KOCH: a New York state of mind

Mayor Edward I. Koch has been emblematic for eleven years of everything good— and everything bad— about N.Y.C., the city of opinions. Now, as he gears himself up to run for a fourth term, he's beset by corruption scandals and an urban environment the Times calls the New Calcutta. MARIE BRENNER paints a portrait of a politician under fire

MARIE BRENNER

"Why are they after me? WHY ARE THEY AFTER ME?"

Adrift in the city of opinions, the mayor of New York has taken to the streets. He strides down Columbus Avenue on a hectic Saturday, a large unmade bed of a man in a crumpled Brooks Brothers suit and a loud pinkand-blue striped tie. ''I want you to see how people react to me," he has told me in the inner sanctum of his black Cadillac. These worried days the mayor, about to declare for an unprecedented fourth term, often searches for the kindness of strangers on local boulevards. "Hellooo! Hellooo! Hellooo!" he says, smiling gaudily at the weekend strollers. His cheeks expand and sag like a Baby Huey; a flicker of hope shines from his small, pale eyes. The passersby smile back; few break stride. Block after block: "Hellooo! Hellooo! Hellooo!" "Don't they recognize you?" I ask Ed Koch, the 105th mayor of New York. "Of course they do! They're just blase! This is the West Side!"

Now the bray has done just what the mayor had hoped it would, which was to attract a noisy crowd, reeking attitude. Suddenly a cluster of shoppers and singles in their battered leather jackets and thrift-shop tweeds confront the mayor of New York. Perhaps they too notice the fear in his pale eyes, which has come to lurk under the bravado. "You're going to kick ass, Mayor!" one young man tells him. "Then why is it, if I'm doing so well, EVERYONE IS AGAINST ME? WHY ARE THE POLLS so LOW?'' the mayor shouts. "Because you've been in office eleven years. You're an institution already! You're an old guy! You've got to take your lumps!" Then the noise begins, the ugly bellowing that is more and more a part of Ed Koch's daily life. "What about Bess and the corruption?''' a man yells from a window. ''''Corruption!" And the mayor brays back, "WHY ARE THEY AFTER ME?"

"What about the homeless, Mr. Mayor?" Another voice hollers, "I've been in housing court for three years now!" A woman in a scarlet coat next to Ed Koch begins a harangue about her subsidized city apartment, and the mayor, an indomitable flail, takes her on, shouting to the crowd, "This woman pays $550 a month for a three-bedroom apartment. IS THAT FAIR?" And now the crowd screams at her, screams at him, £ and it begins, the shr eying and the frenzy the mayor was looking for when he stopped his car, a little human contact on the streets of New York after his eleven years of living alone behind a steel-plated door with a vault lock in his vast white bedroom at Gracie Mansion.

Private Life on Parade

"What Jewish kid in the Bronx from the 1930s wasn't photographed on a pony?" Koch

"He was the ugly kid whose underwear showed at camp, if he ever went to camp."

"The homeless!" "My apartment!" "Leave him alone, he's better than Wagner!" "Corruppption/" "BESS!" "He's the best mayor we've ever had!" They are screaming things at this politician that they wouldn't dream of screaming at any other public figure, and the mayor screams back in a way no other elected official could ever get away with—"Get a roommate!.. .HOW AM I DOIN'?. . .NO WAY!. . .1 SPEAK THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH IS STILL RELEVANT!"—and it is all very New York, thrilling and awful, the mayor's few tufts of hair wild in the wind. The crowd is not really out of control, maybe careening toward danger. The mayor has always behaved as if he were convinced that negative attention is better than no attention at all. In the midst of the frenzy, he is curiously at peace, as if sated by a lover.

Finally, he walks away and turns to me with a smile. "Wasn't that terrific?" he asks, and his voice is light and bright, as if he had no idea that his odd act might be wearing thin. After eleven years of being mayor, Edward I. Koch— "The / stands for his favorite pronoun," a reporter once quipped, although it really stands for Irving—will soon discover if he is still tolerated as the unsheathed id of the city. Lately, he says, he has been trying to be fashionably "kinder and gentler." Such remarks often get a laugh, for Ed Koch has long been the abrasive unconscious, the nutty-uncle stand-in, for much of middle-class New York. Headline in the Daily News:

EXCLUSIVE NEW POLL!

N.Y. TO ED: DROP OUT!

3 OF 4 VOTERS DON'T WANT KOCH!

I don't know anything about you," Ed Koch said to me as I shook his hand the first time. "I hear you're all right, but we'll see about that! Let me tell you something, I am sick of all the ideologues at the newspapers. I am not asking you for a valentine, I am asking that you be fair. Is that asking a lot? To be fair? Get in the car. I have more to say!"

Within our first eleven minutes together, as Ed Koch's car skittered through the downtown canyons on its way to the heliport where the blue-andwhite N.Y.P.D. chopper was waiting to ferry us to the Bronx, the mayor of New York launched a tirade against the press that would continue through our meetings, attacking seven different reporters by name—including two Pulitzer Prize winners and The New Yorker's City Hall correspondent—with the following phrases: "a liar," "the worst of the worst," "lethal," "dangerous," "an arrogant nincompoop," "a pompous bullshitter." "The kinder and gentler Ed Koch?" his longtime amanuensis, Dan Wolf, a founder of The Village Voice, whispered to me in the car. "Don't even try to get a word in edgewise. It's hopeless!"

"How can I explain it? The mayor is his own worst enemy," David Garth, his canny media consultant, later said to me. "I told Ed Koch, 'You run this campaign the way you want, I don't know whether you will win or lose. You run it the way / want, you'll win!' So Koch says to me, 'What do you want me to do?' and I said, 'I want you to shut up!' Remember, we've done three campaigns together. He said, 'I'm not sure I can do that. I am what I am.' And I said to him, 'That's our problem: YOU!' "

"Nothing short of total paralysis will do this time out," Dan Wolf said. "People get tired of you after twelve years—I know that," Ed Koch told me, "but 1 don't see any bright shining faces out there who could ever take my place. What are these candidates but big nothings? Show me one of them who has compassion, personal integrity, courage, and common sense!"

Perhaps after eleven years at GraBrie Mansion it is unavoidable that a certain amount of selective xenophobia has begun to afflict the mayor—touches of the I brooding, paranoiac Richard I Nixon, shades of Lyndon Johnson in his final bitter days at the ranch, the fatigue of Fiorello La Guardia at the end of his third term as New York's mayor. "The mayor's office has a way of using up people," La Guardia's biographer once told the Times. After Koch survived a recent stroke, his advisers teased him, "Use that as an excuse not to run again." Koch rages, he flares, he hogs the camera, he schedules press conference after press conference, he drowns the city in his words, opinions, columns, and books; he is arguably the most accessible mayor in the city's history. Franklin Roosevelt once compared being a politician to being an actor. "After a while the audience wants you off the stage," he said. Perhaps if Ed Koch were less visible, he would not have to read the dismal polls as if they were horoscopes. A great howl of criticism is directed against this voluble mayor in the tabloid press. "A political swine," the columnist Jimmy Breslin recently wrote* of him; columnist Pete Hamill has asked him in print to do the city a favor and retire. The outcry reminds David Garth of a line from Shakespeare: "Out even now, thy voice offends me!" When Ed Koch was still a child, his nickname was reportedly "Blabbermouth. ' '

The mayor, who rarely avoids a reporter, cannot understand why he is often pilloried in the press. "I give no quarter! With a reporter, I won't give an inch!" he says. "Maybe that's what they don't like." "Political power may or may not always corrupt, but power always reveals" is an aphorism of the distinguished biographer Robert A. Caro, which has come to be known as "Caro's theorem." For all his noise, Ed Koch is publicly uninsultable, yet in private he is curiously oversensitive, vulnerable to flattery. Once, in the makeup room of Live at Five, a local news show, the mayor overheard Peggy Lee attacking the columnist Liz Smith. "It was nothing, really," Smith recalled, "the kind of thing I hear on a daily basis. Koch is attacked all the time! But he was so upset by this. From that time on, every single time I saw the mayor, he brought it up, saying how awful it was!"

"I'm the scapegoat for everything!" says Mayor Koch.

Ed Koch has won twenty-two elections and has served five terms as a United States congressman in addition to his three terms as mayor. Although he beat Mario Cuomo in his first election as mayor, Cuomo 'later defeated him for governor of New York. ("I never wanted to be governor in the first place," Koch told a close friend.) He has written two books, one of them a national best-seller; Mayor was on The New York Times best-seller list for twenty-one weeks. Through his writing and investments, he is worth an estimated $650,000. He has been a guest on The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, and even Romper Room—a celebrity mayor ready to don top hat and tails. During his last mayoral race, he won 78 percent of the vote. Yet Ed Koch still appears in desperate search of affirmation. Many of his friends believe that his vanity and insecurities will finally do him in politically. "He has made himself the symbol of the city," one told me. "That was fine while the city was recovering from the fiscal crisis and needed a cheerleader, but now he has to answer for all the city evils. His problems are all his own doing."

Politics is his religion; the city, his life. Koch's circle of advisers has tightened around him; he sees the same tiny group of friends he has seen for twenty years. He rarely goes to parties unless he gives them; he fills his days with ceremonial appearances, often three or four a day—a speech at a Rotary Club lunch, a few moments to sell codfish cakes and currant rolls at a Brooklyn West Indian bakery, fifteen minutes in a college rotunda to celebrate the 350th birthday of the Bronx. Once, he met a famous writer at a dinner and within moments told him a chilling story about someone who had once betrayed him. "It took me six years to get this guy, but I did," Koch said. "I never forgive and I never forget." Koch's enemy list is long. He decries the Park Avenue "richies," as he calls them, even though they pay to attend his yearly fund-raising birthday celebrations. The mayor works fourteen hours a day and has no wife, child, dog, or hobby to relieve his stress. His skittishness with the press has become so acute that he cannot be in a room with a reporter unless one of his six press aides is there holding a tape recorder. "No one is going to misquote me!" he says. One day after lunch at Grade Mansion, the mayor and I were on our way to Brooklyn. "Stop the car, we're out of cassettes," Koch told his driver. "Where can we get more tapes around here?"

New York City, thanks mostly to the invasion of the rich Japanese, the gilded Venezuelans, and other foreign investors, has become an ever more luminous world capital, shimmering with the illusion of financial health. The General Motors sign that for years lit up Columbus Circle now reads HITACHI, and parts of Flushing are so Asiatic that they look like Singapore. Since Ed Koch has been mayor, the financial power structure of the city has shifted from the traditional Establishment to the real-estate tycoons and the takeover barons; the mayor favors the former with tax abatements for their cement monstrosities, which keep blocks of the city almost completely in the shade. ("Nobody wanted Rockefeller Center put up either once upon a time," the mayor told me.) Both groups finance, for the most part, the mayor's campaigns. Yet despite the prosperity, which Koch helped to bring about, his third term has been a shambles. Koch admits privately that it is "the last act that counts in politics," and he knows that if his third term turns out to be his last act, his administration won't look so good. "I'm the scapegoat for everything!" he says. "You want to protest? It costs you ninety dollars to fly to Washington! In New York it only costs a token to take the subway to City Hall!"

New York is an impossible caldron of hidden signals; political power is often conveyed by a special code. The "chemistry of the shoulder," as it has come to be known at City Hall, is a subtle lexicon which signals who has access to the big man and who does not. The unwritten rule of politics is simple: those who are photographed next to you often enough become forever linked with you in the public mind. Shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, so it was with Stanley Friedman, the former Bronx county leader and friend of the mayor who is now serving twelve years in a Missouri prison for federal racketeering, conspiracy, and mail fraud. "He was always around like a second suit," a Koch confidant told me. "It makes me nervous that Friedman is always next to you when you walk into a room," a close friend once told Koch. "You're crazy!" the mayor is said to have replied. "What's the big deal?" One of Friedman's more inventive cons was creating an immense public company named, wittily enough, Citisource, a paper castle which was without any assets except for a $22 million future city contract. At official gatherings, Friedman often insinuated himself physically next to the mayor: "Ed, you're brilliant! ...You're doing great!.. .Fabulous!" "Ed says.. .Last night when I had dinner with the mayor... So I said to the mayor"—these were the Friedman phrases that bounced around the offices of the municipal underlings who could expedite Friedman's demands. The physical image of Stanley Friedman, a chunky man who affected a pinkie ring, shiny suits, and a pointed dark goatee, contrasted strangely with the mayor's baggy pinstripes and proper brogues.

At City Hall, it is now necessary to classify the Koch corruption as "direct" or "indirect." "Direct" corruption, in the Koch parlance, refers to the mayor's tainted appointees; "indirect" refers to the dishonest bureaucrats he inherited. "I've had less corruption than other mayors," Koch told me. But six Koch city appointees have either been indicted or gone to jail. Queens Borough President Donald Manes, an elected official, committed suicide on the eve of his indictment. Bess Myerson, the former Miss America, Koch's dear friend and cultural-affairs commissioner, was on trial most of last autumn on a six-count indictment of attempted bribery and mail fraud. Although she was acquitted, her jurors were later quite public about their ambivalence. "We all felt that something happened. But in no way did the prosecution prove it," one remarked. "You've got to take on my friend Ed Koch's campaign for mayor," Bess Myerson had told David Garth in a happier, distant past. He did. Myerson campaigned so tirelessly for her friend that in all the 1977 victory photos "Porky 'n' Bess," as the reporters would later taunt them, were so close as to be one. Now Ed Koch says, "How was I supposed to know she was so erratic? She was my friend." No more: they rarely speak.

For New York crime buffs, the metropolitan sections of the local newspapers have provided a trove of the escapades of grand and petty criminals who have riddled city government. Their names swim before the eyes: Ameruso, Biaggi, Lindenauer, Lebetkin, Turoff, Chevlowe, Shafran, Liberman... Their confusing antics have been detailed minutely by columnists Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett in the book City for Sale, a searing attack on the Koch administration—bribes palmed in men's rooms and Queens diners or at funerals, phony companies invented from city contracts, patronage schemes and shredded documents, skims, extortions, leasing scams of all kinds. And great courtroom moments: "You got the last bit of blood from my husband!" the wife of Stanley Friedman, who still works for the mayor, screamed out at her husband's trial. The Parking Violations Bureau, the Housing Authority, the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of General Services, the Board of Education, and the Taxi and Limousine Commission have all been rife with graft. "This city corruption scandal... is no media hype.... It's real, it's repellent, and its full extent may never be known," a Newsday editorial observed. Inevitably, the scandal has had ironic aspects; one of the more amusing moral ambiguities to emerge is that the Parking Violations Bureau, the special fiefdom of Donald Manes, with the crooks in charge, made millions more in honest revenue collecting quarters and tickets for the city than it did when it was run by the cleaner bureaucrats. "Well, what can you expect?" a Koch adviser told me. "The crooks even after they take their millions are far more efficient than those rocket scientists who are in government."

"How could I have known about all this," the mayor asked me somewhat disingenuously, "if for years no one in the press and none of the commissioners picked it up? How was I supposed to know? I thought Friedman was an honest rogue! Donny Manes was supposed to be the next mayor! Jimmy Breslin was his friend! They always used to go out to dinnah! If Jimmy Breslin, a famous newspaper columnist, didn't know about his good friend Manes, how was I supposed to know?" After I described the Koch administration as resembling "the wheel of fortune" in my reporting on the Bess Myerson trial in this magazine last December, I soon had an enraged press aide of the mayor's on the telephone. "We are sick of you ideologues in the press," he told me. "We are tired of the mayor's enemies attacking him! There haven't been hundreds of Koch people in trouble. Only six." (The other 242 corrupt officials, mostly low-level bureaucrats, were discovered by a mayoral agency ordered by Ed Koch himself to investigate malfeasance at City Hall.)

The "corruption scandal," as it is called in the tabloids, has prevented Ed Koch from taking firm leadership in his third term on the real issues of the town: the homeless, the problems of lowerclass blacks and Hispanics, the deterioration of the schools, the AIDS plague, and the crack dealers, who seem as pervasive as the army of vagrants who now befoul Grand Central Terminal, once a monument of New York's majesty. Even the Times, which for years covered Koch sympathetically, is running a series on the editorial page called "The New Calcutta," devoted to the problems of New York. Last April, Andy Logan reported in The New Yorker that seventy-eight city-owned buildings on the West Side of Manhattan were "known drug locations"; the city never bothered to padlock their doors.

"Part of the fun of this job is being able to poke your enemies in the eye," the mayor told a friend. Ed Koch's tendency to enjoy his enemies''misery, what the Germans call Schadenfreude, once charmed a city fed up with machine hacks and blow-dried politicos. Now the mayor is on the receiving end of a hefty dose of Schadenfreude, particularly from the "liars" and "nincompoops" he has long insulted in the press. "Is that fair?" the mayor asks. "When you are a person who speaks his mind and does not brook incompetence, silliness, or idiocy, you irritate a lot of people. I have alienated people. I've been here twelve years, and if people think you are vulnerable they love to kick you!" Ed Koch told me.

The mayor has no wife, child, dog, or hobby to relieve his stress.

Mayor Koch is on his way to the South Bronx, to the 129th town-hall meeting he has attended since he took office. "I like to get out and hear what's Ion people's minds," he tells I me. ''Name me another politician who does what I do!" Earlier in the day he has given a deft state-of-the-city address in which he promised to renovate all the city's abandoned and deserted housing completely and to use those hundreds of buildings to house the homeless and the poor—all by 1992. "If we can't get the Wollman Rink fixed for the ice skaters, how can we get those buildings completed?" I ask the mayor in the car, but he is in another zone, thrilled that his speech was so well received. "That was a great speech!" he says to me. "Great! I'll tell you when I give a bad speech. That was a great one! But you didn't hear my extemporaneous remarks afterwards! They were really great!"

The meeting tonight is in a Bronx hospital auditorium. The subject is racism, and the mayor has banned all TV cameras. There is reason for this: in Staten Island, at another town-hall meeting, the mayor was loudly booed. "I have been picketed by the best, and your boos are among the worst," Koch screamed at that group as he scuttled out the back door.

When we arrive in the South Bronx, two angry local reporters with TV cameras accost the mayor. "I want to hear what people have to say," Koch tells them. "I won't let you in with your cameras, because then they will all be theatrical and I can't hear what's on their minds." The issue of the mayor's race relations is highly charged.

"Something is missing! / don't know what it is. Maybe it's you. . .but something is not working in this city." A beautiful black woman has stood up to address her mayor. "You know what it is?" she tells him. "You are famous for shooting from the lip, and sometimes you start talking before you think!" Others address him on the issues of impossible schools, turf battles, racial slurs: "You insulted this community!" "Whatever you think, the puertorriquehos and the Latinos are our neighbors." "You always are talking about justice for Israel, but what about justice for this city and the blacks?" Once again, the more these strangers rough him up, the more the mayor puffs up with pleasure. Afterward, he is again met by the cameramen. "Pretty tough, Mr. Mayor. They said they don't like the way you treat them!" The mayor, who has been so delighted with the criticism inside the hall, scowls and shouts at the members of the Fourth Estate: "Didn't you hear them say anything good? Well, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?"

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I.1 d Koch has mastered the theater of a specific type of New York realpolitik: he invariably articulates the dark thought. "I'd like to dip him in hot oil many, many times," he said of the convicted child killer Joel Steinberg while Steinberg was still on trial. "Jews have got to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson," he said at the height of the presidential campaign, a remark that caused Governor Cuomo to say Ed Koch was unfairly creating the vision of New York City as "a hellhole of contention and divisiveness." The mayor at other times has called the Soviet government "the pits," the United Nations "a cesspool," and rural life "a joke." Ever since he denied Donald Trump a tax abatement for his mammoth Television City project, he and Trump have warred, yet the mayor is also criticized constantly for the number of new buildings he has allowed to be built, for turning New York into cement city. "Greedy, greedy, greedy! Piggy, piggy, piggy!" the mayor said of Trump. "He's a moron," Trump said of him. "I feel calling someone a moron is far more personal and insulting than saying they are greedy and piggy," Koch told me. "Anyway, now Donald and I have stopped the public battle. I think it's because he knows that I am going to win my fourth term as mayor."

Sadly, Ed Koch's churlishness masks his very real governmental skills. He has made admirable advances in public housing and early education; he enforced the tough financial measures of Felix Rohatyn and his MAC-bond strictures when the city was wobbling on the brink of bankruptcy. He has stood up to the unions as well as to the ineffable "them" of the city. Koch, wrote Gay Talese in his review of Mayor, "is the only white man in New York in ten years to talk back to a black man." (In response, for the past three years the Amsterdam News, the local black newspaper, has bannered a weekly front-page column: KOCH MUST RESIGN.) The mayor stood behind his remarkable subway boss, Robert Kiley, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority revamped the horror of the city's buses and trains. He has fought hard but unsuccessfully in the legislature for tough laws to get the crack dealers off the streets, and he has rid the city of the patronage system in the courts. He has also tried, less effectively, to police the other City Hall departments. However he may now repel the press corps of Room 9, City Hall, he has been endorsed by every major newspaper in town for his last two mayoral races. "That's because editorial writers study the governmental issues and don't have to deal with his* mouth on a day-to-day basis," Garth says. "The issue this time is me," Koch says. Richard Daley, the longtime mayor and machine boss of Chicago, had a clever way of dealing with his city-hall reporter-critics; he was a tomb of cold indifference who delighted in annoying them by pretending that he never read their words. When Daley got home from his city hall, he would go down to his silent basement unobserved, then explode. Not Koch.

"The mayor of New York has to dominate this city," Ed Koch told me. "He must always keep his head when all around is turmoil! Are you aware that I am in charge of a $25 billion budget, the fourthlarge st in the land?"

/^iften cynics wonder if anyone can V^/govem New York City; the best intentions are soon tempered, if not wholly decimated, by the horrors of City Hall. One fact is clear: the New York municipal government long has been chaos. There are more than 300,000 city employees, triple the entire population of Albany, the state capital, yet New York lacks home rule. Almost all city taxes and regulations have to be approved by a balky state legislature that traditionally distrusts the city. "Whoever is mayor can't really govern," Ken Lipper, a former deputy mayor for economic development, told me. "You are just like a captain of a ship, trying to keep the ship afloat as the bow waves of daily crisis wash over you. Every day it's a new horror show."

John Lindsay, the handsome mayor of the 1960s, had, despite his elegance and ideals, an administration that dispatched barrels of city cash up to Harlem on a monthly basis for summer jobs "to make sure that the blacks didn't bum the city down," a former Lindsay adviser remembered. Lindsay's political savvy probably prevented New York from turning into Detroit. "It was great. I could take my car up there anytime, and I never felt afraid," a Lindsay adviser told me. Thousands of jobs were given away. At the same time that the city's blacks were becoming more radicalized, the city's welfare payments went from $400 million to $1 billion. Lindsay's welfare commissioner was nicknamed "Come and Get It Ginsberg."

Nelson Rockefeller was governor then, and he and Lindsay instituted what seemed to be superb liberal programs, such as the decentralization of the schools. The New York schools had always been run by a tough central Board of Education; decentralization was an attempt to get the parents more involved in the individual districts. At that time, the schools were erupting with charges and countercharges of racism; there was fear that they would shut down. To avoid that, the Board of Education shifted the power to the individual districts. But soon the new system disintegrated into anarchy. Many of the new school boards, which were primarily black, began to war with the predominantly white teachers' union, which included many Jewish teachers. "We got too many teachers and principals named Ginzberg and Rosenberg in Harlem," one picketer said at the time. Many good teachers and middle-class students fled. Now, two decades later, the tabloids are filled with headlines about a Bronx principal and teachers arrested on drug charges— all of which Ed Koch is blamed for. This winter the Post bannered, PISTOL PACKIN' PEE WEE, the grisly tale of a five-year-old who brought a handgun to his kindergarten class. In February, 411 vials of crack were discovered in a brown paper bag a Bronx eleven-year-old was carrying in school.

The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was also thought to be a humane idea in the Rockefeller years, but the outpatient medical care which was a necessary part of the program was never provided. Now that group makes up an estimated 30 percent of the homeless on the streets. Lindsay's mayoralty was also marred by ruinous garbage and subway strikes, which resulted in a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and a police scandal. The Knapp Commission was convened to investigate corruption, and literally thousands of cops—"everyone except the chaplains,'' Koch said—could have gone to jail for the bribes and thievery that were a standard part of their beat.

"Pinkie rings are back in town,'' an editorial began on the morning in 1973 that Koch's predecessor, the diminutive Abe Beame, became the mayor of the impossible city. Beame was the last mayoral product of the Democratic machine, which had been run for years through the clubhouses and by the bosses. New York City is now said to be a Democratic stronghold; no Republican has been elected mayor since John Lindsay. By the time Abe Beame took office, the city was veering toward total disaster and complete financial ruin.

"When I became comptroller in 1974,1 hired accountants to go through the city books," Harrison Goldin, the longtime city comptroller, told me. "My God, the horror of it all!" Goldin discovered that on the eighth floor of the Municipal Building large cartons of blank city checks were standing in the middle of the corridor. "They had no numbers, no sequence. The way bills got paid in New York City was that a clerk—and there were hundreds of them—just reached into the box and wrote a check whenever a bill came in. You haven't heard the worst! The clerks decided that it was too much trouble to remember who had the special certified-signature machines to validate the checks, so they just went out and got rubber stamps made at Blumberg's Stationery around the comer from City Hall. When the bank statements came in at the end of the month—remember, there were no numbers on the checks—the clerks would just put rubber bands around them and throw them in a comer. That's where I discovered them. There wasn't even an attempt made to go over them. Do you get the picture?"

On another floor of the Municipal Building, an elderly clerk with a clipboard sat on a folding chair in front of what appeared to be a linen closet. Often a crude sign would be taped to the closet door, which was secured by a single padlock: OUT TO LUNCH. The closet had been there since the end of World War II, when William O'Dwyer was mayor. When the auditors discovered the closet, they rushed to Goldin. "Are you aware that inside that closet are billions of dollars in unsecured New York City bearer bonds?" a senior partner at a law firm asked the new comptroller. "Anyone could have cut the padlock on that closet and walked off with those bonds. As bearer bonds, any bank would redeem them. Get it? Pay to the bearer!" Goldin said.

Abe Beame, the mayor then, was confused. "Why does no one on Wall Street have confidence in the city? Why can't we get any certification of the city's bond issues?" Beame once asked a group of bankers in the midst of the fiscal crisis. "Because, Mr. Mayor, nobody on Wall Street thinks you know a thing about finance," a young arbitrageur named Richard Nye told him. "Get that kid's name!" Nye remembers Beame said. The city fiscal crisis was by then so severe that New York could hardly pay its bills or get the public to buy its municipal bonds. Auditors discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in discrepancies in the city's budget figures, and the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen told City Hall that the city's books could never be audited in the time allowed. In the entire city of New York, only three buildings were going up. The real-estate market crashed as people fled the city. A Central Park co-op that now sells for $2 million could be had for $55,000.

Against impossible odds, Ed Koch, a reform-minded anti-patronage congressman from Greenwich Village, beat Mario Cuomo in a vicious campaign for mayor. Signs began appearing on the Westchester commuter trains: VOTE FOR CUOMO, NOT THE HOMO. David Garth insisted that Koch and Bess Myerson take to the streets, kissing and holding hands. "They're like the Smith Brothers—two beards," he remarked famously at the time. Koch was determined not to pander to the corrupt county leaders and to get City Hall to run properly. His integrity was such that he had given up his law practice soon after he entered political life. "No patronage!" he howled during his first days in office. "No more giving away judgeships! No more giving in to the clubhouse bosses." Garth remembers begging Koch to give a few jobs away so that the clubhouses would think that the new mayor understood the city. "For God's sake, give them something!" he told Koch, "NEVER!" Koch bellowed. "What's with you guys?" one real-estate baron asked Ken Lipper during his first weeks at City Hall. "It used to be that if I wanted a block on West Forty-third Street I knew the price: $300,000. I might have to pay, but I would get the block! Now I don't know how to deal with you."

■ j1 d Koch is sixty-three years old and a J_j political dinosaur, one of the last of the great breed of city Democrats who trace their philosophical lineage back to the noble reform movement of New York. In those romantic days almost four decades ago, the highest calling among young liberal members of the "silent generation" who worshiped Adlai Stevenson was to fight the clubhouse politics of New York, where machine bosses such as Carmine DeSapio and Meade Esposito delivered the votes for the county leaders, the borough presidents, and the mayor. DeSapio, with his silk suits and dark glasses, was the most powerful Democrat in the state; he had been Governor Averell Hardman's secretary of state, and had once titillated New York by accidentally leaving $ 11,000 in soiled fiftyand hundreddollar bills in the back of a cab. He later went to jail. "When I think of those days!" the socialite Marietta Tree said. "How I miss them! I used to canvass for the Lexington Democratic Club. We would dress beautifully and sneak into the Park Avenue buildings, using a reverse directory so we could say a name to the doorman. 'We're here to see Mr. Smith on the sixth floor'—that kind of thing. And when Mr. Smith would answer the door in his wrapper at 6:30 in the evening, I would step forward with my papers and say, 'I am your Democratic captain, and I want to talk to you about my candidates.' In those days, we were always invited in, always offered a drink, and for as many apartments as we would go to, we would be offered as many kinds of different things to drink! Everything from gin to Coca-Cola to exotica such as creme de violette! When I think today of the quality of our candidates who are chosen by their television appeal, I wonder if getting rid of New York's political bosses, as we did, was so very wise indeed."

The young Ed Koch invented a life for himself through the political clubs. He operated from the Village Independent Democrats, a group that was so fanatically reform-minded that a member once said of it, "The driven snow was mud compared to the leadership of the V.I.D." They were far to the left of the tony Lexington Democratic Club. Koch and his colleagues stuck out awkwardly at Marietta Tree's cocktail parties, a friend recalled. The future mayor was, Mrs. Tree said, "such an intense young man," a humorless small-time lawyer who had moved out of his parents' Brooklyn apartment because he could no longer take the pressure of his mother's nagging him to get married. "Once even on Ed's birthday, my mother presented him with a cake that said, 'Get Married, Ed!' " his sister, Pat Thaler, told me.

Ed Koch keeps few personal mementos in his fastidious white bedroom at Gracie Mansion. There are several small carved horses and a sad porcelain dachshund from his travels; an odd, large black-andwhite rabbit squats by his bed. On the mantel is a photograph of the mayor at age seven, astride a pony. "What Jewish kid in the Bronx from the 1930s wasn't photographed on a pony?" he asked me. His youthful face radiates serenity; here was a boy who knew he was making someone happy. "Was Ed a mama's boy?" I asked the mayor's sister. "Let's put it this way," she said, "he was a middle child, and our older brother, Harold, was always in trouble! Ed was the good boy."

Reporters have often wondered why Mayor, Koch's autobiography, has only one paragraph devoted to his childhood and his experiences in the war, as if the mayor had no other life before he moved into City Hall. He has often been criticized for his blind ambition. Certainly, his passion for political life came late— long after his impoverished childhood. "You want to know about poverty?" Koch asked me. "I'll tell you about poverty! My brother, Harold, and I used to share a cot in the living room! That's poverty." Perhaps one of the bonds linking Koch, Bess Myerson, and even Stanley Friedman was that they had all survived similar grim Bronx childhoods. The Koch family was so poor that they had to leave the Bronx and move in with relatives in Newark for a year; two sets of parents and four children shared a two-bedroom apartment. The mayor's father, Harold Koch, a Polish immigrant, was a furrier who never learned to write English, except for his name; he often told his children that when he was young, what he did for fun was "to go inside and get warm."

Perhaps a great deal of Koch's need to destroy his enemies can be traced to his Newark days. "Who bought furs during the Depression?" he says. His father lost his business, and was forced to work for his wife's prosperous brother, who owned a Newark catering hall. The brother agreed to give the Koch family the hatcheck concession, but his terms were onerous. The Koch family was allowed to keep tips only, and they had to pay Uncle Louie a yearly fee. "He treated us rotten," Koch told me. As young boys, the Koch sons often worked till two A.M. fetching hats for dime tips. The family was united through love and anger, and a great deal of the dinner-table conversation in their tiny Newark apartment was consumed with rage. The older boy, Harold, who according to his brother spent much of his high-school career in the Newark burlesque palaces, once roughed up his uncle, while young Ed, a loner and a shy middle child, became the perfect student, the boy who at Hebrew school carried the pushke to collect money for Palestine and who drove the neighbors crazy with his incessant talking. He was the chunky teen who was so awkward around girls that his prom date refused to speak to him ever again after he grabbed her breasts in the backseat of a car. "And to think I could have been in Gracie Mansion!" Bunny Persky later told the Daily News's Arthur Browne, who along with two collaborators wrote a biography of the mayor called I, Koch.

"You know what kind of kid he was? He was the ugly kid whose underwear showed at camp, if he ever went to camp," a friend said. But Ed Koch was close to his sister, and was bathed in mother love. Joyce Koch was a hard-driving dynamo from the old school, who hired a tutor in the bottom of the Depression so that she could write in English and "not speak with an accent." "Twentyfive cents an hour!" Koch said. "And the tutor could only write in phonetics! So that's how my mother always spelled!" Although Harold became a successful Long Island businessman, it was Ed who was his mother's real joy. "I don't care if my sister told you she was the favorite," the mayor told me, "I was the favorite."

"Why do you never talk about your experiences in the war?" I asked him. Despite his legendary self-absorption, Ed Koch is curiously nonintrospective. He has never allowed his war record to be used in a campaign, although he was in combat in Europe and later served as a denazification specialist in Germany. He has always masked his fears and basic shyness through his contentiousness. He was, he finally told me, "terrified all the time" he was in combat. He spent days being shelled in muddy foxholes. "The most frightened I ever was was in Holland. I was walking along the dikes with my friend Michael Berrigan as the Germans shelled us constantly with tanks," the mayor told me. "As we were walking along the dikes, Berrigan stepped on a shoe mine. Do you know what that is? A shoe mine is a simple little device that has three antennae, and you step on it and you fly into the air and it tears your foot off. So suddenly Mike is yelling, 'Help! Help! Help!' Here was his leg lying on the ground. I've never been so frightened. All the while the tanks were shooting at us. And I remember Mike said, 'My leg, my leg!' and I looked down at his foot, which was gone, and I said, 'Mike, you're O.K.' I lied. What was I supposed to tell him, the truth? I wanted to throw up."

After the war he was perhaps relieved to move back in with his parents, who by then were living in Brooklyn. He attended law school on the G.I. Bill, then set up a tiny office on Wall Street. "A Wall Street lawyer," his mother used to brag, although Ed Koch, Esq., was one room at the end of a dreary hall. He spent most of his spare time with his kid sister, Pat. "He would always go with me to dances and weekend retreats at the Flatbush Jewish Center," she told me. His law practice remained sketchy, but Koch, much to the merriment of his friends, began to dream of a role in politics. He worshiped Harry Truman and worked on Adlai Stevenson's 1952 campaign. In those days, small-time Jewish lawyers like Ed Koch would never be admitted to a "white shoe" firm, but politics was less restricted. A Jewish man named Meyer Ellenstein had been the mayor of Newark, and La Guardia, who was half-Jewish, had delighted New York when he insisted that Hitler's portrait be hung in the "chamber of horrors" at the 1939 World's Fair. It was Stevenson, though, who captivated Ed Koch. "His eloquence, his words—I loved him," Koch once said. Night after night, Koch would go from his law office to the Village, where he would stand on a box on street comers, speaking avidly for Stevenson. Certainly, Joyce Koch must have been puzzled that her favorite son showed little inclination to have women in his life. He was thirty-two years old when he finally left home for good.

"I'm afraid there is a small crisis today," the mayor's press secretary, George Arzt, told me in February. "The mayor has called the comptroller Joseph Goebbels. Or, rather, he said the comptroller uses 'Joseph Goebbels tactics.' Now I am late to the press conference to deal with this!"

TT'd Koch's style was honed during his X_JGreenwich Village days. Hipsters, homosexuals, young professionals, and artists such as Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg flocked to the Village in the 1950s. Koch, finally free of his family, moved to Bedford Street. He wanted to advance quickly in the hierarchy of the political clubs, but the two Village clubs couldn't have been more dissimilar. In the Village Independent Democrats, young anti-machine reformers controlled the apparatus. There, at first, Ed Koch was considered an outsider, mercurial and not zealous enough. When Koch saw how clannish the V.I.D. was, he joined the Tamawa Club, which was controlled by Carmine DeSapio's machine. For all his ideals, Koch reportedly asked a Tamawa member how long it would take for him to become a judge. "Twenty years," the man told Koch. He returned to the V.I.D.

Ed Koch now had a life. He became a tireless regular on street comers, grandstanding for issues and candidates. At V.I.D. parties and beach weekends, he was the balding young man in the comer taking notes or, as one person put it, "talking incessantly about himself." As many of his friends were marrying, Koch became totally obsessed with politics, perhaps seeing in the political process a chance for the ego gratification that had been denied him socially, as well as a way to contribute to the commonweal. He became a friend of Michael Harrington, the author of The Other America, who later remarked, "His idea of a sexual kick, I think, was to go out and shake hands at a subway stop. That's his greatest erotic encounter."

"Politics is nine-tenths gossip," remarks a character in Jack Gance, Ward Just's new political novel. For all of Ed Koch's diligence, it was the ascension of John Kennedy to the presidency that made it possible for Koch to ascend as well. Carmine DeSapio had thrown his support behind Lyndon Johnson at the 1960 convention, and after Kennedy's election the Kennedy family moved against DeSapio with all their might. By this time, Koch had risen in the V.I.D. to be chairman of the Law Council. Although Eleanor Roosevelt became his ally because he was fighting a DeSapio candidate, Koch lost his first race for assemblyman and wept openly. "I'll never run again. It is a filthy business." But he had no other life. In 1963 he ran against DeSapio as district leader. This time the entire Democratic establishment—including the patrician Catholic mayor Robert Wagner—came on board to guide him through. "If you run as a reformer, you are going to lose!" a prominent Democratic lawyer advised him. "Talk about issues people care about!" So Koch began to attack potholes and the fact that the buses turned around in Washington Square. "We knew where every vote was," the mayor's sister told me, "and on Election Night we were escorting people to the polls in their nightgowns." Just before his fortieth birthday, Koch, the liberal's liberal, beat the boss of bosses by forty-one votes. Fourteen years later, the man who had hardly a childhood friend would be ready to take over New York.

"No one ever said to me, 'Stay away from Stanley Friedman!' What I felt was that he was so smart he would never violate the law," Koch told Henry Stem, the parks commissioner, and me at a Gracie Mansion lunch. "You thought he was going to be like Boss Plunkitt: 7 seen my opportunities and I took 'em,' " Stem told Mayor Koch. "THAT'S RIIUIGHHT!" Koch said.

Youthful dreams and noble ideals die 1 swift and hard in political life. For many years, Ed Koch, now a congressman, had held to the antiquated V.I.D. party line. He had proved himself time and time again, slogging down to Mississippi in 1964 to work as a civil-rights lawyer helping blacks, running a spirited campaign for Congress against the blueblooded Republican Whitney North Seymour Jr. in which he bragged that his relatives were only "traceable to Ellis Island." In Congress, he lobbied against sending aid to Uruguay and Nicaragua with such ferocity that the secret service of Uruguay placed him on a hit list. When George Bush, who was then head of the C.I.A., informed him of this, Koch asked, "Do you provide protection?" "No, we don't do that. I am just calling you to warn you. Be careful!" In those heady years, he was the darling of Jack Newfield of The Village Voice, who is now his avowed enemy, and dinner invitations to his small Village apartment were coveted by downtown intellectuals. He cooked steaks and served three-dollar bottles of wine.

He was always determined to be mayor. In 1966, even before he was a congressman, he had told a close friend when his son was bom, "He will have his Bar Mitzvah in Gracie Mansion." (He later did.) The mayor says that as a congressman he worked feverishly for the rights of Vietnam veterans, and almost every Thursday he would fly back to his Village apartment so that he could hit the streets at sunrise the next morning and personally hand out his weekly newsletter, Congressman Ed Koch Reports from Washington. "Did you get my newsletter?" he would ask. "Was it O.K.?" It was then, when blacks were becoming more and more militant in New York and the middle class was feeling threatened, that Koch, as he told me, "crossed the Rubicon."

It happened in Forest Hills, a middleclass Queens neighborhood, far from Koch's district. The residents were enraged that a three-tower lower-income housing project was planned for their area. Koch took their side: "It's wrong to try and lift the poor solely at the expense of pulling down the middle class," he said. Immediately, he got a phone call from an angry rich liberal supporter. "You are never to oppose low-income housing! Those Jews in Forest Hills have to pay their dues," his friend said. The future mayor, who chose to include this story in his second book, Politics, answered, "You have a wonderful Village brownstone and a house in the Hamptons.

... The people of Forest Hills are willing to pay their dues, but they are not willing to pay yours!" If he angered many of his former supporters, Ed Koch's move to "center spectrum," as he called it, earned him what would be his ultimate power base: the beleaguered white middle class.

The prevalent opinion among Ed Koch's detractors is that his final sellout came at the height of his first mayoral race, in 1977. Koch, running on a wing and a prayer, had scraped together only $635,000 for a race that normally cost about $2 million, even then. "We threw almost every dollar of that onto TV. Headquarters was a walk-up with a staff of five," Garth said. The odds against him were forty to one. Among party regulars and union leaders, the fear about Koch the candidate was, as Garth phrased it, that he was "Crazy Eddie, the Village lefty." He was so much the reformer that no one thought he could run the city. After the primary, Koch, perhaps at Garth's insistence, was pragmatic enough to call the powerful Hispanic congressman Herman Badillo. "I want your support," he told him. Luckily for Koch, Badillo had been ignored by Mario Cuomo, because Cuomo was skittish about pathfinders to power. He knew their price was access. Koch, who perhaps naively saw himself as being above reproach, wasn't worried about their possible demands.

In TV and press interviews, the mayor would be asked, directly or indirectly, if he was a homosexual, and he had to tough it out, be at times belligerent in his denials. David Garth made sure that most places the mayor went, Bess went too. Koch's tension was so palpable that Garth insisted that the candidate never go anywhere alone. "He made me go in the car with him, just so Ed could have someone to uncork with," Dan Wolf told me. Soon enough, Ed Koch's sexuality, or perhaps lack of it, would cease to be a political issue.

For Koch to win, he desperately needed Brooklyn. Although television had diluted a great deal of the power of the bosses, Garth and Koch were taking no chances; they arranged to pay a visit on Meade Esposito, the Brooklyn Democratic godfather. They met at Esposito's mother's house in Brooklyn. Esposito's close friend Judge Milton Mollen was also there that day. Koch, eager to shed the Crazy Eddie label, told the Brooklyn boss that if he threw his support behind him he would see to it that he could walk in the front door of City Hall. "I won't treat you special and I won't treat you not special, but if you want something, you walk in the front door of City Hall and not the back." "It was a Faustian bargain!" Koch's detractors like to say. "He cut a deal with the bosses." Not exactly. If he was to win the confidence of the party, he had to come of age. In a sense, Koch was again taking shrewd advice, just as he had when he ran for district leader and talked about potholes rather than reformist ephemera. For Ed Koch, the need for political reality overcame doctrinaire liberal notions in the city of opinions. Was this blind ambition or healthy pragmatism? Koch's "deal" was subtle and entirely predictable to anyone who had watched the desperately insecure Newark child reinvent himself through his ability to deftly filter expediency into political philosophy.

This is a travesty! An unimaginable horror. The off-duty policeman will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We mourn with you. Nothing can ever bring back the loss of this fine man," the mayor said quietly as he sat at a gathering in Brooklyn with a grief-stricken black widow whose husband had been accidentally shot by an off-duty city policeman. It was a Saturday, and the mayor, without public fanfare, had determined to call on Stephen Kelly's widow, Annie, and his six grown sons; he often makes these private condolence calls. "This event is not on the mayor's schedule—no press is allowed," Lee Jones, the mayor's assistant press secretary, told me. I had learned of the visit when I was at lunch at Gracie Mansion, but for once the mayor was not looking for publicity. "If you come, anything Mrs. Kelly says is off the record, and no taking notes," Jones said. The Kelly family lives in a spacious apartment in a pleasant building on Eastern Parkway, a block from the Brooklyn Museum. Shirley Kelly, the victim's first wife, a dignified, quiet woman, is a longtime city worker. In the car the mayor learned that the family had recently rebuffed the militant Reverend A1 Sharpton's entreaties to turn their tragedy into a nightmare of a public controversy. Nevertheless, the mood in the Kelly apartment was understandably highly charged. Mr. Kelly, after all, had died in his son's arms after the New York cop shot him. The dozens of friends and relatives gathered regarded the mayor warily; anger and tension lurked below the surface atmosphere. Typically, although there were six sons, one a Pasadena lawyer, the Kelly family had for "spokesmen" two black ministers. "We want justice!" one of the ministers told the mayor. "You shall get it," the mayor said (the policeman was later indicted), and then as we were leaving he asked the lawyer son, who wore a ponytail, black sunglasses, and a Beverly Hills T-shirt, "Where are you from?" "California," the man said. "I could tell you were from California!" the mayor said as the friends laughed loudly, their tension momentarily gone. In the car I asked Ed Koch, "Didn't you think there was a tremendous amount of anger in that room? Did you feel the edge?" "Absolutely not!" the mayor told me. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"II/Taintaining skepticism and sensitivity IVXis almost impossible in the trenches of political life. Ed Koch's tragedy as mayor is that he has no clear idea what it is in his character that causes him at times, such as in Brooklyn that day or in the corruption scandal, to be so blind. He is a bottom-line administrator, a product of the legislative process, oddly naive about the workings of the city's slugs and worms. "I can't believe it!" is a favorite Koch expression when he is confronted with an example of his lack of perspicacity. He would never dream of looking into the Parking Violations Bureau if it was running millions ahead in revenue. Because he had never played on the field of regular machine politics, perhaps he sent out unwitting signals through the "chemistry of the shoulder" that he embraced the notion of business as usual. Thieves and charlatans had access and acceptance, even if they had been denied their usual quota of patronage bribes and jobs. When Ken Lipper was deputy mayor, he was regularly visited by Transportation Commissioner Tony Ameruso, a Koch appointee suggested by Esposito. "Ken, we need a ferry to go across the Hudson. I want to give the concession to a certain operator," Ameruso reportedly said. Lipper refused, saying he wanted to commission a study to investigate how ferry service would affect the Hudson River and the Port Authority. "You can't believe the amount of pressure that was put on me," Lipper told me. "Suddenly I'm getting dozens of calls from congressmen and from New Jersey officials. The substance was more or less the same: What did I have against the ferry and Ameruso's guy?" The pressure went on for months. Lipper finally went to the mayor. "Ameruso is going to put the heat on you about me, Mr. Mayor," he said. "Do whatever you think is right," Koch said. There are many stories like this. Once, Donald Manes attempted to take over the Flushing Airport by installing one of his pals. He first suggested a man with ties to organized crime. "I told him I didn't think that was appropriate," Lipper said. Manes then suggested Michael Lazar, who would later be indicted in the Parking Violations Bureau scandal. "We are not putting anyone in that airport that doesn't have transportation experience," Lipper told him. "Whaddaya have against guys from Queens?" Manes asked him, adding, "You tell Koch if he wants Queens in the next election, he better take my guy." "TELL HIM TO GO FUCK HIMSELF," Lipper remembers Koch replied.

There are those who believe that the mayor's genuine desire to end the patronage only caused the Friedmans and the Maneses and the Amerusos to burrow deeper into departments like taxis and parking meters which were not monitored so carefully by the mayor. "That's ridiculous!" Ed Koch told me. Maybe not. Within months of Lipper's leaving City Hall to run for City Council president, Ameruso's ferry concession was granted, and no one questioned how Ameruso had managed to procure the necessary approvals. Ameruso was later indicted and convicted on two counts of perjury.

The sad fact is that Koch sent out mixed signals to his commissioners. Since Stanley Friedman was an elected Bronx county leader who had come to power under Lindsay and Beame, Koch had to deal with him, but he didn't have to invite him to be one of the honored intimates at his private New Year's Eve swearing-in ceremony. When one close Koch confidant saw him, he pulled the mayor aside. "What is he doing here?" he asked, and then walked out. Friedman's appeal, according to those close to Koch, was nothing more than cheap flattery. Stanley Friedman had been a City Hall fixture long before Ed Koch arrived downtown; he was the law partner of the indefatigable Roy Cohn, a fixer and hondler of such venal dimension that his career has filled two recent books. That fact alone should have signaled something to the mayor. "Stanley Friedman had an ethical bypass at birth," a former deputy mayor told me. He was a genius, however, at oozing charm, shmoozing the mayor adroitly. When Friedman recommended appointments that Koch deputy mayors knew were appalling, Koch was sometimes oblivious: "I hear he's great!" When those appointments turned into disasters, close friends would go back to the mayor, saying, "Remember how great he was supposed to be?" and the mayor would shake his head. "Yeah, he really fucked up." In 1985, when Koch was running for his third term, his advisers wanted to endorse "an aces guy" named Jose Serrano for Bronx borough president. Friedman complained bitterly to Koch; he wanted his personal "water boy," Stanley Simon, running the Bronx. "My polls tell me you will have a tough fight in the Bronx, and Stanley Simon has all the numbers," Friedman lied. Koch's advisers howled, "We don't trust Stanley Friedman's numbers." Koch, however, did. Koch swept the Bronx, and Simon barely squeaked in on his coattails. Stanley Simon too is now in jail.

When the corruption scandal finally erupted in the city newspapers, Ed Koch sank into a profound depression. There were days, one deputy mayor said, when it was all his staff could do to get him to leave the lovely yellow eighteenth-century country house on the East River that is his official residence and get down to his office at City Hall. His dark mood, said one friend, was exacerbated by his absolute disbelief. "I can't believe Stanley Friedman! I can't believe Donald Manes! How could they have been crooks?" he would say. Night after night, his friends came to Gracie Mansion or squired him to his favorite out-of-the-way restaurants in Chinatown. The mayor would sit at the table, one recalled, staring into space. "The deputy mayors were running in and out of each other's offices trading information— City Hall was paralyzed for months!" a former deputy mayor told me. Koch was helped through the bad time by his longtime intimates, such as David Margolis, the head of Colt Industries; Allen Schwartz, Koch's former law partner and city corporation counsel; Bruce Barron, his doctor, and his wife, Mary; Dan Wolf; and David Garth. The mayor has always said he believes in the concept of bashert, Yiddish for "meant to be," and perhaps his basic fatalism helped him to survive the scandal too. He had already escaped his cold-water flat, death in combat, and a lack of social graces; he had risen to improbable power in the city of opinions. "There is always a bottom line with Ed Koch," a friend said. "He has immense confidence from being able to say, 'I won mayor of this city three fuckin' times! How many other people in three hundred years can say that?' "

"Hellooo, ladies! How am I doin'? Where are you from?" the mayor asks a cluster of elderly women taking pictures outside City Hall. "Oh, California! Raise your right hand and tell me you're not a member of a sex cult!" "Mr. Mayor, are you going to win the next election?" one woman asks him. "I need your help! They're after me in New York! Maybe you could move!"

T t was oddly calm at Gracie Mansion the X last time I saw the mayor. For a change, there were no aides or longtime friends to cosset him or laugh at his jokes. He was being led from room to room by the photographer Harry Benson, who was posing him against the mantels and moldings that had once belonged to the Scottish merchant who built this charming house. "Isn't this enough?" the mayor kept asking Benson, but his whine was toothless and good-natured; he was enjoying the attention. There wasn't much else on the schedule this fine, sunny Saturday. The mayor of New York had an hour to fiddle away before it was time to leave for WSKQ, a local Spanish radio station. Out the windows of the lovely library with its bottlegreen walls, it was possible to see barges and tugs leisurely churning up the East River. The Triborough Bridge glistened beyond. I noticed the mayor's bookcases were filled with New York texts, restaurant and neighborhood guides as well as serious volumes such as The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro's biography of the developer Robert Moses, who in simpler times ruled New York through influence and threat. On the mayor's mantel was a single memento in a silver frame: the Post's banner IT'S NO CONTEST FOR KOCH, which Tiffany's had presented to him after his last thrilling race. The gardener was in the kitchen playing with her dog, but the vast ceremonial rooms which are the scene of impersonal nightly Gracie Mansion functions were empty and dark. For a moment, I imagined Ed Koch wandering and brooding at night in those chilly halls, trying to figure out how his third term had veered off course.

That morning the newspapers had been filled with stories about the machinations of his possible opponents. "This race will be my toughest," he said with a heavy sigh. Even Koch is aware that "the numbers" do not look so good, but so far he has ignored the advice of several friends and columnists who have urged him not to run again. One of his strong Democratic opponents will be the Manhattan borough president, David Dinkins, who is black. Dinkins, although popular, has become labeled with the fashionable cliche that he has no fire in the belly. Additionally, he was once discovered not to have paid his taxes for four years. Will it matter in New York? "He already comes in with the black vote, an automatic solid 30 percent of the vote," one insider said. There are other contenders, such as businessman Richard Ravitch, the highly respected former head of the subway-and-bus system, a possible dark horse in the primary. The mayor's nemesis, Harrison Goldin, is expected to declare, and one Republican already has, the former ambassador to Austria Ronald Lauder, an heir to the cosmetics fortune of his mother, Estee Lauder. "Little Lord Fauntleroy," the Daily News columnists have begun to sneer. Lauder is being pushed by the Republican senator Alfonse D'Amato, and the Republicans are crowing that Lauder has pledged to spend a considerable portion of his $333 million net worth on the race. If Koch wins the Democratic primary, he will probably face an awesome Republican challenger, the former U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who, despite his very controversial use of the RICO statute in prosecuting Drexel Burnham Lambert, is a popular figure in the city, a latter-day Eliot Ness. If he can hold up as a campaigner, he is expected to trounce Ronald Lauder, despite his millions, in the Republican primary. "Iam tired of all these people saying it is Ed Koch who is going to mount the vicious campaign," Koch was saying that morning, a reference to the latest scorching editorial about his tactics in the Daily News. And then it was time to go. The mayor seemed relieved to have an activity. He turned to me on the porch. "Aren't you coming with me? Don't you want to hear me at WSKQ?" As the mayor of New York walked away, he moved slowly, as if he wasn't happy to go alone.