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One evening this past fall, Barack Obama's Presidential campaign went to Newark, bringing together the two leading figures of what might be called the Oprah Winfrey wing of the Democratic Party. At a downtown rally, the task of firing up the crowd and introducing the candidate fell to Cory Booker, Newark's thirty-eight-year-old mayor, who is Obama's most prominent backer in New Jersey. Obama and Booker have shared in Winfrey's admiration and largesse, and it was through the Winfrey connection that the two men met, and became friends. Their deeper kinship resides in their identities as breakthrough figures—African-American politicians whose appeal transcends race. Both men, reared in the post-Selma era and schooled at élite institutions, developed a political style of conciliation, rather than confrontation, which complemented their natural gifts and, as it happens, nicely served their ambitions. The wish for a post-racial politics is a powerful force, and rewards those who seem to carry its promise. Both Booker and Obama had been scouted by the political pros and the media almost from the start of their public lives. Presidential potential was discovered in Booker when he was still a city councilman, and in Obama when he was a state legislator in Illinois. Obama decided to chance the fast track, declaring a run for the White House before reaching midway in his first United States Senate term. But it may have been Booker who followed the more audacious course: he cast his fate with Newark.
As the hour of the Obama event approached, Booker was in another part of town, the city's Ironbound section, in the parish hall of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, conducting his monthly open-house meeting with constituents. The session was proceeding, as most do, with Newarkers asking for the kind of help that Booker, in most cases, couldn't provide. Many wanted work, for themselves or for family. A white-haired lady complained about the mounting garbage in the vacant lot across from her home. A diminutive woman named Maria Bekowski just wanted Booker to hear her story: her husband had died, the landlord had raised the rent, and now their crêpe business was gone. Booker moved around the room, listening earnestly to each story, until an aide signalled that it was time to leave. He hugged the crêpe lady, and slipped out the back door of the church.
I rode along as Booker's black S.U.V., driven by a plainclothes police sergeant, eased into rush-hour traffic. Most of the cars were heading out of the city, an indication of just one of Newark's many problems. Unemployment is double the national average, and of the city's hundred and fifty thousand jobs more than three-fourths are held by people who don't live in Newark. That means not only a smaller tax base but diminished civic involvement. Booker had sold himself to Newark as someone who could sell Newark to others, and he spends much of his time with capitalized outsiders, talking up Newark's advantages—its proximity to New York City (ten miles away), its port, its airport, and its rail systems. At the moment, though, Newark's most marketable commodity is Booker.
When he arrived in the city a decade ago, he was a second-year student at Yale Law, and already notable for his promise. He had been student-body president and a member of the football team at Stanford, and had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was a striking young man, with blue-green eyes and a quick smile, animated and immensely personable—the sort of person who attracts important mentors. One of these was Ray Chambers, the leverage-buyout pioneer, who is a Newark native and one of the city's most influential citizens. Chambers helped convince Booker that he had a political future in Newark, and he and others have aggressively positioned Booker as the face of a new Newark.
During the drive to the Obama event, Booker returned a call from Chambers, who told Booker that he had arranged a meeting with a group of important developers in New York, people who had avoided Newark for years; now they were eager to hear from the city's young mayor. By the time Booker finished talking, we had arrived at the rally site, the Performing Arts Center, and he had not yet looked at his talking points. He read aloud from the first page—"Barack Obama draws on his ingenuity, authenticity, integrity, to unite America"—and frowned.
"Sounds very vanilla to me," he said. "I'll have to think of some chocolate, real quick. Or some Neapolitan, maybe, is the way to go. All righty! We'll wing it!" With that, he was out of the car and heading toward the backstage door. Inside the auditorium, the orchestra seats were nearly filled by Obama enthusiasts, and the candidate's travelling media corps was in position. Booker made a startling entrance—he ran to the center of the stage, grabbed the microphone, and hollered, "Hellooooo!" The crowd whooped, and he added, with a bob of the head, "It's hot in here!"
I had heard Booker give his Newark pitch to civic groups—a measured appeal, with references to "transportation modalities" and "funding mechanisms"—and his performance that evening was a surprise. He sprang directly into the mode of a tent preacher, at mid-sermon. "Some people applaud change, but we want transformation," he intoned. "Some people say we need to take a step forward. I say we need a quantum leap.
"If you look at the issues we have going on in America today," he continued, shouting now, "we all know, in our hearts, in our homes, and in our neighborhoods, we can no longer tolerate politics as usual, we can no longer tolerate the same people over and over again. We need somebody that's going to come in and have a vision, that's going to have insight, that's going to have audacity, who's going to have integrity and authenticity—and that is Barack Obama!"
Booker went on like this for several minutes, drawing loud cheers at the payoff lines, and offering an unsubtle dig at Obama's establishment rivals. "I'm so tired of people talking about experience," he said. "It was their experience that got us into a war." When at last Booker brought Obama onto the stage, he faced the candidate, bowed deeply from the waist, and left. Booker didn't linger at the rally. He walked directly to his vehicle, asked the driver to turn on the lights and the sirens, and headed back to the community meeting in the Ironbound.
On our way to the church, I asked Booker if he ever reflected upon his own career in light of Obama's swift rise. He replied by telling me how things had been for him five years ago, after his first run for mayor.
In 2002, as a freshman city councilman, Booker had waged an insurgent mayoral campaign against the four-term incumbent, Sharpe James, a cunning machine pol who had run City Hall since 1986. James fought viciously to hang on—on one occasion, according to Booker's people, referring to his opponent as a "faggot white boy"—and did, but Booker's campaign, premised on an end to corrupt, race-based bossism, established him as a political celebrity. The contest, which seemed to presage a new order in black politics, attracted national press coverage, and inspired the documentary film "Street Fight." Booker became a favorite of Democratic benefactors in Hollywood and on Wall Street; New Jersey's former Governor Brendan Byrne declared, "I think he's going to be President of the United States one day. There's an inevitability about Cory Booker's future." The state political establishment, which had backed James, began courting Booker with talk of statewide office. When scandal forced Senator Robert Torricelli to withdraw from his 2002 U.S. Senate reëlection race, Booker was approached about replacing him on the ballot. Had he accepted the chance and won, Booker would have entered the Senate as its only black member, two years ahead of Obama—who was, at the time, still a relatively obscure Illinois legislator. Booker declined the overtures. On the night of his loss to James, he announced his intention to stay in Newark and to run again in 2006.
"I wasn't in this for a political position, I was in it for a sense of personal purpose," he told me. "I would betray myself if it became just about a quick rise."
Newark was well acquainted with politicians who were in the business for themselves, but Booker's politics of self-fulfillment, naïve as it sometimes appeared, was something new. Booker had grown up in the prosperous suburbs of New Jersey, the object of such high expectations that, when he decided in law school that his calling was to save Newark, the only question from his family and friends was "How can we help?" Booker considers this awakening "the greatest blessing of my life," as it freed him from agonizing over how and where he should invest his talents. The neoconservative Mark Gerson, a schoolmate of Booker's at Yale Law, and one of his closest friends, recollects that Booker was scarcely around New Haven after his second year. "He had this really passionate devotion to ameliorating the suffering that he saw in Newark," Gerson recalls. "I mean, he'd go there all the time, and he basically lived there. It just really resonated with him that he had to do something. At that point, the only question was: What was the most effective way for him to marshal his energies? He knew, even then—and I knew, everyone around him knew—that he could do something. Something very significant. It was a matter of how."
Among those eager to sign on to the Booker mission was the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which bestowed upon Booker a two-year fellowship that paid him a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar annual salary to practice public-interest law in Newark. Booker took on slumlords and won some victories. A year later, though, he decided that, to really make a difference, he needed to win political office. "He saw how much of the suffering was a consequence of bad governance," Gerson says.
What Newark needed, Booker believed, was a devoted core of talented people who knew how to balance budgets and manage agencies, and a leader who could apply innovative ideas to Newark's chronic miseries, such as schools and public safety. He had enormous self-confidence, and he exuded ambition and idealism in almost equal measure. Richard Holbrooke, the former Assistant Secretary of State, met Booker at a luncheon one afternoon, and walked away feeling as if he had just encountered a VISTA volunteer from the Kennedy-Johnson era.
Booker's 2006 mayoral campaign attracted young volunteers and vast sums of money, mostly from outside Newark. Booker outspent his opponent, Ronald Rice (a Sharpe James surrogate), by twenty-five to one, and he took in checks from Steven Spielberg, Chris Rock, and Barbra Streisand, among other celebrity Democrats. Booker won by a record margin. His inaugural gala set a Newark standard for glitz. Some guests paid thirty thousand dollars for a twenty-person luxury box at Riverfront Stadium, and the cheapest ticket went for five hundred dollars (roughly the average Newarker's weekly wage). Over the generations, Newark politics had produced its share of showmanship, drama, and even farce; the Booker era represented a novel try at glamour.
It also posed an important test, in the most difficult setting, for the new postracial politics. Newark had been a black-majority city for forty years—it is now fifty-four per cent black—governed through most of that time by two black mayors, Kenneth Gibson and Sharpe James, who enjoyed the support of national black leaders. This unbending support, even after things turned badly wrong in Newark, had the effect of associating the black political establishment with failed policies and a corrupt political culture. Booker stood as a repudiation of that, an Ivy League technocrat who insisted that there was nothing "black" about Newark's ailments or his proposed remedies.
"Stand with me, Newark," he implored at his inauguration, "because I tell you right now, I can smell the future—the future is now."
Booker thanked his "professors of Newark," a reference to people he had met in the housing projects when he arrived in the city, an eager naïf from Yale. "I got my B.A. from Stanford,'' he liked to say, "but I got my Ph.D. on the streets of Newark."
But Booker's Newark education had scarcely begun. Before a year passed, he had become the target of assassination threats and a recall effort; a surprise deficit obliged him to raise taxes and lay off hundreds of city workers. His business administrator, Bo Kemp, was given a security detail—perhaps the first municipal bean counter ever accorded that precaution. Booker had promised to stem Newark's pestilential violence with a more professional police force employing the best crime-fighting strategies, but still the bodies kept falling, at nearly the same rate as before he was elected. The low point came late one midsummer night last year, when four young Newarkers, college kids who had never been in trouble, were set upon in a schoolyard and shot, execution style. Three of them died. Two days later, a local activist—one of Booker's professors of Newark—came up to him after a community meeting and said, "Cory Booker, their blood is on your hands."
The northern division of the Garden State Parkway begins at the New York border and winds south past Saddle River, Ho-Ho-Kus, Montclair, and Glen Ridge, the sorts of prosperous havens that make New Jersey one of the wealthiest states in the country. Farther down the parkway, across the Passaic River, is Exit 145, which is like a passage to an alternative universe.
Newark is perceived by outsiders as a place best avoided, a frightening city where an unwary stranger is apt to get mugged, or have his car stolen, or worse. One-quarter of Newarkers (nearly twice the national average) live below the poverty line, and the city's median income, of thirty-four thousand dollars, is half that of New Jersey. Forty per cent of the city's residents do not have full-time work, and an outsized portion of those who do have jobs work for the city—Newark's biggest employer. Newark leads the nation in the percentage of children being brought up by grandparents (the city's out-of-wedlock birth rate is seventy per cent). Newark is a college town, with five campuses, but only twelve per cent of its adult citizens have a college degree (compared with twenty-seven per cent in the nation as a whole). That is certainly a reflection of the city's abysmal public-school system, which spends nearly twice the national average per pupil but graduates only a third of its high-school students. Half of Newark's eighth graders fail language-proficiency tests, and three out of four fail math tests. In the early nineties, it was discovered that the schools were overtly corrupt—funds were routed away from the classroom, and administrative positions were being bought and sold. The state assumed control of the city's schools in 1995, and has run them since, to little avail.
The most malignant force is Newark's violence. The cityscape is a gallery of mayhem, with "R.I.P." memorials spray-painted on walls, sidewalks, and schoolyards, in homage to fallen friends. The dead are typically young African-American and Hispanic men, often associated with the city's thriving illicit-drug economy. Newark's population is one-sixth the size of Manhattan's, but its murder rate is eight times as large, and six times worse than the national average. That's why Booker has made public safety a top priority, and why he insists upon being personally informed of every new shooting in the city. I was visiting him one evening last fall when his police director stopped by to update him on a shooting that had occurred that afternoon. While the two men were talking, they were interrupted by an officer bringing news of yet another shootout, a vengeance incident, just a few blocks away. In his off hours, Booker is notified of violent incidents by the police, who text-message his BlackBerry. "It's sort of the weird relationship I have with my city BlackBerry," he says. "Any violent crime at all will come through. So, unfortunately, that's integrated into most weeks, if not days."
The Port of Newark is one of the largest seaports in the country, and Newark Liberty airport is the country's fifth-busiest international gateway. But there is only one movie theatre in New Jersey's largest city, and just four chain supermarkets. When Booker was staffing his administration, one of his young recruits told him that when she needed to buy a new television set she had to look outside the city, because there were so few retail options.
Newark's maladies are made more vivid by the insistent presence of the city's former self. It is asserted in the fiction of Philip Roth, which summons the vital, striving city of Roth's postwar youth, and in the reminiscences of former Newarkers, whose devotion to an irretrievable time and place rivals that of former Brooklynites.
Newark is among the country's oldest cities, founded as a refuge by New England Puritans, but it has not been a place that could be called a "fair city." Newark is a place of heft and big bones and solid constitution. Brick City, it calls itself. Its location at the nexus of a network of railroads, canals, and turnpikes made it a natural center of commerce in the eighteen-forties, and eventually the most industrialized city in America. Newark's factories produced leather and celluloid, sheet metal and thread, pistols for the Army and paper boxes for hats. The Westinghouse Works plant, on Orange Street, made radio parts, switches for the Holland Tunnel, and curling irons. Krueger Brewery was the first to distribute beer in cans. And, for more than a century, Newark was a leading insurance center, with both Mutual Insurance and Prudential headquartered on Broad Street, downtown.
If there is one abiding symbol of Newark's former pride, and its ruinous decline, it is the imposing four-story Art Deco structure on Chancellor Avenue, Weequahic High School. Chancellor Avenue was the Champs-Élysées of Jewish Newark, the Weequahic section stretching from the stately Weequahic Park, with its lake and golf links, through tree-lined neighborhoods of comfortable homes, before passing into Irvington. Along the way were the sweet shops, pickle-barrel delicatessens, and pizzerias. Weequahic was the neighborhood claimed by second- and third-generation Jews who had made it in Newark. In the postwar years, before Newark's outward migration began, Weequahic High School was consistently ranked among the best in America. Roth graduated from there in 1950, and, even a decade later, Weequahic led the state in producing graduates who went on to earn Ph.Ds. It was the sort of school readily credited by its graduates for their subsequent achievements, a place that inspired a lasting loyalty and, from Roth, fiction's best high-school cheer:
Ikey, Mikey, Jake, and Sam,
We're the boys who eat no ham,
We play football, we play soccer—
We keep matzohs in our locker!
Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!
The Weequahic Indians still play ball on the vast playing fields adjoining the school, but, according to a 2007 study, Weequahic High is now deemed a "dropout factory"—a designation accorded schools with a dropout rate of forty per cent or higher. There are about seventeen hundred such schools in the United States, and three of them are in Newark, the worst being Weequahic High.
Newark's decline began just as the city seemed at its most robust, in the early postwar years. Its population reached its peak, four hundred and thirty-eight thousand, in 1950. The Celluloid Company, once a major employer, having lost the market to better, less flammable plastics, eventually closed. The famed Newark breweries faded away and mostly vanished. Newark's tanneries were slowly pushed out of the city. The Newark Police Department sponsors an annual "safe day" for Jewish families to visit cemeteries in neighborhoods now considered to be unsafe.
Meanwhile, new parkways and turnpikes opened the suburbs to city dwellers. As the mostly white middle class and the manufacturing base departed, Southern blacks, in search of work, came streaming in. In one remarkable period, from 1960 to 1966, Newark's demographic makeup changed from a sixty-five-per-cent white majority to a sixty-two-per-cent black and Hispanic majority.
Newark was peculiarly handicapped by its political culture, perhaps the most corrupt in urban America. Since the nineteen-twenties, Newark had made itself hospitable to the most nefarious elements of the Mob. Principal among them was Abner (Longy) Zwillman, who rose from peddling fruits and vegetables to controlling Newark's numbers racket and, ultimately, most of its organized criminal activity. Zwillman "imported" much of the liquor that made its way into the United States during Prohibition. He was an early member of the national crime syndicate, and a genuine thug, but he also had a certain gossip-page charm. He owned popular night clubs and dated Jean Harlow, and he befriended, and eventually controlled, important Newark politicians. Zwillman's chief rival was Ruggiero (Richie the Boot) Boiardo, who was the head of Newark's Italian Mob. Zwillman dominated Newark's organized crime, and its politics, until February 27, 1959, when he was found hanging from a rafter in the basement of his home. Boiardo then became Newark's uncontested crime boss (and, he later boasted, the inspiration for Vito Corleone; some of the "Sopranos" characters are said to have been modelled on his associates). The degree to which Boiardo also controlled the city's politics was documented in a series of F.B.I. surveillance recordings, which detailed the Mob's influence on the 1962 mayoral election of Hugh Addonizio.
Addonizio became mayor at what turned out to be a critical moment for Newark. As its revenue base shrank, the city raised taxes to compensate, reaching a punitive property tax rate of $661.70 on a ten-thousand-dollar home. Property was sold at giveaway prices and, in many cases, was simply abandoned. On top of the city's official taxes, there was also a shakedown fee for anyone wishing to do business with the city. What remained of Newark's middle class by the mid-nineteen-sixties finally gave up. "Whoever was able to move to the suburbs, moved," a federal government report later concluded.
Among those who could not leave were many in the city's new black majority, tens of thousands of whom were now without jobs, and consigned to abysmal housing conditions. Addonizio, who had relied on an alliance between blacks and Italians for his win, integrated Newark's police force and brought some blacks into government; but the real power in the town was firmly held by the white minority, which controlled the City Council and the school board, and dominated the police force. Black Newarkers had genuine grievances, including an urban-renewal project that called for clearing a hundred and fifty acres in the mostly black Central Ward in order to build a medical and dental college. Addonizio made matters worse when the secretary of the school board retired; overlooking a qualified black candidate, he appointed a white man with only a high-school diploma to oversee a school system largely populated by black children.
It was a perfect setting for the radical fevers of the era to take hold, and they did. Tom Hayden moved to Newark in 1964, and, with several other S.D.S. activists, gained influence over the federally funded anti-poverty program in Newark, using it as a political base in challenging the city government. Others came, too—an assortment of black militants, student activists, antiwar radicals, and the occasional racial huckster. Albert Roy Osborne, a former wig salesman who styled himself Colonel Hassan Jeru-Ahmed, the head of the (mostly imaginary) Blackman's Volunteer Army of Liberation, led local black citizens in raucous confrontations at school-board meetings. Audley (Queen Mother) Moore, the revered Black Nationalist, came over from Harlem, and seized the chair at the conclusion of one particularly rowdy planning-board meeting.
The rhetoric of black identity, and racial confrontation, became ever more pointed. Public rallies featured such speakers as the writer and Newark native Amiri Baraka. The former LeRoi Jones had found an intellectual home, and some artistic success, as a Beat poet and playwright in New York but had been drawn back to Newark in 1966. By then a committed Black Nationalist (venturing into anti-Semitism), Baraka and his wife, Amina, established a theatre they called Spirit House, which soon became the home base of the most militant activists. Neighborhood youngsters were taught how to use mimeograph machines, for the production and distribution of incendiary political flyers. "We were agitating furiously," Baraka recalls now. "I had stamped 'Black Power!' across buildings around the city. We were putting out leaflets and stuff. We had to fight, we had to struggle. That was clear, because we saw ourselves as Malcolm's children."
Such was the atmosphere in Newark on the evening of July 12, 1967, when a taxi-driver named John Smith was pulled over by two Newark police officers whose patrol car Smith had allegedly been tailgating. Smith disputed the cops' assertion that he'd been driving provocatively, and when he was arrested an altercation resulted. The incident occurred directly in front of the William P. Hayes Homes, one of Newark's high-rise housing projects ("sky ghettos"), many of whose residents watched from their windows as Smith was dragged into the Fourth Precinct police station, across the street. A crowd gathered on the street below, and a rumor quickly spread that Smith had been killed. A delegation of local civil-rights leaders went to the precinct house, visited with Smith, and reported to the crowd that he was alive, urging them to go home. As a member of the delegation spoke, a Molotov cocktail flew by and smashed into the brick wall of the precinct house. Cops, wearing riot gear that included First World War-style helmets, rushed into the fray. Down the street, a liquor-store window was smashed, the first of hundreds of such incidents that would occur during the next four days. "It was rebellion," Baraka says. "I never say 'riot.' The people were pissed off. They had just taken too much, you know?" When the Newark riots ended, on July 16th, twenty-six people had been killed, twelve hundred had been injured, and nearly fifteen hundred arrests had been made.
During a state inquiry into Addonizio's handling of the riots, and surrounding events, investigators learned of the Mayor's kickback schemes, and of his ties to the Mob. He brashly declared himself a candidate for reëlection in 1970, even though he had to ask the judge presiding over his criminal trial for permission to be in Newark on Election Day. But politics in post-riot Newark had moved far beyond the cobbling together of black-Italian coalitions. "Our premise was to get the white people out," Baraka says. "That's it. Get them out of City Hall. I mean, not necessarily run them out of town, but to get their foot off our necks and, to that extent, drive them out of there. That was clearly our mission. And, of course, the rebellion itself helped speed the leaving of the white folks. I mean, that rebellion must have scared a lot of people. A lot of middle-class Negroes got out of here, too. So that was sort of the clearing out."
Baraka's candidate in the 1970 race was Kenneth Gibson, an African-American city engineer, who ran a campaign that could appeal to the city's remaining whites. (He was a reformer.) Baraka helped bring Jesse Jackson and other prominent blacks to Newark on Gibson's behalf. Privately, he anticipated the revolutionary implications of a Gibson victory. "We will nationalize the city's institutions as if it were liberated territory in Zimbabwe or Angola," he wrote.
With the election of Gibson, who served as mayor for sixteen years, control of the city did pass to blacks, but he disappointed those who had visions of a new black paradise in Newark. Baraka and his allies planned to assume control of Newark's public-radio station, WBGO, as well as the local cable-television franchise, which they intended to use as a reëducation tool in the public schools. Those and other plans were stymied by the new Gibson-led government. "They never understood what Black Power meant, what we were talking about," Baraka says. "Once we got them in, ironically, we were sort of shoved aside." Gibson disappointed, too, as a reformer. Patronage and political favoritism in dispensing city jobs and contracts, an old Newark tradition, continued, as did the perpetuation of no-show jobs. This was brought home to Newarkers in the summer of 1981, when the city's water supply was interrupted. It turned out that vandals had opened a valve on a major pipe supplying the city's water. Attention turned to the water system's chief of security, who happened to be living in Florida at the time, enjoying a comfortable retirement, aided by his twenty-four-thousand-dollar city salary. "I gave him a perk, if you will," Gibson conceded. During Gibson's tenure, Newark's unemployment rate increased, the city's population shrank, and Newark schools plunged toward the depths that ultimately resulted in the state takeover.
In 1986, Gibson was defeated by Sharpe James, who also fashioned himself as a reformer. He, too, disappointed in that regard. James's chief of staff, Jackie Mattison, was convicted of bribery in 1997. (Agents found a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars stuffed beneath the floorboards of his girlfriend's attic.) James himself now faces corruption charges. According to prosecutors, he used city-issued credit cards to finance personal vacations and entertainment to the tune of fifty-eight thousand dollars, including nearly nine thousand dollars to Norwegian Cruise Line for a vacation that he planned to take shortly after leaving office. He is also accused of having arranged land deals for his frequent companion Tamika Riley, who paid about forty-six thousand dollars for nine city properties and resold them to developers for more than six hundred thousand. (James and Riley have pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
But James understood that racial pride counted for a lot in Newark, and that people took pride in a man who had been brought up in the streets of Newark at a time when a black kid could get badly hurt by venturing into the wrong neighborhood. If he drove a Rolls-Royce and owned a yacht and enjoyed the company of beautiful women, that, too, was a validation. He was a political showman, and he worked hard at it. When Booker ran against James, in 2002, James, who styled himself "the Real Deal," said to his upstart opponent, "You have to learn to be an African-American, and we don't have time to train you." People who had grown up in Newark knew just what he meant. Black Newark was more than a demographic description.
In the summer of 1969, as Newark grappled with questions of Black Power and an approaching election, Cory Booker's parents were house-hunting in Harrington Park, a comfortable, nearly all-white town in northern New Jersey. A few months after Cory, their second son, was born, Cary and Carolyn Booker, executives for I.B.M., were transferred from Washington, D.C., to New York. Colleagues suggested that they take up residence in Harrington Park, a town with pleasant homes and a reasonable commute to New York, and the Bookers soon found a house they liked. The next day, when they called the broker who had shown it to them, they were told that the place had been sold. The Bookers confronted the broker with their suspicions of discrimination, and, with the help of the local Fair Housing Council, they were able to buy the house.
What happened to the Bookers after that event, though, is perhaps more instructive. The sellers of the Bookers' new home, a furniture-company executive and his wife, were appalled when they learned how the couple had been treated. "They had us over and apologized so profusely," Carolyn Booker recalls. "They just had no idea that this was going on. They actually took the house off the market with the real-estate agent, because they were so incensed by the whole thing." The Bookers soon met their other new neighbors—a local banker, a radiologist, a contractor, a schoolteacher—and were made to feel welcome by them all.
The Bookers found that many whites in their new community were eager to show their acceptance of a family that was very much like their own. Cary and Carolyn Booker had been among I.B.M.'s first hires in a program established to bring blacks into the company's higher ranks, with Cary recruited into sales, and Carolyn into marketing. Cary was a natural salesman, funny and thick-skinned; born to a single mother in the North Carolina Piedmont, he had gone to the state college for blacks, his tuition partly paid by home-town folks who took up a collection for him. Carolyn, a regal beauty with a dignified bearing, had once dreamed of becoming the next Dorothy Dandridge. She had grown up in Louisiana, and had attended Fisk, the private black college in Nashville. The couple met in Washington, where Carolyn, directly out of college, was working as a speech therapist for the public schools. "When we got married," Cary says, in a thick country accent, "she offered me speech lessons." The Bookers were pioneers, but not agitators; they'd come to Harrington Park, Cary says, because "we were looking for a place to live—we weren't breaking a barrier, or anything."
The Bookers expected a great deal of Cary, Jr., and Cory. When the boys were still in the crib, Carolyn sat beside them, babbling with them, "to help develop the language skills." Later, the Bookers didn't have to needle their boys about studying, because the family rules were firmly understood—anything less than A's and B's on their report cards meant no sports.
Cary and Cory were almost the only black students in school, but their parents had taken pains to instill in them a color-blind ideal. Carolyn Booker told them stories about her college years, when she supported the lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville and was joined by white students from nearby schools. She told them about the white people her mother and her grandmother had known in Louisiana, who could be counted on for help when trouble came. "You want your children to be aware that prejudice exists in the world," she told me. "But, at the same time, you want them to recognize that, on a larger scale, with just ten per cent of the population of the United States, you need to have friends of all colors, of all races, of all ethnicities. And you need to approach every person as an individual, and not as a group."
For the most part, Cory thrived in school, in the classroom and on the playing fields, and his successes were applauded by the adults in his life. When, as a junior in high school, Cory failed to make it into the honor society, alarms sounded at home. A meeting was convened at school. The Bookers met with each of Cory's six teachers, a few of whom suggested that perhaps Cory would be better off if he weren't enrolled in so many honors courses. "When everybody left," Carolyn recalls, "I turned to the guidance counsellor and I said, 'How many students do you have that are in six honors courses?' She said, 'Oh, none. We never put students in more than three honors courses.' And I said, 'Well, how did Cory get six?' And she says, 'Well, he was recommended.' So, I said, 'You all chose to kill him with kindness?' " (Cory says this is a mother's tale; he doubts that his load was that heavy.)
Cory came to see his life as an effort to live up to a "great-leader complex," which his parents impressed upon him in his youth. In high school, he was an all-state tight end and the president of his senior class. At Stanford, he played football for four years, making the all-conference academic team, served as the president of his senior class, and worked as a live-in volunteer at a student-counselling center. His friends marvelled at his ability to cast himself in new settings, take on outlandish challenges, and still flourish. Booker's experience at Oxford, though, surprised even his parents. One evening, Booker had a date with a young woman who asked that he join her after a meeting of the L'Chaim Society, a campus organization run by a Lubavitcher rabbi to promote involvement in Jewish life. When Booker arrived, his date wasn't there, but the rabbi's wife invited him to stay. "By the end of the night, he knew everyone there," the rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, recalls. "We were dancing on the tables at three in the morning."
Booker and the Rabbi (a media-wise figure who went on to write a book called "Kosher Sex") became close friends. Booker began to study Judaism, learned some Hebrew, and eventually became the president of L'Chaim. "I went over there to visit him," Cary Booker recalls, "and I said, 'Well, what the hell are you doing now?' He said, 'Well, Daddy, this is very interesting.' He said, 'This'll help me somewhere along the line.' " Booker kept up with his Jewish studies. "Who do you think is the person most in demand as a speaker to Jewish groups in this country?" Boteach asked me recently when I visited his home, in Englewood. He answered his own question: "Cory Booker."
Booker's apparent empathy extends in many directions. A 2002 article about him in the News India Times noted that, during a visit to Agra several years earlier,
not only did he take in the delights of the Taj Mahal, but sat next to the marble mausoleum and learned about Vedantic ideas as well as a secret mantra, which is so special that he cannot share it with anybody. . . . He now knows a great deal about the Vedas, meditates on a regular basis, and relishes Indian cuisine.
One of the biggest influences in his life is Mahatma Gandhi, who, he says, inspired him so much that he turned vegetarian. "Be the change you want to see in the world," is one of his favorite quotes from Gandhi.
Booker's ability to ease into different cultures was put to perhaps its most difficult test when he decided, in 1995, to go to Newark. He subsequently moved into a notorious housing project known as Brick Towers, and lived there until 2006, when the building was condemned. Last summer, Booker attended his twentieth high-school reunion, and as he walked around the schoolyard with an old friend he was struck by how nice the place was—like a college campus. "You know, I had this weird upbringing," Booker told me. "I had these parents who were not from a community like that, who grew up poor, from tough communities, who really came up through the sixties." Booker said that when his parents told their stories about growing up in the segregated South it filled him with a sense of nostalgia for a time and a place—and a culture—wholly different from the privileged life his parents had provided for him and his brother. "It was weird," he said. "I didn't grow up in Newark, but the time I felt most at home was at Brick Towers."
Booker lived on the sixteenth floor of the building, whose heaters and elevators worked only occasionally. The place was down the street from a crack house. One day, while he was walking with his father, a teen-age shooting victim stumbled into their path and died in Booker's arms. Brick Towers was Booker's passage to Newark. "I just felt so at home there," he told me. "I felt like I was part of something, finally."
Brick Towers became Booker's political base in Newark. His residence there, and his legal work on behalf of the project's fifteen hundred residents, gave him a credential (the Yale law degree meant little in Newark), and it was the president of the tenants association, Virginia Jones, one of Booker's "professors," who urged him to run for office. Outside Brick Towers, however, Booker encountered something, in each of his three campaigns, that he had never before really experienced: raw racial prejudice. The Newark grapevine had it that the light-skinned Booker was actually white, an agent of malign outside forces, maybe even the Ku Klux Klan. "He went to Stanford, and he's Jewish," Sharpe James declared matter-of-factly on the "Today" show in 2002.
The question of who is and isn't authentically black touched a nerve in the community. "I think that is one of our deepest prejudices—not recognizing the diversity that is in the black community," Carolyn Booker says. "You can take it back to slavery, where there was such a divide between the field slave versus the yard slave versus the house slave, in terms of their relationship with the white plantation owner and planter. Which then gets you into the whole color thing—what shade you are. They thought I was white. 'He has a white mother,' they'd say. Some columnists still write that he's from a racially mixed family. I find it almost comical, because surely, at some point back in my grandmother's and great-grandmother's generation, that was true. But as we go down the line, from my grandmother, who was married to a black person, to my mother and father, who are both black, to Cary and me, who are both black—I don't know how you get there. But, obviously, the skin color, the eyes, the straight hair, says, Well, you physically don't look like I look, so, therefore, your experience couldn't possibly be like my experiences."
Booker knew that he desperately needed local wisdom, and he was told that there was only one man who could help him: Carl Sharif, a near-mystical figure in the political world of Newark. Sharif had entered politics during the Addonizio era, an angry young black man who pestered his way onto the staff of an Addonizio aide. When the racial tumults came, Sharif saw mostly futility, and kept his distance. "You had all the new people who were talking revolution," he told me recently. "After all the philosophy and chatter and talking, and the brilliant speechmaking, and all the rest, none of those people who did all that were able to come here, infuse any resources, and make the circumstances better for the people who were living on the ground. They talked about it. They wrote about it. They said brilliant things about it. But they didn't open a single storefront. They didn't create a single job. They didn't do any of the things that needed to be done."
Sharif became a political manager, running the successful campaigns of several Newark politicians, and once helping a young Sharpe James, but he managed to remain independent of the ruling machines. He had a reputation for being his own man, which, in Newark politics, was decidedly rare. Sharif was also considered (Booker was told) slightly dangerous. He'd been indicted for aggravated assault in the early nineteen-eighties, and though he beat the charges (which, he insisted, were politically motivated), the affair further shaped his singular image. He avoided the press, and most politicians, too. By the time Booker came calling, in 1997, Sharif, with his short-cropped gray beard and his Morgan Freeman baritone, seemed, in the newcomer's eyes, a repository of political wisdom. ("A true genius," Booker says.)
Sharif had heard of Booker's slumlord battles, and he knew that Booker would be dismissed by many as a slick opportunist. Twice he told Booker that he wasn't interested. On Booker's third try, Sharif tested him, naming a fee that he considered to be outrageously high. Booker agreed to pay it, and asked how he could win. Sharif responded with advice that, he said, he would have given Booker for free: "You have to knock on every single door in the Central Ward."
"But that's sixty thousand people," Booker protested.
"Time's slipping," Sharif said.
Booker, characteristically, took up the challenge and, with a small team of core supporters, came close to knocking on every door in the ward. In his first campaign, for city councilman, he forced a runoff and eventually won. Sharif's consultation then, and thereafter, was enough to help Booker overcome, but not quite vanquish, the impression that he was an Ivy League operator.
The Bookers campaigned for their son in Newark, and as they canvassed the neighborhoods they found that the conversation nearly always turned to the question of black identity. "People would say, 'Yeah, I know, but can you make him talk like us?' " Carolyn recalls. The former speech therapist responded to these remarks with a small lecture. "I would say, 'Why would you want that? There's nothing wrong with the way you talk. It's the way that you've grown up, and it's what your environment has taught you. But his environment is so much broader than your environment. And where he wants to take this city will require him to interact with all kinds of people, with all kinds of language skills. Is it more important that he confront and be like you? Or is it more important that he can take his likeness in you and convince other people that they should invest in this city? Because this is really what you need.' "
The question of authenticity wasn't just a matter of skin color or idiom. It was also, perhaps essentially, a matter of political orientation. In each of his campaigns, Booker faced an opponent from an earlier generation, who was reared at a time of confrontation, and whose politics reflected that time. Al Sharpton stood with Sharpe James against Booker, and Jesse Jackson (whom Booker had admired as a teen-age volunteer in Jackson's 1988 Presidential campaign) labelled Booker "a wolf in sheep's clothing." (This generational cleft, and the confrontation-versus-conciliation divide attending it, is, of course, a key feature of our current racial politics. In Barack Obama's contest with Hillary Clinton, he faces the opposition of an array of figures from the civil-rights generation, including John Lewis and Charles Rangel, and he, too, has been labelled an upstart. A few weeks ago, Andrew Young suggested that Obama was less genuinely black than Bill Clinton—and, by extension, Mrs. Clinton.) Washington's new mayor, Adrian Fenty, whose mother is white, is a reform mayor in the Booker mold, and has also excited tensions in the black community. He was criticized for not appointing enough blacks to top positions in the district's government, and recently a poll in the Washington Post showed that while seventy-four per cent of whites in Washington believe the city is headed in the right direction under Fenty, only forty-five per cent of blacks agree.
Professor Martin Kilson, the first black faculty member to receive tenure at Harvard (now an emeritus professor), wrote a widely circulated letter of complaint against Booker, in which he asserted, "He's functioning as an errand boy Black politician for conservative Republican power-class penetration of governing control of Black Newark." Kilson had been prompted by a speech Booker gave to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, in 2000, in which Booker renounced what he called the "old paradigm" of big-city mayors who used race-based machines to dole out entitlements, and thus maintain power. Booker counted himself as part of the new paradigm—"quick thinkers, people who are trying to make their governments engines of economic opportunity and judge them not by how many jobs they can provide but by how much wealth they can create and how efficiently they can deliver services within their own city." Booker doesn't hesitate to quote Frederick Douglass, but he will do so in making an argument for, say, school choice. That is precisely the quality that attracted many of his supporters outside Newark, including his neoconservative friend from Yale Law, Mark Gerson. "He is pro-capitalist, pro-business," Gerson says. "He's pro-school vouchers. He doesn't care about the political provenance of an idea, and he's color-blind."
Booker assumed office in July, 2006, after a record victory (seventy-two per cent of the vote), but with his political identity as a Newark outsider still very much intact. He had promised to make Newark America's leading city in safety and prosperity, and now brought to that task the expertise of an inner circle composed principally of other outsiders. For the job of business administrator, he appointed the Ivy League entrepreneur Bo Kemp (who received the highest salary in city government); he hired Stefan Pryor, a pal from Yale Law, who had led the effort to revitalize lower Manhattan after the terrorist attacks, as the director of economic development; his corporation counsel, Aney Chandy, a Skadden, Arps alum, came from the state attorney general's office, where she ran the civil-rights division.
Booker's key appointment, and the riskiest one politically, was his choice of a new police director. Controlling crime was his first priority, the issue upon which his success or failure would be judged. ("I will live or die on public safety," he has said.) The Newark Police Department had played a crucial role in Newark's racial history, reaching back to events that precipitated the 1967 riots. During that period of white-minority rule in Newark, the police—mostly Italian and Irish officers, arresting black suspects—were seen by many Newarkers as an occupying force. The N.P.D. was now a fully integrated agency, and many hoped that Booker would choose his new top cop from within the ranks. Instead, he initiated a summer-long, nationwide search, and discovered that the best police departments had adopted the strategies and systems of the New York Police Department. "We interviewed everybody all over the country," he says. "And a lot of the people were the scions of the New York City police hierarchy and went to other places, and put in the same thing." In the end, Booker went directly to the source, hiring a second-generation New York cop named Garry McCarthy.
Booker defended the hire on the ground of meritocracy ("I realized that the best person for the job was not black"), but there was another compelling reason to reach outside Newark. The N.P.D. had in effect become, under Sharpe James, the enforcement wing of James's political machine, and Booker had personally felt its sting. "There are people in the Police Department that were really effectuating some of the most vicious things against me, personally," he told me. "I mean, we had sugar being poured in our gas tanks by undercover officers. We were being followed, constantly. And now that we're in office these are still people who had high-ranking positions in the Police Department."
Booker introduced McCarthy to Newark just after the 2006 Labor Day weekend, declaring that Newark "will not again, in anybody's mind, be synonymous with crime or corruption." Over the weekend, four people had been murdered in the city. McCarthy, a blunt-spoken man with a cruiserweight's build and a gray-stubble goatee, perfectly fit the image of a tough Irish cop from the Bronx. He had a temper, but also the reputation of a very smart cop, with an innovative instinct; he'd run the drug dealers out of Washington Heights, without alienating the neighborhood, and as the N.Y.P.D.'s deputy commissioner for operations he intimately knew the policing strategies that had given New York its seemingly perpetual reduction in crime. What Newark noticed about McCarthy, though, was that he is white. Amiri Baraka was so vexed by the appointment that he gave the Mayor a book titled "How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy."
McCarthy found Newark to be a revelation. For years, he had lived with his wife and two daughters in Rockland County, a thirty-minute drive north from Newark. "But I didn't hear a damned thing about this city, for almost twenty-five years," he says. "There was nothing in the media. Nothing. The place didn't exist." After he took command, it was suggested to him at a community event that his new quality-of-life program was Fascist. He was taken aback. "I said, 'Fascist? Fascist? "Fascist" went away in the sixties, didn't it?' "
I met McCarthy one evening last fall, when he allowed me to ride along to the site of a multiple shooting in the Central Ward. At the scene, he was briefed by detectives, who had gathered up nine empty .40-calibre shells and tried, to little avail, to interview possible witnesses. Knocks went unanswered, even at apartments where the lights were on and televisions were blaring. The graffiti at the scene—a repetitive lament for someone called Booby—suggested a commonplace quid pro quo. As we drove away, McCarthy spoke about the incident in the detached tone cops often assume—he had seen it before, and will see it again, probably soon. I was a bit taken aback, though, when he used the same matter-of-fact tone in describing an administrative chore he had taken care of that day. "I fired the COMPSTAT unit today," he said. "I told 'em, I can get bad numbers from anybody."
COMPSTAT was the most famous of the strategies employed by the Giuliani-era N.Y.P.D., a computerized statistical accounting, constantly updated, of which crimes are occurring in a city and where. Used creatively, and aggressively, COMPSTAT can dramatically reduce crime, by matching resources with crime hot spots. It is also an accountability tool, used to measure a unit's effectiveness. "If you can't get the job done, you're going to get thrown overboard," McCarthy said. Newark had a COMPSTAT program of sorts in place when McCarthy arrived. But, like much else in the department, it was ineffective.
"We would have, say, ten shootings in one week, and we would record eight aggravated assaults," McCarthy said. "You know, that's impossible. If you get shot, it's an aggravated assault."
A few days later, we resumed our talk in his office, in the police headquarters building, adjacent to City Hall. McCarthy sat behind his desk in a high-backed faux-leather chair; as he spoke, a cockroach made its way across the top of the chair's headrest. He said that when he arrived nearly a third of the department's cops had desk jobs, and nearly two-thirds were working a Monday-through-Friday daytime shift. "C'mon!'' he said. "You don't have to be a criminologist to figure out that cops have to work at night, particularly on the weekends." By rearranging schedules, McCarthy was able to put more cops on the street, where they were needed to implement new strategies, such as quality-of-life arrests. He said that during that week his officers had issued 1,696 quality-of-life summonses—arrests for minor infractions, in the hope of finding something more. He picked up the stack of summonses and read through them. "C'mon, tell me there's a winner in here. Ding! We've got a winner! We stopped a guy for loitering, and he had a firearm."
McCarthy said that a big part of his job has been to transform the department's culture. "One of the things that was done here is political transfers that were punitive. So you're a police officer that's working, let's say, in the Second Precinct, which is north. And you have a problem with somebody in the administration, whether it be a councilman or a political heavyweight, whatever. That police officer would most likely be transferred to a really distasteful assignment, like prison press division—something known as 'cellblock' here. That guy could be Batman or Superman, as far as policing goes. It didn't matter. What mattered was that he got on the wrong side of the wrong guy."
Not everyone in the department has embraced the McCarthy program. "My mind-set is to create a transparent, professional policing agency," McCarthy told me. "We're going to find people who became cops who shouldn't be cops, and it's our job to find out who they are, root them out, and get rid of them."
The Newark Police Department was a microcosm of the broader city government, as Booker discovered very early in his term. Within two weeks of taking office, he received a letter from the state Department of Community Affairs, informing him that the city's budget, submitted at the end of the Sharpe James administration, was such a mess that it had to be scrapped. Among the many red flags in the city's flawed accounting was the listing of $251 million in cash on hand; the same reckoning showed only $96.5 million on deposit, in city accounts. What looked like a $45-million surplus proved to be a deficit of more than $40 million. A new budget was written, which necessitated a drastic increase in property taxes. Booker's core of bright young administrators were engaged in triage; he had to ask the City Council for millions of dollars in order to hire outside legal firms to examine the city's financial arrangements. Booker went outside the city with this work—and he was criticized, since some of the firms he hired had made contributions to his campaigns—because City Hall was still populated by the James loyalists who had concocted the bogus budget.
Booker found that sometimes even the simplest ambitions were beyond reach. The city had been trying, for example, to set up a 311 hotline system for easy citizen access to the government. Booker thought the process would take six months; he now concedes that it will be more like two years.
"I think Booker's strength, in some way, is his weakness," Carl Sharif says. "Everything he tells you that he believes and wants to do, he really thinks he can do it. That's a great strength. But at the same time it could be a huge fatality. Because the truth is, you can't do it all. And the question is, how do you adjust to not being able to do some of these things that are incredibly important to you?"
Booker has found himself trading favors with members of the City Council, ostensibly members of his team, who had come into office as part of his election sweep. "It's the Realpolitik that I'm living," he says. "Being someone who considers himself idealistic, you have a council person who comes to you and says, 'My cousin needs this . . .' and you know that it's going to control votes, if you need to pass whatever. What do you do in that situation? Or, when you're looking to hire two law firms, both of which are qualified, but one is connected to a state senator. You get that every single day. You really have to know where your moral compass is, and you have to figure out what lines you're willing to cross to get to the greater good, and which ones, even though they might be a shortcut, you're just not willing to take."
Booker still faces vigorous opposition. His abiding vulnerability is his image as an interloper. The stigma revealed itself again after an odd, and damaging, experience Booker had last spring. He had attended an event in the mostly white suburb of Summit, where, microphone in hand, he went through his usual routine. He talked about his journey of faith, and spoke enthusiastically of his Newark professors, singling out one woman in particular, Judith Diggs, who had recently died. "Now, this is a huge, sort of portly woman, without many teeth in her mouth," he explained, "who probably was the most artful and eloquent user of curse words I've ever heard in my life." The audience tittered. Booker went on to say that Diggs was a district leader in her ward, "the anchor, the rock, that everybody knew."
It was the sort of language that Booker often uses when talking to people of his own background about those he has met in Newark. The talk was videotaped by one of the attendees, and the video inevitably made its way onto the Internet. The controversy that ensued—some of the most pointed criticism came from Booker's allies—posed a genuine political crisis for Booker last summer, just as he was getting mixed reviews about his first year in office, and a recall effort (instigated by James diehards) was gaining momentum. Booker apologized for the remarks.
"There are certain messages that the community has to have," Sharif says. "Certain things you have to say, whether people want to hear them or not. But, you see, if you offend people, if you offend their sensibilities, they won't vote for you. So you can't say to people, 'Look, my sanitation department is not throwing trash on the ground. You are! The community. You're throwing trash on the ground. Stop throwing crap out of your cars, put your garbage in your garbage cans. Stop walking down the street, unwrapping wrappers and just dropping stuff on the ground, and then calling City Hall and complaining about it. Clean up!' "
McCarthy expresses wonder at the byzantine politics of the city, and he is not alone among Booker's allies in wishing that the Mayor would strike at his enemies with greater force. Booker is, in a way, Giuliani without the bite. As we were talking in his office one afternoon, I mentioned to Booker that many of his strongest supporters worry that his relentless solicitude might, in the rough and tumble of Newark politics, be a real weakness. Booker, who is ordinarily so animated in conversation that his hands flail and he begins stammering, calmly clasped his hands and leaned toward me. "I've been hearing that all my life," he said. "Even on the football field. My coach would say to me, 'Cory, you knock the guy down. After the whistle blows, you're not supposed to help him back up.' But I really have lived a life that says that kindness, inspiration, tapping into the common values that we all share is a much more powerful motivating force than fear. And, frankly, if you manage that way, when you do blow a gasket I think it makes it all the more meaningful."
Newark's police director takes a different view. "I encourage him to toughen up, and wield the axe a little more, all the time," McCarthy says. "All the time. Because—and I don't say this as facetiously as you might think—we're all surrounded by assassins."
By the middle of summer, the mood in Newark had grown so testy that friends of Booker's, seeing reports of boisterous protests outside City Hall, began calling him to express concern. Booker reassured them that he was fine, and vowed to press on. He kept a schedule that wearied his aides, and it sometimes seemed that there was no block party, church celebration, or neighborhood event that he ever declined. Saturday, August 4th, was such a day.
That morning, Booker attended a street-ball basketball tournament in the South Ward. At 1 P.M., there was a thirtieth-anniversary celebration for a local pastor, followed by quick visits to four block-association parties. Then Booker attended an anti-drug event across town, followed by a reunion of former residents of the Hayes Homes—the high-rise project, now demolished, that had been the ignition point of the 1967 riots. There was another block party, and then the Mayor played Simon Says with children at one of the city's Respect for Life rallies. The day's last event was an alumni reunion at the Peshine Avenue School, featuring a performance by the school's most famous former teacher, Melba Moore. Booker danced with the crowd, then made a late-night food run, and went home to bed. At 1 A.M., he was awakened by the sound of his BlackBerry. The message was from police headquarters, and it said that four people had been shot in the city's West Ward. Booker was alarmed by the number of victims, but it sounded like a gang- or drug-related incident; he asked to be updated in the morning, and went back to sleep.
McCarthy, who had himself been in bed when he got word of the shootings, decided to go to the scene. He wasn't yet sufficiently familiar with Newark to know the way, so he rode with a police lieutenant. The shootings had occurred in a schoolyard in the Ivy Hill section of town, which was unusual. Ivy Hill, at the western edge of town, is a neighborhood of rare calm and order, almost suburban in feel. Seton Hall University is less than a mile away from the Mount Vernon School, the site of the incident; the imposing Ivy Hill apartment buildings, Newark's largest private complex, is across the street. The lieutenant, who had already been at the crime scene, warned McCarthy, "Director, it's not pretty."
Three bodies—two boys and a girl in their late teens or early twenties—lay crumpled at the base of a short green wall at the rear of the school playground. They bore knife wounds on the arms, suggesting a struggle, but they'd been killed by gunshots fired, at close range, at the back of their heads. There was so much blood on the pavement that a fire truck had to be summoned the next day. A fourth victim, a young woman who was also shot behind the ear at close range, had somehow survived, and was receiving emergency treatment at the hospital. Some ganglike graffiti were found at the scene, as well as bottles of Colt 45.
By morning, the police knew that the victims were not "players"—they weren't involved in gangs, or in the drug trade. The survivor, nineteen-year-old Natasha Aeriel, was alert, and speaking with detectives. Officers began making telephone calls to the other victims' families.
James Harvey was making breakfast when his telephone rang. It was his sister-in-law, Jaime. Harvey's twenty-year-old son, Dashon, a student at Delaware State University, often stayed at his Aunt Jaime's house, and had listed her address on his driver's license. A police officer had come to her door that morning, she told James, and asked if she would go down to the medical examiner's office to identify Dashon.
The medical examiner's building was adjacent to the hospital complex, now called University Hospital, where James Harvey was born, forty-one years earlier. Harvey's parents had been among those who came up from the South during the nineteen-sixties, looking for work. His father, Elmo, had been lucky, and hired on with the city, in the water department. James Harvey had gone to high school in Newark, and, with his father's help, he also got work at the water department, and was employed there still. "Just a blue-collar guy," he said of himself. Dashon, his oldest child, was born in the same hospital. The umbilical cord had been wrapped around his head, and when he was delivered, by Cesarean section, his head was imprinted with a circular white line, where the cord had been pressing. Like a halo, James thought. James wasn't married to Dashon's mother, but he took pride in being a part of the boy's life. Dashon made it easy. He stayed out of trouble, and his friends were good kids, too. Dashon had attended University High, which required an admissions test. His father wasn't surprised when Dashon was accepted to college, or by the fact that he seemed to be thriving there: Dashon was so popular that his classmates had recently elected him Mr. Junior.
At the medical examiner's building, James Harvey saw the grieving families of the other kids. He didn't know them, but he later learned that Dashon had gone out on Saturday night with Natasha; her younger brother, Terrance, also a student at Delaware State; and their friend Iofemi Hightower, who planned to join them at college in the fall. The kids had stopped by McDonald's and then headed over to the West Ward, where they decided to hang out by the bleachers at Mount Vernon School. When some thugs showed up, Dashon and his friends sensed trouble and tried to leave. Terrance made it to the car, but he was forced back to the playground with the others. Natasha was taken aside, where she was attacked and left for dead; the other three were lined up against the wall and shot. The killings seemed horribly random; the police have yet to establish a motive.
The next morning, James Harvey was asked to identify his son, and was led into a room by a police officer and a man in a medical smock. Dashon wasn't there. "They don't allow you to see him," he told me a few weeks later. "They want to show you a picture. 'We're gonna show you a picture of him, and then we want you to identify him that way,' they said. And the picture that they show you, you want to believe it's not your son. You want to believe it's not him. But there, by God, is your son. It's him.
"But I don't want to accept it, because I'm looking at his face, and seeing his state of mind, the way he was when they snapped that shot. And I can't get that picture out of my mind. Because the picture I see, he has his jaw swollen. He has one eye open, one eye closed. His mouth was ajar, where you could see his teeth, but you could see blood in his mouth. And to see your son that way, it's going to take a lifetime for me to ever get over it. And this is the image that I see."
By that morning, the incident was already big news. Even in a city so accustomed to sudden, violent deaths, the apparently random attack on four innocent college kids stood apart. Reporters wanted to hear from the Mayor, but Booker remained silent through much of the day. That evening, he arrived at the scene of the shooting, where a press briefing was being conducted by county officials. The city's heart had been broken, Booker said.
By Monday, the city was roiling. Booker's usual critics cast blame his way, and they were joined by others. Iofemi Hightower's mother, sobbing, declared to a television reporter, "I want Cory Booker to do something. I am grieving, but I'm angry at the same time. I want him to do something." After a community meeting, Booker was confronted by the sometime ally who had told him that the victims' blood was on his hands. "It's obvious that I'm not to blame for this, but I'm taking personal responsibility," Booker said at one public gathering.
Booker had spoken to the victims' families as soon as he learned their identities, and on Tuesday morning his office telephoned James Harvey again. There was to be a press conference that day, and the victims' families were invited to attend. James said he would try, but first he had to see to the business of readying his son for the funeral. He called his mother, Dorothy, and asked if he could bury Dashon in the family plot, next to Elmo, who had died the year before. "It was either going to be me or one of my children," she told him, giving her consent. He arranged to have the Cotton Funeral Home retrieve Dashon from the medical examiner's building. "I had to get him out of that place, that cold, desolate place. Because he has no clothes. They stripped him down—he has no clothes on, he's just laying on a table with nothing on. And I wanted to get my son cleaned up, dressed as soon as possible. To make arrangements for his burial, instead of a college graduation, which he was headed for."
Harvey realized that he would have to buy Dashon a suit. He had never bought a suit before, though he had figured that he would need one for Dashon's college graduation. He wanted to be careful about it—Dashon had been known for his sartorial style, and Harvey wanted to get it right. The salesman who helped him was very nice when James explained why he was there, almost as if he had done this before. Harvey found just what he wanted, and he decided to buy an identical outfit for himself, for the funeral. "It was basic black, with a flair to it, a shine," he told me. "With a peach-colored shirt, and a tie to match. You know the Pittsburgh Steeler colors are, like, gold and black? It was like a mixture of that, but it was more like peach-and-black, a mixture. We had rust-colored shoes. It was very nice. Elegant."
His shopping done, Harvey headed to City Hall, where reporters and community activists were already gathered. He met briefly with Booker, which inspired Booker to ask Harvey to say something to the gathering. When the moment came, Harvey stepped up to the microphone, nervously.
"I don't blame Mayor Booker," he said. "Because it's not on Mayor Booker." Pointing his finger at the crowd, he added, "It's on you guys. It's on the parents of the city of Newark."
Harvey's remarks were carried in news reports, and by word of mouth, and for the next several days people stopped him in the street and thanked him for speaking as he had. The mood of the city changed. Booker says that Harvey's appearance has made all the difference for Newark, and for him. He had a public reconciliation with Ron Rice, Sr., the man he had defeated in the mayoral election, and they agreed to work together to make Newark safer. A private group donated three million dollars to have gunfire detectors installed throughout the city. The new arena opened, bringing thousands of visitors to Newark's downtown. The Newark police, meanwhile, relentlessly pursued leads (the malt-liquor bottles found at the scene contained fingerprints), and they soon had six suspects, believed to be associated with the MS-13 gang, in custody. "They were just not gonna be denied until they were done," McCarthy says. "There was an incredible amount of teamwork, hard work, and I was so totally impressed by everything they did. That could be a watershed moment in this Police Department that has suffered, and tolerated, so much dysfunction. I can tell you this—the N.Y.P.D., which has got bells and whistles and resources that we obviously do not have, would have been hard-pressed to turn that job around more quickly than we did."
Even Professor Kilson, at Harvard, though he still considers Booker "an establishmentarian, conservative political instrument," has seen signs of advances in Newark: "Any evidence of a Booker-type black urban regime objectively solving problems through what I call pragmatic creative conservatism, I take my hat off to them." He went on, "This is not a post-racial era. Racial dynamics are still here, and alive and well. But, yet, things are shifting. And you'd have to be an ideologic, Black Nationalist-minded true believer not to understand it."
The killings provided an opportunity for moral leadership, and Booker embraced it. He spoke at all three of the funerals, with an eloquence equal to the moment.
After Dashon Harvey's funeral, James Harvey told the Mayor that some good might come of his tragedy. Booker assured him that it already had.
"It's this weird moment," Booker told me a couple of months later. "I'm elected to the highest job of my life, something I've been aspiring to for years, and you'd think I'd feel this great sense of independence and power. But it's not so. It's the time of my life when I actually feel— maybe not weaker, but more dependent upon others than ever before. And that my success is completely dependent upon how other people are doing." ♦


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bigmaestro necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 166 diseños de 52 diseñadores freelance.
Accord Business Administration needs a new logo to be used on its website, stationary and all printed materials. Main focus of design should be on the word Accord, as it will also be used in our DBA – Accord Physicians and Accord Enterprises.
Accord Business Administration
Accord business Administration needsa new logo to be used on its website, stationary and all printed materials.Main focus of design should be on Accord, as it will also be used in our DBA –Accord Physicians and Accord Enterprises.
Definition of 'accord' – agreement,harmony…
Accord Business Administration (ABA)provides medical practices with services designed to allow doctors toconcentrate on the patient care by taking over their back office operationsfrom a to z. The comprehensive list of management services includes butis not limited to:
- Call Center
- Billing, Coding, and Collections
- Insurance Negotiations
- Oversight of Day-to-Day Operations
- IT Services
- Marketing Services
- Business Development
- Anything else that doctors need to outsource to make their professional lives easierThe logo should ideally portray acomplexity of today's business world yet incorporate all of the business piecescoming together harmoniously. Medical theme may be present but is not necessaryfor a successful logo. The word "Accord" should ideally be incorporatedinto the logo.
We are an energetic, young group ofpeople and so the logo should be fresh and "energetic" as well.
- unique logo
- custom font
- easy conversion to b/w
- recognizable icon (possible variation of capital letter A)
- recycled logos/icons
- funky fonts
- too many colors
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.

subset: commoncrawl


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At the recent Chara Hobby event outside Tokyo, a whole slew of new Pocket Monster toys were on display. Many of the toys, viewable in the above gallery, will be in crane games in Japanese arcade games. Snag 'em if you can!
【キャラホビ2012】「ポケットモンスター ベストウイッシュ」、サトシ&デントがフィギュア化 [インサイド]
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.


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Additional State Patty's Day markers show event's decline
Additional State Patty's Day markers show event's decline
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – More in-depth statistics on State Patty's Day 2014 show declining crime and emergency room statistics, signaling that the drinking event is fading.
Shortly after the student-organized holiday March 1, campus and State College authorities reported declines in arrests, citations and alcohol-related emergency room visits. When compared with statistics from 2011 -- when some of the primary indicators were the highest since the event's 2007 inception -- the latest figures show that State Patty's Day has been steadily falling out of favor with revelers looking to recklessly consume alcohol.
From Feb. 28 to March 2, police logged 102 arrests and citations -- a 58 percent drop from 244 arrests/citations in 2013 -- according to preliminary data from four agencies: State College Police Department, Penn State University Police Department, Centre County Alcohol Task Force and the borough's Department of Ordinance Enforcement & Public Health. Compared to 2011, when arrests/citations were at 412, the 2014 statistics represented a 75 percent decline. Police made 14 driving under the influence arrests in 2014 as well as in 2013, a 52 percent decline from the 29 arrests that occurred in 2011.
Overall in 2014, State College and University police report a total of 135 crime and ordinance violations, a 47 percent decrease from the 254 reports received in 2013. Compared to the 367 reports in 2011, the 2014 statistics represent a 63 percent decline.
Staff at Mount Nittany Medical Center treated 34 alcohol-related cases over State Patty's Day weekend, a 32 percent decline from the 50 in 2013, and also report lower blood-alcohol content levels for patients.
As in years past, a task force consisting of University and community representatives spearheaded multiple initiatives to create a safer campus and downtown over the weekend. Chief among the strategies was a stipend paid to 34 downtown establishments agreeing to forgo the serving and selling of alcohol; five area beer distributors also accepted stipends. Also on March 1, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board agreed to close its Wine and Spirit Stores in the Centre Region. In addition, the Penn State Interfraternity Council banned social functions over the weekend.
The State Day of Service, a student-led volunteer project, mobilized 540 students who volunteered more than 1,000 hours with 31 agencies in the community over the weekend.
For 2015, campus and community leaders will be focused on organizing a February festival aimed at attracting a diverse audience to downtown State College.


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Donation Based
We have been asked by Lord Matreiya, who holds the Christ Healing Energy, to open a healing clinic. Every Tuesday morning at 10.00am and 11.00am we will offer healing on a group basis with several healers working at once. The healing energy is not a replacement for prescribed medication from a doctor but will support any treatment in a positive way. To book a place at a healing session please contact us on 0207 387 0358.


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Get Comodo's Signature Antivirus
and Firewall Combo
Are you burdened with security issues on your machine with Windows 10?
Comodo Antivirus for Windows 10 is at your service to defend you against malware attacks that are newly designed to infect Window 10 OS.
Protect your machine from getting infected with our efficient Comodo Antivirus that strongly stays one step ahead from security threats.
Comodo Antivirus for Windows 10
A flawless security tool programmed to protect Windows 10 PC
- Cnet.com
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Comodo Antivirus for Windows 8 utilizes the core features of antivirus and firewall combined with the exclusive Defense+ and Auto Sandbox technology. Comodo is the only vendor who provides these trademark features to offer best protection. The Windows Antivirus program also uses Default Deny protection which prevents virus infection by allowing only authorized programs to run. Defense+ defends against malicious threats while Sandbox mode runs suspicious files in an isolated environment to secure system registry.
Are programs stored in Sandbox forever?
No. The auto sandbox mode is a temporary virtual system environment created to test run files and programs before they access your original operating system, files and registry. Comodo Internet Security for Windows 8 offers a feature to send suspicious files to Comodo AV labs for detailed analysis. Safe and authorized programs are added to the whitelist while threats join the blacklist of programs. The sandbox is recycled and ready to perform a new set of operations after completing each task.
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Get concrete knowledge on latest threats online and identified malicious programs. Download the complete Windows antivirus database published by Comodo AV labs which lists all recently added, new and modified entries to the virus definitions. Users can also use the database to manually update offline entries.


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RICHMOND, Va. – The post-race incident between Turner Motorsports' Nelson Piquet Jr., Richard Childress Racing's Brian Scott and their crews carried over into an alleged physical altercation in the driver motorhome lot at Richmond International Raceway late Friday night, Henrico Police said.
A statement from Lt. Linda N. Toney said police were investigating the assault, which occurred at approximately 11:15 p.m.
Two adult males were taken into custody as a result of the ongoing investigation, Toney said. She said one of the two adult male victims has a shoulder injury.
ORIGINAL INCIDENT: Scott, Piquet Jr. in painful encounter
NATIONWIDE AT RICHMOND: Keselowski rallies to win
Their identities were not released, but RCR confirmed some of its team members were involved.
"We are aware an incident took place outside of the track's infield following Friday night's NASCAR Nationwide Series race at Richmond International Raceway involving members of our team and others from another team," RCR Director of Communications Tim Packman said. "We are cooperating with the local authorities in this matter."
Requests seeking comment from Piquet's representatives were not immediately returned.
Richmond International Raceway said it could not comment due to the ongoing investigation.


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Flights to Aalborg
Aalborg (Ålborg) was originally settled as a trading post based on its position on the Limfjord at the entrance to the North Sea. The city remains an important industrial and commercial center in Denmark.
With some of the area's most picturesque houses from the 17th century, Aalborg is the country's fourth-largest municipality and boasts an approachable and fun-loving city feel. The city is also home to the Aalborg Zoo, Aalborg Maritime Museum and the Utzon waterfront.
Museums and family attractions in Aalborg
Aalborg offers a variety of entertainment options for families with children. Open year-round, the Aalborg Zoo is the perfect destination for a family visit. See one of the world's best enclosures for polar bears designed specifically for the behavior of the animals and more than 1200 other animals over 8.5 acres of public land.
The Aalborg Maritime Museum, also open year-round, exhibits the history of the Danish merchant fleet over the past 200 years. Its main attraction is the Springeren submarine, the last class of submarines to be fully designed and built in Denmark.
The Utzon waterfront is also worth a visit. It was named and designed by Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon, who grew up in Aalborg. Take in a visit to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg and the Utzon Center to experience the transformation of the waterfront. If that isn't enough, complete your visit with a trip to Karolinelund Amusement Park with its roller coasters, carousels and other rides and attractions.
Outside Aalborg
Just outside of Aalborg, visit northern Jutland's stunning countryside and fantastic bathing beaches full of what nature has to offer. In the summertime, join Danish locals in towns such as Løkken and Blokhus facing the Skagerrak. The beach sands are surprisingly fine and white and are amongst the most expansive in Europe.
Take a day trip up to Skagen, the northernmost tip of Denmark, where the two parts of the North Sea, the Kattegat and Skagerrak, literally meet in front of your eyes.
Shopping in Aalborg
Despite its smaller stature, there is no shortage of shopping in Aalborg. From the boutiques on walking streets, Bispensgade and Algade, to the smaller shops selling fashions from up and coming young designers, you never know what you'll discover in Aalborg. When your feet need a rest from all of the shopping, take a break at any of the bars and restaurants on Jomfru Ane Gade.
What's up in Aalborg
A 20-minute drive
from Aalborg is Nibe, an old market town a stone's throw from busy city life.
Aalborg Carnival
The largest in northern Europe and a good opportunity to party away with the Danes.
Soegaards Bryghus is Aalborg's first microbrewery.


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Shovels, Tampers, and Digging Tools
Grainger carries a large selection of shovels, tampers and digging tools in assorted sizes and shapes to help you find exactly what you need. Landscapers, utility workers, construction crews, farmers, groundskeepers and many others can appreciate the value of high-quality tools as they search for ways to get their work done faster, easier and more effectively. Durable cable trenchers and placers, post hole diggers, augers, soil probes, compactors and other shovels, tampers and digging tools from Grainger can help. Shop online today!
Please select a Category


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Shaheen, Ayotte urge for fishery decision change
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) � New Hampshire Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Kelly Ayotte are calling on the Department of Commerce to reconsider its decision to require drastic quota reductions designed to end overfishing of Gulf of Maine cod and haddock this year.
In a joint letter, the senators asked for a reconsideration of the National Marine Fisheries Service decision, which threatens the survival of New Hampshire's fishing industry and the economic well-being of its coastal communities.
Officials are set to meet this week to decide catch limits for fishermen who chase bottom-dwelling groundfish, such as cod and haddock. A key New England Fishery Management Council committee has already recommended massive cuts that fishermen have repeatedly warned will destroy the industry.


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OSScamp Delhi September 2009
OSScamp is a series of community-driven unconferences targeted specifically at promoting FOSS implementation and development in India. It is India's largest unconference on open source. They bring together the best brains and the most passionate technologists and enthusiasts under one roof and create a platform for sharing best practices, experiences, and knowledge.
OSScamp Delhi will see IT professionals, Enthusiasts and Students come together to discuss and shape the future of open source in India.
Event Title: OSScamp Delhi September 2009
Location: New Delhi
Venue: Netaji Shubhash Institute of Technology
Sector 3, Dwarka, New Delhi
Date: Saturday September 5, 2009 – Sunday September 6, 2009
Time: 9:00am – 6:00pm Timezone: Asia/Calcutta
Fee: — Free — 🙂
Website: http://delhi.osscamp.in
Contact Person:
Kinshuk Sunil, OSSCube, firstname.lastname@example.com (+91 99100 24895)
Piyush {email@example.com}; (+91 9910904233)
Sigup for the Event!
Snort – the de facto standard for intrusion detection/prevention
What is Snort?
Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention system, capable of performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks. It can perform protocol analysis, content searching/matching and can be used to detect a variety of attacks and probes, such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, and much more.
Snort uses a flexible rules language to describe traffic that it should collect or pass, as well as a detection engine that utilizes a modular plugin architecture. Snort has a real-time alerting capability as well, incorporating alerting mechanisms for syslog, a user specified file, a UNIX socket, or WinPopup messages to Windows clients using Samba's smbclient.
Snort has three primary uses. It can be used as a straight packet sniffer like tcpdump(1), a packet logger (useful for network traffic debugging, etc), or as a full blown network intrusion prevention system.
The Power of Open Source Development
The roots of Snort's development methodology hail from the Open Source movement, a movement pioneered by Richard Stallman at MIT during the 1980's. The idea behind Open Source is that all software should have source code available and be developed by communities of interested developers. This ideology and the power that it unleashes to develop superior software was further explained and highlighted in what is considered to be the seminal treatise on Open Source development, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond. In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond outlines how the Open Source development methodology can be leveraged to create superior software compared to traditional proprietary methods. The Snort project relies on this ideology heavily and it's impact shows, in test after test Snort has come out at or near the top of the heap when compared head to head with other sensor technologies.
The Snort Community
The power and reach of Snort is due in large part to the power and reach of the Snort user community. Aside from the seasoned developers at Sourcefire, there are literally thousands of experienced programmers reviewing and testing the functionality and rule sets. By leveraging the "many eyeballs" theory that was popularized by Eric Raymond and used to launch Linux to success in the operating systems market, people in the open source Snort community worldwide can detect and respond to bugs and other security threats more quickly and efficiently than in a "closed" environment.
To help foster this sense of community and provide a platform for users to share their ideas and experiences, local Snort User Groups have been formed throughout the world. To find a user group in your area, click here.


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Thank you for confirming your attendance at our 2013 Roger Bootle presentation.
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