American Gangster (11 page)

“Rangel didn't even vote for his own bill!” complained an eye-rolling Dick Cheney to Fox News' Sean Hannity. (Rangel says he voted nay to protest Republican procedural finagling.)

Rangel, who has that raised-bushy-eyebrow
who me?
thing down pat, purports to be “flabbergasted by the fuss” caused by his draft statements. “I've been talking about this for years and no one paid attention. I guess that's the power of the majority.”

Gee, you think?

A world-class press hound, Rangel was soon wall-to-wall on the tube. “I want to push the debate, make them think about what exactly war means,” says Rangel, with the assurance of a man whose position on the issue has been impeccable for the past fifty-six years, ever since November 30, 1950, which was when he found himself, along with forty or so other members of the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion of the Second Infantry Division, hunkered down in a foxhole near the Yalu River.

“We had these ten thousand crazy-ass Chinese coming down on us,” recalls Rangel. “All I could hear was bugles, screams, and gunfire. Dead, bloated bodies were everywhere. Guys' toes were falling off from frostbite. I thought we were deader than Kelsey's nuts. The Chinese dropped leaflets saying they were colored people like us, and when we got back to the States we weren't going to be allowed to swim in pools in Miami Beach and how could that be worth fighting for?

“In a situation like that, you don't think about saving the world from communism, you think about surviving,” says Rangel, who despite shrapnel wounds managed to lead several soldiers to safety, for which he got the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, both of which now sit on a shelf in his
125th Street office. “People who haven't been in war don't understand what a difference a wrong step here, a bad decision there makes…. That's the question in Iraq. How long can you wait? By tomorrow it's gonna be too late for someone. It is a matter of time … time running out.”

It makes sense that time would be on the mind of someone past his seventy-sixth birthday, even a workaholic (sixteen tightly scheduled hours per day is routine) who looks fifteen years younger and plans to keep going forever. Rangel gives you his happy-warrior line about how he's “never had a bad day” since getting out of that foxhole, but he admits to feeling “the claustrophobia” of time. He says the chairmanship “couldn't have come any later for me.”

Fact is, if the Democrats hadn't won this time, Rangel would have retired. It would have solved a lot of problems; his wife, Alma, had been after him to stop for years. Mostly, though, “I couldn't take it anymore, how the Republicans were running things. Someone like Tom DeLay has no interest in legislating. He just wants to push through policy. This wasn't the Congress I'd grown up in. The House of Representatives was being destroyed right in front of me. Sending people to prison camp without trial, wiretapping without warrant. This was another kind of America. I didn't want to be part of it.”

Word that Rangel might quit sent a chill through Harlem. It isn't that he doesn't have his rivals. The Reverend Calvin Butts, who has Adam Powell's old job at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, has sniped at Rangel for years, once calling him “a timid politician” willing to “settle for crumbs.” But no one wanted to see all that seniority (some might say pork) go down the tubes. Local papers ran pleading headlines:
BROTHER CONGRESSMAN
!
DON
'
T GO
!

A thoroughgoing secularist, rare among old-school black politicians in not bearing the honorific “Reverend” (his Catholicism once had Harlem Baptist ministers debating whether he should even be allowed to speak from the pulpit), Rangel has greeted the Democratic victory as tantamount to being born again. “For me, it's a reprieve. My grandfather told me about seeing people getting lynched, how it haunted him, thinking what he could have done about it. I didn't want to have my grandchildren ask, ‘What
did you do when the Constitution got ripped up?' and have to answer, ‘I quit.'”

So there he is, getting called Mr. Chairman, living what he calls “my honeymoon,” which figures to go on through the first week of the 110th Congress. That's when, Rangel says, “The clock will start ticking again. We got two years to turn things around.” It is, as Rangel says, “a short fuse.”

Once it seemed as if Charlie Rangel had all the time in the world. “Growing up in Harlem, I didn't think much about the future. My father left when I was six. I was just drifting around.” Indeed, it isn't hard to find Harlem codgers willing to boast, “Charlie Rangel?
Shit
. I used to take his lunch money.” The army changed that. “When I came out of the service in 1952,” Rangel says, “I had so much self-esteem.”

Back home, however, was not all that different. “I had a hundred jobs. I worked in a drugstore. The Adler Shoe Store. Sold vacuum cleaners.” He also worked down in the garment center, where he had the epiphany that set him on his life path. “I was unloading a truck, and these boxes fell out, spread all over the street. This cop came over and said, ‘You better clean that up, boy.' I started picking up the boxes, and I'm thinking,
I'm pretty sick of this crap
. I thought I'd reenlist, go back into the army. Then I thought to myself,
‘No
. I'm Sergeant Charles Fucking Rangel.
Who are these people to treat me like this?'”

Rangel went back to high school, at age twenty-three. He took a job-aptitude test that indicated he'd make a swell mortician, a classic race-based track for black men. Rangel's response was “Screw that.” He used the GI Bill to pay for school, getting his degree at NYU in three years, then enrolled at St. John's law school. Becoming a lawyer seemed logical.

“The most important person in my life was my grandfather,” Rangel relates. “He was an elevator operator at the court buildings downtown. He wore a neat uniform and was always talking to men in slick suits. I got the idea that being a lawyer or a judge was the most magnificent thing a human could do. It was funny, though, when I told my grandfather I was going to be a lawyer; I thought he'd never stop laughing.”

He put himself through school as a desk clerk on the night shift at the Hotel Theresa, sometime home to Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, and Moms Mabley. Moms defended Rangel when he was caught reading his law books on the job. “Let the boy study,” the old chitlin-circuit comic snorted. Rangel was at the Theresa when Fidel Castro came to the U.N. after the Cuban revolution. “They said he got thrown out for plucking chickens in his room, but I never heard about that,” says Rangel, a longtime opponent of the U.S. embargo of the island. Once, meeting with Castro, Rangel said the United States might see things differently if he held “free and fair elections.” Castro said he did have “free and fair elections.”

“But you get all the votes,” Rangel said. Castro replied, “Don't
you
?”

Rangel started his career as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District. Later came a term in the State Assembly, which set him up to run against Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in what remains the most pivotal election ever held in Harlem.

“I knew Charlie could beat Adam; all he had to do was listen to me,” says former Manhattan borough president and Ur-Harlem businessman Percy Sutton, who along with Basil Paterson and David Dinkins and Rangel (who calls Sutton “my mentor”) formed the so-called Gang of Four, young-Turk Harlem politicians chafing under Powell's increasingly erratic suzerainty.

“In the beginning I called him Pretty Boy Rangel, to denigrate him, because he was one of those handsome types, hair pushed down and that mustache. But he had a way about him, with that great humor, an ability to influence people,” recalls Sutton, who, like Rangel, lives at the Lenox Terrace apartments, Harlem's revered power address. (As a young pol, Rangel was summoned to the Terrace apartment of the aging Bumpy Johnson. Harlem's most famous gangster wanted to look at the new guy in town. “He said I looked okay and I left, fast,” Rangel says.)

“Adam was a great man, but he didn't understand the new Harlem,” Sutton continues. “He went down to Wyatt Tee Walker's church on 116th Street and condemned Martin Luther King Jr. That's when I knew he was slipping, ego getting the best of him. We told Charlie to go down to Selma
to march. When he came back, we said here's the man who wears the orange vest of courage, which is what the marchers wore…. Adam thought it was all in the bag. How could anyone beat him?”

Dead since 1972, Powell still casts a shadow. Rangel's office is in the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building. In a 1994 primary, Adam Clayton Powell IV, running almost exclusively on his father's name, held Rangel to a spindly 58 percent. Not that you'll ever hear Charlie Rangel utter a bad word about Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He says, “I keep the faith, always, baby.”

Ask Rangel how come it seems like every black politician in New York is another politician's son or daughter, and he cackles. “I call that the ‘no child left behind' school of politics…. My mother was a seamstress, there was no family business to go into.” So he rolls on, secure in his mottled skin, the self-made wise old head, dean of the delegation. “Talking to Charlie is like getting the lottery numbers early, because if history repeats itself, who's seen more history than him?” says state assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., one of those politicians' sons.

Retirement talk aside, Rangel never gets tired of being the congressman from Harlem. “I've always lived in Harlem. Never wanted to go anywhere else.” The most cosmopolitan of neighborhood guys (he can be seen cruising down St. Nicholas Avenue at the wheel of his own car, sans a single bling-encrusted bodyguard), Rangel says he's never wanted any other office. Standing in front of the Capitol Building, he says, “Couldn't be a senator—going all around the state, talking to farmers, taking pictures with pigs and cows? Forget that.” Likewise, he's never been tempted to be mayor. “Staten Island? No.”

All this raises the question, if Rangel really is Harlem, and vice versa, what's he really done for the uptown ville in his long tenure? The answer to this is a matter of perception. During the dope plagues of the seventies and eighties, Rangel was on the front lines of the
farkakta
war on drugs, chairman of the congressional committee on narcotic abuse. He visited South American countries, made tough-love speeches, set up programs. Yet 125th Street was still overrun by crack. Despite much legislation aimed at job creation, unemployment in his district remained among the
highest in the country. After years of talking about upgrading neighborhood schools, now he says he's “all but given up on public education. I see no relationship between what our kids get in school and the ability to make a life for themselves.”

Detractors—hard to find these days—say Rangel's legislative activism is really “a cover,” since no one ever solves massive sociological problems like drug use and unemployment. “It's a failure-proof, no-blame situation for him,” says one close observer. “He can always say, ‘Look, I'm only one guy. What do you expect?'” Others disagree. “In Harlem, you're always going to have your cynics—people who say he's done nothing, he's only in it for himself. But that's wrong,” says Kenny Knuckles, head of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, part of the $500 million infusion of public and private capital that has changed the face of Harlem in the past few years. “Charlie Rangel wrote the empowerment legislation. He made it happen,” says Knuckles.

Argue all you want whether a new condo development on every block, Home Depot, and latter-day white hipsters getting off the A train at 145th rank with Countee Cullen and Minton's Playhouse when it comes to a Harlem Renaissance. Gentrification is a citywide conundrum. Why should Harlem be any different? There's some irony that Rangel, a link to an earlier, more flamboyant uptown, will be remembered as a prime mover of this shinier, corporate version. It is a legacy that will no doubt preclude the rise of another Charlie Rangel, the new Harlem figuring to be full of competing power interests, not the sort of place that elects the same guy for thirty-six years.

Rangel says, “Housing prices are a problem. But its better than boarded-up buildings. Everything changes. Harlem will stay Harlem.”

Rangel's ardor for his uptown vote bank was on display at a recent holiday turkey giveaway held by the Martin Luther King Jr. Democratic Club. In the interests of decorum, you had to sign up in advance. There was to be no walk-up largesse. Told this, a grizzled man in a Florida Marlins baseball cap and using a golf putter as a cane said, “I can't have no turkey?” Since he'd lived in Harlem all his life and always voted Democratic, he felt entitled. Hearing Rangel would be there, the man scoffed.

“Oh, Mr. Draft,” he said. “That's the stupidest fucking thing that ever came out of that man's mouth.” The guy said being in the military was the worst experience of his life and anyone who advocated “sticking a gun in a young man's hand” was “sick in the head.” He'd tell Rangel exactly that, too, straight to his face.

When the congressman arrived, the man engaged him in animated conversation. Later, standing behind a table piled high with bags of Arnold herb stuffing, Rangel said there was a man outside who'd signed up for a turkey but his application was unfortunately lost. The man had a sick mother to boot. The guy in the Marlins cap came in, got his turkey. Clutching cans of cranberry sauce, he turned to say it was “his valuable military service” that earned him his holiday dinner. In the army, he said, “they teach you to speak up for yourself.” Informed of all this, Rangel could only smile and shake his head.

Today, in the final throes, so to speak, of the 109th Congress, it is moving day at Rayburn, the House office building. Hallways are lined with desks and chairs. “Losers' furniture,” says a mover, pushing a “Republican watercooler” on a dolly. Rumpled features pushed forward like the hood ornament of an old DeSoto, Rangel trundles through the electoral detritus without comment. He sees no reason to rub it in.