Nassau GOP chair intends to collect fat paychecks for 3 jobs
On the heels of pay-to-play corruption scandals that have tarnished the Long Island GOP, the Nassau County Republic Party has elected a one-time disbarred lawyer to be its new leader — and the retirement-age politico intends to collect fat paychecks from three different jobs simultaneously.
Joseph Cairo, 72, the new chairman of the Nassau County Republican Party, is also head of the Nassau County Off-Track Betting Corporation. He’s paid $198,000 at OTB.
The long-time No. 2 to former Nassau GOP boss Joe Mondello had his law license yanked in the 1990s for misusing client funds. His license was reinstated and the politically-connected lawyer now has an established law practice, GOP sources said.
He also has not ruled out collecting a third paycheck from the Nassau GOP.
Mondello, his predecessor, made more than $250,000 last year as GOP boss, and pulled in $1.5 million from his private law practice and real estate investments, records filed with the government show.
At one time, Mondello also simultaneously headed the Nassau GOP and OTB.
Cairo’s law office is in Valley Stream, his OTB’s corporate office is in Mineola and Nassau GOP headquarters is in Westbury.
A Post reporter found him at GOP headquarters.
Cairo said he was not relinquishing his OTB executive job or suspending his law practice after taking the reins of the GOP.
“I’ve been at OTB. This is a crucial time at OTB with possibly sports gambling coming so we’re deeply involved with that there now,” Cairo said.
“This is a political position. My attorneys tell me there is no conflict and I think having a position in a political party is such that it’s been done in the past by people on both sides of the aisle. And I think it’s currently done, too, in some other counties — their elected officials are also party chairmen,” he said.
But watchdogs have long complained that allowing people to simultaneously hold top positions in government and party leadership opens the door to conflicts of interests and potential corruption.
“It’s business as usual. This is an example of the rotten political system in Nassau County,” said George Marlin, who formerly served on the Nassau County Interim Finance Authority, a state agency set up to monitor the county’s shaky finances.
Marlin said the multiple paid gigs for Cairo is remarkable, especially after the Nassau Republicans lost the county executive’s race and the Town of Hempstead supervisor’s race last year amid concerns over corruption.
“They’ve learned nothing,” Marlin said. “They don’t care.”
Cairo chalked up the suspension of his law license to a mistake from the distant past.
“I think that’s something that happened — it was earlier than ‘95, that’s 25 years ago, and I think people who know me know the type of person I am,” he said.
With that, Cairo grabbed a suit jacket from a parked black Cadillac before jumping into the passenger seat of a Jaguar driven by a friend.
Cairo is right about one thing. On Long Island particularly, politicians simultaneously collecting hefty paychecks from top government and political party posts is a time-honored tradition.
The Post reported last week that Rich Schaffer is drawing down a combined $350,000 from three paychecks as head of the Suffolk County Democratic Party, as the full-time Town of Babylon Supervisor and from a law practice that includes representing plumbing contractors.
But Long Island Democrats have their scandals, too.
Gerard Terry, the former North Hempstead Democratic Party chairman, was convicted of tax evasion for failing to report his income that included payments from legal services provided to eight different local government agencies.
New Nassau County Executive Laura Curran, a Democrat who won the election on anti-corruption platform last year, passed executive orders barring county government officials from holding party positions or from accepting gifts.
New York City has a law that bars top government officials from serving as party bosses, following the municipal corruption scandals of the 1980s.
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WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. By Thomas Geoghegan. 287 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $19.95.
Thomas Geoghegan's "Which Side Are You On?" is a quirky, brilliant career memoir of a man who attended college in the late 1960's and moved on to Harvard Law School, but who did not follow the natural course and rise into the upper ether of government service or the wealthier law firms. Instead, he plunged downward, because of 1960's-type ideals and a romantic mishap, into the smoky pit of union politics. He joined a campaign to overthrow a corrupt leader of the United Mine Workers union. Unfortunately the victorious reformers squandered their victory and the union went into decline, and Mr. Geoghegan moved on.
He enlisted in a movement led by Edward Sadlowski to reform the United Steelworkers. But Mr. Sadlowski went down to a defeat that, as Mr. Geoghe gan says, had all the earmarks of a stolen election. And the Steelworkers, too, went into decline. Mr. Geoghegan moved on to a labor law practice in Chicago, where he has remained and prospered, though not by the grandiose standards of his fellow graduates of Harvard Law.
Yet even his victories, some of them, turn out to be defeats in disguise. He toiled for years helping a group of laid-off steelworkers win a multimillion-dollar settlement from Wisconsin Steel; but the workers were owed, in truth, more than they received. So Mr. Geoghegan's career has been, all in all, the career of many another frustrated idealist in the American labor movement in the last couple of decades. As he says of the history of the miners' union: "To die, and to die, and to die."
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What is the reason for labor's troubles? Mr. Geoghegan's book is informal, personal, full of anecdotes, complaints and wisecracks -- not a grand-scale analysis. Still, he does develop a few points. Union leaders are sometimes at fault, especially in unions where autocratic methods undermine the movement's strength by sapping the spirit of community. But the main problem is deindustrialization, he says. In the 1980's alone, one out of three jobs in American heavy industry disappeared. Mr. Geoghegan blames Reaganomics, which made imports cheaper while making investments more expensive, thus transferring industry out of the country. And he blames American investors, who have proved reluctant to seek out innovative new industries.
Deregulation of industry under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was another setback for labor, in his view. Nor has American law been much help. In no other country outside the third world, Mr. Geoghegan argues, is it tougher legally to organize a union. Organizers have to stand out in the parking lot whispering "psst" to the workers, and if any of the workers do get the message and start to organize their own shop, the likelihood of their being fired is estimated at one in 20, though Mr. Geoghegan believes the figure is much worse. Either way the statistic is a devastating indication of the tyrannical atmosphere in a good many American work places.
The National Labor Relations Board, after years of Republican rule, has gone over to the cause of labor repression. The N.L.R.B. can function, in Mr. Geoghe gan's phrase, "like a bloodless, bureaucratic death squad." And if, despite the N.L.R.B. and everything else, a union does get organized? Arbitration and other legal maneuvers can drive a poor union to ruin, and even a well-meaning union into bureaucratization. At the Labor Day parade in Chicago, he tells us, the floats pass by with lawyers "sitting on carnations, waving to the crowd." This has not been a happy development for the American labor movement. Then union busting got elevated to "almost a science." The science consists of firing people until they give up.
The obstacle to unionism that irritates Mr. Geoghegan most of all, though, the thing that probably motivated him to devote his weekends to writing his book, is a certain popular smugness about unions that has taken hold, the attitude that regards unions as ugly, oppressive, goonish, primitive, undignified and a threat to individual liberty. There are, of course, instances to point to, for example the teamster stewards who have terrorized critics within their union by literally going for the eyeballs during brutal beatings -- "like in the revenge plays of the Elizabethans." An atmosphere of gangster kitsch surrounds the teamsters, in Mr. Geoghegan's assessment. A certain teamster tendency to dress like Tom Wolfe catches his eye.
But Mr. Geoghegan wants the world to understand that, some gangsters aside, the threat to the freedom and well-being of people at work does not come from unions. Unless yours is the kind of job that lets you wander out to a coffee shop to while away the afternoon, he suggests, the only individual freedom you are likely to retain during your hours at work is the sort that is guaranteed by a labor organization, if you are lucky enough to have one. For what else is going to give you the right not to kowtow to the boss?
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What else will let you dent the company truck or make some other human error now and then, and not be dismissed on the spot for your crime? One nationwide delivery company fires people "just for fun," according to Mr. Geoghegan. The International Harvester Company was "so mean, so vile" to its laid-off employees (it sold a Chicago mill, workers charged, to avoid pension liabilities) that even the company's investment banker, Lehman Brothers, had to put up a protest. What will protect you from companies like those on the days when the banker is feeling less kindly? A union, if it can. Unions will get you, Mr. Geoghegan observes, an average of 20 percent more pay, too, which is not exactly a threat to your own individual freedom.
Unions could even offer economic prosperity for the country as a whole, in his argument, if people would only let them do it. His god and hero, long after his own youthful days at the miners' union, is still that old-time miners' leader John L. Lewis, who used to organize the mining industry to be more efficient at a time when the owners couldn't do it themselves. Unions could perfectly well play that role for American industry as a whole today -- if only the laws would get out of the way, and if only the union leaders would work up a Lewis-like imagination, which they aren't rushing to do.
But don't unions make it harder for the economy to keep up to date? No, or at least they don't have to, Mr. Geoghegan tells us. He notes that in the last 30 years, the organized work force in the United States has sunk from 35 percent of the total work force to 16 or 17 percent today, and in that time the American economy has modernized by going from manufacturing to services. But while Canada's economy has also modernized, Canadians "join unions like crazy" -- mostly because "they can get away with it, i.e., no one will fire them." Union strength in Canada during those same years has risen from 25 percent to a respectable 32 percent, and without ruining the country, either. Canada, Mr. Geoghegan says, is "the free world."
He has somehow maintained his friendships all these years with fellow lawyers who did not enter labor, and with old East Coast companions who went from 1960's idealism to making a killing in, as he says, "real estate or cappuccino" -- and he knows that, to these old friends with incomes vaster than his own, nothing will seem more foolish than looking to labor for positive national leadership. Yet it is a main point of his book, always put in the gentlest terms, that antilabor biases of liberal and enlightened people do not necessarily do them credit.
The horrors of factory work (and of other work, too), the fewer than 10 fingers that too many steelworkers still tend to have, the human ruins that are left behind every time a mill picks up and moves -- these things are no less visible today than in the past. Yet they generally do not get noticed.
As a solid man of the elite, Mr. Geoghegan himself likes a trendy iced cappuccino now and then. But on his way to get one in New York's SoHo one day, he happened to glance through an open door and saw, kneeling on the floor of what appeared to be a wretched sweatshop, two or three Asian women, sewing. Then the door closed and he walked away, thinking, "It's filthy in there."
Some people, perhaps most people, peek through doors like that, but they manage not to put together what they have seen. Or they put it together and rail against unions anyway. What is the attitude, one wonders, that can make a wealthy person shake with indignation at the idea that somewhere a lowly high school graduate is working hard and, because of a strong union, is bringing home a solid middle-class income?
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Mr. Geoghegan, as he presents himself in his book, is a literary man. Wandering around Chicago makes him think about Dante's hell and David Mamet's dialogue. He is witty and modest, self-conscious to a fault, rueful about women and about the tricks of fate that have led a poetry-quoting Ivy Leaguer like himself into the ranks of Chicago labor. Integrity is his biggest theme. Picking up his book is like sitting next to Holden Caulfield at an airport bar, grown up now and banging his glass whenever the topic of upper-middle-class snobbery gets broached. Sometimes the bar-banging gets out of hand, and Mr. Geoghegan begins to feel a little sorry for himself. He makes hyperbolic comments like, "Lane Kirkland is outside the American consensus in a way that even Abbie Hoffman never was" -- which is partly true, but mostly whine. He goes on: "It seemed everything I touched in my life had been a disaster."
His own personality is to marvel at. How can a man identify with the industrial labor movement for his entire career, yet still insist, as he does, on his continued membership in the privileged class that he abandoned years ago? When Mr. Geoghegan uses the word "we," you can never tell whether he means "we of the labor movement" or "we of the snooty elite." This strikes me as strange. On the other hand, it isn't fake. Some people adopt new identities the way they put on a hat, but Mr. Geoghegan is unchangeable. Not even Rich Trumka, the current president of the Mine Workers, could teach him how to spit tobacco.
The truest thing of all in his book is the feeling of open, ardent love that he expresses for ordinary working people who try to help one another out -- which is unionism's main principle. He attends meetings of the laid-off women employees of a Chicago steel company, and admiration and affection nearly bubble out of him. He meets with the nurses of rural Illinois who ask his help in forming a union, or with hippie-haired carpenters who are trying to wrest their organization out of the hands of corrupt leaders, and he sees nobility of purpose and democratic decency, and he can't resist giving a cheer.
His book is charming and acidic at once. I think it is unparalleled in the literature of American labor, at least since the days of Edmund Wilson's labor-writer friend, Charles R. Walker. It is inspiring, too. What this country needs is more people like Thomas Geoghegan. I would press these pages into the hands of anyone wondering what to do in life. Ever consider a career in the labor movement? It won't be glamorous. Success will not spring from your every step, at least not until the political situation changes. Your own colleagues will drive you to despair.
But you will have soul.
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