As mayor, he decided against his daredevil ski trails in Colorado. Wearing a cast to a press conference could raise questions about the health-nut mayor not taking his own advice. But in the spring of 2017, a very tan Bloomberg limped into a book party at his philanthropy headquarters. When told he looked particularly fit, Bloomberg admitted that his latest skiing venture left him with a pulled muscle.6 The black diamonds? he was asked. Yes, he answered, and shortly after his seventy-fifth birthday.7
Golf became Bloomberg’s steadiest sport over the years, and it is generally a good game for the comfortably rich—riding around in a cart, having somebody hand you the right club, outdoors but not really inconvenienced. It is also a very good way, its devotees will tell you, to uncover personal quirks about your golfing partners, and, at the same time, for them to learn more about you. Percy Boomer, a famous British golfer and trainer once wrote, “If you wish to hide your character, do not play golf.”8
Thus, Bloomberg, the golfer, was another version of Bloomberg, the tycoon, and Bloomberg, the politician. He did not take an easy swing at the sport; he tackled it with a passion, sometimes even a fury, that surprised many of his fellow golfers, but not those who knew him well. On weekends, often at his private enclave in Bermuda, Bloomberg would play thirty-six holes of golf—walking eighteen, taking a cart on the next round. It would be a form of speed golf, the famous Bloomberg impatience on display even in his off-hours. One partner called him “intense.” Another labeled him a “grinder” who played with grit and determination. Mike Bloomberg did not play golf; he assaulted it.
John Gambling, a radio personality on New York’s WABC-AM and later WOR radio, shared Bloomberg’s passion for golf, and almost every Friday morning while he was mayor, Bloomberg would chatter on the air with Gambling about issues big and trivial. It was a relaxing time, the end of an overscheduled week with golf on the horizon, and with that ease often came the possibility of an inappropriate slip, a “Bloomberg blurt” as journalists came to know it. Once the pro-immigrant Bloomberg was trying to explain how immigrants keep America going by doing jobs nobody else wants to do. “You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs. You and I play golf. Who takes care of the greens and fairways in your golf course?”9 he asked, assuring his Saturday spot in the next morning’s tabloids. One golf club manager hurriedly assured the Daily News that all those working on his fairways and greens were not in the country illegally.
Even after that, however, Gambling and Bloomberg continued to mock each other’s golfing skills. “He does not rise to the level of good,” Gambling laughed after the mayor left office, “but he’s a lunatic about it.” And he added for emphasis: “I think the reason why he is such a fanatic about golf is because he doesn’t excel at it. When he can’t do something, it drives him nuts.”10
Bloomberg often set himself impossible goals whether in business, politics, or his personal life. Once, welcoming a group of leaders from Latin America to his New York offices, he said that there were two things he wanted to do before he died—“speak Spanish like a native and hit a golf ball like a pro.” This got a chuckle from many in the crowd of Latin officials who had just heard the former mayor speaking Spanish like a native Bostonian.
Indeed, the trained engineer at first approached golf as a challenge that simply needed to be solved, like everything, with the right equation, the right step-by-step process that could turn him into New York’s Arnold Palmer. Bloomberg hired experts, trainers, and, at one point, Joseph Bruno, then the Republican leader of the New York Senate, recalled giving Bloomberg a trick club designed to improve a golfer’s swing. Swing badly, and the club head would nod and droop, an obvious rejection of the effort. Bruno told the Times that when Bloomberg tried it, “the thing flipped and flopped, and I could see he was getting pretty upset.”
It didn’t end there, of course.
A few weeks later, Bloomberg saw Bruno and tried the club again. This time there was no flipping, no flopping. It was a perfect swing, so perfect that Bruno said later that “he must have gone out and bought a dozen of those things and swung them everywhere he went.”11
Bloomberg explained it this way: “I can tell you every part of my body, where it should be at every part of the swing. You can’t do a thousand calculations in a quarter of a second. That’s why it’s so hard, I think for me, to learn how to hit a golf ball.” He smiled, then added, “But I think engineering is a great background.”12
Bloomberg’s golf scores were never Olympian. Early in his effort, he shot 121. At nearly fifty strokes over par, bringing in a duffer’s score apparently increased his determination. But the fact that he admitted such a humiliating effort also helped confirm what many of his fellow golfers report after a round with Bloomberg.13 The man was scrupulous about counting every shot. No gimmies. No cheating allowed. Soon, his handicap index was a respectable 13 or sometimes 15.
Bloomberg loved hanging out with celebrities in the city at galas or a press conference, any media city event that featured Salma Hayek or Jennifer Lopez or Lady Gaga. But he also loved to play golf with the sport’s rock stars, like Tiger Woods, even if their scores were considerably different.
“What’s great about golf, it’s just you. If you play tennis, Roger Federer on the other side of the net, you will never return a serve. I can play against Tiger Woods, and he has nothing to do with me,” he said. “You’re playing your game. He’s playing his game. As long as you don’t slow anybody up, you have a fine time together.”
Those fine times apparently included games with Presidents Clinton, Obama, and even Donald Trump, the president whose scoring was the opposite of Bloomberg’s meticulous count-every-stroke version. (Former ESPN columnist Rick Reilly once said of Trump’s golf game that “when it comes to cheating, he’s an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.”14)
During his years as mayor, Bloomberg’s enthusiasm for golf only increased, and city officials soon learned that if they wanted to interrupt his golfing plans, it had better be an emergency.15 He could focus on details about golf that would not seem to matter to such a busy man. For example, he wanted his favorite golf courses to flow from green to green with no interruptions from the outside—like a road cutting between fairways. After visiting the La Tourette Golf Course on Staten Island, for example, Bloomberg became concerned that golfers had to stop for traffic to get from one hole to the next. He wanted a signal, to give priority to golfers, even though traffic engineers resisted. In the end, six months after he left office, the city’s transportation department finally agreed to put up a flashing yellow light that turned red when golfers were trying to get across.16
Similarly, in 2016, Bloomberg slipped into the Southampton Town Hall on Long Island17 one day to try to talk officials into closing a road through the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. The club is near Ballyshear, his sumptuous $20 million, thirty-five-acre estate in the Hamptons. The proposed rerouting of this road infuriated neighbors who enjoyed the scenic shortcut through the golf course, and when word got out, they bristled at Bloomberg’s interference. By 2018, the club and the town and Bloomberg had reached a compromise. The road would be closed only when the US Open was being played at Shinnecock, but would reopen after that busy week.18
To his golfing partners, Bloomberg did provide an inside glimpse of his character. They reported that he was intense about every swing and meticulous about his scorecard, but he was also funny, full of ribald jokes, making fun of their trips to the sand trap and his own visits to the rough. Mainly, for the restive Bloomberg, this was a rare tonic, a place where he could actually come as close as possible to relaxing before returning to his overloaded schedule at business, philanthropy, or his next round of political activism.
16
BLOOMBERG’S BULLDOG
“New York is the safest big city in the nation.”
—Bloomberg, Washington Post, August 18, 2013
“It’s like burning down a house to rid it of mice.”1
—U.S. District Court Judge Shir
a Scheindlin on stop-and-frisk policies in the Bloomberg era
When Bloomberg took over as mayor in 2002, crime was one problem he figured he didn’t have. Rudy Giuliani, his predecessor, had vigorously attacked crime in the city for eight years, and the murder rate had dropped more than half—from 1,560 a year to 649, not counting 9/11. Giuliani had taken the fear out of daily life for most New Yorkers and visitors from around the world, and Bloomberg’s task was to find someone who could keep crime going down and also address the city’s heightened threat of terrorism.
The mayor elect picked Raymond Walter Kelly, a tough, thirty-year veteran of the NYPD, an educated man who had experience in Washington and on Wall Street. Plus, he had been police commissioner before, when David Dinkins was mayor.
Ray Kelly had the city in his bones. He grew up dodging cars to play stickball on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and learning the hard lessons of both Catholic school and the streets of New York City in the 1950s.2 He worked his way through Manhattan College (where a student commons building was named after him fifty years after he graduated). In his junior year he joined a police cadet corps—a paid opportunity to learn about the best and the worst of the city’s police force.
Five days after he was sworn in as a young city police officer, he took leave to join the marines. He married his teenage sweetheart, and after Vietnam, went back to the city police force. He got a law degree at night from St. John’s University (the late governor Mario Cuomo was one of his professors). As he moved up police ranks, he also earned a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard, then, after his time as police commissioner from 1992 to 1994, Kelly served under Clinton in the Treasury Department’s enforcement arm. Then he was head of global security at Bear Stearns.
Kelly also looked the part of the toughest cop in the nation’s biggest city. In public, he barely smiled, offering instead a thin-lipped Cagney grin. He was fit, a muscular barrel of a man whose buzz cut grew shorter with every decade. By the time he took over One Police Plaza for Bloomberg, the police commissioner was so trim in his custom-made suit, with his perfectly tied Charvet tie, his perpetually fresh handkerchief carefully tucked in a breast pocket, that even Bloomberg seemed a tad mussed by comparison. Jaw jutted as if always ready for a fight, Kelly looked so indestructible that the city’s headline writers quickly labeled him “Bloomberg’s Bulldog.”
Over twelve years, Bloomberg and Kelly would enjoy plenty of success keeping the city safe. Crime went down steadily. There were no more terrorist attacks—sixteen failed attempts, some caught by chance but most after considerable effort on the part of the police. And Bloomberg became the anti-gun mayor who would take his mission fighting to control the spread of guns to other states with lax controls and even to the powerful National Rifle Association.
Yet, that very battle against illegal guns left a deep scar on his mayoral legacy—a rise in street stops by police of hundreds of thousands of city youths, mostly black or Hispanic. To his critics, this was another racially charged police tactic, one so outrageous that a federal judge eventually ruled it unconstitutional. Bloomberg would defend his stop-and-frisk record even more vigorously as criticism became more intense, especially as he became more public about his political ambitions. For him, frisking young people for guns was, once again, a health matter. It was about saving lives.
* * *
When Kelly said yes instantly, to Bloomberg’s offer to return to his old job, he promised to work to keep the city safe, to curb crime and terrorism, and to improve relations with communities in high-crime areas, often blacks and Hispanics who had learned to distrust police under Giuliani. He called his mission “the three C’s”—Counterterrorism, Crime Fighting, and Community Relations.3 Bloomberg would celebrate how much Kelly succeeded in keeping crime down and blocking terrorist attacks. The question for the new mayor, the political neophyte, was how well he would stand up to a tough police commissioner if his methods of controlling the city became excessive.
Lowering the already low crime rate would be hard, but Kelly adopted and refined a workable system that his predecessor (and sometime adversary) William Bratton had established. Bratton had streamlined communication between the brass and the cop on the street. Bratton’s CompStat system pinpointed higher-crime areas that needed more police officers in order to prevent crime, not merely catch criminals after the fact.4
Kelly added security cameras to monitor the streets of the city, and he kept track of the details, bringing those numbers to the one-on-one meetings with the mayor, no aides, no extra ears, no pushback.5
The weekly police sheet suited the data-loving Bloomberg. One of Kelly’s regular collections ran 263 pages. It included details about quality-of-life arrests (76,000 arrests over the decade from 2001 to 2011), a graffiti database of 11,018 “chronic vandals,” and color photos of their “tags,” plus more serious concerns like the twenty-seven prisoners who escaped in 2010 and the way Chinese gangs trafficked in drugs like Ecstasy. It seemed that Mike Bloomberg had found his crime-fighting avatar.6
Fighting terrorism would be harder. New York City had plenty of alluring targets for anyone trying to kill and terrify Americans. Times Square. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Statue of Liberty. As Bloomberg put it, look in the pocket of any terrorist and you’ll find a map of New York City.7
From his Washington experience as undersecretary for enforcement at the Treasury Department, where he was responsible for the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Kelly knew that New Yorkers could not count on Washington to protect them from terrorists. Where were they before 9/11, for example? Local police were not on the feds’ need-to-know lists, and the only way to get information from the big investigation networks was to trade with them—tidbit for tidbit. “I worked in Washington, remember?” Kelly would say later.8 So he decided he would have to protect the city with his own local version of the FBI and the CIA.
Bloomberg relished the idea of creating the city’s own intelligence operation—especially when Kelly managed to nab a thirty-five-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Cohen. Here was a spy’s spy, and he now would be running New York City’s secretive intelligence operation. At the press conference announcing the new intelligence squad, reporters trying to get a little biographical information asked Cohen his age. He replied that he was between twenty-eight and seventy.9 Cohen hired seven hundred police officers who spoke fifty languages and dialects—from Egyptian Arabic and Farsi to Spanish spoken in Mexico and the Caribbean.10
During the Bloomberg-Kelly years, terrorists failed at sixteen attempts to attack the city. Part was luck, like the time a T-shirt vendor in Times Square saw smoke coming out of an SUV and called over a cop on horseback. The streets were cleared almost immediately, and the car, which failed to explode, gave investigators clues they needed to find the driver and examine his methods.11
Other attempts failed because Kelly and his intelligence squad had prepared for the likes of Iyman Faris, a sleeper al-Qaeda agent. Faris wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge—more than 100,000 vehicles a day; 8,000 people on bikes, skates, and running shoes; lovers posing for historic mementos and people in wheelchairs enjoying the spectacle. Kelly got word about the threat and had police officers crawling over the bridge, “the Godzilla bridge” as some of the al-Qaeda terrorists referred to it in intercepted emails. And when Faris spotted Kelly’s forces, he abandoned his mission, emailing his handlers in Pakistan that “The weather is too hot.”12 Faris was caught and eventually sentenced to twenty years in prison.13
* * *
Kelly’s success soon came with its detractors. His “Demographics Unit” was designed to track people who had been to Pakistan or other areas suspected of fomenting terrorism. Officers in plain clothes went to mosques looking for potential terrorists and listening for radical rhetoric—a tactic that drew intense criticism from the Muslim community. Kelly later bristled at the criticism. “We’d get leads,” he said, “and
we’d follow them there. If they went into a mosque, we’d follow them. If they went into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, we’d follow them.”14
Likewise, when Kelly’s surveillance teams began monitoring student websites in the northeast, the president of Yale protested that spying on Muslim students was “antithetical to the values of Yale.” Bloomberg scoffed in response. “Of course, we’re going to look at anything that’s publicly available, in the public domain. We have an obligation to do so, and it is to protect the very things that let Yale survive.”15
Bloomberg supported Kelly in pursuing terrorists, even into the mosques. But the mayor also made it clear repeatedly that he did not want New Yorkers—or any Americans, for that matter—to single out Muslims for the murderers among them. Other religions had murderers as well.
In one of the most forceful examples of his unswerving support of religious freedoms, Bloomberg defended the building of an Islamic center to offer interfaith meetings near the World Trade Center site. Some of those who lost family members in the attacks were horrified since the attackers had been radical Muslims. The proposal ignited an outcry from conservatives like Newt Gingrich. “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington,” Gingrich huffed.16 If that comment was not ugly enough, Mark Williams, a Tea Party conservative, called the project a monument “for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey god.”17
Such bigotry infuriated Bloomberg. He quickly spoke out in favor of the developer of the center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose goal was to create a place for people of different religions to talk with each other. Plus, Bloomberg, the businessman, believed strongly in the imam’s right to build a religious center on his own property.18
The mayor’s most powerful response to the anti-Muslim crowd came on August 3, 2010,19 when he gave a speech on Governors Island with an array of city officials and religious leaders around him. With the Statue of Liberty pointedly as background, Bloomberg made a passionate plea for Americans to understand how basic are the nation’s freedoms of—and from—religion. He cited the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, when a group in Queens petitioned the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant to allow Quakers to set up a house of worship. Stuyvesant had them arrested. But their effort began the long and crucial trek to religious freedom and property rights in an increasingly diverse New York City. As Bloomberg said of the Islamic center, “The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.”
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 21
