The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (15 page)

“I’ll pay,” he said.

“How much?”

“What they gave me. Four hundred thousand dollars.”

“He lies again!”

“Seven hundred twenty thousand,” one of the buyers said.

“I received six hundred twenty-five thousand,” Ostreicher said.

“When will he stop deceiving and lying?” another of the buyers said.

“Which is it?” Rosengart asked sharply.

“Seven hundred and twenty thousand,” Ostreicher said finally.

The agreement was reached with both sides seething. They finished at an hour reserved for prayer. Anger was suspended. There were nine, including Ostreicher. A tenth man was needed in order to reach a minyan, the number required for prayer. “You?” they said to Rosengart. He nodded. Why, of course. The long day of distrust, deceit, and denunciations ended in prayer.

However, when Rosengart finally got back to his office, he put the details of the unconscionably bad construction into a file, where it would remain for six years. Then one day an investigator for the government’s Department of Labor took the file. It would become the start of a clear fact pattern in a case against Ostreicher.

T
HE SON, RICHIE
O
STREICHER,
had spent several years studying the Talmud in a Satmar community in Monroe, New York. Studies in Hebrew schools are at marathon length. His friend Sam Newman, who was there with him, recalls, “We studied fourteen, fifteen hours a day. We got home twice a year. He seemed to like it. I was not too sure. You can see who is going to continue as a scholar. After you come out into the free world, and you still want to study, that shows your desire. Me, I wasn’t so much for it. Richie did study once in while.”

As the sections of the Talmud are thousands of years old, each section must be scoured and discussed and gone over again and again. Newman says that of course he and Richie studied for interminable hours the rules that no one is allowed to take advantage of an employee, that no employer is allowed to eat until he pays his workers. But this refers to day workers, who put in a hard day and should be paid that night. Workers on a weekly or monthly payroll are different. As for day workers, if a man says he needs the job so desperately that he will work cheap, you shouldn’t take advantage of him. Still, he is so desperate for work that at times you create a job for him, and this puts it into a gray area. It isn’t right to take advantage of him, but the question is, is it the wrong thing to give him this work right away? After all, you’re not God. God is God. The man needs work. But does his need mean you’re supposed to pay him more than he’ll take? On the street, the answer is a distillation of scriptures: Pay the guy enough so that you can have something under your feet when you stand and claim that you’re not robbing him.

In their lives and times of living in the most diverse center of population in all the world—a Brooklyn of people driven off the cotton fields of the South by machines, or from the slums of San Juan and Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo and the sparse living of Cholula—the Hasidim had the most complicated feelings. They didn’t like anybody who wasn’t white, don’t worry about that. But they couldn’t do without them, particularly Mexicans, because they
were cheap labor and the world has nothing to rival that, nor has it ever. Then, unlike the non-Hasidic Jews and the Irish and Italian and Germans, the Hasidim did not flee from other races. The Hasidim bought land and houses because they were going to remain in Brooklyn. The Lubavitch grand rebbe, Menachem Shneerson, called it a deep moral obligation not to run from blacks. Others, particularly Catholics, didn’t know what he was talking about. They were moving out to Long Island to spend three and four hours a day getting to and from work because they loved the Long Island Expressway so much. The Hasidim regarded themselves as morally superior to these people. They stayed in Brooklyn and called 911 on the blacks and Mexicans at night. In the morning they hired them to work off the books, and for minimum wage—maybe.

W
ALKING INTO THE
temporal world, Richie Ostreicher went immediately to work in his father’s construction company. He also became active in the Ninetieth Precinct community meetings. If a cop was sick or injured, Richie was a visitor. He became a cop buff with a yarmulke. The police at first thought he was a local rabbi, but then Richie, by behavior and speech, magnified this illusion into his becoming a police chaplain, and a man of the cloth with this badge can do just about anything and at all times.

Williamsburg is the neighborhood of the Ninetieth Precinct, which is in a gray cement three-story corner building on Union Street. The precinct shares the front of the building with the Fire Department’s Battalion Fifteen. Chief John Dillon, short and stocky, with a crew cut, is in charge. The boss over him is Deputy Fire Chief Charles Blaich, who is a critic of the New York City Buildings Department and of the work they allowed to proceed. Blaich began with a degree in chemistry and a master’s in protection management, and then kept taking construction courses because all fire department promotion exams have many building questions.

Blaich married Mary DiBiase, who was the photographer for the
New York
Daily News
who climbed a fire escape to get the famous picture of mobster Carmine Galante dead with a cigar in his mouth in the backyard of a restaurant in Ridgewood, Queens. “Don’t you look up my dress!” she said to the photographers following her up the ladder. Her photo went all over the world. Now she raises two kids in Staten Island and once in a while gets a call from the
New York Times
and from some Catholic publications. She goes out with her cameras and tells herself, “queen for a day.” She bought $6,500 worth of cameras for sports events, and she takes pictures of night baseball games at Yankee Stadium while whatever her family does for dinner, they do it alone.

Around the side of the building is Truck Eight of Police Emergency Services. Upstairs, always on the ready, is Billy Pieszak, out of Our Lady of Czestochowa school, on Thirty-second Street in the Sunset Park neighborhood. During his school days Polish was the first language. His home bar is Snooky’s, which everybody in his Brooklyn knows. His best souvenir is a New York City detective badge used to open the show
NYPD Blue
. It was given to him by Bill Clark, who once was a detective in the Ninetieth Precinct and went on to become the producer of
NYPD Blue
.

There was an afternoon when Bill Clark and a television crew were shooting a scene in front of the precinct. A car with police lights and windshield parking placards pulled up, and a heavy guy with a beard and yarmulke got out.

“Bill Clark,
NYPD Blue?
I’m the NYPD Jew,” he said.

He introduced himself as Richie Ostreicher. Clark thought he was a Police Department chaplain. If there is one thing that makes an Irish detective back off, it is a Jewish chaplain. Clark, even though retired, did what every Catholic cop ever did, and that was to virtually genuflect. This came from the nights and days of the Satmar’s famous Rabbi Wolfe, who was introduced as an untouchable by the Brooklyn commander and who then walked into the squad rooms of the Sixty-sixth and Seventy-first and Ninetieth Precincts and without
so much as a grunt of hello went into the confidential files. Detectives typed up notes without looking at him.

Rabbi Wolfe’s main need was all accident reports involving Satmars. If, on rare occasions, a Satmar had a criminal matter pending, Rabbi Wolfe studied the complaint, then asked for a match.

After the day’s filming, Clark went for dinner at the Old Stand, on Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Richie followed in his car. As he observed kosher rules, he ate no food. Instead, he had soda and talked incessantly about the police. He said it was “the job,” which is how police give their occupation: “I’m on the job.” He identified precincts in cop language. It was the “nine-oh,” not the Ninetieth. He was engaging and excited about cops. Clark recalls, “He did not have a gun. If he had one, he would have made sure that I was aware of it, that he was carrying. He talked like the construction business was his. But I assumed his father was the show and that Richie just did things for him.”

When Clark got back to the Regency Hotel, where he was staying, there were flowers in the room for his wife, Karen, from Richie Ostreicher.

Richie Ostreicher was married on November 25, 1998, and had the reception at the Le Marquis at 815 Kings Highway. The guest list showed Police Commissioner Safir at table fifty-four, Inspector John Scanlon at fifty-five, First Deputy Commissioner Patrick Kelleher at thirty-one, Inspector Vincent Kennedy at thirty-two, Deputy Chief of Patrol William Casey and Chief Tom Fahey at thirty-six, in addition to the mayor’s special assistant, Bruce Teitelbaum.

The father had just bought nine lots from the city at an uncontested sale for $345,000. The lots ran the length of a long Williamsburg block, Middleton Street. He intended to build three-and four-story apartment houses.

AT THE SAME TIME
the construction work of Eugene Ostreicher was stopped temporarily by the Fire Department, Eduardo Gutiérrez
was in and out of stores asking for work. A Korean who had a fruit store on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn hired him without saying a word. Eduardo knew that the job was seven days a week of twelve-hour days at pay of $250 a week.

Eduardo became another Mexican sitting on a box in front of the flowers and fruit bins outside a market, the immigrant learning that
America
is a word that also means drudgery.

The United States Department of Labor showed in a survey that a Korean immigrant starting work in New York received $500 a week and a Mexican only $270, which is an unrealistically high figure. Down to the bottom, the lightest skin color does best.

One Korean store owner hired a Korean for $500 and two Mexicans for $230 and $270 a week. When his business slowed, he fired the Korean and one Mexican and hired a second Mexican for $170 a week.

The study showed that the usual Mexican earned $170 a week for a seventy-hour week, the equivalent of 1,700 pesos; there was no such salary in dream or reality anywhere in San Matías.

The Mexican population in the United States has reached six million. They wire home $6 billion a year. This amount is counted on by Mexico’s banks. Mexico’s credit line with American banks is based on the expected national income from Mexicans without papers in America.

They are in the dark dawn doorways of coffee shops and restaurants, the bread delivery next to them, waiting for the place to open for the start of their twelve hours as dishwashers and porters for $170 for a six-day week.

“Why don’t you go to school?” Angelo, the owner, asked José, fourteen, when he presented himself for a job in the Elite Coffee Shop on Columbus Avenue. José asked, “Is the school going to pay me?” Angelo shrugged and he motioned the kid to the kitchen, where he would still be ten years later.

They all put their bodies up.

My friend Maurice Pinzon was on an East Side subway when three Mexicans got on at the stop underneath Bellevue Hospital. One held up a hand that had a white hill of bandages. He cursed the job that caused this. He had lost a finger and the doctors in Bellevue couldn’t help. “They throw away my finger like garbage,” he said. One of his friends said, “Now you cannot work.”

“Why not?” the injured one said.

“How can you drive at work?” one of his friends said.

The guy shrugged. “I drive with one hand.”

In Brooklyn, the A train on the old dreary el tracks outside drowned out the crying of the women in the second-floor rooms. The body of Iván Martínez, 17, a brother and cousin to the thirteen people in the apartment, had just been taken off the street and carted to the medical examiner. He was here from Puebla, delivering pizza for $150 a week, when three hoodlums from the neighborhood shot him in the head, took $36, and went for chicken wings from a Chinese takeout.

And Brother Joel Magallan sits in the offices of the Asociación Tepeyac de New York on West Fourteenth Street and talks about the trouble of trying to make it better. “They hired census organizers a year before. They hired Mexicans one month before. We had no chance. The new president of Mexico wants to have a guest worker program. You sign up in Mexico. That means none of the people coming here as guest workers can join a union.”

He held out his hands. In the far suburbs of Suffolk County, two Mexicans who stood in front of a 7-Eleven store in the town of Farmingville were picked up by two whites who said they wanted them for day work but instead took them to an isolated place and gave them a beating. Some politicians in Suffolk thought that a central hiring hall would stop violence, but the county executive turned down the idea. He said it would be illegal to put a roof over their heads.

In the room next to Magallan’s offices, one of his staff was interviewing a young guy who had been working at a store selling
accessories in the Bronx. He worked one hundred hours a week for $200. The boss had tables set up outside the store and wanted the Mexican to work them. “I had a bad cold,” the Mexican told Magallan’s worker. “He fired me.” They had the Mexican get a witness and made out papers for $8,800 in back pay. Maybe there would be this one victory. Maybe not. It is so hard to be on the bottom in New York.

Eduardo Gutiérrez became another of the black and brown who stand in the cold darkness of Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and wait for someone to pick them up for a day’s work. It is his first morning here. He had come to Brooklyn for a construction job, but it was shut down for a while, and the Korean market was a bust, so he was on the street to look for work.

There is no street with the past and present of Bedford Avenue, which starts miles away at hamburger stands and bars around Brooklyn College and crosses Nostrand Avenue to form a space where old men, with cheers still in their ears, tell of the day John F. Kennedy drew a crowd of far over a million in his campaign in 1960.

After the college neighborhood, Bedford Avenue runs into streets almost entirely of color. It is here, a few yards up from the corner of Empire Boulevard, that it goes past high gloomy brick public housing known as Ebbets Field Houses, which stand where the old ball field had the Dodgers as a home team. So few know that it is the place where the most profound social change in the country took place. That was on a raw March afternoon in 1947 when Branch Rickey, the owner of the Dodgers, sent a typewritten note to the press box at Ebbets Field during a preseason exhibition game. “The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of infielder Jack Roosevelt Robinson from Montreal. He reports immediately.” Thus changing baseball, and the nation, whether it realized it or not. Robinson was the first of color ever to play in the majors. This happened while Martin Luther King Jr. was a sophomore in an Atlanta high school, it was before
Brown vs. Board of Education
, before Harry Truman integrated the armed forces, before Little Rock school desegregation,
before the lunch counter sit-ins of the South. Before anything here was Jackie Robinson on first base at Ebbets Field as the first black in baseball. Long years later, during a lecture at the New York Historical Society, Frank Slocum, who had been in the Dodgers office in Robinson’s time, was asked how something of such magnitude and complications could have been done with only two sentences, when any decent law firm would compile a foot-high stack of briefs.