The Staten Island Problem - Part 5: Revenge of the Forgotten Borough

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0:42The third way. I'm Jake Brennan, and on my podcast, Hollywoodland, I revisit some of the biggest stories from Hollywood history, separating the myths people want to believe from the reality underneath them. Hollywoodland is part of the Exactly Right Network. Listen to new episodes every Monday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:11Pushkin.

1:19Election night. New York City, 1993. Staten Island Caver. And that is hooking up all the headquarters live via television. That is Staten Island Cable's host, Frank Cipolla. Remember Frank? Former assistant press secretary for the Staten Island Borough president, the one who got yelled at in those sham meetings late into the night? He got a new job, which gave him a front row seat to the big vote. John Markie live here on Channel 77 from Secession headquarters at the Island Chateau. Channel 77 bringing you that live. The end of the campaign had been crazy. Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari drove around the island in something called the Freedom Bus, talking secession.

2:02Staten Island politicians worked the rush hour ferries to try and gin up more votes to secede. And on election night, it looked like it had all paid off. We go to Monica DiClerico at the Island Chateau with the latest results, Monica. There's a new total coming in. Well, there you have it, Frank. That 66 % is the total now. The atmosphere here is like a party. The numbers were huge. You know, it's funny. Ten years ago, when Senator Markey first introduced the word secession, people thought of it as a joke. Absolutely. We know very well that this is no joke. It was a landslide. People were celebrating all over the island.

2:48State Senator John Markey gave a victory speech. He was the chief sponsor on the bill to secede in the first place. You realize, as a city that can plan for its own and doesn't have to say, may I, may I do this and may I do that, we will be going to... People on the island voted almost 2-1 in favor of secession. The Goldenboro, I don't know. I think we just might get rid of that nickname.

3:18Dan Singletary was there, that artist who I'd found on those old tapes passionately arguing for secession. Dan, obviously your efforts have not been in vain. Did you ever expect to see such political fervor as you've seen tonight? This is one of the most wonderful nights, I think, for Staten Island, for the New York City, and for New York State. It was decisive. Or so they thought. As many of you listening already know, Staten Island wasn't going anywhere. It would remain part of New York City. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Singletary knew that too. When did you realize that? Well, I was getting down pretty close to the end.

4:04Towards the end of this process, you're like, this might actually not happen. I said, but it had to do something. And I said, you know, if we got something out of this, it was better than what we were. The vote was a referendum. It was Staten Island saying, we want to leave. But the New York state government was going to have the final say. And the next year, when the referendum came before the state assembly, the speaker just killed it. It was dead in the water. I hoped that it might be possible, but I knew the probability of all that is so difficult.

4:47Someone else had to have known where all this was going, too. Guy Molinari. This was supposed to be the biggest night in his borough's history. And yet, he was nowhere to be found on the island. Instead, he was in Manhattan with his good friend, Rudolph Giuliani, who was at that moment being elected mayor of New York City.

5:26When I started this series, I told you that this story would amount to a big argument about where our country finds itself today. There's an old way of thinking about time that I love, from the Middle Ages. The idea is that time doesn't just go horizontally, where today is closest to tomorrow, but also vertically. That certain days are closer to all their earlier incarnations. Christmas this year is nearer to Christmas last year than it is to December 26th. It's like a wormhole. And what I'm proposing is that when voters went to the polls on November 2nd, 1993, to elect a mayor and decide whether or not to break New York City up and send Staten Island off on its own, that day was very close to Election Day 2016.

6:16That the era we are living in now has everything to do with that moment then. That as a historian told me when I began all this, America really does happen first in New York City. And the America happening now is something you could see first in the Staten Island secession movement. And even more critically, in the man that movement gave us. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffrey. This is the Staten Island Problem. Our final episode, Revenge of the Forgotten Borough.

7:05Okay, so let's rewind. I want to focus in on the time leading up to that 1993 election, because I realized that Rudy Giuliani and Staten Island Secession were being driven by the same engine. And I wanted to understand what that engine was. The practice of politics in this city stinks. I mean, it is an old-fashioned way of practicing politics. America first met Rudy Giuliani as a crusader who took on the mob. As U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he went after corruption everywhere, on Wall Street and especially in New York City government. Crooked politicians and crooked bosses of political organizations that are running counties that are in dire need of honest, decent people running those counties who are raping those counties for their own advantage.

7:53And one of the very first people encouraging Giuliani to consider running for a higher office was Staten Island's borough president, Guy Molinari. I think that they had a special kind of relationship or friendship. It went beyond friendship. It was like extended family. Randy Mastro worked with Giuliani in the U.S. Attorney's Office and later as his first deputy mayor. And he witnessed Molinari's relationship with Giuliani firsthand. A lot of similarities in backgrounds, Italian-Americans, working-class family backgrounds shared a lot of the same values. Giuliani was born in Brooklyn. He was a very serious child.

8:37He would sit on his front stoop and read while the other kids played stickball. He started the opera club in high school. He wanted to be a priest. His college girlfriend remembered, quote, he liked to say,

8:58Molinari was with Giuliani from the very beginning. The day Giuliani announced his first mayoral run in 1989, it was Molinari who went to all five boroughs with him making introductions. Part of what they shared was an outer borough view of the city. Both were familiar with the politics of white people living on the periphery. And while some Staten Islanders were trying to leave the city entirely, Molinari was looking for someone who could remake it in Staten Island's image. I think there was definitely a sense in both their parts about being fair to every borough, and that Manhattan had probably been favored by many prior mayors.

9:41David Dinkins beat Giuliani during the mayoral election of 1989 and became the city's first black mayor. But that election had been a warning sign to liberals in New York. Giuliani had lost by the slimmest margin of any mayoral race since 1905. His supporters were angry. They demanded a recount.

10:06Please relax and just listen. He will be...

10:18The first political campaign I covered in New York City was Rudy Giuliani's second run for America, a successful run. And I went with him to Staten Island. What? Oh, yeah. Malcolm Gladwell, reporter covering New York for The Washington Post back then, who somehow waited until our final episode to reveal to me that he had met Giuliani and gone to Staten Island with him in 1993. He wrote about it in an article called Rudy Giuliani's Whispered Revolt. I spent the day on a—we started in the morning. We took the—you know, got in the cavalcade. We went over the bridge and I ended up, came back late at night.

10:55He did, you know, he did events all throughout the day. And it was very clear that like, these were his people, even though he's a, for me, he's Flatbush. He's not, you know, he's an Italian, but they were, it's the Italian-ness and it's a sense of grievance. It's the people who resent Manhattan. Resent Manhattan. And the kind of, and also his close affiliation with the police. Such a kind of cop guy. And that is, that's Staten Island is cop central. Yeah. Giuliani spoke to exactly the kind of person who might want to secede from New York. He promised to do whatever it took to put New York City to order again.

11:31He would be Bruce Wayne to New York's Gotham. As U.S. attorney, he seemed to love to publicly shame his victims with these dramatic perp walks. His message was that all the other mayors had been too tolerant. He promised a kind of illiberalism. Zero tolerance. The thing about Rudy is that Rudy's not fine. right? He's not genteel. He's not sophisticated in the way that some of these other characters are. There's something angry and kind of mean and kind of coarse about him. And coming in to the New York City political scene for the first time he realizes he has to he realizes it's not going to, if he's himself at that point, it's not going to fly.

12:17It's too much of a departure. So he has to kind of play it down. Play down his true essential Rudiness. For a few years now, I've had a question about that true essential Rudiness. Is he the same guy now as he was then? People used to think of him as America's mayor, the guy we depended on during 9-11, or the guy who cleaned up New York City. They don't recognize that guy in Rudy today, standing in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total landscaping, spreading lies about stolen elections. That's why I'm so interested in understanding the Giuliani of long ago. Because I think that actually he's always been the same Rudy.

12:59And there's a specific moment back in the 90s when you could see it clearly.

13:06One morning a year before the 93 election, Rudy Giuliani and Guy Molinari met up for a very fateful day. The police union had organized a protest. They were angry about a series of riots where they felt Mayor Dinkins had betrayed them. Washington Heights and Crown Heights. They were angry that he had a big plan to put more civilian oversight on the police. So they gathered outside a place where they knew they'd get some attention. It was a show of force on the steps of New York City Hall. 10 ,000 off-duty cops banded together in protest. Fed up and angry with a city they claim doesn't back them up.

13:47There were 10 ,000 off-duty cops. Many were drunk, and things started getting out of hand. They began to climb on cars, chanting, Dinkins must go.

14:02They held signs with racist caricatures of Dinkins with huge lips and a gigantic afro, calling him a washroom attendant. They intimidated a black councilwoman as she tried to cross the street. People hurled racial epithets. Then they charged up the steps of City Hall. A reporter told CBS what he'd seen. They climbed the very steps of government and felt comfortable to call the mayor of this city a nigger. It's outrageous. If David Duke had a police department, it would look and sound like this group of people who assaulted our senses.

14:40I was in City Hall at the time. The mayor wasn't. First deputy mayor at the time, Norman Stiesel. Dinkins was actually uptown at a funeral. And so you were the highest-ranking person at City Hall. Yes, I was. They decided to basically, they were thinking about storming City Hall. Police inside told Stiesel they had an evacuation plan through an unused stable in the back. At some point in all this, Rudy Giuliani arrived at City Hall. The head of the police union asked him to try to calm things down. He said he led a small group out of the main area and over to a protest outside the plaza, where there was a stage on a truck bed.

15:24Guy Molinari had already spoken there. Giuliani got up. He'd seen the out-of-control rage and hate at Dinkins and had a choice. Calm things down or feed the fire. He chose the latter. The reason the morale of the police department of the city of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone. David Dinkins! He said the move to increase oversight on the cops was just, quote, to protect David Dinkins' political ass. He said Dinkins' policies were, quote, bullshit. Stiesel, still inside City Hall, heard everything. And there's no question in my mind that that's what he talked about when he got up on the stage.

16:15You could hear him. It was, you know, right outside where we were. So I don't know. And so you felt he was inciting. Well, there's no question about it. Yeah.

16:30The rioters veered away from City Hall and blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge instead. They threatened drivers. One writer kicked a New York Times reporter in the stomach. Another group of cops found a car with older Black people inside and began to shove it back and forth. Dinkins was outraged. For Rudy Giuliani to urge them on, as it were, it demonstrates an irresponsibility on his behalf.

17:01I've started having this weird feeling as I work on this series that I think of as the flicker. Like, when I'm riding the subway listening to Wu-Tang, the cars have less graffiti, but they're basically the same tin cans. And sometimes something shifts, and I feel like I'm looking at the world 30 years ago. The same thing happened when I watched what little tape remains of the riot. Something flickers, and suddenly I feel like I'm looking at the 2020s. After the break, I want to take you to a rural part of Wisconsin. that helped me understand why.

17:51I'm Jake Brennan, and on my podcast, Hollywoodland, I revisit some of the biggest stories from Hollywood history, separating the myths people want to believe from the reality underneath them. Like how the story of Marilyn Monroe isn't just the story of a Hollywood icon. Marilyn Monroe has become so iconic that her death can only be explained through conspiracy theories. And for some fans who can't let go, these stories have metastasized from conjecture to accepted fact. So on August 4th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe died. Then the rumors started and she died again. And now, we're going to set the record straight and learn about the way Marilyn Monroe actually died the third way.

18:39Learn more about what happens when fame, media obsession, and conspiracy collide. Listen to Hollywoodland on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:53Sometime in the year 2007, a political scientist living in Wisconsin decided to leave the city of Madison and start driving around the state. I knew that if I wanted to understand how people make sense of politics, the best way to do that is to listen to them. Catherine Kramer, professor at the University of Wisconsin. There's something going on in these rural communities that's very similar all across the state.

19:25She started hanging out at gas stations, athletic clubs, diners, any place she could find a civic association outside one of the big cities. She realized that she kept hearing the same conversation in all of them. like a simmering emotion right it's it's different from anger and then it's just kind of this you might say like a chip on your shoulder a sense of like these people piss me off i'm trying to think of a nicer way of saying but like those people piss me off and they just don't understand me those people don't respect me this sense of i'm not getting my fair share in like three important respects.

20:09Those three respects, Kramer says, are money, the feeling that all the jobs and resources are somewhere else, namely the cities, power, the idea that all the decisions are also made in the cities, and finally, respect. Also something cities get more of than rural places. Together, this all adds up to a feeling. Resentment. it's not that they just don't understand us they don't care and they don't like us like they think we're not worth listening to because they think we're uneducated and backward and sexist and homophobic and what have you this feeling has always existed country folk hating city folk city folk thinking country folk are backwards but what kramer found is you could put numbers to it and it had gotten a whole lot more intense starting in the 1970s.

21:04And it wasn't just rural-urban. It was about anything on the periphery of the big cities, which were only getting bigger. These sentiments show up in so many places and parts of our population, right? That sense of low-boiling resentment towards the people in charge, Like, who doesn't feel that right now? Secession was the manifestation of that same feeling. And it expressed itself in two ways. A vote for secession and a vote for Giuliani. On election night after they'd lost, that had been very clear to the Dinkins campaign. What defeated us was the secession issue on the ballot in Staten Island, which stimulated turnout there way out of proportion with its normal turnout.

22:00So many people had come out to vote for secession on Staten Island, way more than had voted in 1989. And 82 % of the people on Staten Island voted for Giuliani. The vote from the Forgotten Borough is a big part of how we got Mayor Giuliani, the first Republican mayor of New York City in decades, taking the stage at the New York Hilton. I'm standing before you as the next mayor of New York City.

22:33The next day, Dinkins' chief political officer said, quote, The only surprise, as far as I am concerned, was the size of the Staten Island numbers. You can show what I consider minor increases for Rudy across the board, but not major ones. If you fit Staten Island into the mix, there is the difference.

22:56Staten Island was part of a movement, of people saying, we don't believe the sum is greater than the parts, and we'd like to go our own way, actually. It was the most outer borough of the outer boroughs saying they wanted to be the center, not the periphery. For some, it was absolutely about race, but it was also about respect, about geography. It was about not wanting to be the dump anymore, and they started a movement that changed their reality. by electing a leader who was Outer Borough himself, who understood what it meant to be on the periphery and both hate and need the center. Giuliani made the ferry free.

23:34He invested almost half a billion dollars in the Staten Island waterfront. He got them that baseball park I used to go to in the summers when I'd just moved to New York City. But the biggest thing he gave them is that he and Guy Molinari managed to close the dump. On March 22, 2001, the last barge of trash sailed out for fresh kills. Giuliani stood on his porch and saluted as it passed. The dump was at that point the largest man-made object on Earth. The process of Staten Island bearing the burden of the rest of the city's garbage was inequitable, and now it's over for good. For the rest of the city, particularly its black and brown residents, the results were more mixed.