The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

by Jimmy Breslin

  Other Hasidic groups grew as rapidly. The average couple had a minimum of five children and more likely ten. The men had side curls and wore black coats and hats, and the women had their heads covered. Only those in one of the neighborhoods could tell one group from another by their dress. The Puppas wore tall, wide hats, homburgs, with no fold in the top. There was an indentation that seemed punched in with a fist. The hat was Hungarian. The Satmar wore flat hats, a flying saucer from Romania. All wore long black coats and black suits.

  They place this barrier of custom between their lives and the world outside, and parts of their customs are looked at skeptically, particularly the covered heads at all times, and in the case of women, the wearing of a wig, or sheitl; simultaneously, the face of the woman is open for all to see and admire. For the men, the hat is protection against cold.

  Hasidic custom forbids them to shake hands with a woman, which causes them to flee from any woman whose hand is outstretched. But their clothes are the armor of any Hasidic political movement. At election time in Williamsburg, they line streets with as many as two thousand, with the sameness of their black hats and coats and side curls making it appear that there are tens of thousands. In Borough Park, Hasidics fill one street for a rally. The politician on the stage thinks the crowd extends for a mile.

  “Our voting is massive,” Rabbi Shea Hecht announced one night. He alluded to tens of thousands, but the actual number in the Satmar area on election night was thirty-five hundred or so, and in another Brooklyn area, that of the Lubavitch, there were the usual three thousand.

  Somebody running for mayor of New York never sees the numbers, just the hats. There is no time to stop and make a campaign promise to the Hasidim. This is not a labor union with a single demand. The Satmars open with schools, hospitals, and police. Nor are they all that anxious to begin bargaining. As a politician is at his most vulnerable in the haze of victory, the thing that stands out most sharply in recollection is all those black hats. Now, one after another, the black hats walk into City Hall or municipal offices where they want something done. If the mayor is a Roman Catholic, like Giuliani, he bows because he thinks anything else will be interpreted as anti-Semitic.

  “We feel we are at our strongest when we come to the mayor after the election,” Isaac Benjamin was saying one day. Benjamin often speaks to newspapers and television for the Satmars. “Anyone can get a campaign promise. We get government action.”

  The mayor doesn’t know one Hasid from the other, but he throws himself into every set of arms and pledges his love forever. Much more than that. He summons assistants and orders them to handle any contract one of these rabbis—his best friends in the whole world—hands out. Giuliani placed an assistant, Richard Schairer, into the police department as a liaison to the Jewish community, meaning the Hasidim. He then made a campaign fundraiser, Bruce Teitelbaum, Chief of Staff, who would be helpful to all the needs of the Hasidic community.

  Not once would these politicians, who are supposed to carry the last election figures in their hearts, realize that they picked up the same three thousand or so votes that the guy before them received, and that in their own areas the Hasidim could not defeat a black state assemblyman, Al Vann, and that someday soon the Hispanic vote would bury everybody.

  Still, you get a non-Jew—and particularly a Roman Catholic—in office in New York, and here is what he says: What is it that you’re talking about? You’re trying to tell me that they do not exist, that I can’t see all those black hats? If I listen to you and ignore them, every one of them will be an enemy, and you tell me how I get reelected then.

  As part of publicity for a Central Park concert, Garth Brooks, the country singer, came to City Hall to meet the mayor. Entering the office, he noticed the most prominent picture, that of Giuliani surrounded by black hats. Brooks’ eyebrows went up. “I didn’t know you had Amish in New York,” he said.

  THE GREAT TEMPTATION of cheap labor rose out of factories that attracted more cheap labor, Puerto Ricans, into the neighborhood. They first came on a ship, the Marine Tiger, huddled against the winter cold in the first heavy jackets of their lives. Summer people in winter clothes. Soon they were arriving on late-night flights from San Juan, kikiri flights—the flight of the chicken. An expressway was built that cut Williamsburg into two sections and destroyed twenty-two hundred units of low-cost housing. The city’s answer was to sweep up all the poor and put them into huge high-rise housing projects. This was first done in ancient Rome when all the poor came in from the countryside and authorities built the first high-rises in the history of the world. After a while, the poor hated them and set fires. As municipal corruption in Rome had no bounds, the firemen wouldn’t come unless the chief was paid. The buildings were adjudged a failure, and the high-rises for the poor were no more. In New York, two mayors in a row who had gone to Yale, Wagner and Lindsay, put up more high-rises for the poor than the world had seen. They were supposed to have studied things like this in school.

  The projects in Williamsburg started a clash between Satmars and Puerto Ricans over who got the most apartments. In late December of 1970, Satmars boarded yellow school buses and went to City Hall, where three thousand in their black hats and great round fur hats demonstrated. Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican women rushed the projects and in the lobbies they put up huge Christmas trees. When the Satmars returned and were confronted with this blaze of lighted trees, there was the beginnings of a riot. Somehow, it was established that the Satmars would have apartments on the first three floors because they cannot use elevators on their holy days and the Puerto Ricans would live all the way into the sky. The Satmars and other Hasidim began a thirty-year push to get the land and housing they needed. One of those days in the future was to make a local builder named Eugene Ostreicher an important man in Williamsburg.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Outsiders, particularly anybody nonwhite, assume the Satmars have tremendous wealth. It is at least overrated. In street talk, most Satmars don’t have forty dollars. In Brooklyn, the “economic boom” is something to be read about in the newspapers.

  “Am I supposed to be burdened by my fortune of money?” Isaac Benjamin was saying in his hardware store on Church Avenue. Whenever anything happens that puts Satmars in the news, Isaac Benjamin is the one everybody calls. He bought the store by promising the owner, David Kramer, as he was dying, that he would take care of Kramer’s son, George, forever. The son is autistic and has a photographic memory. He also yells at people when they walk in. Kramer died, Isaac took over the store, and now he stands behind the counter and Kramer’s son, middle-aged, yells as you come through the door. He walks to the window and looks out at Church Avenue’s traffic. A truck goes by. “Ralph Avenue!” he calls out. That is the address on the truck.

  “If he is here thirty years from now, he will tell you Ralph Avenue,” Benjamin says.

  Kramer’s son comes back from the window.

  “Birthdays,” Benjamin says. “He knows everybody’s birthday.”

  “What’s your birthday?” George Kramer asks. “October seventeenth? Same as Christine’s. Isaac’s is November seventh. Same as my friend Etta Wagner. She’s in the Hebrew Home for the Aged, the Bronx. Fifty-nine-oh-one Palisades Avenue. Goldfine Pavilion, room one-fifty-seven. Al Wagner lives in Boynton Beach, Florida. Fifteen Victoria Road. His birthday is June tenth.”

  Benjamin has read of tax breaks to Pergament and Home Depot and vast riches for all big stores. He fights it out in Brooklyn at full taxes and with Kramer’s son still yelling at the customers. He tries to keep up with all matters Satmar.

  “Nobody knew,” he said. He was talking about the builder Ostreicher. This stocky man came here from Hungary in 1951 and became a citizen in 1956. He started by putting in flooring for supermarkets and then went into general construction in Williamsburg and upstate New York Satmar communities.

  “We never knew anything about him except that he let himself be giving to charity. Yeshivas were enjoying his f
ruits. At dinners he was always a sponsor. Rabbi David Neiderman. Herb Siegel of the city Housing Preservation Department. On Hooper Street near the firehouse he built a yeshiva and a shul. In Monroe he did the same thing. How did he begin? I think he started in floor tiles. Construction, his children took him into construction. How do you get into construction? You go in, you learn how to read prints, and then you’re in construction, I guess. We didn’t know anything except he was a sponsor at dinners.”

  New York is the only place ever where a landlord receives cheers. Unlike Manhattan, where buildings search the sky and carry the developer’s name, Brooklyn buildings are mostly low and carry addresses whose numbers—760 Seventieth Street—immediately mark a person as one who must use a bridge or tunnel to get to Manhattan. The landlord is absolved if he can use the title of builder. In Manhattan, the city of unimaginable riches, it is the land developers, barterers, lawyers, and lenders who live the most lavishly, are regarded as the most important, and have politicians fawning and begging for their money. The Manhattan builders contribute outlandish amounts in public to candidates—brazenly, too, for they will give $250,000 to each candidate and receive no criticism. They are of the preferred class. The finances of Brooklyn builders are usually much less, but for the 1996 campaign of Rudolph Giuliani, an unknown, Joseph Spitzer, showed up at the treasury with $83,000, an amount that caused people to drop to one knee. Mr. Spitzer gave his address as 1446 Fifty-ninth Street in Brooklyn, the same as Chaim or Richie Ostreicher. A man or woman can come to a candidate with a plan to feed hot lunches to orphans, and another can arrive with good big fresh money. Those with the hot-lunch idea remain out by the elevators while the money guy is in the innermost room being worshiped.

  Immediately he becomes known as a great builder.

  And those known as builders usually can’t drive a nail or saw a board.

  Especially Ostreicher. In 1993, complaints were received in the offices of the New York State attorney general about the condition of condominiums purchased from Ostreicher. An associate attorney general, Oliver Rosengart, went and inspected the buildings one morning. The buildings were on the Williamsburg streets where Ostreicher did all his construction. The three-story buildings had openings in the walls, with no fire stoppage. There was a vertical column of wood when there was supposed to be steel. Drainage was pumped from the basement out to the sidewalk, and there it ended. Rosengart said to himself that the houses were not good enough for the West Bank. Rosengart, an engineer and a lawyer, wrote a report that said, “These buildings are by far the worst constructed buildings I have seen in ten years in making these inspections.”

  Eugene Ostreicher was the first to arrive for a meeting.

  “If they don’t like the houses, I’ll pay them back,” Ostreicher said.

  “How much?” Rosengart said.

  “Twenty-five thousand. That’s what they paid me.”

  In an adjoining office were the four families. Already they had sworn that they had paid $180,000 each.

  Rosengart stepped in and told them of Ostreicher’s figure.

  “Liar!” one of them said.

  “Robber!” another said.

  Rosengart asked for proof. “Have you got evidence? Show me your records.”

  He knew the answer. Of course they had no papers to show. Hasidic transactions are made in cash, and in full. Other than a sudden outbreak of diphtheria, nothing will empty a room faster than the first flash of a traceable check. Everyone involved here believed deeply that any check would be scrutinized by the chief accountant of the Internal Revenue Service himself. Money to buy a house was tough enough to earn without having to risk prison by being asked to account for it.

  “You can’t go to civil court without any records,” Rosengart said. “You better go to a rabbinical court.”

  The closest outsiders can compare this procedure to are the Italian mob sit-downs, where one person made important by his murder statistics hears complaints and delivers irrevocable judgments. However, the four purchasers had difficulty finding a rabbi in Williamsburg who would sit in judgment of Eugene Ostreicher. He was one of the few people who could obtain land and build housing for people who were sleeping on floors and in hallways. So what if some things were wrong with some of his houses? That could be fixed. The important thing was that people should have a place to raise families and a place to worship. It takes a great man to build for them. Therefore, Ostreicher was great.

  The house buyers went from one rabbi to the next and finally they turned to Rosengart and said that they would go to his bais din, or rabbinical court. At first he refused, only to succumb to the ceaseless tugging from the four buyers. So there came a morning when they sat in Rosengart’s office and he was behind the desk with the full power given to him by thousands of years of Jewish law.

  “How much did you pay?” he asked the four. He looked at them sternly.

  “One hundred and eighty thousand dollars.”

  “Is that true?” he said to Ostreicher.

  “They gave me thirty-five thousand,” Ostreicher said.

  “He lies!”

  “How could you lie like that? You are in a sacred court.”

  “I’ll pay,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “What they gave me. Four hundred thousand dollars.”

  “He lies again!”

  “Seven hundred twenty thousand,” one of the buyers said.

  “I received six hundred twenty-five thousand,” Ostreicher said.

  “When will he stop deceiving and lying?” another of the buyers said.

  “Which is it?” Rosengart asked sharply.

  “Seven hundred and twenty thousand,” Ostreicher said finally.

  The agreement was reached with both sides seething. They finished at an hour reserved for prayer. Anger was suspended. There were nine, including Ostreicher. A tenth man was needed in order to reach a minyan, the number required for prayer. “You?” they said to Rosengart. He nodded. Why, of course. The long day of distrust, deceit, and denunciations ended in prayer.

  However, when Rosengart finally got back to his office, he put the details of the unconscionably bad construction into a file, where it would remain for six years. Then one day an investigator for the government’s Department of Labor took the file. It would become the start of a clear fact pattern in a case against Ostreicher.

  THE SON, RICHIE OSTREICHER, had spent several years studying the Talmud in a Satmar community in Monroe, New York. Studies in Hebrew schools are at marathon length. His friend Sam Newman, who was there with him, recalls, “We studied fourteen, fifteen hours a day. We got home twice a year. He seemed to like it. I was not too sure. You can see who is going to continue as a scholar. After you come out into the free world, and you still want to study, that shows your desire. Me, I wasn’t so much for it. Richie did study once in while.”

  As the sections of the Talmud are thousands of years old, each section must be scoured and discussed and gone over again and again. Newman says that of course he and Richie studied for interminable hours the rules that no one is allowed to take advantage of an employee, that no employer is allowed to eat until he pays his workers. But this refers to day workers, who put in a hard day and should be paid that night. Workers on a weekly or monthly payroll are different. As for day workers, if a man says he needs the job so desperately that he will work cheap, you shouldn’t take advantage of him. Still, he is so desperate for work that at times you create a job for him, and this puts it into a gray area. It isn’t right to take advantage of him, but the question is, is it the wrong thing to give him this work right away? After all, you’re not God. God is God. The man needs work. But does his need mean you’re supposed to pay him more than he’ll take? On the street, the answer is a distillation of scriptures: Pay the guy enough so that you can have something under your feet when you stand and claim that you’re not robbing him.

  In their lives and times of living in the most diverse center of populat
ion in all the world—a Brooklyn of people driven off the cotton fields of the South by machines, or from the slums of San Juan and Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo and the sparse living of Cholula—the Hasidim had the most complicated feelings. They didn’t like anybody who wasn’t white, don’t worry about that. But they couldn’t do without them, particularly Mexicans, because they were cheap labor and the world has nothing to rival that, nor has it ever. Then, unlike the non-Hasidic Jews and the Irish and Italian and Germans, the Hasidim did not flee from other races. The Hasidim bought land and houses because they were going to remain in Brooklyn. The Lubavitch grand rebbe, Menachem Shneerson, called it a deep moral obligation not to run from blacks. Others, particularly Catholics, didn’t know what he was talking about. They were moving out to Long Island to spend three and four hours a day getting to and from work because they loved the Long Island Expressway so much. The Hasidim regarded themselves as morally superior to these people. They stayed in Brooklyn and called 911 on the blacks and Mexicans at night. In the morning they hired them to work off the books, and for minimum wage—maybe.

  WALKING INTO THE temporal world, Richie Ostreicher went immediately to work in his father’s construction company. He also became active in the Ninetieth Precinct community meetings. If a cop was sick or injured, Richie was a visitor. He became a cop buff with a yarmulke. The police at first thought he was a local rabbi, but then Richie, by behavior and speech, magnified this illusion into his becoming a police chaplain, and a man of the cloth with this badge can do just about anything and at all times.

  Williamsburg is the neighborhood of the Ninetieth Precinct, which is in a gray cement three-story corner building on Union Street. The precinct shares the front of the building with the Fire Department’s Battalion Fifteen. Chief John Dillon, short and stocky, with a crew cut, is in charge. The boss over him is Deputy Fire Chief Charles Blaich, who is a critic of the New York City Buildings Department and of the work they allowed to proceed. Blaich began with a degree in chemistry and a master’s in protection management, and then kept taking construction courses because all fire department promotion exams have many building questions.