American Gangster (12 page)

Not that Rangel didn't allow himself “a period of gloating.” This largely centered on his plan to “repossess” H208, an office traditionally used by the Ways and Means Committee but loaned out by the Republican majority to Dick Cheney. Eschewing sending an exterminator to give the place a quick spray, Rangel says he decided to “be gentle as I restore the dignity of that office…. But still: When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

Rangel says he's tired of Democrats standing around with goony looks on their faces, “pinching themselves” to make sure the Wicked Witch is really dead. The other day, when his colleagues from the Congressional Black Caucus, the group he helped found, cheered his ascension to chairman, he was heard to say, “Knock it off already.”

“The election's over. We won,” he says. “Let's do business.”

In 1975, when Rangel switched from the Judiciary Committee to Ways and Means, Charles Diggs, a thirteen-term black congressman from Detroit, said he was nuts. “He said no one ever leaves Ways and Means, that I'd be a freshman for thirty years.” After just a few years, however, through some unexpected attrition—including longtime chairman Wilbur Mills's being caught in the midst of an affair with stripper Fanne Foxe—Rangel found himself the committee's third-ranking Democrat.

“Only Sam Gibbons and Jake Pickle were ahead of me,” Rangel recounts. He didn't become the ranking Democrat until 1996, after Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. It has been a decade of fronting an increasingly marginalized minority.

The past six years, sitting beside Republican chairman Bill Thomas, have been particularly vexing. Hearing that Thomas had once been named the House's “meanest” and “second brainiest” man in a poll of congressional aides, Rangel says, “Right on both … All those years, he never once asked me for a vote. He did everything he could to stifle debate and the democratic process in general.” Plus, Rangel says, “the man has no personality. None.”

The animosity came to a head most infamously in July 2003, when, as Rangel puts it, “Thomas called the cops on me.”

As Rangel tells it: “Thomas came in with a revision of this giant pension bill. A big thick thing. He says we're going to vote on it. I said we haven't even read it, how can we vote? He said too bad…. I told my guys, that's it. We went into the library, said we weren't coming out until we were done reading. Thomas went bananas. He said if we didn't get out of the library he'd call the Capitol Police, which he did. The sergeant at arms knocked on the door and said, ‘I'm sorry, but it seems as if the chairman has called the police.' He says you're trespassing. We looked at him like you must be kidding.”

Days later, citing his “poor judgment,” Thomas tearfully apologized on the House floor. “I felt bad for him,” Rangel says. “I didn't think he was going to cry.”

It was a lot of heavy water under the bridge, Rangel says as he passes through the Capitol Hill tunnels to 1100 Longworth, the Ways and Means
hearing room. It's a trek Rangel has made thousands of times over the years. But this one is different. This is the last hearing of the 109th Congress, the final time Rangel would sit in the smaller leather chair directly to the left of Thomas's big one.

“Hey, Charlie, just don't let the door hit him on the way out,” says a woman in the elevator. The fact that she's a Republican bears out Rangel's contention that many in Congress, conservatives included, are pleased autocrats like DeLay are gone, that people are sick of thinking of the opposing party as mortal enemies.

“You'll see,” Rangel says, turning to the woman. “I'll be nicer than you'd think.”

As far as Rangel's concerned, the restoration of civility is part of his job as chairman. “Most of the younger people in Congress have never experienced working in a bipartisan way,” he says. Just the night before, he attended a party for Nancy Johnson, one of the five Ways and Means Republicans who lost in the election. Clearly touched, Johnson said, “One of the worst things about losing is not getting the chance to work with you.”

Mr. Congeniality stuff aside, the Hill is abuzz as to what Rangel will do as chairman. Far more of a policy wonk than most suspect, often burning the midnight oil studying arcane trade packages, Rangel can be expected to fight off any dead-ender Republican action on Social Security privatization. He will also push for a repeal of Bush's tax cuts. Asked if he thought any of the cuts deserved to be renewed, Rangel said, “I can't think of one.” This doesn't mean the business community sees no silver lining in Rangel's rise. A recent story in the neo-con
Weekly Standard
, “Harlem Globetrotter,” detailed Rangel's fondness for free trade, making the case for him as a “pragmatist,” a “deal-maker,” and potential closet globalizer.

What being chairman will do to Charlie Rangel is something else again. People talk about how he'd better watch his back, that Cheney and henchmen like Alberto Gonzalez are likely doing a fine-tooth job to see what dirt they can find on him. “Let them look,” Rangel says. In 1999, New York State attorney general Dennis Vacco charged Rangel and old pal
Percy Sutton with financial malfeasance and mismanagement of the Apollo Theatre. Vacco's successor, Eliot Spitzer, exonerated Rangel, with the proviso that he remove himself from the board of the Harlem landmark. This aside, few accuse Rangel of being in it for the money. Rangel's more concerned about “my routine.” Known to run his office like a fifties City Council member, Rangel says he'll be a little less hands-on. “Someone else will have to return all these calls.”

Job one is filling the committee with people he likes, that is, as many New Yorkers as possible. “I'll try this on an equity basis,” he tells some power trader on the phone. “If not, I'll make it happen politically.” In other words, down in the trenches. Whatever, it works. Rangel got Queens County leader Joe Crowley on the committee, the guy he wanted all along.

A chairman has to multitask, Rangel explains. To wit: He begins telling a story about how he was working in his office one night when Jorge Mas Canosa, leader of the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, showed up unannounced. Mas Canosa told Rangel it might be healthier if he gave up his opposition to the Cuban embargo. “What are you implying?” Rangel wanted to know.

Rangel is interrupted in mid-story. Costa Rican president Óscar Arias Sánchez has arrived with a large entourage.

“Mr. President!” Rangel shouts, greeting Arias and his ministers. A far-reaching discussion of U.S.–Costa Rican economic relations ensues, including much talk about the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which Rangel voted against. A half hour later, after calling Rangel “one of the most powerful people on the globe,” Arias leaves. He's barely out the door when Rangel picks up the Mas Canosa story exactly where he stopped.

However it goes on Ways and Means, depend on Rangel to be in charge. Case in point was a recent Capitol Hill breakfast for the New York congressional delegation with then governor-elect Eliot Spitzer. Chuck Schumer was extolling Rangel as “a straight shooter,” saying how proud everyone was that “Charlie had finally reached the promised land,” when Rangel, impatient to start the meeting, let forth with an eardrum-rattling whistle. “Now,” he shouted, in Sergeant Rangel mode.

“He also can whistle really loud,” Schumer added, skulking off to his seat.

Rangel's last hearing in the minority—on Medicare payments for “end-stage renal disease”—goes off without incident. Acknowledging that it's outgoing chairman Thomas's birthday that very day, Rangel says he wants the record to show that “regardless of what many may think,” he has “never had an unpleasant conversation with Bill Thomas,
outside this room
.”

Later, Rangel is still in the now-empty 1100 Longworth. It is a large, impressive room hung with portraits of former Ways and Means chairmen. Some, like Wilbur Mills (1957–1974) and Dan Rostenkowski (1981–1994), served a long time, then went down in flames. Others like Harold Knutson, Republican of Minnesota (1948–1949), are largely forgotten. James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, and William McKinley became president. Now the portrait of Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, will join them.

“Never had my portrait painted before,” Rangel croaks. His likeness will, of course, be the first of a black man to adorn the stately walls of 1100 Longworth. Noting that a number of other Americans of color, old colleague John Conyers and Brooklyn's Nydia Velasquez among them, would be chairing committees in the 110th Congress, Rangel says he is “honored that the descendants of slaves might have their chance to restore the Constitution in this great nation of ours during this time of need.”

To sit in the big chair at the front of 1100 Longworth, where he's spent so much of the past three decades, seems a fitting end to Rangel's particular American journey. Looking around, he says, “I've always thought this was a beautiful room.”

A saga of the artist in a landscape of brutal change. What will a man do to save a life's work? From
New York
magazine, 1998
.

Mark Zero, street video artist and filmmaker, was asleep at his girlfriend's house in Williamsburg two Saturdays ago when the call came from Rockets Redglare, noted downtown personage. Rockets said something “really bad” was happening at 172 Stanton Street, the century-old Lower East Side tenement where Mark Zero has resided for the better part of the past decade. The place was swarming with cops. Fire engines were everywhere. They were evacuating the building.

This didn't seem particularly strange to Mark Zero—
nom de art
of Mark Friedlander. Something was always wrong at 172 Stanton Street. The place was a pit. Hot water was intermittent, the pipes leaked nonstop. In winter torrents of cold air flew through rotting window frames, in summer it was a sweatbox. But when you live the Art Life, especially on the outskirt occupied by Mark Zero, a rough edge or two is to be expected. Indeed, Mark Zero, thirty-five, whose father expected him to be a doctor when he was growing up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, felt he'd be happy enough to live the rest of his days in the fourth-floor walk-up at the corner of Stanton and Clinton.

“It was home, if you can understand that,” he said.

Before Mark Zero arrived that Saturday night, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had already been to 172 Stanton Street. Standing in the snow, Rudy assured everyone not to worry, things were well in hand, public safety issues were being addressed. This did not appear to be the case as far as Mark Zero could see. Many of his longtime and (mostly) well-loved neighbors—the elderly Mr. Kleinkopf, twenty years a waiter at Ratner's on Delancy Street; the Bangladeshi family upstairs; the Spanish people from down the hall—were standing out in the freezing cold, many of them crying. Officials from the City Department of Buildings had issued a “vacate order” for 172 Stanton Street, declaring it an unsafe structure.

Years of shoddy maintenance and the previous night's two and half inches of freezing rain had taken its toll. Former home to untold numbers of Lower East Side immigrants (the address is mentioned in Jacob Riis's famous tome of the dispossessed,
How the Other Half Lives
), 172 Stanton Street had seen its last sunset. No more matzo balls would be boiled on stove tops here, not another plantain would be fried under the harsh light of a fluorescent ring, never again would a junky would climb up the fire escape to steal a rabbit-eared TV. The tenement was ordered to be torn down that very day. Orange-outfitted demolition crews were already on the scene.

Commanded by Jerry Hauer, the flinty-eyed head of Office of Emergency Management, City officials promised residents they would be allowed in the building one last time to retrieve their possessions and pets. Then, suddenly and without explanation, the City's position changed. No one would be permitted back into 172 Stanton. The building would be torn down immediately.

This is when, Mark Zero said, he began to lose it. “Everything I had was in that apartment. My entire archives, fifteen years of shooting videos and film on the streets of New York. Twenty hours of documentary footage from the Men's Shelter on Third Street, a hundred party shoots. All my paintings, my screenplays, a thousand songs I wrote, my guitar, albums full of family photographs of old Nazis I found in East Germany. Who knows how many autopsy photos. Everything! My entire life's work.”

Mark Zero tried to explain this to the cops on the scene, but they wouldn't listen. They told him to get back, for his own safety. “My own safety!” Mark Zero exclaimed. “You knock down that building without letting me get my stuff, you might as well be killing me right here and now. Go ahead, take a gun, shoot me. It'll be the same thing.”

When the cops just looked at him “like I was fucking crazy,” Mark Zero said he had no other choice. He waited until no one was looking and slipped into 172 Stanton Street. “I ran up the stairs, trying to decide what to do,” he recounts. “I had this giant duffel bag in the closet. I had to figure out what to save and what to leave. I had to be organized. To triage. I knew I couldn't get all. Top priority was the edit masters of my most recent work and my cameras. Except when I got into the apartment, everywhere I looked was something that meant a lot. Something I created out of nothing. It was like some totally sick TV show: you know, you've got like three minutes, what out of an entire existence do you save?

“Then I heard this really loud noise. Like:
bam!
The whole building shook. I looked out the window. They had this giant machine out there, with a big metal ball.
A goddamn wrecking ball right outside my window, coming right at me
. I figured I had two choices then. I could stay quiet and hope the ball didn't hit me. That way I could save some more stuff. On the other hand, I thought, well, I could die. They could cave the place in on my head. So I went to the window and started screaming,
Stop! I'm in here!”