Reading the candidates

Daily Point

What they’re consuming

In the Newsday editorial board’s endorsement interviews this cycle, we’ve been trying to pin down the candidates on a surprisingly treacherous subject: what they are reading or watching these days.

Sometimes the political hopeful laughs nervously and pauses. One can almost see the thought cross their minds: Is “Ted Lasso” going to offend someone? Is my beach read too unserious? Sadly, we are not fact-checking the candidates’ actual library checkouts or Hulu histories, but we are trying to get an answer. Stay tuned for a full list of books and shows, but here’s a sneak peek at the responses from Tuesday alone, the board’s busiest day of interviews so far.

• Laura Gillen, the Democrat and former Town of Hempstead supervisor who is running for New York’s 4th Congressional District, name-checked “The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz,” by narrative history wizard Erik Larson. Her TV choice, the satirical comedy “The Great” about the rise of Russian monarch Catherine the Great, was also relatively educational. But she did allow that her husband made her watch law enforcement spoof “Reno 911!” Who among us.
• Democrat Jackie Gordon, who is making her second run for New York’s 2nd Congressional District, tried to suggest she was too busy for cultural content given her 11-hours-a-day of call time. When not campaigning or dialing for dollars, however, she says she listens to The New York Times news podcast “The Daily” and is slowly making her way through “Unthinkable,” a personal and political memoir by her potential colleague Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “Like two sentences at a time,” Gordon says.
• New York Attorney General Tish James gave perhaps the most topical and political answer. The top law enforcement officer who has made it her business to take on the gun industry said she was reading a book about suing gun manufacturers.
• Then there was Rep. Andrew Garbarino, who told us he had been watching “The Offer,” a miniseries about the making of the classic film “The Godfather.” As Long Island’s sole congressional incumbent running for reelection, perhaps he felt secure enough to also add his nighttime audiobook listening routine: the memoir of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who did his own recording. “I have not been able to get past chapter four because he puts me to sleep,” the CD2 Republican said of the memoir, aptly titled “The Long Game.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Talking Point

New PBA legal battle features familiar names

In July, when the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association sent Suffolk District Attorney Ray Tierney’s campaign committee a check for $5,000, it could have been seen as a bit of a turnaround. The PBA famously gave Tim Sini, the former DA whom Tierney defeated last year, hundreds of thousands of dollars for his first, successful run and then his second, unsuccessful one.

But Tierney rejected the check, citing an opinion issued by the county Board of Ethics last October which said such contributions are improper due to the close working relationship between prosecutors and police officers.

Now the PBA has filed a lawsuit on the issue in federal court, with a cavalcade of familiar names drawn into the action.

The lawsuit, filed Sept. 28 in the Eastern District of New York, names Suffolk County, the Board of Ethics, and Suffolk Legis. Rob Trotta as defendants.

Trotta is the former Suffolk cop who first brought the issue to the fore when he asked the Board of Ethics for an opinion on whether he could take a political contribution from the PBA, whom he battles at every turn.

The case has landed on the docket of Judge Joan Azrack, who presided over the trial of Sini’s predecessor, Thomas Spota, who was convicted in the cover-up of the crimes of former Suffolk County Police Department Chief James Burke. Burke beat a suspect who’d broken into his car, Christopher Loeb, and the fallout eventually embroiled a cadre of cops who helped Burke and Spota attempt to hide the crime.

Trotta’s tangles with Burke got him booted from the FBI’s Long Island Gang Task Force.

And Trotta said attorneys he’s talked to about representing him in the case the PBA has brought include James Miskiewicz, who prosecuted Burke, and Richard Donoghue, who was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District while the office was prosecuting Spota.

“I have no idea why I was even named,” said Trotta, who added that his only involvement was asking the Board of Ethics for an opinion.

And, he confirmed, the county, which is to say Suffolk taxpayers, would be paying for his attorney, because he took the action in his role as a legislator.

— Lane Filler @lanefiller

Pencil Point

Adding fuel

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Final Point

For LI, everything's in the title 

Among the National Book Award fiction finalists announced last week was a novel with a strikingly Suffolk County name.

“The Town of Babylon,” by Alejandro Varela, follows a professor of public health who returns home to care for his father and, begrudgingly, attends his 20-year high school reunion.

Varela writes movingly about modern suburbia, a place where distance is measured in time: “twelve minutes door to door” or “twenty-five minutes without traffic” or “I did it in under an hour cuz there were no cops.” It’s a place that includes immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, from Ireland and Italy and Poland and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic and Ghana and Peru, many of whom first transited through the big city. That includes “Uncle Ikbir,” who runs an electronics store and first experienced the suburbs as a taxi driver when a “coked-out day trader” paid with a $500 check for the drive home.

Ironically, Varela has said he originally wanted the Babylon title to be a “biblical” reference, “the story of Babel.”

“I imagined the town in the novel being populated by people who share a geographical space but who don’t truly commune with one another,” Varela said in an interview featured on the literary website Bloom. “To further complicate the title’s origins, I grew up in an unincorporated suburban village within the township of Babylon, which undoubtedly informed my writing.”

At first, he wanted the personal location connection to be “insider knowledge,” and the book doesn’t precisely situate the town geographically because he wanted to “communicate a universal experience” as opposed to just a Long Island one: “The suburban-urban divide isn’t specific to New York or to the East Coast.”

The book’s reception, though, shows that you can’t exactly keep Suffolk down.

“[R]ight off the bat, people equated the title with the Long Island town,” Varela said in the Bloom interview. “So much for anonymity.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano