The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

by Jimmy Breslin

Caterina went back to the OSHA offices on Varick Street in Manhattan and typed up a report with Ostreicher’s answer to an official question from a government agent.

  If Ostreicher hadn’t been so quick and boisterous to hurl out his denials, Caterina might have helped him. OSHA has only civil penalties, and the staff would have been anxious to push Ostreicher away from dangerous practices. He liked loud lying better. And this became obvious, and started Caterina on investigating the building being done on the block. First, there were witnesses who had seen a collapse. Then there were the Fire Department records. Caterina then began to talk about this lying with James Vanderberg, a thirty-two-year-old agent for the United States Department of Labor. This agency could prosecute criminally. The file on Ostreicher now included the results of all this investigating, along with Fire Department reports of collapses on the scene and of Ostreicher’s involvement with the buildings. Neither memos nor Fire Department reports would go away. They were written and filed in the time of computers, but the paper lasted and the reports retained their clarity and impact about the three collapses in February 1996.

  JOSEPH TRIVISONNO, the buildings superintendent for Brooklyn, was in anguish trying to keep his job against stiff interference on the Lorimer Street buildings. Suddenly, Trivisonno was bewildered by the papers about a building being built at 26 Heyward Street, up the block from the brick condominiums being built by Eugene Ostreicher. The more he looked at the papers, the more his eyes narrowed. He was on crazy street. The plans for 26 Heyward were for a building that was 108 feet deep. That allowed room for the building and for a 35-foot-deep backyard as required by law. Trivisonno knew that the lot was only 100 feet deep. Somewhere the builder had to reach into the air and come up with eight feet of Brooklyn land. The owner of the land behind the offending building said he wanted to keep his eight feet and would fight all the way to the Supreme Court for it.

  At the end of 1996, two businessmen who were of the Puppa sect of Hasidim bought 26 Heyward and wanted to change the footprint of the building, the floor-to-area ratio, to build nine condominiums in the five-story building to house faculty for a yeshiva. Under the zoning laws, if you put even as little as a rabbi’s office in a building, you were allowed to enlarge it. Excavation for number 26, on an empty lot next door to number 18, and the placement of struts between the old and new buildings (which meant the new building was holding up the old one) put cosmetic cracks in the old building. A complaint came in by phone, and Trivisonno had his inspectors stop the job until 18 Heyward was stabilized. No blueprints had been turned in. Another call brought a claim that there was no such religious anchor as a rabbi’s office in their five-story building, but there were condominiums that would go for $350,000 each.

  The records of the United States Department of Education show that a great college was located in the tan two-story building a few doors up at 105 Heyward Street. Supposedly, it was a converted yeshiva grammar school. It became the most ambitious temporal reach of the Skver Hasidic group, who came out of Russian mud to Williamsburg. They also occupy their own town of New Square, in near upstate Rockland County.

  In a bakery on the corner of Heyward, the milk bottles have the labels of New Square Farms, the upstate milk farm of the Skver group. There are about three thousand living in New Square, eleven hundred of them registered voters. All are dedicated to study and the passing of knowledge and wisdom to those who follow. While this is a beautiful way of life, all this studying takes as many as thirteen hours a day, and this leaves no time for a job. Simultaneously, bills must be paid with more than prayer. One day, four of the men of the village sat down and developed a plan that would allow the village to study and still have an income. They announced a university-level school called Toldos Yakov Yosef. The students were not required to attend classes, but regular contact with an assigned mentor was supposedly required. The school was beautiful to run in that it required no start-up fees other than the few dollars for applications for government Pell grants for students. The Pell grants are American government at its most indescribably beautiful. Named after Claiborne Pell, the senator from Rhode Island, they are federal college tuition assistance grants—not loans—awarded to undergraduates and based on income. It gives a student without enough money some help to finish an education. The students receive grants of $1,500 or so, with a maximum of $3,300 a year. The program has some defenses against the stray schemer, but it never envisioned nor threw up breastworks against an organized criminal raid from a place like Heyward Street, Williamsburg. Soon, the new university had 1,544 checks for Pell grants coming in the mail to the school. This made the school more than somewhat profitable….

  Because there was no school.

  While 105 Heyward grammar school was the address, there were no students. There was no faculty. There were no books.

  On streets whose waking hours were dedicated to trimming corners, Eugene Ostreicher looked up from his cinder blocks and bricks a block or so away, and found his shaky buildings produced loud, treacherous candy store money in comparison to 105 Heyward, where they had only to empty the mailbox each day to gain their fortune.

  They collected the Pell grants for the first year of their no-show college. There wasn’t even a letter asking a question. They went on to the second year and it was better yet: they added a few students and received grants for them. After this, year after year it went on, and the school brought in $40 million of government money. All of New Square studied and prayed, and the bills were paid. Four people ran the school. They spent all of their time cashing checks and evading inspections.

  A federal Department of Education group, including agent Brian Hickey, finally moved on Heyward Street, the home of the great university. This time, Hickey came in with a scheduled government inspection, from which there could be neither postponement nor subterfuge. Also, it was scheduled for five days, from the second through the sixth of June, 1992, with a full team of inspectors. The school could not stand the light of a heavy candle.

  The inspectors began with the book lists of the college students. They discovered that books bought with Pell grants were high school books for the eleventh and twelfth grades of the yeshiva schools upstate in New Square.

  The inspectors found that the chief administrators listed on the Pell grant records were: Chancellor Chaim Berger, the “brilliant thirty-two-year-old nationally known educator,” and the registrar, Kalmen Stern.

  Hickey found the chancellor in a room on the first floor. He was in fact a ninety-one-year-old man.

  “Hello,” Berger said.

  “Are you the chancellor?” he was asked.

  “Hello,” the old man said.

  Next Hickey met the registrar, Kalmen Stern. Somehow he got Stern to write something for him. “Write down what you think of your job,” Hickey said. Stern wrote, “He has a good car.” Then he wrote what he thought of America: “A-M-R-I-C-A.”

  The first floor of 105 Heyward had some old men reading religious textbooks. They had been gathered up from the neighborhood and thrown into a sudden university.

  There was a great amount of noise from the second floor, where the student body, preschool and kindergarten kids ages three to six, was running about. They had been dispossessed from their usual first-floor playroom to make room for the university inspection.

  The inspection team asked to speak to six college students. The school could produce only four. Registrar Stern presented a man who said he was a college student.

  “When did you enroll?” Hickey asked.

  “What do you mean by enroll?” the man asked.

  A woman had a transcript that showed two years of philosophy courses.

  An agent asked her, “Do you know what philosophy is?”

  “No.”

  A woman named Polyna was introduced as an English major. She needed a Russian interpreter to speak to one of the inspectors.

  “Student number 21,” the federal report stated, “could not recall when he started at the school, bu
t thought he had attended last year. Student 21 stated that he did not understand most of what went on because he doesn’t know the English language.

  “Student No. 23 stated he did not have time to discuss education. Student 23 did not respond to questions regarding the subjects studied. He asked the reviewers to put the questions in writing and send them to him.”

  When the reviewers were leaving, the educational genius, ninety-one-year-old Chaim Berger, looked up from a nap.

  “Hello.”

  Back in the Manhattan offices, the federal education team filed a simple report: “We are requesting emergency action and termination be taken against Toldos Yakov Yosef.”

  The students and school were an illusion, but the money from government grants was more than somewhat real.

  The New Square educators took down $40 million from the government over ten years. In recorded American crime—groups under five members, no weapons—this receives all-time honorable mention.

  But then it went further. There were four people sent to prison over this. On the day they went in, Skvers were writing letters to get them out. The Skvers were ceaseless and went from one official to the other until, in the year 2000, they wound up with a president’s wife who thought everything she looked at, from trinket to mansion, was hers. Hillary Clinton was running for the Senate. All Hasidic groups voted against her, for good reason: She was a woman. However, at New Square, she willingly walked on the women’s side of the street, and did not shake hands with the men. When meeting the wise man, Rebbe Twersky, she sat with the desk between them. The town of New Square alone voted for her, by 1,200 to nothing. After the election, all she saw was black hats. She then made an appointment at the White House for Rebbe Twersky. The date was for a Friday. The rebbe and his people were unsure of where the White House was. One of them called an editor of a Jewish publication in Brooklyn and asked, “Can the rebbe go to Washington and come back in time for sundown?” At the White House, Twersky and Ms. Clinton, now a senator-elect, sat happily as Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon for the New Square prisoners. That night in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a non-Jew, and therefore one who could answer a phone that day, rushed into a synagogue and told the son of one of the New Square prisoners, “They pardoned your father!”

  IN FEBRUARY 1997, the mayor was up for reelection, and with the first rustle of campaign money sounding in Williamsburg, the expediter for 26 Heyward Street headed out of the computer room and went down the hall into Joseph Trivisonno’s office. Trivisonno remembers the expediter telling him to get a zoning change that would take care of the missing eight feet. Trivisonno said his department did not get zoning changes or grab land out of thin air. Trivisonno says the expediter said to him, “You get approval for us.”

  Trivisonno remembers saying that he could not.

  “We’ll get you.”

  “The next thing was somebody saying I was anti-Semitic,” Trivisonno said.

  Kenny Fisher, a city councilman from an old, well-known Brooklyn political family, suppressed that quickly.

  Afterward Trivisonno felt the first fatigue. “If I had to ask for all this help for nothing, then how am I going to last through something that actually happens?” he said to a friend.

  MAYOR GIULIANI ANNOUNCED a policy of closing X-rated movie houses and bookstores because they hurt children. He ordered seventy-five building inspectors out to do the work. Forty percent of a store had to be legitimate books and videos. The rest of it could be for adults. As the history of censorship could serve as wallpaper for a psychiatric ward, sex shop owners began to stock shelves with biographies of Daniel Boone. Once these hit the required 40 percent, here came all those adult books.

  This brought the former Carmella Lauretano, who is the wife of a building inspector on detached duty in sex shops, to see Trivisonno. As Trivisonno recalls it, she said to him, “Make my husband get off that job. My husband is a building inspector. You have him in whorehouses. My husband is a family man. You got to stop this.”

  FIRE CHIEF BLAICH called a meeting of technical people from the Buildings Department, engineers and experts in construction. They stood on the street in front of the Lorimer Street buildings, and each time Blaich pointed out a dangerous flaw, they all concurred. “Ostreicher should be stopped from doing any building,” Blaich said. “We’ll put it in writing. We’ll all sign it and that should put it over.” Suddenly the group with him began to shrink. “You better do that yourself,” one of them said. Blaich said, “Why only me?” The guy said, “Because you’re civil service.”

  Blaich wrote the letter and sent it in.

  The answer came on August 26, 1998, when the first of eleven certificates of occupancy was signed by Joseph Trivisonno and issued to the owner of the Lorimer Street buildings. A certificate of occupancy means you can move into, rent, or sell the building, which has been certified as legal by the City of New York.

  Trivisonno said that the building defects had been cured and that in all other cases such as this the building was allowed to be completed and certificates issued.

  Blaich shrugged. He had gone further than anybody had before. He had made charges on paper and signed it. The cave-in this time was Trivisonno. Of course it wasn’t enough. Nothing helped Trivisonno, either. In City Hall, they still complained that Trivisonno was obstructing commerce in Brooklyn. Commissioner Gaston Silva wanted him to take a leave. “Teitelbaum is the one who wants to get you,” Silva said, “but we hear he may be going. He’ll head Giuliani’s campaign when he runs for the Senate. When he goes, you can come right back.”

  Next, Silva asked about the problem with 26 Heyward Street. Trivisonno said the owner had claimed faculty housing that in fact wouldn’t be there, and that there was an eight-foot overlap problem. Silva hung up. Trivisonno now heard from a secretary: “They want you out.” Trivisonno called the commissioner and asked who wanted him out. Trivisonno resigned in March. He was replaced by Tarek Zeid, whose wife is an expediter. Zeid departed and soon, Commissioner Silva was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  That day, Eduardo got home by 4:30 and called Silvia, and this time he got her before she left for work. She had spent most of the hours after finishing her morning job at the mall on the other side of Highway 6. She had bought pants and blouses for her sisters back home and Winnie the Pooh toys for her nieces. Her sister Emilia was with her now; she had been stopped twice at the border and frightened several times in the desert, but there was no thought of giving up. Silvia got her jobs at both the barbecue restaurant and the Olive Garden. Between them they were sending home $2,500 a month. They now had a one-bedroom apartment, near where Silvia had first lived. That one had been filled with enough relatives to form the trunk of a family tree.

  When Eduardo called Silvia this time, he talked about his job. “He told me he had to climb up on the building,” Silvia remembers. “He told me that the work was very hard. Then he said again that he had to climb up on the building. He said the sun was cruel. He had to climb up. He said he didn’t like that. It seemed shaky to him. I knew he had never been that high up. I asked him if it was dangerous, and he said it was. I didn’t know what else to say. He was there. I was here. What could we do?”

  For Eduardo the days had changed only because he was not staying home in the room so much. Now he came to the room in Brighton Beach right after work, took a shower, and went out. He was the youngest of the group by five years, and the age difference with the roommates had become wearing. On Friday night, the others started out at the round table in the kitchen, and Alejandro drank one beer with great gulps, then another and a third, after which he reached for the bottle of tequila. The rest tried to keep up with him. Originally when they did this, Eduardo would sit on the kitchen floor and make fun of them, or he’d go into their room and fall asleep. But over the months he saw that drinking was a morose celebration and that conversation consisted of short bursts of despair. When they needed more alcohol, somebody went down to the store on Neptune
Avenue. Later, Eduardo noticed that one of them would leave and wouldn’t return for some time, after which a couple of others would leave. After a few months, he figured out they were going with prostitutes in doorways and cars. Once, in one long drunk that went on for a day and a half, Alejandro drank thirty bottles of Corona beer and a bottle of tequila. There were no classic drinking stories told of this episode. Only the number of bottles was cited. Alejandro had a fierce hangover, but neither he nor the others could speak about it with any humor. One sad night of drink in the kitchen became another the next week, and the weeks became months and the months would become years.

  Not only did late-night homesickness torture them, but the loneliness became more searing in the sunlight. They sat in the room and told themselves—and then their wives and children on the phone—that they would be home soon. They did not learn English because they were sure of leaving for home forever. They drank at sunrise on weekends and spoke only in Spanish, thus robbing themselves of any chance for better work.

  Many times, Eduardo went to watch television in his friend Lucino’s room two flights over Kings Highway, a subway stop up from Brighton. Lucino lived with his cousin Julisa and her husband and two children. He was a short, stocky, handsome thirty-two-year-old with a prominent nose. Working in Mexico City as an accountant, he saw there was no future and left. He came unannounced to Julisa’s apartment. Why wouldn’t he? He was a relative. After a couple of days, it was plain. Why would he ever leave? He lived there.

  Following this, one night Lucino’s brother Pedro called. “I’m here,” he said.

  “Where?” Julisa said.

  “At the airport. I’m coming over.”

  Pedro came in, sat down, weary from travel, and went to sleep. Next, a cousin, José, called from the airport. He, too, was coming over. He, too, could not be moved if you put dynamite under his feet. Soon another of Lucino’s brothers called from the airport. Julisa couldn’t remember his name, but knew he could eat. Lucino mentioned vaguely that Aunt Matilda might be coming in from Mexico. Julisa thought that this would be sometime in the distant future, and in the meantime Aunt Matilda could get arrested at the border. Two nights later, the phone rang. “I’m here!” Aunt Matilda cried.