Trump world’s Tracey Flick (“ME, Pick ME,”) Elise StefanICK, and it’s 2nd Favorite Felon, Fraud & Con Man, George Santos–THE perfect Trump team for NYS, who’ll pardon Trump for ALL his State crimes.
George Santos & Elise Stefanik. It takes a fraud to know one. (official GOP Photo)
Over the past two years, I’ve written a few pieces about Georgie Santos, the former Drag Queen of a thousand lavish costume changes and faces.
Santos, a Diva Dirigible, hovering over two years of Republican politics, and endorsed and embraced by fellow Congressional con artists like Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin, had a tumultuous tumble from glory into the gory details of his lies, his make-believe-life, and finally, prison.
Like the Hindenburg blimp bursting into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the imposter immolated himself as he lied and lied as fast as he could flap his arms and his gums, and got booted out of Congress.
Then, came a swath of indictments for breaking a number of federal laws, followed by his arrests, his criminal convictions, and finally, a 7 year jail sentence, for defrauding many of his followers out of some $350,000—all of which he was pardoned from by Trump earlier this year because he was “100% Trump.”
Santos, the shape shifting showman, quickly became Elise Stefanik’s favorite dragged queen. She raised money for her Georgie, and lavished praise upon him across New York State as a future Republican leader. Fortunately, we have photos, and it appears that Stefanik—the Tracey Flick of American politics—absorbed the Santos-style of lying and then lying about the lies she continues to tell. Like Georgie Santos, StefanICK was “100 % Trump.”
Affectionally known (by me) as “ICK” ( see my Ode to Ick, below) Tracy wants everything she sees. Congress? Sure. House leadership? Drool. Trump running mate? Of course! UN Ambassador? Why not, she was in the Model UN in High School! Governor of NY? YES! She did lead the NYS Young Republicans, before she mentored the latest crop of young anti-Semites presently heading the group! ICK will try anything! ESPECIALLY if it brings her more attention, and, could put her in a position to Pardon Donald Trump from all his New York State crimes! Win! Win!
Stefanik is skilled at coddling criminals, having winked at Georgie Santos’ illegal use of campaign funds for Botox, Spa Treatments, lavish hotel visits, fancy meals and expensive clothing—all such stereotypically Drag Queenie stuff. But ICK and her GOP ilk like her in the House, LOVE a good fraud, as evidenced by their cult-like boot-licking of Trump, and their continuing masquerading as “lawmakers,” ever since their foot-soldiers tried to burn the U.S. government down on January 6, 2021, and were pardoned of their felonies by the Felon-in-Chief.
Trump, and his busted little valise, Elise, advocated for a new lower level of cultishness I call “Santos Ria” (named after Georgie) built on a flim-flam framework of fraud, deception, lying and lawlessness by still—to this very day of ICK’s announcement of her candidacy of Governor of New York State— defending the pardoning of 1,500 January 6 Felons—among them many violent criminals, pedophiles, wife-beaters, anarchists, terrorists, thugs, and probably a few Communists.
ICK’S upstate New York Congressional Constituents—abandoned by her use/abuse raw ambition again and again—could be forgiven if they exhumed the long-dead body of Sam Stratton, and elected him in absentia to represent them. Even a Dead Sam would be better than being fleeced by Tracey StefanICK, shape-shifting as fast as she can into the form of her fellow Young Republican leader, Georgie Porgy Santos….
So before you even think you have to listen to the Elise the Busted Valise’s bloviation about Mamdani or liberals or Mike Johnson’s 6-week Congressional vacation to avoid discussion of the Epstein Files, remember who was the chief cheerleader for George “The Pardoned Felon” Santos as a key part of the “Next Generation of Republican Leadership.”
Isn’t that exactly the kind of judgement and constituent service you want to see in the Governorship of New York State? A vote for ICK is a vote supporting the pardon of Georgy Santos, a vote for the pardon of 1500 January 6 felons, and a vote for the futurepardon of Donald Trump for all of his New York State crimes.
A decadent party of America’s richest & most callous at Mar-A-Lago, celebrated the denial of Food Stamps to 40 million Americans, when destroying the SNAP program gave tax cuts to the rich.
(Donald Trump and his fat cat friends feasted and partied all Halloween Night at Mar-a-Lago while 40 million Americans, mostly children, worried about where their next meal was coming from. The only appropriate question is: What would the fitting punishment be for the cruel crime vs. humanity?)
Dancers at Trump’s Halloween party as people begin losing food stamps under his administration pic.twitter.com/LWknoEktw6
In Stephen King’s novel Thinner, an arrogant, obese, sleazy, wealthy and politically connected lawyer runs over and kills an old woman crossing the street, because he’s getting a hand-job in his car, and loses control of the steering wheel. The lawyer escapes legal punishment for the crime by leaning hard on all of his friends in the local police department and the courts to exonerate him.
Furious by the failure of this obese, crapulent, flatulent oligarch to be brought to justice, the woman’s 106-year old father—a member of a group of Romani (gypsy) outcasts casts a curse on the killer of his daughter by uttering one word: “thinner.”
The curse takes effect on the obese oligarch immediately. No matter how much fattening food he stuffs into his large pie-hole of a mouth—hamburgers, french fries, cheesecake, ice cream, gold-decorated chocolate bon bons—he loses weight at an incredible rate of speed. The more he gorges himself, the thinner he gets.
We’ve got to find a fitting punishment like that for each and every guest at Mar-A-Lago on Halloween Night, 2025, there to celebrate Donald Trump’s “Great Gatsby” themed Ball for Billionaires. They dined on the richest, most fattening foods, while 40 million Americans were being forced to go hungry, because the corpulent capitalists in the room took away the money meant for Food Stamps to gorge themselves on bigger pieces of seven-layer cake, and gargantuan tax cuts.
The grotesque sight of the nation’s wealthy, with their boiling teeth glistening in the glare of kleig lights and feather-fans, wallowing in wave after wave of festooned food they would never finish—having fun while they forced tens of millions of children to go hungry, could never be erased.
I shared with my granddaughter Stephen King’s story, and the curse of “thinner,” upon the truly evil, heinous and unjust, and the savvy 16-year old thought it wouldn’t be punishment enough for the jewelry-dripping perpetrators of crimes vs. our youngest humans.
“That crowd likes being thin,” she observed. “They spend all their waking hours obsessing over how to lose weight. I’d flip the curse, and call it “Fatter.”
I sat up straight.
“Brilliant, “I said to my brilliant grandchild. “Brilliant The more they stuff into their faces, and their pockets, the fatter, and more obese they get. Their caloric corpulence multiplies ten-fold. Each morsel of food they take away from the mouths of babes, adds layers of flab to every part of these pigs. Each dollar they take away from programs to help the the poor and working people, converts to pounds of flesh, where they least want it to show.”
I shared with her how Stephen King’s story ended, but we decided to come up with our own, more fitting ending.
They’d just burst, like Augustus Gloop, and exist no more.
The Co-Creator of the “Great Schlep”–which organized young, progressive Jews to persuade their parents and grandparents to vote for Barack Obama–writes why some NYC Rabbis have Mamdani all wrong.
(Photo by (Selcuk Acar /Anadolu via Getty Images)
(Editor’s Note: Every so often, someone captures a moment so spot on—in so many facets—that his or her insights must be shared with thoughtful people at just the correct moment in time. Mik Moore, a writer for the historic Jewish Telegraphic Agency—which even Progressive Jews read—has done just that with this important piece.
I post Moore’s piece admitting to a few biases:
First, I am a human being, and believe that all of us deserve dignity, and equality; that no single group is “chosen” as special over another, by virtue of anything. We are all “chosen people,” by virtue of our creation and our existence.
Secondly, I am a Jew, and I believed that before I converted to Judaism 45 years ago; I believe that even more strongly today, as an active member of a Jewish congregation in Santa Rosa, California.
Third, I’ve known Andrew Cuomo for 40 years. He hired me to work in his father—Mario Cuomo’s— first Administration in December, 1984. In my book, “Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo and My Brother,” (Heliotrope Books, NY, NY, 2017) about my work for a lover of the law like Mario Cuomo, and my brother Michael’s work for a violent violator of the law, John Gotti, I quoted Andrew Cuomo extensively in a positive light, and wrote about his skills in getting things done in government.
When it came time to pick a title for my book I made certain not to use the word “Mob” on the cover, in conjunction with Mario Cuomo’s name—since they were polar opposites, and I was bearing witness to the fact that the Cuomos had NO mob connections, unlike Donald Trump. I knew, my own family was connected to the Mob, and I wrote the book to crush the ugly, negative, anti-Italian stereotype that had been used repeatedly against Mario Cuomo, a man of impeccable integrity.
Ironically, Andrew Cuomo is using similarly destructive, ugly and negative anti-Muslim stereotypes against Zohran Mamdani, and he knows better, since he knows the power of such stereotypes to stigmatize, divide and polarize people.
Unlike most people in public life, Andrew Cuomo was blessed with extraordinary role models in his mother and father, paradigms of public service and love for others.
His father stood strong and courageously against the forces of hate and right-wing fanaticism that took power under both Reagan Administrations and the Administration of George “Poppy” Bush. Mario Cuomo was a champion of working family, liberal and progressive values at a time when “liberalism” was used as a slur, the way Donald Trump’s right wing extremists—in a more violent version of McCarthyism— now throw around the word “socialist.”
The favorite pejorative of “Cultural Marxism” used by Trump, Vance and Stephen “Goebbels” Miller, and the indefensible Pete Hegseth today, is precisely the term Hitler and his henchmen used to demonize the Jews of Europe during the 1930’s and 1940’s, leading to the systematic extermination of six million Jews, socialists, disabled individuals, trade unionists and gays. Andrew Cuomo, knows better, and he knows the evil consequences of such dangerous language, exhibited by his own strong support of Marriage Equality in New York State.
Fourth, I met Bibi Netanyahu and Arik Sharon decades ago when I worked with Mario Cuomo, and I also had the great privilege of meeting Shimon Peres, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Yitzhak Rabin. I admired the great courage and moral strength of these world leaders, and was particularly stricken by the angst and pain etched into Yitzhak Rabin’s face—a general in the 1967 War— when I was fortunate to meet with Rabin in his office in Israel, just a few short years before he was assassinated campaigning for peace between Israel and Palestine, and a two-state solution.
Rabin, an advocate of peace because of all of the death and destruction he had seen first hand, was murdered by a fanatical Extreme Right Wing Jew who was a disciple of convicted Jewish terrorist Meir Kahane—a hero to several of the ultra nationalist extremists occupying positions of power in Netanyahu’s extremist Israeli government, still adamantly opposed to a two-state solution and to the continued existence of the Palestinian people.
Andrew Cuomo knew all of this history, when he decided to join Netanyahu’s legal defense team, and argue against “War Criminal” charges brought against the Israeli leader by the ICC, the International Criminal Court, for carrying out genocidal attacks against civilian, non-combatants in Gaza, killing 75,000 human beings, mostly women and children, and bringing about severe sanctions vs. the Israeli people by the United Nations, and by leading Western nations including the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Norway, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Cuomo consciously made the cheap, morally lazy, political pandering calculation that ALL Jews were alike, and that we all blindly supported Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, and on the West Bank. Not even the IDF’s (Israeli Defense Force) own ‘Code of Ethics’—which defines proportionality of counterattack as a rule of war and prohibits the slaughter of non-combatants—supports Netanyahu.
As Cuomo, and many other prominent Democrats and donors to the Democratic Party will learn on election day this year, we Jews have strong ethical, humanitarian and moral values, that transcend base tribal appeals. Our children and grandchildren are advancing those universal humanitarian values, without prejudice or paralyzing, blind group pride, and doing as we hoped to teach them by example: Advocating on behalf of ALL humanity, not just for a “chosen” few. (By Steve Villano)
**
Jewish fears about Zohran Mamdani reveal more about us than about him — and it’s a problem
On the surface, I have a lot in common with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. We have 138 mutual friends on Facebook. We are roughly the same age. And the synagogue he has led for the past quarter century, Park Avenue Synagogue, is where I attended Hebrew school as a teenager in the early 90s, learning with some of the city’s best teachers.
And yet when I saw Cosgrove’s jeremiad against Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party nominee for mayor of New York, I couldn’t find much overlap at all. So as his sermon makes the rounds, I decided to share my perspective as a New Yorker with decades of experience engaging Jewish voters.
While Cosgrove was finishing high school in Los Angeles, David Dinkins was elected mayor of New York. He had a long record of alignment with Jewish institutions regarding Israel. Dinkins opposed anti-Zionist resolutions at the United Nations. He traveled to Israel three times, including during the Gulf War while mayor.
I remember in 1990, South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela had been released from prison and was planning to visit New York City. Dinkins, who like most New Yorkers considered Mandela a hero, was thrilled to welcome him. The Jewish communal leadership, on the other hand, had mixed feelings. See, Mandela saw parallels between the Palestinian struggle and his own, and was an ally of Yasser Arafat. Therefore, Mandela was tainted.
Dinkins served just a single term as mayor. Despite putting the city on a path towards greater safety, he faced significant challenges (including the Crown Heights riot) and was replaced by notorious bully — and future Trump attorney — Rudy Giuliani. Jewish voters may have been the difference in denying Dinkins a second term (and the great Ruth Messinger a first!).
David Dinkins was the first non-white person to serve as mayor of New York. Today, Zohran Mamdani is seeking to be the city’s first Muslim mayor. He is supported by many Jews, possibly more than any other candidate, including thousands of members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, an organization founded when it organized a Shabbat service at B’nai Jeshurun to welcome Mandela to New York back in 1990.
I was born in New York City and have lived here most of my life. Every single mayor in my lifetime has supported Israel, regardless of its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. None has supported Palestine.
To put it another way: Palestinian New Yorkers have never had a mayor who they would consider an ally when it comes to issues impacting their homeland. Many mayors have been happy to fete Israel’s worst leaders. Today, the main challenger to Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal defense team. Cosgrove said Jews will be unsafe if Mamdani is mayor. Will Palestinians in New York City be unsafe if Cuomo is elected?
Remember during the Democratic primary debate, when the candidates were asked which country they would visit first if elected mayor? Many, including Cuomo, said Israel. But Mamdani didn’t say he’d visit Palestine; he said he’d stay here and focus on his actual job: running New York City.
Mamdani has never said anything to suggest he would withhold protection from Jews; on the contrary, he has repeated his commitment to their safety. Mamdani’s love for New York and New Yorkers is impossible to miss; he is running a campaign driven by the belief that this great city should be available to all. Contrast that with his suburban nepo rival, who is trying to fearmonger his way into office.
In his sermon, Cosgrove suggests that Jews need to prioritize the safety of other Jews over non-Jews, to prioritize the safety of Israeli Jews over Palestinians. He suggests that this is natural, an act of self-interest common to all communities. He said, “For Jews, ahavat yisrael, love of Israel, does take precedence over other loves. Every human being is created with equal and infinite dignity, yet we prioritize the needs of our families, our people, and our nation.”
Maybe this is why Cosgrove and so many others struggle to understand how Mamdani, as a Muslim anti-Zionist, could ever care as much about Jewish New Yorkers as Muslim New Yorkers. They have projected their own value system onto him, and don’t trust him to act on behalf of those outside his own group. (Or maybe they don’t realize that for true New Yorkers, the outgroup is New Jerseyans.)
In 2008, I was the co-creator of The Great Schlep, the campaign Cosgrove mentioned in his sermon, where young Obama supporters convinced their skeptical grandparents to vote for the first Black president. He thinks we need one in reverse, with the wise elders of the Upper East Side schooling the wild youth of Brooklyn. But in fact, despite their distinct views about Israel, the dynamics that made older Jewish Democrats initially skeptical of Obama are the same that make you and your congregants skeptical of Mamdani. It’s fear, stoked by Israeli hasbara, amplified by right-wing media, and seasoned with a pinch (or more) of old-fashioned bigotry.
The good news is that, whether or not Cosgrove or his congregants vote for him, I believe Mamdani will not turn his back on them. Unlike Trump, or Giuliani, or Cuomo, he doesn’t subscribe to the Roy Cohn model of politics. He actually takes the notion of being a public servant seriously. I hope we are all lucky enough to experience it.
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is the CEO of Moore+Associates, a creative agency based in New York City that works with political campaigns and non-profit organizations. He is the co-founder of Schlep Labs, a Jewish Super PAC, serves on the steering committee of The Jewish Vote and on the boards of several Jewish non-profits.
The first “NO KINGS” day was on the Porcine Emperor’s 79th Birthday, when some five million Americans expressed love for Democracy, and disdain for Autocracy. Now, Trump reveals his naked hatred.
(The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no allegiance to the US Constitution, no respect for democracy, no heart, no conscience & no soul. But he has spawned the largest pro-democracy, pro-America demonstrations in the nation’s 250 year history.)
For Donald Trump’s 77th birthday 2 years ago, he was given the gift of a 37-count criminal indictment, with 31 of those charges pertaining to blatant violations of the Espionage Act, including spilling Nuclear secrets.
His actions are similar to what former National Security Advisor John Bolton has just been charged with, and the 74-year old case that resulted in execution by electrocution of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg for violating the Espionage Act. It’s seems so serendipitous, and certainly poetic, that, in the end, the lives of Trump and the Rosenbergs are so intertwined.
Four years ago, on the anniversary of the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly providing valuable, top-secret information to the Russians about nuclear weapons designs, radar, sonar and jet propulsion engines, the WashingtonPost broke an explosive story headlined: “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.”
Now that we have physical evidence that boxes and boxes of highly classified US secrets—including Nuclear plans, and plans of how best to attack the US—were left in Trump’s bathroom, in a public ballroom and strewn about in closets and storage rooms, Trump’s illegal violations of the Espionage Acts are veering into Ethel and Julius territory.
As we’ve witnessed everyday in Trump’s incessant Smash, Grab & Grift 2nd Administration’s frenzied fever to snort up every dollar and put EVERYTHING in the U.S. up for sale, the prospect of Trump selling highly classified nuclear documents to Vladimir Putin or the Saudis for billions of dollars—or of his recklessness of his mishandling top secret documents he should never have had–is entirely plausible. It adds an entirely new, and dangerous, dimension to Trump’s reign of terror, including the possibility that Russian spies or foreign agents from anywhere, could have photographed these top secret military documents, while using the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, or that Trump is still monetizing similar top secret, classified information—even while he is President.
Like Trump’s friend, mentor, role-model and lawyer Roy Cohn—lionized in the movie, “The Apprentice,” as Trump’s primary tutor—I grew up thinking that only alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” spilled nuclear secrets to the Russians, and our enemies, not Presidents. After all, it was Roy Cohn who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for violating the Espionage Act. My faith in the US Justice system has been shaken because Trump hasn’t been treated exactly the same way as Ethel & Julius. It is so unfair, as Trump himself would say. And, since the foreign asset Trump was not treated the same way the Rosenbergs were, as a Jew, I believe the actions vs. the Rosenbergs were blatantly Anti-Semitic. It’s eerily like Trump and his team of hatemongers using the term “Cultural Marxists,” a phrase popularized by Adolf Hitler do demonize progressive Jews.
After I devoured the brilliantly researched and written 49-page criminal indictment of Trump which lays out not only his continuing theft of top secret classified documents over two years, but his willful obstruction of the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve them, visions of Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, began dancing on my brain.
Quickly, I ran to get my printed and signed copy of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.
I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s personal role-model and fellow Studio 54 partier, as well as his attorney, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest in 1950.
ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.
ROY: But am I dead?
ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.
(Pause)
ETHEL:
I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finallydied.) It burns acid green.
I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ‘cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.”
Will the same thing be said of Trump? Is Trump destined to become his own Roy Cohn? Will he die as Cohn did, in his own shit, and stripped of everything he ever knew?
The only President in all of American history to be twice impeached, twice indicted of crimes, and twice arrested (so far), Trump’s recklessness, and flagrant disregard for any and all laws, have surprised even those of us who have long pegged him as a criminal cipher, a con, a fraud, a liar, and a mob-boss wannabe. Is he capable of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians or the Saudis, the UAE, Qatar, or the highest bidder? Is he capable of forgiving the Qataris of funding the single biggest act of violece and terror vs. the U.S., and accept gilded planes, gifts and millions of dollars in bribes from them? Would he sell pardons to the highest bidders? White wash the most heinous sex crimes committed against children in U.S. history? Dangle a pardon for the female Sex Trafficker who facilitated and participated in those crimes in exchange for her silence about his involvement?
Perhaps, the only appropriate eulogy that could be given for Trump’s lawless, 50 + year temper tantrum and his unending drag show of distraction in public, is a variation on the theme expressed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—thrice electrocuted– over Roy Cohn’s deathbed: “Better he never had never lived a public life at all.”
The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no heart, no allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, no respect for Democracy, no conscience, and no soul. Everything about him and his team of grifting thugs is revolting; showing up to defend the Rule of Law, democracy, the Bill of Rights, and the fundamental ideals of America itself, is an appropriate patriotic —and legal—response to the theft of a nation’s secrets, its’ substance, and its’ soul.
100 Years of hate and violence against Black and Brown people, and once again, the Government greenlights the cruel, grotesque, illegal and inhumane actions.
.
Black Hawk Helicopters in Chicago’s night sky;
BiPlanes dropping turpentine bombs,
Incinerating Greenwood, Tulsa.
Black families die.
Masked Men rappelling down, past one bedroom,
Kicking in windows of another, at random,
Ransacking, attacking
Coming for my mother, my mother, my mother…
Flash bombs, today’s turpentine torches,
Ignite terror in wide-eyed babies
Screaming for their mamas;
Clothing ripped from their tiny bodies;
Doll-like hands shackled with plastic ties
Made for tying trash bags together.
White-hot violence in the night,
Greenlighted by White authorities, out of sight;
Breaking laws, knocking down doors,
Tossing any nightshirts they find to the floor;
Some, still filled with the fragile bodies wearing them.
Night errors, night terrors come to life;
No Badges, no hearts, no conscience,
Only cruelty, cutting dark skin, like a knife.
Beyond the threatening faces these ghastly ghouls
Imagine they see through the slots in their mirror-faced shrouds;
They never ask if the demons they hunt are, instead,
My brother was a bagman for one of the country’s most notorious mobsters, and he did it with grace. Tom Homan, the notorious mobster Donald Trump’s Big Bad Border Czar, disgraced the calling.
(Fred Flintstone? Or, Trump Border Czar Tom Homan inhaling his latest bag of cash?)
My brother was a bagman for John Gotti and the Gambino Crime family for years.
He cut a very elegant figure for performing such a grubby job of shaking people down for money in exchange for “protection.”
Six-feet tall, with striking black hair when he was younger and glorious grey salt & pepper hair as he aged, he was the very model of a modern American mobster. He had a perfect petite nose, beautiful dark eyes, and a quick, warm, welcoming smile.
My brother modeled himself after the debonair Pat Eboli, my mother’s cousin by marriage, and the quiet, strong, model for Marlon Brando’s “Godfather “ character. My mother’s first cousin, Jean, was married to Pat Eboli—brother to the successor to Vito Genovese, Tommy Eboli. My mother’s other first cousin, was Alfred Lettieri, Jean’s brother, who went on to play “Solozzo the Turk,” in Francis Ford Coppola’s first “Godfather” movie. It was Al Lettieri, drug-doing friend of Al Pacino,’s who introduced Coppola, and Pacino and Brando to our cousin Pat Eboli, and the rest, as they say, was movie history.
Pat Eboli, was the apple of Lucky Luciano’s eye, and his Cary Grant-like good looks, made him more movie star than mobster. He was an ethereal force in our family, hovering over family-history like a God, paying in full for my Aunt Josephine’s—my mother’s older sister’s—50th Wedding Anniversary back in 1962.
The Anniversary Party was held at my parents home in North Babylon, Long Island, and was the first time since 1957’s Appalachin Mob Boss meeting in upstate New York, that leaders of the Genovese Crime Family and the Gambino Crime Family were together in the same location. The Gambino Crime family was represented by Carmine “Charlie Wagons” Fatico, another relative by marriage on my mother’s side, whom we affectionately referred to as “Uncle Charlie.” Ironically, ten years later, in 1972, Carlo Gambino, “Uncle Charlie’s” boss, would have Tommy Eboli murdered for failing to pay him a $4 million debt. It was that mob assassination, between the two prominent New York Crime families, that led our cosmopolitan cousin Pat Eboli to flee the US, and never be heard from again. Still, we worshipped him.
It was easy to see why my brother, the bagman, idolized Pat Eboli. Pat was reserved; he was elegant; he didn’t boast or brag, or talk in a steady stream of four-letter words. He listened; he looked at you; he was generous to all of the people he loved; he smiled at you, and he never expected anything in return. He was, in short, just like my brother, and my brother saw that you could be a very tough guy, without being a tough guy.
That may have been my brother’s role model, but with Pat Eboli’s disappearance went my brother’s chance to apprentice with him. Instead, it was “Uncle Charlie” who offered my brother a desperately needed entry-level position in the Gambino Crime Family, which my brother was forever grateful to secure.
My brother was a lover, not a killer, and Fatico, a shrewd judge of men, who was John Gotti’s real-life godfather into the Gambino Crime Family, saw that my brother was not a thug, but a gentleman. He appreciated my brother’s dapper looks, and kind demeanor, and knew he would make a perfect, professional, non-threatening bag man, who would leave no tracks or bruised feelings.
I remember walking into my brother’s office unannounced one day in the early 1980’s, before I started working for Mario Cuomo, and saw him counting piles of money sorted out on a huge wooden desk. I surprised him, and ever so gently, he asked me to give him a few minutes of privacy until he was done. He had just gotten back from his “morning rounds” of collections, and wanted to make sure the right amounts went to the right people.
But that was my brother’s style: to minimize what he was doing, to be discreet, to not make too big a deal out of anything. He would never have openly accepted $50,000 in a brown CAVA food bag, from people he didn’t know, the dumb way Trump’s Bagman, Border Czar Tom Homan did. So tacky; so cheap; so typical of Trump and his miscreant minions.
I communicated to my brother recently about this as we approached the 11th anniversary of his death by pancreatic cancer:
ME: Do you believe this guy? He’s in law enforcement for 40 years, and he falls for the most common sting operation in the FBI. It’s as if ABSCAM never happened, and those Congressmen never took briefcases full of cash, and “Mr. Law Enforcement—Honan—was not even aware of the scam?
My Brother (MB from here on out, which also abbreviates “My Bagman”:
MB: Predictable.
ME: How so?
MB: Look at where he grew up. West Carthage, wayyyyyy the fuck upstate New York. When the biggest City near you is Watertown, you know things are bad. He worked as a patrolman for the local Police Department, making what? $7500 a year? What kind of food could they possibly have in such a bumfuck place? I’m sure they ate tunafish sandwiches on Christmas Eve.
(To my brother, a gourmet chef, not having good food was a fate worse then prison. And Christmas eve, was, for someone with his culinary skills and growing up Italian, the equivalent of making it to Carnegie Hall. You were duty bound to give it all you had: seven fishes and then some. The biggest insult you could give to another family was to say that they ate tunafish sandwiches on Christmas Eve.)
ME: Yeah, but he got out. He quickly made a career for himself in Immigration. He moved up.
MB: (looking at me sideways) Are you serious? You ever been to a border town in Texas? Or Arizona? In the summer, when it’s 105 degrees everyday? You call that moving up? Only some kind of sick bastard would do that, and subject his family to it.
ME: Well, he is sort-of-a-sick bastard. He’s the Corporal Schultz, Nazi-look alike who bragged that it was his idea to separate children from their caregivers. Imagine being proud of ripping babies from their mothers breasts? And he claimed to be a devout Catholic, and boasted of disagreeing with Pope Francis on immigration.
MB: A phony piece of shit. Did you ever take a good look at his mannerisms? He talks tough, and he immediately looks down to make sure his fly is zipped. So insecure in who and where he is. He says a few more stupid things and then pulls his underwear to get it out of his butt crack. The mark of a real jadrool. “A cop’s cop,” he called himself. A dirty, smelly cop if you ask me.
ME: How much money do you think he’s worth today, from his lifetime in public service?
MB: Oh, I don’t have to guess; I know.
ME: How do you know?
MB:I’m dead, remember. I can see everything, even the Epstein files.
ME: So, you already know he’s worth some $10 million?
MB: Know? I watched him grift and grovel for it. He was barely out the door at Immigration when he was paid $150 K to lobby for Fisher Industries, a construction firm that ended up getting a $225 million contract with the State of Texas of to build a section of Trump’s border wall? You think the payoffs stopped there? They never saw that kind of money in West Carnage…
ME: Carthage. West Carthage.
MB: Carnage, Carthage. It’s all the same fucking thing. He wears a badge for a while, struts around like his shit doesn’t stink and rips working stiffs off for millions the moment he gets the opportunity, always hiding behind his sainted “career in law enforcement.” Two years before he joined the SECOND grifting gang to seize power with Trump, he was taking thousands of dollars in consulting fees from the GEO group—the largest prison operator in the US. Our crowd served a lot of time in a lot of their hellholes, and we knew about those pilfering fuckers.
ME: Did you also know they run for-profit prison systems AND build immigration detention centers?
MB: Sons-of-bitches. Well, they sure found the right bagman. The fuckin’ FBI didn’t have to try to catch him by stuffing hundred dollar bills into a cheap brown lunch bag and posing as greedy businessmen. Schultz the Nazi was already bought and sold a thousand times over by these corporate criminals. He found them all by himself.
(My brother had served 90 days in prison for income tax evasion, the typical charge that usually tripped up bagmen because they never claimed their illegal profits on their taxes. The feds pressured him to provide them evidence on John Gotti and the Gambino Crime Family and he refused)
MB: You know what stinks. Not that I went to jail. It was my choice to serve my time; I knew what I did was wrong, and I took my punishment like a man. I never whined like that garbage pail in the White House.
ME: Why do you call Trump that? I know you guys used to do business with him, lots of construction business in New York, providing him cement and drywall. I know that the Teamster Boss John Cody, your buddy, used to drive him crazy, and had Trump peeing in his pants so much, that he forced the flatulent fraud to give his mistress a fancy apartment in Trump Tower. But I heard it from you, from John Gotti, Jr., from every one of your Gambino colleagues who dealt with him: you all called Trump “The Garbage Pail.”
MB: (smiled a sly smile). Because that’s all that’s inside that piece of shit, Garbage; that’s all he holds, garbage; that’s all that comes out of his mouth— garbage.
ME: You were starting to say what you thought really stunk to high heaven about Homan?
MB: He’s a vulgarian. We mob guys got the reputation, but it was just an act we put on to scare people. Homan is a true vulgarian; he wears crappy-looking clothing; he carries himself like shit on a stick; he smirks, as he rips families apart. He hides behind his hollow, pompous poses of being a lawman or a holly roller or a television bullshitter, but he is the smug, self-satisfied face of true evil. He always looks like he just swallowed the evidence of his own guilt and the guilt of all of his accomplices. For me, I was just one of the boys, and when we got caught for doing stupid or mean or illegal things, we paid the price for what we did. Homan, the true vulgarian, and Trump, his criminal Capo, know they never will and that they’ll make more money off what they’re doing, and get away with it. That’s what stinks.
ME:(I paused to absorb the power of what my dead brother just told me) Now, who and what’s in the Epstein files?
MB: (My brother looked at me and winked) I’ll talk to you again in two weeks.
(And, with that, my brother disappeared into the night.)
