My brother Michael would have been 86 years old this week. He had many talents, including as a creative cook and an engineer; he lives on in my book as a gentle & loving man, who lost his way.

Steve Villano

Jul 21, 2026

(My book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother” Heliotrope Books, N.Y.—available on Amazon—and my brother Michael Villano, as I remember him.)

My brother Michael, nine years older than me, would have been 86-years old this week. He’s been on my mind a lot lately, since my son has just co-authored a book about the great chefs and winemakers in California’s wine country, and my brother was a first-rate chef.

He was my first hero, a calm gentle presence in my chaotic early life, the opposite of my father whose temper could explode as quickly as the steam boilers he labored over in the bowels of the basement of a rich man’s office tower in mid-town Manhattan. Gifted with patience, my brother Michael would assemble all of the toys my father had no patience, or time, for putting together.

I always saw my brother through my mother’s eyes, and that view was rose-colored, gentle and perfect, even when my brother’s life veered into a far different direction in later years. To my mother, to me, my brother was always there, ready to help, to calm the waters.

He could build anything—a four-poster bed, a bicycle, or a house like the one he constructed in Paradise Valley, Arizona, when Arizona was still an undiscovered paradise. I once watched him cook a meal from scratch for two dozen people, each ingredient carefully chosen, each choice delicately considered, each course, better than the one before. I was mesmerized by his short, stubby fingers and how much they looked like our mother’s. In a different time, in a different life, with different financial backers than those who dragged him down, my brother could have become one of the great chefs of the world. Who knows? He may have even been featured in my son’s book.

My brother’s life and mine, diverged sharply over the last several decades of his life. As I detailed in my own book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother,” (Heliotrope Books, N.Y., 2017) Michael worked with the Gambino Crime family and John Gotti as a “bagman,” during the same time I was working with New York State Governor, Mario M. Cuomo—the most prominent Italian-American public official in the United States, a model of integrity who revered the Rule of Law.

I knew, first-hand, that Mario Cuomo had no connections to the Mob, because I did. And my brother and his organized crime associates talked openly how “Mario Cuomo was unreachable,” and how Donald Trump—who slobbered all over them in New York’s construction industry– was a cash-cow they loved to bully, because he would do anything they demanded, terrified of their toughness. Kind of like how Trump still rolls over for another gangster today, Vladimir Putin.

My idolization of my brother Michael turned into sadness, anger, sorrow and then, in the end, love again. He had lost his way, made a cascade of mistakes, and got sucked into a whirlpool of debt and obligation and personal loyalty he could not escape.

On my brother’s 70^th birthday, in 2010, we met for lunch at a waterside restaurant in Northport, Long Island, facing Crab Meadow beach. I told him I was working on my book, and had been since 1988, when he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for income tax invasion.

“Just like Al Capone,” he would joke, referring to the tax evasion convictions, which I didn’t find too funny because of the pain it put so many of us through.

Each time Donald Trump compares his, thus far, 34 Felony convictions to the 23 that Capone had, as if to prove he was tougher and more of a criminal outlaw than Capone, I am reminded of my brother’s braggadocio.

I told Michael I was the only one who could tell this story, and the only one who would do justice to it. He agreed, and was very supportive, even enthused about it.

“Just don’t rat anybody out,” he said to me, in typical New York mob fashion.

I smiled at him.

“That would be kind of hard, Michael, since everyone is dead,” I said.

John Gotti was already dead for 8 years, at age 61, and my brother was no longer involved with the Gambino Crime family. It was 17 years since I worked for Mario Cuomo, and I was now running a non-profit organization and living with my family in Northern California.

In early Spring, 2014, I learned that my brother was battling pancreatic cancer. I no longer had an unlimited amount of time, nor did he. I wanted to finish this story I had been working on for nearly 30 years, so he could read it before he died.

I could not write fast enough. In November, 2014, my brother Michael lost his 9-month long battle with pancreatic cancer. My manuscript now had an added purpose: to give new life and meaning to the memories of my brother, complicated as they were, and to our relationship.

Then, within 60 days of my brother’s death, Mario Cuomo died. I had run out of excuses for not finishing my book. All of the principal characters were dead, but me. And no one else had written the story to give me a final reprieve, as I had hoped, so the only option left was for me to tell it myself; to excise this growth from inside me.

Ironically, after my book was published in the summer of 2017, there were a number of people who wished it had never been written. Sure, as Pete Hamill noted when he wrote “A Drinking Life,” family members hate when “one of their own,” tells the stories everyone was trying to hide.

My family was no different than Hamill’s. My mother died 10 years earlier so I didn’t have to worry about her being upset about “airing our dirty laundry.” In fact, I purposely postponed telling the story as non-fiction for 14 full years before my mother died.

In 1992, I had lunch with the elegant Italian-American writer Gay Talese, at one of his favorite restaurants around the corner from his E. 61^st townhouse in Manhattan. Talese had asked Mario Cuomo to write a book-jacket blurb for his autobiography Unto the Sons, and the Governor delegated the task to me since he had no time to read the book, and knew I loved Talese’s writing.

Talese and I talked a bit about his book, his family, and about the difficulty Italian-American writers experienced in revealing family secrets. As a probing journalist, Talese wanted to know what my family secrets were. I told him that I had written two fictionalized versions of the story—each one, approximately 500 pages.

Talese looked straight at me and told me that such a powerful and unique story begged to be told as non-fiction, a form or writing he favored. He challenged me to do a 10-page outline for a non-fiction book over the next few weeks.

When I got back to him, my “10-page outline” had grown to a 154-page annotated and detailed outline, complete with quotes, contemporaneous notes and sources. Talese took one look at the tome and told me: “You’ve got the book right here.”

“There’s only one problem with it, Gay,” I said. “I won’t publish this story in non-fiction form while my mother is alive, and while Mario Cuomo is still Governor. It would kill my mother, and it could be distorted to be used against Cuomo.”

So, I sat on the story for years, work-shopping it as fiction, as a stage play, or as a screenplay. My brother Michael may have been fine with the non-fiction story of our lives—even a little titillated by it– but his surviving family was not, despite my painstakingly portraying my brother as my life-long hero, and as a good man, who simply lost his way.

The Cuomo family hated it, and expressed to me through confidants that “the book should have never been written.” They were not happy with having Mario Cuomo’s name in the same book as someone affiliated with “the Mob.”

“Why,” I responded, “Only Cuomos are supposed to write books? Only their versions of stories are to be told?”

It did not matter how much I explained that the book was written as an eye-witness account of how Cuomo had NO mob connections; that I wanted to definitively dispel the vicious, ethnically prejudiced rumors that because Cuomo was Italian he must be “mobbed up.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, and I wrote the book to give first-hand evidence to that.

To the Cuomo’s none of that mattered. They were worried about the headlines linking the name “Cuomo” with any mention of the Mob, even if it was to prove those rumors were all lies. Astounding.

In settling on “Tightrope’s” full title, I rebuffed the suggestion from marketing people to put “The Mob” in the book’s title, to sell many more books. I rejected that suggestion, not just to protect Mario Cuomo from malevolent screen shots, but because my life was not torn between me and The Mob, but between me and my brother, who happened to work for the Mob.

In the end, it was my story; nurtured inside me for more than three decades; told over years in parts to therapists, friends and colleagues; recorded in dozens of notebooks, memos and papers kept contemporaneously from my years of working with Mario Cuomo; and from my endless days of witnessing my brother’s criminal record unfold in Federal court, and, finally, being the only family member present to watch him get sentenced to prison.

My brother is dead 12 years now, and each time I go back and re-read a portion of my book about him, he is still alive, and, I’d like to think, wishing he had followed a different recipe for his life and been more in tune with the kind, good person I knew and loved.

Singer/Songwriter/Citizen Activist Harry Chapin died in a car crash 45 years ago. In the documentary “When In Doubt, Do Something,” which I worked on with Rick Korn, we examined Harry’s life.

Steve Villano

Jul 18, 2026

(45 years ago this month, singer/songwriter/activist Harry Chapin was killed in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway. He was 38 years old.

In addition to recording 12 Albums, and performing some 2000 concerts over a 10-year career, Chapin co-founded the International world hunger organization, WHYHunger, with former Catholic Priest and social justice advocate Bill Ayres

That really wasn’t too much of a surprise since Harry’s great aunt was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, and a force in progressive social action going back to her opposition to the US involvement in WWI, and her being jailed and beaten for demanding voting rights for women.

Working with then-Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and President Jimmy Carter, Harry Chapin pushed hard for the creation of the first — and only — Presidential Commission on Hunger in US History in 1980. It still stands as the only American Hunger Commission ever created.

With WHYHunger — 51 years after it’s founding — still fighting hunger and the broader issues of poverty and income inequality, and Harry Chapin Food Banks feeding tens of thousands of Americans across this nation each year — Chapin’s music, his messages of social justice, and his work for social change are more important and relevant today than they have ever been.

Six years ago, I had the privilege of working on a documentary film: “Harry Chapin: When In Doubt, Do Something.” The unique, socially conscious documentary, was produced, written and directed by Rick Korn, S.A. Baron and one of Harry’s sons, Jason Chapin. It has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, Amazon Video, Netflix and on airline flights nationwide, and is still available on streaming services.)

***

When Harry Chapin was killed in a motor vehicle accident on the Long Island Expressway, July 16, 1981, the news was slow to spread.

It wasn’t like when Elvis died four years earlier, nor when John Lennon was assassinated only seven months before, on December 9, 1980, just two days after Harry Chapin’s 38th and final birthday.

Then, the news of the deaths of those legends travelled at the speed of sound, like giant trees falling in the center of media forests. Everyone knew instantly. The whole world went dark for a time, as if someone pulled out the plug.

Despite their similarities of age, Elvis was 42, and Lennon, 40, Chapin’s musical career never came near those heights, with Cats in the Cradle being his only #1 top 40 hit, over a span of 10 years, 12 albums, and hundreds of poems and stories put to song.

Fellow Long Island musician, Billy Joel, who produced 33 top 40 hits, and performed before over 100 sell-out crowds at Madison Square Garden, recalled Harry’s many kindnesses toward him in the “dog eat dog business” of music.

“I was the opening act for him at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis (now the Stifel Theatre) in 1973–74, “ Joel said in an interview at his Motorcycle shop and museum in Oyster Bay, Long Island, NY.

“He was the headliner. He plugged me to his own audience. ‘How about that Billy Joel,’ he said. That was so gentlemanly of him, and, I never forgot that.”

Years later when the five-time Grammy Award winning Joel’s star rose faster and higher than Chapin’s, Harry opened for him, and Billy made a point of saying “we worked together, and we always worked really well as a show.’

Harry Chapin was not in the rarified league of John Lennon, Elvis or even Billy Joel when it came to fame. Few musicians were. But, regarding humanitarian work, few celebrities came close to Chapin, nor did many try to follow his lead, until after he was gone. Harry had created a Humanitarian Hall of Fame for performers who could translate their popularity into a permanent public good, and there were few stars applying to get in.

“In Harry’s case, he was literally the only artist in those days doing great humanitarian work,” said the late Ken Kragen, Chapin’s manager from 1976 until his death.

“ That’s what really made him unique. He was the only artist getting something done on the issues of hunger and poverty. He was very, very committed.”

Kragen, who would, in the mid 1980’s organize two enormous events aimed at alleviating hunger and poverty — We Are The World, and Hands Across America — which raised tens of millions of dollars and global awareness about the urgency of alleviating human suffering, credited Harry Chapin with being the source of his inspiration.

“ I had this overwhelming feeling that Harry Chapin had crawled up inside me, and he was directing everything I was doing, “ Kragen said. “Suddenly, I became the doer of his will. It was one of the things that pushed me to keep going.”

Billy Joel, standing next to Cyndi Lauper among the dozens of major recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, Quincy Jones, & Stevie Wonder participating in the 1985 recording of We Are The World which Kragen arranged, underscored that assessment of what made Harry Chapin stand out from everyone else in the music business a full decade earlier.

“He was inspiring how motivated he was to try to help others. He was like a saint to the point of being a martyr, “ said Joel, noting that Chapin, seven years older was like an older brother to him, and taught him the importance of giving back. “If there was a religious medal for musicians who helped other people, Harry’s face would be on it,” Joel said.

Harry’s unmistakable smiling face and lanky body were badly burned in a fiery car crash, when his tiny Volkswagen Rabbit with a flawed seat-belt mechanism, was rear-ended by a big truck bearing down on him.

Family members knew something was wrong when he was late for a significant meeting in NYC with his Business Manager, half-brother Jeb Hart, and top talent agent Shellie Schultz of ICM.

The meeting, blown-off the day before by Harry, had been rescheduled for July 16, by Jeb, who was now struggling to manage the day-to-day details of Harry’s musical career, out of sheer exasperation, to get Chapin to slow down a bit, concentrate more of his time and attention on his family and career, and devote less energy to the many social and political causes that were consuming him.

“Harry’s greatest quality, was his quality of inclusion, but he was just running, running on vapors, “ said Jeb, “and his career had become secondary. He was out of control. We were trying to get him to focus.”

In his decade of performing across the country, in venues that ranged from backyard barbeques to the Bottom Line Café, to big, sprawling concert halls, college campuses and the steps of the US Capitol Building, Harry Chapin did some 200 concerts per year, with nearly half of them being benefits for one non-profit or political cause or another, mostly fighting hunger and poverty.

From March, 1980 through July, 1981 — the final 16 months of his life — Harry Chapin juggled enough projects to fill a career: he finished his work on the nation’s first-ever Presidential Hunger Commission which he and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont (D-VT) were instrumental in getting President Jimmy Carter to create; participated in unique Radio “HungerThons” with WPLJ-DJ and former Catholic priest Bill Ayres raising millions of dollars for the World Hunger Year (WHYHunger) organization they jointly established; founded Long Island Cares with his wife, partner, conscience and “one-person think tank” Sandy Chapin, who gave birth to the idea of a Presidential Hunger Commission; performed with Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers at the funeral of his assassinated political hero, Allard Lowenstein; relentlessly conducted fundraising benefits across the United States for progressive Democratic candidates courageously combating the Reagan landslide of 1980; and gave the 2,000th concert of his career at the Bottom Line Café, in Manhattan over one weekend in January, 1981.

“Harry just couldn’t say ‘no’,” said Jeb Hart. “He had so many people he was talking to across a spectrum of causes and issues. He’d be making commitments to all of these entities in the midst of doing all these concerts.”

Chapin was involved with “good people,” as he liked to say, quoting Pete Seeger, long a role model for him in how to integrate his music into living a life that mattered on the most important social issues of the time.

In Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2019), author Jeff Place writes:

“Pete saw his music as a means to move mountains — to end racism, poverty, social injustice, political ineptitude and war. There was a reason behind every song Pete wrote or sang. They carried messages and taught lessons. They fostered hope or strength or both. Even the simply fun folksongs had a purpose: they made us feel happy and connected, which could lead to a respect for your fellows, or love for your neighbor, saving the earth from environmental disaster, or…”

Tom Chapin recalled a concert he, Harry and Pete did at Huntington High School, in early January, 1976, to benefit Huntington’s PAF Playhouse, the performing arts group which was a particular passion of Sandy Chapin’s, who was dedicated to arts and arts education.

“One of the students in the audience asked Pete if he thought that all of the benefits for good causes had made any difference, “Tom said. “Seeger responded with this trademark honesty. “ I don’t know,” he said to the student. “But, I do know this. I’ve met good people; people with live hearts, live eyes and live minds.”

“Such a perfect Pete answer,” Tom Chapin said. “Deflecting any credit, not putting down a young reporter’s slightly pushy question, and pointing out what the concerts had done for him personally. Harry and I never forgot it.”

Each used his celebrity to improve peoples lives; Each died in a terrible accident on July 16, at 38 years old, 18 years apart, which was their age difference.

Steve Villano

Jul 15, 2026

(JFK, Jr., & Harry Chapin: Lovers of Life; Brothers in Death.)

They were always there, right in front of me: Harry Chapin, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., linked in death on the same exact date — July 16.

They died 18 years apart, their age difference, when they were both killed in terrible accidents at 38 years old.

Chapin’s brief, shooting-star-of-a-life ended on July 16, 1981—45 years ago— in the fiery crash of a small car on the Long Island Expressway; JFK, Jr.’s, in the crash of a small aircraft—on July 16, 1999— somewhere off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

They were lovers of life and brothers in death, but their families — guided by strong women — and their mutual lust for life were intertwined in ways that one of Harry Chapin’s five children, Jason, would come to experience first-hand, in his work directly with JFK, Jr. and his “Reaching Up” non-profit organization.

The son of President John F. Kennedy founded “Reaching Up” in 1989 — eight years after Harry Chapin died — to give greater access to higher education and training to healthcare givers working with individuals with disabilities.

The organization’s work not only enlarged the scope of the Special Olympics founded by JFK, Jr.’s Aunt Eunice Shriver, but it also shared the compassion and common sense of the life-saving work done by a national non-profit co-founded by singer/songwriter Harry Chapin at the peak of his fame — “WhyHunger’ — still tackling food insecurity in local communities 50+ years after it was formed, as well as providing job skills to lift people out of poverty. Chapin and Kennedy were answering similar calls to serve others.

Jason Chapin, who worked with Governor Mario M. Cuomo and was elected to two, four-year terms on the New Castle Town Council in Westchester, County, NY, has, along with his four siblings — Jono, Jaime, Jen and Josh, and their mother Sandy — carried on Harry Chapin’s work forWhyHunger and local food banks since 1975. He is the only Chapin to know JFK, Jr., and work with the “Reaching Up” organization and its City University of New York partner (CUNY) from 1995 to 2001.

“John was extremely passionate and dedicated to the organization, “ Jason Chapin said. “ I will always remember our Board Meetings which John chaired. He politely greeted everyone in the room when he arrived. He attended all of the annual Reaching Up Kennedy Fellows Convocations and was very friendly with the Fellows.”

It was precisely the same way JFK, Jr., greeted me 30 years ago, at a non-profit breakfast at New York’s Plaza Hotel , which I attended as a guest of Jason Chapin’s. I was representing Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, where I was a Vice-President, and wearing a “We Believe in Brooklyn” button to boost Brooklyn’s visibility among the Manhattan political and media elite.

JFK, Jr., who sat a few seats away from me at the circular table, spotted my button as soon as we got seated. He leaned over to me and whispered

“My family believes in Brooklyn, too,” JFK, Jr. said.

“We still believe deeply in the Bed Stuy Redevelopment Project.”

The Bedford Stuyvesant Redevelopment Project was an important initiative started during the too short Senate term of his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, when he was NY’s U.S. Senator, from 1965–68.

What JFK, Jr., did not know then was how important Jason Chapin’s grandfather, John Cashmore, was to his own father’s election as President of the United States in 1960. Cashmore, Brooklyn Borough President from 1940–1961, delivered 66% of Kings County’s vote to JFK, helping him beat Nixon in New York State by five percent, and win NY’s 45 electoral votes, giving Kennedy the 303 Electoral votes he needed to win the Presidency.

I mentioned to JFK, Jr. how important the Bed Stuy project was to Central Brooklyn, the community served by our public hospital, and how important his own father’s example of public service was to me in guiding my life’s work.

“You probably get tired of hearing that from so many people of my generation,” I said to JFK, Jr.

“I never get tired of hearing it,” he said. “It makes me proud to see how many people my father inspired.”

Over the four decades I’ve known Jason Chapin, I’ve heard him say, with unending politeness and grace, the exact same words about his father, when people tell him Harry Chapin inspired them to commit their lives to fighting poverty and hunger, or improving public health, or helping refugees find access to food or shelter.

“I’m always amazed by how many people my father reached, how many lives he touched,” Jason says again and again.

Harry Chapin, like many of the Kennedys (the glaring exception being Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of HHS) was determined to use his celebrity to do good, performing 2000 concerts during his 10-year music career, with half of them as benefits, raising more than $6 million to fight hunger, and millions more on his radio “Hungerthons” with WhyHunger co-founder and radio host Bill Ayres.

Ayres was a former Catholic priest who Marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963 — to pressure JFK, Jr’s father to enact Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation. He had already played a part in changing the world before he met Harry Chapin.

As with JFK, Jr., Chapin was encouraged to take his activism, courage and compassion full-time to Washington, and run for the U.S. Senate from New York, which neither man lived long enough to do.

Harry recognized, as JFK, Jr., did with the creation of “Reaching Up” in 1989, that his name attached to any project could attract politicians, the media, the public and funding to the cause.

Chapin’s crusade against hunger and poverty, and his successful campaign to create a Presidential Hunger Commission —the only such Commission ever created in the United States—with the help of former United States Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT.) and President Jimmy Carter, exhibited the same instincts that propelled JFK, Jr., to launch “Reaching Up” and George Magazine : they both knew that politics and pop culture had merged, and that those in a position to use their fame to improve human existence, and to demonstrate their love for life, had an urgent responsibility to do so.

Now, 45 years after Harry Chapin’s death and 27 years after JFK, Jr’s — both on July 16 — their lessons of lending their celebrity, and giving their lives, to improving the lives of others, are more crucial than ever before. Kennedy & Chapin intuitively understood that fame and fortune carried with them a soaring social responsibility to be fearless in the selfless, public-spirited service of others struggling to survive each day.

One clear, bold phrase defined Risa’s confidence and humor; we can still hear, and feel, her voice, her presence, her humanity, and love for those of us lucky enough to share her life, and laughter.

Steve Villano

Jul 12, 2026

(Risa Goldberger Gregory, center in red pants; Carol Jacobson Villano, right in yellow top, Risa’s college roommate; and me, in an “Immigrants” tee-shirt, on the Main Academic Podium—the main Quad— at SUNY Albany, where we graduated in 1971, 55 years ago. Risa, a source of life, love and laughter for all of us, died earlier this year. Her 77th birthday would have been this week, as well as her 50th Wedding Anniversary. Photo by Linden Gregory.)

There was so much more to Risa “Bessie” Goldberger Gregory than met the eye.

Gentle eyes of blue, five foot-two, Risa’s diminutive presence, her quick smile and contagious laugh, and her natural cuteness often disarmed people who met her, but didn’t really know her.

Her petite persona belied the steely determination behind each one of those 62 inches, just like they did in such historical figures as Joan of Arc, who was the same height; Golda Meir, two inches shorter than Risa; or, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a towering 4 feet, 10 inches tall.

Risa would have loved the comparisons with women of valor in history, since she loved history. In fact, we became fast and lasting friends when we first met during our Freshman year of college at SUNY Albany, in Dr. Warren Roberts’ Western Civilization honors class, and learned we were both from Long Island, an incubator for much more than buffoons like Joey Buttafuoco, ghouls like the Gilgo Beach killer, or fabulist frauds like Georgie Porgie Santos.

We were mesmerized by the remarkable Dr. Roberts, who masterfully made world history into a Netflix series, some 12 years before any cable networks were invented. Risa Bessie and I hung on his every word, especially when Dr. Roberts explained his well-documented theory of the influence of sex upon history. After all, it was 1968.

I knew next-to-nothing about sex at that time, and chuckled quietly as Professor Roberts regaled us with tales of royal debauchery. Risa, on the other hand, whose sex eduction may not have been any more advanced than mine, laughed hilariously, and the rest of the class laughed with her, because….well, that’s just what you did when Risa laughed, and her smile flashed and her bright eyes twinkled. No one could be left behind.

Risa could talk about Warren Roberts and history in depth, or she could talk about clothing and make-up and music and art and feelings, with the best of us. Not shy, she was unafraid to challenge anything or anyone. If you met Anna Goldberger, her mother, to whom Risa was devoted for decades, you would understand her in-your-face fearlessness. Putting it all together, made Risa one of the first real Renaissance women from Freeport, LI, but she’d be the first one to roll her eyes and say “Oh, please,” if you called her that. Warren Roberts, a master of accomplished modesty, would be proud.

It was Junior Year of college, the Fall of 1969, when Risa and I, and my soon-to-be life-long love & partner Carol Jacobson, all became Resident Assistants or RA’s—24-hour on-call dorm counselors who received free room, board and tuition, for providing a little local, and loco, parental guidance to students in our dorms. Risa took to the job immediately, quickly interpreting RA to mean “Risa’s Authority.”

I got my earliest hint of “Risa’s Authority,” when I first visited the RA Suite which Risa and Carol shared in Eastman Tower, a 22-floor dormitory on State Quad. Carol’s side of the room was orderly and neat, but covered in dust—a condition which has lustily, and dustily, continued through our 54 years of marriage. Risa’s room-side, on the other hand, was a dust-free zone, where everything sparkled, for fear of running into the wrath of Risa, if as much as an errant speck of dust challenged her hegemony over her high-rise heaven.

The ability to make dust jump out of her way (“You’re not the boss of me!”) was a harbinger of Risa’s leadership ability to make college freshman move from where they were not supposed to be. With the end of curfew and limitations on conjugal college student visitations coming to an end on our watch—it was, after all, 1969, the year of Woodstock—a new form of unquestioned authority needed to be found, especially in times of fire drills, emergencies or rowdy crowds that got too loud.

The RA’s met; we explored other options; we searched for solutions; we discussed acceptable alternatives into the early-yawning hours. Suddenly, the sound of pulled fire alarms ricocheted around the Quad. Scantily clad students began pouring out of their dorms into the Quad, heeding the call of the sirens in the night to “PARTY.” Chaos threatened to consume us, until one sharp, clear, no-nonsense voice echoed throughout the Edward Durell Stone designed cement canyons of the State University’s Quad:

“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa Bessie bellowed. “GET OFF THE QUAD!”

Students stopped in their tracks. Where did that command come from? There was no giant stomping over the Quad? No Big Brother loud-speaker. Was it a premonition of the ferocious voice forcing its’ way out of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in the not-yet made sci-fi horror movie “Alien?”

“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa roared again, quickly taking control of what could have been an out-of-control circumstance.

“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa boomed once more into the darkness of the night, searing that life-saving directive into our memories for all of eternity.

Fast forward more than 50 years later, when parts of Risa’s memory began to leave her, that quintessential Risa quote—”GET OFF THE QUAD’“—could still cut through the fog of this night, and evoke her beautiful smile and contagious laugh, bringing us back into the same slice of time, back to our college years, back to our oldest and best friends, when we were sure that what we had would live forever.

Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Viet Thanh Nguyen & Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the never-ending fight for humanity and justice.

Steve Villano

Jul 05, 2026

(Photo by Steve Villano, at the National Memorial for Peace & Justice; Montgomery, Ala.)

I didn’t blow out any candles to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States.

I spent the day quietly, the way I often like to put big celebrations in perspective: I read; I wrote; I sat outside in my garden and thought; I had breakfast with my best friend; got together for a shared dinner with our neighbors; and relished the joy in my youngest granddaughter’s eyes as she played with our next-door Pugs, declaring that the thing she liked best about the fireworks was the smoke trail they left behind in the night’s sky.

It was the perfect metaphor for what was important and lasting once all the hype, hysteria, flashes in the sky, and in the pan, were gone; that, and who remained, was what mattered.

For hours during the day I lost myself in the words and wisdom of Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin; in the clear, sharp observations of Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer, who escaped war and oppression at age 4, just before America’s Bicentennial; and, in the brilliant legal analysis of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her powerful concurring opinion in the Birthright Citizenship case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court right before the July 4th holiday weekend began.

I sat and conferred with all of these geniuses to make some sense of the carnival-like cage match between totalitarianism and the truth being played out in Washington, DC, the latest demolition site for the destruction of Democracy by Donald Trump, the architect of anarchy, repression and greed.

Sometimes, the never ending deluge of demoralizing news, challenging our most fundamental rights and beliefs—and all that we’ve worked toward over the past 60 years—makes me want to say “enough,” throw up my hands, and live out my remaining days in peace somewhere else, like Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, England or France. But then, I remember. I could no sooner walk away from my grandchildren than I could from the roiling world we are leaving for them.

We have been here many times before, I think, under far worse life and death circumstances. One such test came 160 years earlier, when the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was enacted to enshrine birthright citizenship into law, to erase racial inequality, and to move America closer to the universal equality ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Two years later, and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed overwhelmingly with a Citizenship Clause, that extended US citizenship to any slave born on American soil, and to others. The cost of extending equality to “all men”, as Jefferson originally promised, was severe: up to 750,000 American deaths—slaves and free men— and 470,000 Americans wounded in 4 years of the Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history, fought over the fulfillment of a sacred promise for fundamental human rights and dignity.

Fast forward to today, when masked White Supremacists waving Confederate flags and wearing neatly pressed Khaki slacks marched through the streets of our Nation’s Capitol on the 250 Anniversary of our Declaration of Independence—which declared that “all men were created equal,”— tried again to use terror to erase all of that history and suffering and death, and pretend that “citizenship” was, instead to be found in the “blood” of only certain people, instead of in the universal protections of the common law, or the soil of a special land. It’s the same diabolical web of blood libels the Nazis used against the Jews nearly 100 years ago, inspired in fact, by Jim Crow laws of some of the same Southern States that legalized slavery and flew the Confederate Flag.

Frederick Douglass, in his famous oration on July 5, 1852, entitled, “What, to the American Slave, is your 4th of July?,” forced White Americans nearly a decade before the Civil War began, to face the humanity and dignity of the Black population it ignored while celebrating “freedom & liberty” and pretending that, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence “all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights:”

“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

Douglass never relented, nor gave up in the face of increasingly violent opposition to his position. Even after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the onset of the Civil War the following year, Frederick Douglass continued to fight for full-citizenship for America’s Black population. He took nothing for granted:

“Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man, or our model…He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of white people in this country. YOU are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are, at best, only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”

Douglass was not just referring to Lincoln’s longstanding advocacy of Colonization—relocating American Blacks to either the West Indies or to Africa. He was directly referencing the North’s necessity of freeing the slaves in order to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the union. Whether by design or default, freeing the slaves had become an essential military tactic for the North to win the War. Following the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, thousands of freed black, enslaved persons left Southern plantations, and reinforced battered Union troops, instrumental in the Union’s victory over the Confederacy.

I looked to Douglass and James Baldwin to learn how to channel my fury over the systematic efforts by Trump, his troglodyte followers and their rebranded version of White Supremacy (Patriot Front? MAGA? Christian Nationalists?) and to strengthen my resolve to fight fatigue, or, worse, the temptation to walk away from the battle ahead.

I turned to James Baldwin, in his take-no-prisoners book, The Fire Next Time, first published in 1963, the year four little Black girls were murdered at Sunday School in a Birmingham Church; and Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were assassinated. Baldwin’s book was republished in 1964, the year that Civil Rights Freedom Riders, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were gunned down in Mississippi by the KKK working in collaboration with local law enforcement officials. The fire, the fury, was all around us; the following year, Malcolm X was assassinated; three years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:

“One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and in American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less, than the achievement of the impossible.”

“If we—and now, I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!’

Baldwin, once again, helped me answer the questions I continually asked myself and friends: “Why do we stay? Why after 60 years of struggling for human rights in this century and the one before, do we continue to fight?”

The obvious answer was always: for our children, for my granddaughters, to repair this broken world and make it better, fairer, more just; to fight alongside others who should not face these fights alone. Fleeing to a saner, gun-less, more democratic, more egalitarian, less-hate filled, less cruel country— although we had the means to do it—was never really an option. We were compelled to stand our ground.

An essay published on Zeteo’s Substack by one of my favorite writers, Viet Thanh Nguyen, on July 3, 2026, entitled “250 Years of Cruelty: The American Empire and How to Save the US” riveted my attention with its’ opening sentence:

“The word I think of to describe the United States on its 250th anniversary is cruelty. There are other words, of course, that could describe a country of such size, power, and diversity.”

The author’s earlier works, particularly his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, had powerfully influenced my thinking and my own writing, as did his personal journey.

Born in South Vietnam in 1971, during the peak of the Vietnam War, Viet’s family fled to the US after the fall of Saigon in 1975. During the American Bicentennial, they wer were living in a Fort Indiantown Gap, a Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, refugee camp, where more than 32,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian war refugees were re-settled. It was a bitter irony that the same camp was used throughout the previous decade as a large ROTC training camp for US Army soldiers, heading off to fight in the American war in Southeast Asia.

Viet Thanh Nguyen goes on to raise the disconcerting possibility that the “arc of the moral universe,” of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently spoke, might not always turn toward justice, but:

“…the gravity of American history bends that arc towards something far worse than justice.”

He goes on to write that we may be witnessing:

“…the black hole of cruelty that has always been there from the very beginning of the United States, or “America,” or the “New World.”

He quotes the late anti-colonialist poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who described the age of American Imperialism this way:

“The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.”

Viet goes on to write that “the persuasiveness of American propaganda about being the greatest country in the world has never worked on everyone, but increasingly that propaganda is failing to work for ever greater numbers of people.”

Linking the present US Government’s war against our own neighbors with the unending war against non-Whites around the globe, Viet Thanh Nguyen warns us that:

“American propaganda has always been about the spectacle of the city upon a hill on whom the world’s eyes are turned, a brightly lit extravaganza marked by Hollywood and lubricated with Coca-Cola. Now the spectacle is about the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, the lurid punishments of inhuman detention that spur cheers and glee from a significant part of the American people, encouraged by the would-be American Nero and his fawning minions who take pleasure in their taunts and insults. The bullying of the weak and the desperate inside American borders is matched by the lobbing of missiles outside those borders, the flexing of admittedly enormous muscles that is not matched by intelligence.”

The author dispenses with the notion that this “American cruelty” is something new, or the result of a “declining empire:”

“The cruelty was always there, from the slaughter of Indians to the exploitation, murder, torture, and rape of Black African enslaved peoples to the abuse and mockery of Mexicans and Chinese, Latinos and Asians, who were forcibly incorporated into American empire or brought in as cheap labor. American empire was also erected on the labor, subservience, and silencing of women, and the suppression of sexual diversity. If some idea of American exceptionalism is to be saved – this idea that Freedom is the greatest American invention and export – then the liberation of all peoples inside American borders will have to be realized, regardless of race, gender, sex, religion, nationality, or any other feature that is used to single out elements of humanity.”

Too many Americans take delight in cruelty, he observes, since they “cannot take delight in generosity, hospitality and possibility.”

Just a few days before Viet’s message was published of how to mitigate future “American cruelty,” a great-great-great granddaughter of slaves schooled the nation on how the U.S. Constitution commands that we follow “the universal vision of belonging and citizenship,” and not the path of cruelty, exclusion & hate.

Writing what may be one of the most powerful, historically accurate and important concurring Judicial opinions of our time, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the first Black women to serve as a Supreme Court Justice—issued a clarion call for clarity and primacy of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, at a time when this core principle of the US Constitution is under its most severe attack since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, 160 years ago.

Born in Washington, D.C, in 1970, and raised in Miami, Florida, by a father who was the Chief Attorney for the Miami Dade County School Board, and a mother who was a principal for an Arts High School in Miami, Justice Jackson brilliantly articulated the majority decision of five other Supreme Court justices of how the 14th Amendment was essential to the “Second Founding” of the United States, in 1868.

Justice Jackson, a champion for equal justice, demolishes the myopic, historically wrong and legally incorrect views of the Trump Administration—and of it’s unintelligible and unthinking mouthpiece on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas:

Justice Jackson writes: “By ignoring that our Constitution stands firmly against caste and subjugation—on all axes and in all manners—they deny the clear, universalist vision shared and proclaimed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers: to “rebuild a shattered empire . . . to plant deep and solid the corner-stone of eternal justice, and to erect thereon a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law.”

Thomas, jettisoning his own long-expressed, tone-deaf “racial blindness” test for the Constitution, makes the tortured claim that the 14th Amendment only applied to freed and enslaved Black men, in response to the dreadful Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied citizenship to Black people because of their “blood,” regardless of their birth on American soil. Justice Jackson easily disposes of Thomas’ historically & legally empty arguments, and she exposes the bald-faced duplicity of Thomas’ overnight flip-flop of his decades-long insistence on “racial blindness.”

“Of course,” Justice Jackson writes, “ the ultimate irony is that for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision, the Government and the principal dissent (Justice Thomas’) propose a return to its core tenet (of the Dred Scott decision).”

“Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship. It is that odious conclusion that the Citizenship Clause plainly rejects, as the Court explains… I add only that the Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim—one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright. The America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result. Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today, and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation’s founding—that all human beings are created equal— once more.”

I read and re-read Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s tour-de-force of an opinion over the course of the July 4th weekend, savoring every tightly reasoned phrase, zeroing in on her compelling case that, in fact, the US Constitution before the passage of the 14th Amendment, was anything but color-blind, since fundamental rights were denied to Blacks on the very basis of their skin color. Despite those racial restrictions written into the original Constitution, Justice Jackson noted that “freed Blacks who advocated for the 14th Amendment “fought for the shared humanity of all people.” It’s a concept of the universal rights of man that Clarence Thomas is incapable of comprehending.

I went back to Justice Jackson’s writing to hear once again, the call to history and memory articulated by Frederick Douglass, especially in the face of the Trump Administration’s jingoistic jihad against history it is hell-bent on hiding, and its’ frantic fanaticism to whitewash the truth:

“Douglass declared that his own aim was to “‘show that nations should have memories.’ In the time since Douglass’s prescient observation, Americans have come to learn that fading memories are not the only danger. The distortion of historical facts—retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims—may be an even greater threat.”

I watched my youngest granddaughter follow the fire works across the night’s sky on the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, marveling that once the lights had burned out, she carefully followed the trails of smoke that reminded us of what we just witnessed, and what we could be part of again.

I watched the wonder on her pure, cherubic face, and knew that I was exactly where I was meant to be for all the nights and days and challenges yet to come.

##

E. Jean Carroll schools a nation how to beat a bully, sexual predator, liar, fraud, whiner, welcher, cheat & grifter again, and again, and again. Never give in; never give up; outlast the bastard.

Steve Villano

Jun 29, 2026

(Photo by Steve Villano, of the Statue of Sainte Jeanne D’Arc at the Cathedrale of Notre Dame de Paris, May, 2012, Paris, France.)

It took a tough, tenacious, courageous, intelligent and persistent 80-year old woman to teach this nation how to beat Donald Trump again and again, and how to make him pay for the consequences of his actions, in the only language he understands: costing him money.

Like Sainte Jeanne D’Arc of France, E. Jean Carroll on New York lighted the way to dignity and victory over abject evil, and schooled the bulbous, bellowing bully who has abused and stolen from all of us, is our new national symbol of freedom, independence, and courage, and a true symbol of this nation’s 250 Birthday celebration.

Thrice now, this lightening bolt for justice—E. Jean Carroll—stood up proudly against Donald Trump, an algae-sogged swampbeast of modern times, defying death threats and drubbed the dribbling Donald in courtroom after courtroom, including the highest court in America—the US Supreme Court—which the sputtering, spoiled Fatty Arbuckle of our century—believed he owned. In the end, which came this week, the Supreme Court wouldn’t even listen to the wild-eyed whines of the worst human being in recorded history to ever occupy ANY public office in the United States.

This latest Court decision in favor of E. Jean Carroll, like all of the other legal losses piled up by Trump and his soon-to-be disbarred band of ambulance-chasing lawyers, is yet another clarion call to everyone fighting Trump: never give up, never give in, never capitulate to pressure from a sexual predator, liar, grifter and amoral ghoul.

Saint Jean D’ Carroll showed the con man’s cowardly Christian supporters—who canonized the original Jeanne D’Arc some 500 years after they burned her at the stake— how pure guts, a strong sense of morality, a steel spine, persistence, and an unshakeable determination to never back down in the face of pure evil, will triumph.

This brave woman–sexually assaulted, abused and libeled on a huge scale by Trump–beat the lawless sexual abuser, liar, convicted libeler, and fraud in an arena he has always abused, the way he abuses women: the Courthouse.

Today, she stands astride him once again, sword of justice pointing toward the heavens, our new national shero. Oh, how Trump’s maggot supporters will despise the use of that term, since it represents diversity, and the triumph of right over might & money.

Trump never really saw Jean D’ Carroll’s slaying strikes coming, since she had a few time-tested weapons on her side whose existence Trump has never recognized and cannot comprehend: the law, the truth, and moral courage. In short, she and her kick-ass team of attorneys led by Roberta Kaplan, took no shit, which, in the end, is all Trump really is.

Acting more like Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Trump–who mistook E. Jean Carroll for one of his Epstein girls–also mistook his own lies for the truth.

That approach may work at MAGA cult covens, or or with corporate toadies willing to pay tithes of tributes to be in on the theft of billions of our tax dollars, but not before real, live judges and jurors. When Trump whines that “the courts are out of control,” what he means is that they are out of his control—even the Supreme Court justices he selected, who didn’t want to hear his losers’ voice anymore.

Outraged that he lost a $5 million sexual abuse and libel case to Carroll three years ago, Trump—never a financial nor legal genius with anything he could not steal— decided to double-down, multiplying his initial loss nearly 18 times (to a total of $88 million) by seeking “retribution” against his sex abuse victim in print, at his MAGA mosh pits, and on national television.

The crapulent, spoiled brat, chauffered to private school in his mother’s rose-colored Rolls Royce, just couldn’t stand the fact that years after he physically and emotionally abused her, Carroll–refusing to bow before him–continued to wield her sword of truth, law and moral courage against him, over and over again in Courtroom after courtroom. Each new Trump lie became a new cause of action, costing the financial failure more and more money every time he texted a libel, or opened his mouth—a sure sign that he’s lying.

There are historic implications for this case, which could open the floodgates in the other pending cases against Trump. Courage begets courage. It’s no wonder he’s pilfering billions of dollars of our taxpayer dollars and shaking down corporations down for billions more: he’s stuffing his pockets for the legal battles he knows face him and his family in the years ahead.

With a mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-class jury finding that for repeatedly lying about the sexual assault Trump was found guilty of committing— an act, which, the following year was included in a new definition of rape under a new New York State Law—and for incessantly smearing the name and reputation of his victim, Donald Trump was punished over and over again. This week, not even his own appointed conservative Justices could stand to hear his whining words once again.

The jurors from urban and suburban counties in and around NYC, where Trump was born, refused to be intimidated by the threats of violence by Trump’s deranged supporters. Neither was the courageous Carroll—whose name, unlike the jurors’, could not be kept secret.

In Mary L. Trump’s Substack column on the day of the verdict in the Carroll case, Trump’s niece, a clinical psychologist, wrote:

“Donald is someone who has gone through his entire life without facing consequences—and I believe he thinks he can get away with everything. Today, that changed. It was one of the first times Donald has been made to answer for his egregious behavior.”

If only the same standards would be applied to the dozens of other sexual assault charges against Trump, brought by women—and young girls—alleged to be as young as 14 years old—when they were abused and assaulted. .

One of the most ominous statements which puts the Carroll verdict and its validation by the highest court in the United States this week in context for what may lie ahead for Trump, once out of office, came from one of Carroll’s attorneys, Shawn Crowley, to MSNBC, on the day of the jury’s decision:

“I believe very strongly after today, that the lesson is that actually, no one is above the law, and, that your behavior, and your statements, and your threats and your lies are gonna catch up to you someday.”

Even if that someday doesn’t come until after Democratic majorities win both houses of Congress later this year, or when Trump is finally out of office, hope is eternal that Crowley’s prediction will come true. It certainly did at the US Supreme Court on June 29, 2026, when they upheld the core Carroll verdict.

But, it was E. Jean Carroll herself, always bouyant and radiant in victory, head held high in the glow of justice achieved, who perfectly articulated the call to action for women just like her, and millions of others fed up with being abused by well-connected, people in power, and stuffed into the closets, dressing rooms and cages those ghouls construct to try to rob humans of fundamental dignity and rights:

“ This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep women down.”

THIS week, even Trump’s hand-picked Justices on the Supreme Court reaffirmed that message once again, and they did it by silently telling Trump to shut the fuck up.