Beware ‘hunger’ for government reform

Hofstra University Professor Maureen Murphy.

In some ways, 1996 seems so very long ago.

It was a pre-9/11 world, so America wasn’t waging a long-term war abroad, much less two or even three long-term wars. 

Also, in 1996, there were no iPods or iPads or Facebooks, and gasoline cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 a gallon.

That was also the year an array of Irish American educators and lawmakers got together and formed an impressive coalition which convinced state lawmakers that all students in New York State should learn about the Great Hunger, the
 Irish Famine which sent millions of desperate Irish across the globe in the 1840s. 

More on the Great Hunger in a moment.

These days, of course, we are waging bloody war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and something very much like it in Libya.  In 2011, we text, we tweet and, therefore, we are.

But there are important similarities between then and now.  President Bill Clinton suffered a big defeat in the 1994 congressional elections, when Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, took over both houses of Congress.

This led to fundamental questions about the role of government in the 1996 presidential campaign. Similar questions are being asked now, in the wake of the defeat Democrats suffered in the 2010 elections, and with the 2012 presidential race looming.

This, in and of itself, is a good thing.  We should never be afraid to question the status quo, especially when hard-earned taxpayer money is the focus of these questions.

New York Daily News columnist Bill Hammond took state lawmakers to task last week in a column entitled
“The Mandate Mess: Pols Dream Up Wasteful Programs, We Pay for Them.”

“Like the road to hell, the highway to New York State's broken government is paved with good intentions,”

Hammond wrote. “Year in and year out, well-meaning Albany politicians set out to make the world a better place.”

Hammond later cites “questionable mandates” such as those which “require schools to teach about the Irish

Potato Famine, calculate the body-mass index of each student and hire four separate contractors for major construction projects.”

Irish Americans swiftly responded, defending the value of learning about the Great Hunger.

“Bill Hammond doesn't think the Irish Potato Famine is worthwhile subject matter for the children of New York?” Damian McShane of the Bronx asked in the News’ vaunted “Voice of the People” section. 

“Perhaps (Hammond) should learn the history of that event, so he could better understand the lessons children can take from it. The evils of colonialism. Racism and discrimination in Europe. The first great wave of immigration to this country. 

“These topics seem pretty relevant to me, given what's going on in the world. But apparently they're not the kind of thing Hammond thinks our children should learn -- or the kind of information one needs to get a journalism degree.”

Hard to argue with that.  Of course, Hammond might say he was trying to make a larger point.  Hammond, after all, doesn’t doubt that the lawmakers have good intentions.

“What they generally fail to do…is think all the way through the real-world consequences of their social engineering. And they almost never follow up to see what actually happens,” he adds.

The basic question -- should state governments be in the business of deciding small-scale issues such as what should be taught in history classrooms?

What Hammond and many of today’s vociferous government critics fail to address is that state governments are often simply responding to grass roots movements. 

The Great Irish Famine curriculum was not implemented because a few lawmakers decided willy-nilly that they want to be nice to the Irish.  Hofstra University’s Maureen Murphy and many other like-minded educators built an impressive coalition and pressed lawmakers into action.

The lawmakers, thus, were representing the will of a vocal group of like-minded people.  That’s pretty much how Democracy works. 

It’s not to say the will of the people is always wise.  Sometimes it’s downright dumb.  Democracy, after all, is a messy business. 

As Winston Churchill (who knew a thing or two about butting heads with the Irish) noted, democracy is the worst form of government…except for all of the other ones.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

An Irish American Serb story

Bosko Radonjic.

In June of 1979, a hijacked Boeing 727 landed at Ireland's Shannon airport.  The plane had been commandeered by a Serbian nationalist who had been flying to Chicago, to be sentenced on a bombing charge. 

Before the plane landed, however, the Serb, named Nikola Kavaja, burst into the cockpit and claimed to have a bomb.  Kavaja eventually freed most of the crew and passengers, but maintained control of the plane.

His ultimate plan was to fly the aircraft to Yugoslavia and crash it into a building housing Communist officials.

The plane, however, ran low on fuel and had to land at Shannon, where the hijacker ultimately surrendered. 
Ireland did not have an extradition treaty with the U.S., though diplomats scurried to put one together in about five minutes, so that Kavaja could be handed over to U.S. authorities.  He was arrested in Dublin and Kavaja was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in jail.

This is one of the few, and certainly most colorful, Irish-American-Serb stories out there. But it is not the only Irish-American-Serb story.

A close associate of Kavaja's, who went to prison for participating in the same bombing, was a man by the name of Bosko Radonjic, who died earlier this month in Belgrade at the age of 67.

Known as "The Yugo," Radonjic had earlier lived in New York City before serving three years for the Chicago bombing. Radonjic later returned to New York City, where he found work as a humble parking lot attendant.

It so happens that Radonjic settled on the West Side of Manhattan, an enclave known as Hell's Kitchen.  At the time, for an enterprising young man unafraid to spill blood, this was not a bad place to be. 

Within a decade, Radonjic would find himself aligned with John Gotti. The Serb would also become the unlikely leader of the most famous Irish American criminal gang in New York history.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. The year was 1982.  The bars and docks and gambling halls and loan-sharking operations in Hell's Kitchen were generally ruled by Jimmy Coonan and the Westies, the Irish American gang linked to the Gambino crime family.

Just a few years earlier, Westies leaders Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone had been in prison. But the duo had maintained control of the West Side.

Though heavily Irish, the Westies were willing to take on an associate who could earn and take care of himself.  So, beginning in 1983, Radonjic -- "The Yugo" -- went to work for Coonan.

Two years later, the killing of Gambino kingpin John Castellano outside of Spark's steakhouse in Manhattan shocked the underworld. Gotti was now ruling the Gambino family, and proved willing to work with the Westies.

Soon enough, however, the Westies themselves were in decline.

Featherstone began providing the government with information about Irish associates such as Coonan, "Mugsy Ritter" and James McElroy, some of whom were sentenced to decades in prison.

This came just as the West Side was flush with cash, thanks to yuppies willing to live in the formerly rough neighborhood because of its affordable rents.  Not a few of those yuppies were interested in buying cocaine.

Irish American Westies such as Kenny Shannon and Kevin Kelly spent several years attempting to exploit this market.  But police pressure grew too great and they turned themselves in. 

And so, as the 1990s dawned, it was time to call in "The Yugo." Bosko Radonjic became the acknowledged leader of what remained of the Westies, dabbling in high-profile burglaries. 

But even The Yugo couldn't stand the heat in Hell's Kitchen.  He returned to his native Serbia in the early 1990s where, during the wars that wracked that region, he became a close adviser to accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic. 

The Yugo was eventually arrested on jury-tampering charges in 1999, but he was released when the main witness against him -- Sammy "The Bull" Gravano -- was deemed unreliable.

The Westies.  A war criminal.  Sammy the Bull.  The Teflon Don.
Yup. It's just your average Irish American Serb story.

(Contact "Sidewalks" at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The Catholic Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln

Robert Redford at the New York premiere of his new movie The Conspirator on Monday night.

MICHAEL O’Laughlin grew up on the same Baltimore Street as one of the most infamous villains in American history -- John Wilkes Booth. Booth remembered O’Laughlin -- and sought his help -- when the actor-turned-villain began to plan the crime of the century.

Booth, of course, achieved notoriety in April of 1865, when he assassinated Abraham Lincoln.  This tragedy came just days after Lincoln finally managed to steer the North to victory over the South in the Civil War. 
Had the result been different, the course of world history would have been radically altered.

It has been 150 years now since the first shots of the Civil War were fired.  There has been a deluge of TV specials, newspaper articles and commemorative events exploring this anniversary. 

Meanwhile, Robert Redford’s latest movie, The Conspirator, takes a close look at the assassination and trial of the conspirators who hatched the plot to kill Lincoln.

At the center of Redford’s new movie, in fact, is Mary Surratt (played by Robin
Wright), who was accused of participating in the plot to kill Lincoln and assist Booth’s escape. 

Much was made, in the frenzy following Lincoln’s assassination, of Surratt’s religion.  She was, after all, a devout Roman Catholic.

In fact, when you consider that Surratt as well as her accused son, John, were Catholics, and a man with the name of O’Laughlin was among those accused of taking part in the plot to kill Lincoln, it should be no surprise that a conspiracy theory swiftly took hold that Catholics were at the center of the plot to kill Lincoln.

The Internet, to this day, is filled with theories outlining the Vatican’s role in killing Lincoln, not to mention the Jesuits’.

An ex-priest who Lincoln had once defended in court named Charles Chiniquy, once asserted that, when it came to whacking the American president, "the Jesuits alone could select the assassins, train them, and show them a crown of glory in heaven.”

Redford’s new movie, according to reports, actually makes note of Mary
Surratt’s religious background, which certainly did not help her in the eyes of her accusers and public opinion.  (Neither did it help that Surratt actually had hosted meetings held by the conspirators to kill Lincoln.)

Of course, America had a deeply anti-Catholic strain in the 1860s.  The Jesuits, at this time, were accused of many evil, anti-American deeds.

O’Laughlin, meanwhile, did play a role in an earlier attempt to kidnap the president, though his religious background has been under debate for years, with some believing he was Catholic while others argued he was actually Methodist.

Either way, it should be added that it is understandable why some might believe Catholics were responsible.

John Surratt, for one, had planned on becoming a priest, had met with Booth to plan to kidnap Lincoln on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day!) of 1865, and even fled to Rome after Booth killed the president.

Meanwhile, Lincoln is now one of the most revered men in American history.  But that was not the case during the actual Civil War. 

Among his most passionate opponents were certain Irish Catholics.  After all, Irish loyalty to the Democratic party by then was strong. 

Lincoln, of course, was a Republican.  In fact, the newly-created Republican Party was a coalition which included Know Nothings and other anti-immigrant groups.

It was Lincoln who was blamed for drafting Irish immigrants into fighting a war they didn’t understand. 
Not for nothing does the song “Paddy’s Lament” include the angry line, “Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln.”

Of course, political anger is one thing.  Assassination is another. 

As for Redford, he believes his movie -- which is about the trial of an outsider 150 years ago -- has relevance today.

Referring to Guantánamo Bay and other military tribunals in the news, Redford told Parade magazine, “Obviously, I could see the parallels to the present.”

Good thing we don’t assume members of certain religious groups are inherently violent anymore, right?

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

All eyes on Guantanamo but…

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Sean Patrick Riordan is an Irish American attorney who has worked with the Feal Good Foundation, an organization which advocates on behalf of 9/11 first responders. 

Riordan, who has roots in Cork, Mayo and Armagh, served as moderator at a recent forum designed to educate first responders and their families about the nuts and bolts of the $2.8 billion Zadroga Bill, the controversial legislation passed late last year meant to compensate first responders for illnesses suffered while working at Ground Zero.

Of course, with all that money comes a lot of questions – and controversy. 

Just last week a legal firm got itself into some hot water when it ran an advertisement prominently featuring a firefighter.  The text accompanying the ad declared “I was there,” and went on to outline how the legal firm could assist the families of first responders.

The only trouble is that the firefighter depicted in the ad was actually not at Ground Zero.  There was much hue and cry, the firefighter threatened to sue, and the legal firm apologized.  (Though, according to a judge, the firm had not done anything technically wrong.)

Anyway, this all goes to show you that the Zadroga Bill, as great as a victory as it was for 9/11 families, can turn messy very quickly.  This point was not lost at the forum recently moderated by Riordan.

Sometime next month, a so-called “special master” is expected to be named regarding the funds available under the Zadroga Bill and how those funds can be divided up. That person, many observers agree, will have a crucial duty -- to make a difficult process run in a relatively smooth fashion.

If the wrong person is tapped as special master?  Things can get nasty very quickly.

Of course, unless you were one of 250 or so people who went to the Zadroga Bill forum in Queens last month, you might not know much about this.  That’s because once the Zadroga Bill was finally passed to much hoopla, the story pretty much fell off of the media radar screen.

This week, of course, all the talk is about the decision to try the criminals behind 9/11 at Guantanamo Bay, rather than in downtown New York.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was among those who support not holding the trial in New York.  However, this stinks of weakness to some Irish American observers.

“Our job was to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the others to sure and swift justice as the murderers they are. And the only right way to do it was with the very system they sought to destroy and so many courageous Americans have died defending,” columnist Michael Daly wrote in Tuesday’s Daily News.

“Instead, we called these criminals enemy combatants and we lost faith in our own courts and laws. Some of us were afraid the trial would make our city a target. Others were so shameless as to complain about the inconvenience.”

Nevertheless, with all due respect, it’s hard for many New Yorkers not to breath a sigh of relief.   It seems there is no easy answer on this one. 

And, indeed, viewing these terrorists as a hazy new thing called “enemy combatants” does set a troubling precedent. 

Nevertheless, it seems to me you could forgive any family who suffered as a result of 9/11 for worrying that something horrible could happen as a result of a protracted terror trial in downtown Manhattan. Anything from a terror attack to a much-needed ambulance stuck in snarled traffic could inflict further pain on New Yorkers who have already put up with enough.

The broader point, though, is that while we jack up the rhetoric arguing for or against the terror trial, we have once again forgotten the day-to-day travails of first responders. 

Where is the public debate on who will become the “special master?”  This is a position that is expected to be filled next month! 

As it is, winning passage of the Zadroga Bill was extremely laborious and painful.  Implementing it could be worse.  It has to be handled with delicacy and respect. 

There are people in the trenches doing great work preparing for this process.

But will we be ready when the rhetoric and headlines turn nasty?

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

A Portrait of Bravery and Baseball

Jimmy Breslin

Despite a long spell of winter weather that seems more appropriate for skiing, baseball season opens up across America next week. 

It is shaping up to be another barnburner of a year, certainly in the American League East, where Irish American fans in Boston and New York will yell and scream at each other, as the powerhouse Yankees and stacked Red Sox duke it out.

It is fitting, then, at this time of year, to look back at the so-called American national pastime. To look back to an era when the greatest concerns were not who was going to get the largest slice of baseball’s billion-dollar pie. 

To look back at a time when the game’s all-time home run king was a boozer and womanizer (Babe Ruth), but not an accused steroid junky and possible perjurer (Barry Bonds, who is on trial right now).

Thankfully, we have legendary Irish American newspaperman Jimmy Breslin to lend us some perspective.  Breslin’s latest book is a biography of former Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey. 

Rickey, of course, is the executive who convinced Jackie Robinson that the time was right to racially integrate Major League Baseball.  The year was 1947, and the game of baseball was as white as snow. 

Integration in general American life was barely up for discussion, and the game of baseball was not much more interested.

As Breslin makes clear in Branch Rickey (Lipper/Viking), the brainy general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers thought the time was right -- but only if the right kind of player was up to this extraordinary challenge. In the end, Robinson paved the way for a cultural revolution. 

Of course, back then, there was no way to tell if this experiment was going to work.  Opposition was fierce, and there was no guarantee Robinson himself would be able to survive the ugly racism that was surely going to come his way.

After all, Robinson famously faced a court martial in 1945 when, as an Army lieutenant in World War II, he refused to back down when a white bus driver spewed racist words at him while telling him to get to the back of the bus.

Indeed, as Breslin also makes clear, while this is a noble story with heroic behavior, that is not all there is to the story of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson.

Rickey, after all, may have been a visionary.  But he was also a businessman. 

He knew that getting Robinson onto the diamond at Ebbets Field would change America.  But he also knew it would simply make them a better baseball team.

Breslin uses his trademark razor-sharp wit to, at the same time, credit Rickey with changing the game, even if his models or motivations were not always pure.

Rickey, for example, is credited with creating the minor league farm, system, which allowed teams to draft very young players and mold them, then use them when they were ready for the big leagues -- or trade them.
As Breslin puts it, players were grown “like crops.” He adds that the minor league system “was modeled somewhat after the Southern system of slavery.”

Then again, Breslin admits that for all of his New York credentials, he himself had some reservations about taking on this project.

“The rule I followed from my first day as a copy boy in the sports department was that you couldn’t write about a gamer unless you went to see it.  These people who tried reporting by watching television were killing readers with lifeless stories.  It still is like this, except there are many fewer readers to murder,” he says.
Breslin proceeds to tell the fascinating story of his single encounter with Rickey, way back when Breslin was in high school. 

Despite this singular meeting, Rickey is a classic Breslin subject --an underdog, no angel, and just a little bit crazy. 

Breslin might have made him up in one of his novels, as a political operative on Queens Boulevard, perhaps, if Rickey wasn’t such a colorful real-life character.

The effects of the changes wrought by Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson would be felt from Mississippi to Northern Ireland in the decades that followed.  We should never take that for granted, even if we look around and shake our heads at the current state of the baseball game. 

Not that it was so much better back then.  Rickey and the Dodgers parted ways before the Dodgers won their only World Series in 1955, and the Dodgers left Brooklyn a few years later.
Ah, the good old days.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The failed plot to kill President John F. Kennedy

On April 3, the long-awaited mini-series The Kennedys will air on cable TV. 

Starring the likes of Greg Kinnear and Mrs. Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, the mini-series was famously dropped from another cable channel a few months back.  Rumors swirled that members of the Kennedy clam were displeased by its depiction of Jack and Bobby and the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy.

Well, the mini-series will finally air beginning April 3 on something called Reelz.  This may turn out to be much ado about…well, not very much.  Most of us, like it or not, already know much more about the Kennedys than we want to know.

But this is an opportunity to recall a more or less forgotten episode in the history of the Kennedy clan.  Not many people know that the mythic era of early 1960s Camelot might have been over just one month before it began thanks to an anti-Catholic nut with a violent streak named Richard Pavlick.

So much attention is paid to the Kennedy assassination of November 1963 that it is easy to forget that in December of 1960 -- just weeks after JFK won his historic election over Richard Nixon -- Pavlick tried to kill Kennedy in Florida.

The failed JFK assassination attempt has been given fresh attention by veteran TV journalist Jeff Greenfield, who has just written a fascinating little book called Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (Putnam). 

Greenfield plays the “What if?” game with history, imagining how America would have been different if various scenarios had played out among the most powerful men in the nation’s history.

One of the scenarios Greenfield looks at is the failed attempt to kill JFK in December of 1960.  As he described it in a recent article, “On Sunday, December 11, 1960, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick, age 73, driven by bigotry against Catholics and contempt for the Kennedys’ wealth and influence, parked outside Kennedy’s Palm Beach home, holding a switch connected to seven sticks of dynamite -- enough, in the words of the Secret Service, to ‘level a small mountain.’”

Greenfield continues, “Only Jacqueline Kennedy’s appearance, to see her husband off to church, kept Pavlick from ramming Kennedy’s car and detonating the explosives. (He was captured four days later by authorities who had been tipped off.)

“The closeness of the call was appalling,” Secret Service chief U.E. Baughman wrote in his memoirs.

This even though an Irish American postal worker from Pavlick’s New Hampshire town had done a great job tipping off authorities to Pavlick’s suspicious behavior. 

Thomas Murphy was a postmaster in Belmont, New Hampshire, who started to receive messages from Pavlick after the well-known local kook had left the town.  The ominous letters implied that the world would soon know all about Richard Pavlick. 

Murphy contacted the authorities, who soon discovered that Pavlick had recently purchased dynamite.
And yet, only fate intervened and prevented the assassination.

It is fascinating to wonder what would have happened to civil rights, Cuba and even Vietnam had the anti-Catholic Pavlick succeeded. 

But it is also worthwhile to stop and imagine the hatreds that drove him.  It is far too easy to forget these days just how deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism was in American history. 

The election of JFK, as many have noted, may very well have been the final obstacle which helped Americans accept members of the Catholic church as full and equal citizens. 

Imagine, though, if Kennedy had been killed by a nut driven by those very same hatreds.

At the very least, Catholic Americans -- especially the Irish -- would have taken this hard.  They would have felt that they had finally made it to the top of the mountain, only to abruptly be thrown off.

History has more or less forgotten Pavlick.  He lived until 1975 in a New Hampshire hospital, where he died at the age of 88. 

It is possible that amidst all the sex stories about Marilyn and Bobby and Jack, the Kennedys mini-series will look at this dark, forgotten episode of anti-Catholic history.

It is possible.  But not likely. 

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Enough already with the Irish mob

A friend of mine came up to me the other day and mentioned that a new movie called Kill the Irishman, was about to open.

“How many of these Boston Irish mob movies are they going to make?” he added.
I pointed out that Kill the Irishman, which opened this week and stars Val Kilmer and Christopher Walken, is actually set in Cleveland.

But his point was well taken.

Now comes word that the legends behind Goodfellas – Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorsese – are going to team up once again for a movie based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses. The book tells the life story of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a hired killer who supposedly whacked notorious union leader Jimmy Hoffa.

For the record, to “paint houses” is mob speak for someone who is willing to kill for money.

The working title of the Frank Sheeran movie? The Irishman.

Which means, the same week Kill the Irishman opened up, we have the announcement that another movie called The Irishman is about to be made.

Oh, and you might also be reading these days about a gritty little Brooklyn movie playing in theaters called White Irish Drinkers.

This, of course, comes on top of films such as The Town, which came on top of films such as Gangs of New York and State of Grace and even the aforementioned Goodfellas, which makes much of DeNiro’s character, Jimmy Conway, being Irish.

I think we can safely say there might now be more Irish crime films than actual Irish criminals out there.

This must be what Italian Americans feel like every time yet another B-level mafia caper comes rolling out of some film studio.

Look, there is no more fascinating story than the history of the Irish American gangster, as author T.J. English has made clear in his authoritative history of this criminal specimen.

The Irish were never quite the top dogs of the underworld in any given city, yet they were always right there fighting for their unseemly slice of the pie.

In addition, they managed to blur the lines between crime and politics impressively, not to mention bloodily.

But what is this current fascination with the Irish American underworld? It is true, as the guys in The Westies liked to say, that because they were Irish they needed to prove they were crazier. That never gets tired on screen.

Danny Greene, the Cleveland legend who is the subject of Kill the Irishman, was many things. But he was most definitely crazy.

Still, it seems there is something deeper going on here, and it seems particularly relevant right around St. Patrick’s Day.

This is the time of year when everyone has their green-tinted glasses on, and we see the Irish as charming folk who wear Aran sweaters and strum harps and whistle Irish Spring tunes.

But there also seems to be an understanding that there is more to the Irish American story than Aran sweaters and Guinness. There seems to be an endless craving for the dark side of these supposedly charming people.

And it comes at a time when the Irish in America are as successful as they’ve ever been – perhaps even to the point of feeling as if they are beginning to blend into the more bland American landscape, as newer ethnic groups command attention.

Let’s face it, a lot of Irish folk love these crime films as much as anybody. Is this some way for Irish Americans to maintain their ethnicity?

Maybe that’s reading too much into it. It is interesting, though, that just as Frank McCourt tapped into a deep well of Irish sadness in the 1990s -- when Irish
Americans were prosperous and there was peace in Northern Ireland -- so it seems these armies of old-school Irish criminals have come along at a time when there is anxiety about it means to be an Irish American in 21st century America.

One thing it means? Watching movies about Irish criminals. Kill the Irishman?
It seems tempting, at least in the movie version of the typical Irish criminal. It would be nice to tell some quieter Irish American stories.

But don’t hold your breath. I think some of us still need to prove how crazy we really are.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)