Einach any credit for Rivera’s close win over Savage. But he was quick to light into Brown for allowing Casey to run a rough-and-tumble political operation out of the mayor’s office. Hoyt described Casey as a first-rate political operative. “But he has no business holding a position in government,” Hoyt said.
That position gives Casey incredible leverage to achieve his political ends. And, for his part, Casey seems to believe that a rubberstamp Common Council is good government. “This is about governing for this administration,” Casey told Robert McCarthy of the Buffalo News back in June. “We need folks in place to help us achieve our ultimate goals.”
Hooray for checks and balances.
Einach says that Casey has gone far past rumor-mongering. “Messages have been delivered to me through friends of mine, with Casey’s name on them,” she told Artvoice in an interview last week. “The administration figures out someone who knows me, and whom I trust, who calls me and says, ‘This is what Casey said.’ They’ve contacted businesses with which I have relationships and they’ve threatened those businesses in some way. They’ve threatened other friends of mine with serious actions that are highly illegal.”
Einach did not elaborate on the nature of the threats to herself, her friends and their businesses, but Bryon McIntyre, a Buffalo firefighter who’s running against the Ellicott District incumbent, Brian Davis, offered a few examples. McIntyre left a stack of fliers in Destini’s, a pizzeria on Main Street near Allen, which was spotted by a staffer in Davis’s office. The staffer said that if the restaurant kept the fliers, a grant the owner had applied for would be denied. The owner removed the fliers, still has not received the grant and Davis’s campaign office has opened across the street. Meanwhile, McIntyre’s campaign office at 397 Jefferson Avenue was burglarized on July 3. The suspected burglar—identified in the police report as a “local winehead”—bypassed the alcohol in the refrigerator, instead stealing an ancient, mammoth, black-and-white TV (“The dust on that thing was 12 years old,” McIntyre said) and a three-CD changer.
Oh, yes—and a manila envelope filled with signed petitions, some for McIntyre and some for other politicians running against the Casey-Brown machine.
McIntyre said that one Thursday night not long ago he sat next to Brown while the mayor was watching his son play basketball. The mayor asked McIntyre how he was doing, and McIntyre replied that he was fine, except that he’d just announced his candidacy for the Ellicott District seat and he’d had the tires on all four of his vehicles slashed overnight. During his life in politics, McIntyre explained, he’d had his car tires slashed several times, including when he ran for the city’s school board. He described it as “a message,” as “the price of doing business.” Einach said that her tires were slashed during her run for mayor in 2005. She said friends had told her to expect that sort of thing: “They told me they’d do anything except kill you,” she remembered.
“[Brown] told me, ‘Yeah, they used to do us like that too when we started,” McIntyre recalled. “I said, ‘So that makes it right?’”
Davis, McIntyre’s opponent, has the support of the Brown administration. So powerful is the pressure to elect administration-friendly councilmembers that McIntyre’s own union, IAFF Local 282, has endorsed Davis. It’s the first time the firefighters union has ever endorsed a non-member over a member.
The fight for the Common Council has extended to the Delaware District, as well, where incumbent Mike LoCurto—formerly Hoyt’s chief of staff—is facing a Casey/Brown-sponsored primary challenge by Jennifer Maglietto. Maglietto works in the administration’s CitiStat office. City Hall employees have been circulating her petitions. As this newspaper was readying to go to print, a press release for Maglietto’s campaign arrived by email; it came from the private email account of Melanie Gregg, who works for the city’s Office of Strategic Planning and whose emails are more often titled “News from Mayor Brown.”
City Hall employees who work on campaigns are ostensibly volunteers—and maybe that’s what Gregg is—but most are more aptly described hostages. They work for whomever their bosses in the administration tell them to support.
“I’ve had City Hall employees come up and apologize to me for carrying my opponent’s petitions,” LoCurto told Artvoice. “They tell me they have no choice, they have to do it.”
Einach said that City Hall insiders are circulating Savage’s petitions, too. They’ll approach other city employees and ask them to sign; if they hesitate, she explained, “They’ll say, ‘How’s the job going?’ or something like that.” The implied threat is clear. Einach said her supporters told her that Savage’s campaign workers were on the streets circulating petitions two days before they were legally allowed to do so. McIntyre said that sort of cheating is typical. But, he said, what are you going to do? The deputy commissioner who hears petition challenges at the Erie County Board of Elections is Alonzo Thompson, a close ally of Byron Brown.
“How can you trust the petition process when the guy your petitions have to go through is the president of Grassroots?” McIntyre said. “This is a dinosaur democracy. It’s one of the last old machines.”
In the press release explaining her withdrawal from the race, Einach wrote,
The wonderful and awful thing about running for public office is that as a candidate I have gotten a clearer picture of local government…
What I see is despicable…
The language of threats against me during this race has been violent…They have come with Steve Casey’s name as the sender…
I have seen enough to know that I want to make sure the Primary votes in the Niagara District do not split in such a way that Peter Savage III, the candidate supported by the Casey-Brown administration, secures the Democratic line in the General Election. Since it is unrealistic to expect the endorsed candidate, David Rivera, to withdraw, I am bowing out.
That is a sad story indeed—and we’re only on chapter one. Tune in next week, when the saga continues.
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Originally Posted by WNYresident
