Trap (9781476793177) (2 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you fucking burned my mom's apartment while I was in jail!”

“That's not true. She was smoking in bed and her cigarette started a fire.”

The young man's face contorted in rage. “More lies! I'm not listening to any more lies. So I'm going to give you a choice, Karp, which kid gets it first?”

“Please, as a father I'm asking you not to do this . . .”

“Dad?” Giancarlo said.

“It's okay. It's going to be okay.”

“See, you'll even lie to your kids,” the young man said. “It's not going to be okay. But I am going to give you a choice, Karp, which one do I shoot first?”

“Me, shoot me.” The old woman's voice surprised them all. Goldie Sobelman was standing unsteadily on her feet, her hands bound at the wrist in front of her. “I'm old. Shoot me if you must kill someone for your mother.”

The young man pointed the gun at her.

“No, me,” Giancarlo said. “I'm not afraid of you, you Nazi son of a bitch.”

The young man's eyes blazed with rage as he swung the gun back toward Giancarlo. “Well, you should be,” he snarled.

“Hey, asshole!” Zak yelled.

“WHAT?” the young man shouted back.

“Catch.”

Brooklyn, weeks earlier

T
HE LARGE MAN IN THE
Brooks Brothers suit sitting in the back of the bar on Jay Street in Brooklyn nudged the nicely dressed younger man next to him. “There's the bitch now.” He then rose from his seat and lifted his hand as the slightly stooped, elderly, gray-haired woman bundled against the cold in a long wool coat walked in the door.

She spotted him and grimaced as if she'd just smelled something rotten before she noticed the young man. A look of pain and sorrow crossed her face, but when he couldn't look her in the eyes, she took a deep breath and let it out with the shake of her head. Her mouth was set in a firm, hard line as she navigated through the other patrons to their table.

When she arrived, the older of the two men stuck out his hand, but she ignored it and turned toward his younger companion. “I can't say I approve of the company you keep these days, Micah, but it is nice to see you,” she said as she sat down.

“It's good to see you, too, Rose,” Micah Gallo replied quietly.

A waitress strolled over and Rose Lubinsky asked for a glass of water. Shrugging, the older man tapped the rim of his highball glass to indicate that he wanted another Old Forester bourbon. Pricey stuff, but the president of the largest teachers union in New York State, with his quarter-of-a-million-dollar salary and under-the-table perks, could afford it.

Despite his expensive tastes in clothes, cars, women, and bourbon, Thomas “Tommy” Monroe came from the old Irish-Italian neighborhood of Bensonhurst, the son of a schoolteacher mom and a truck-driving father. A big guy, he'd played football for a second-tier college team until he got kicked off the squad for fighting with his teammates and coaches, and then walking out on an “anger management” class he'd been ordered to attend if he wanted to stay. Following an “incident” in which he'd been accused of raping a coed at a fraternity party, he'd then been invited to leave the college altogether and had to finish his degree and get his teacher's certificate at a small liberal arts college in New Jersey that didn't care about his character as long as he paid his tuition.

After graduation, he took a job as a PE teacher and wrestling coach at Public School 238 in Brooklyn but found his true calling working for the Greater New York Teachers Federation. Like all other public school teachers, he'd had to sign up with the union when he first got hired—there was no choice in the matter and dues were automatically taken out of his paycheck. But as the son of a teamster and a proud member of the teachers union, he'd been fine with it and soon found out that his penchant for cracking heads and kicking asses on behalf of the GNYTF was useful to the hierarchy. He could turn on the macho charm when necessary, but it was his ruthlessness and street smarts that helped him climb the union power ladder and eventually got him elected president.

That had been twenty years ago and now in his early sixties, the former athlete had gone to seed. His ruddy Irish face and red nose belied his affection for booze and the good life, as did the beer belly that hung over the top of his expensive, tailored pants. And he'd long since lost his sense of duty to union members, except as pawns to manipulate in order to stay in power and fund his lifestyle.

“Whatever works” was his motto when dealing with opponents, both those inside the union—including reform-minded individuals—and those on the outside. One of the most tenacious of the latter, and the reason for this meeting with Rose Lubinsky, were the proponents of charter schools. The charter school movement in New York got its start in 1998, and after being held in check—mainly due to union lobbying—for ten years, had been expanding ever since thanks in large part to Lubinsky, the president of the New York Charter Schools Association and the heart and soul of the movement. Limited to a hundred schools in that first decade, there were four times that number now and a serious threat to the union and thus to Monroe.

The reasons were simple. First of all, the charter schools, although public and taxpayer-funded, were nonunion. This diluted the power of the traditional large teachers unions like the GNYTF to control education in New York State. And every one of those nonunion teachers represented a loss in union dues. Fewer bucks meant losing political clout by curtailing lobbying, or outright buying of, politicians and the leaders of the union-funded, anti-charter parent groups. It also meant less money for the union president's salary and bonuses, as well as the hidden slush fund available for his “expenses.”

For the first time in years, Monroe felt his position as union president was being threatened by increasingly unhappy members. Every student sitting in a charter schoolroom instead of the union-dominated public school rolls meant less money from the state and federal governments which based their financial support on enrollment. Losing funding affected raises and bonuses for union teachers, too. However, the members' dissatisfaction was as much about working conditions as it was money. Public school classes were overcrowded, filled with indifferent and even hostile students, and lacked any support from most of the parents.

Charter schools were a different story with a combination of better or equal pay, safer working conditions, students who wanted to learn, and administrations that by and large saw themselves as partners with their faculty. The best teachers, as well as the more dedicated students, were leaving the public schools as fast as they could find an opening with a charter school. Only the limited number of positions available kept the desertions from becoming an all-out stampede.

Meanwhile, union members were openly questioning if Monroe was losing his grip. Meetings were becoming increasingly contentious, and his spies reported teachers grumbling about his ostentatious lifestyle; his reform-minded union opponents were gaining ground.

Since the beginning, Monroe had fought the charter school movement tooth and nail. Fear had been a major tactic, telling teachers that charter schools were a threat to the union, and without the union to protect them, all the benefits like pensions, health coverage, and wages they'd won over the years would be lost. Using a public relations firm, and aided by a compliant media, he mislabeled charter schools “elitist,” especially in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, claiming that they were a conservative white man's conspiracy to remove the best and brightest from the “ 'hood” and leave everyone else to suffer. It didn't matter to his public relations spiel that charter school enrollment was predominantly from minority neighborhoods. “Divide and conquer” was the purpose behind “racist” charter schools, he claimed, and that played well with his core constituency.

If words and fear didn't work, he fell back on payoffs and intimidation, including physical attacks and character assassination. A few years earlier, he'd employed such against one particularly difficult opponent, the man now sitting next to him, Micah Gallo, at the time a young, energetic Hispanic who had started the first charter school in Brooklyn for low-income, disadvantaged children.

Gallo had grown up in that neighborhood, had even been the leader of a gang. But he survived the public schools and after graduating from a teachers college had quickly signed on with Lubinsky and the charter school association, which helped him launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Charter School. The school had been a resounding success. Although its teachers were initially paid less than union teachers in the public schools, their working conditions were far superior, even though they'd had to share space with a public school, and soon the students' test scores outstripped their public school counterparts by large margins.

Monroe felt the tide turning against him and the union when
The New York Times
published a big feature story on Gallo and his school, comparing it favorably to the public schools in the five boroughs. When the story came out, and then was picked up by local television stations, Monroe took a lot of heat from union teachers and parents. It had made them look bad, they said, and they wanted to know why he'd been unable to counter. This time they weren't so accepting of his promises to quash the charter school movement, and his attempts to get his pals in the media to back him met with shrugs and noncommittal responses.

Monroe decided that it was time to eliminate the competition and started by trying to buy Gallo. He offered him the position of assistant superintendent of the Greater New York school system at a salary many times what he made at the charter school with broad hints of there being more where that came from. The young man turned him down and threatened to go to the press if he tried to bribe him again.

So he reverted to his more base nature. He arranged for die-hard union supporters to try to intimidate Gallo by lurking outside the school and following him home. They punctured his tires and scratched the paint on his car. When that didn't work, a “specialist” was called in; in the dead of night, Gallo's car was firebombed.

Instead of chasing Gallo off, however, the bombing backfired. Charter school parents started escorting him to and from work and watched his neighborhood. An even more in-depth article appeared in a weekly alternative newspaper,
The West Village Spectator
, written by investigative journalist Ariadne Stupenagel. The article and citizen complaints put the pressure on the police to step up patrols and get serious about trying to catch his antagonists. Even Monroe's ties to the police union reps did him no good; in fact, he was warned that if something bad happened to Gallo all bets were off.

Gallo weathered the storm, though not without damage. Monroe's spies reported that he didn't appear to be sleeping well and dark circles had appeared below his eyes. “He seems tense, like another good shove and he might break,” one said. But he refused to give in, and Monroe looked for the proverbial last straw. Alas, Olivia Stone, his longtime partner in crime, provided it.

Stone, the former attorney for the teachers union, had high aspirations. With the financial and “get the vote out” backing of the union, Stone had campaigned for and been elected district attorney of Kings County, which encompassed all of the two million–plus residents of Brooklyn. She was unqualified for the job, having spent a few years in the Legal Aid Society Office before following the money to the teachers union. However, the incumbent district attorney's campaign had been torpedoed by scandal—an alleged affair with a stripper from the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn—two weeks before the election. Of course, Monroe's political operatives created and disseminated the faux rumored affair. By the time the incumbent had dispelled the false allegations, the smear tactic had worked; he was out of office and Stone was in.

It was real handy to have the DA of Kings County to help deal with problems, such as Micah Gallo. They'd concocted a plan to finish the job that Monroe had started. When one of Monroe's spies told him that Gallo sometimes took his school laptop computer home with him, they knew they had what they needed.

Gallo's school was actually located in a portion of one of Brooklyn's shuttered public high schools. As charter schools were still tax-supported and the equipment inside the schools was owned by the public, technically, taking the laptop to his residence—even if for work purposes—was illegally removing school property.

A cooperative police detective took an anonymous complaint from a “concerned source” that school equipment had been disappearing and that Gallo was suspected of selling it off and lining his own pockets with the proceeds. Stone secured a search warrant from a union-supported judge and the police raided Gallo's home where not only was the “stolen school property” laptop located but also several other pieces of equipment.

Of course, it was all a big setup. Teachers and administrators routinely took work-related material and equipment home. The additional “public school equipment” was planted. Gallo was arrested.

This time Monroe's lackeys in the press were only too happy to jump all over the story. The former gangbanger-turned-heroic-educator's fall from grace was just too good a scandal. A little bird had even tipped off a photographer for the
New York Post
so that there was a perp photo on page three of Gallo being led from his home in handcuffs.

Monroe at first declined to comment on “the unfortunate situation.” But when pressed for a quote, he “reluctantly” acknowledged that “the lack of oversight and supervision” at charter schools was one of the “major drawbacks. They sort of operate under their own rules even with taxpayer money.”