Normal American politicians can be expected to say they admire Lincoln, or F.D.R., or Reagan. Not Donald Trump. “Meade ruled with an iron fist,” he said admiringly of Amadeo Henry Esposito, who ran the Brooklyn Democratic Party for 15 years, from 1969 to 1984.
Trump recalled Esposito having a baseball bat under his desk and, in his dotage, swinging a cane at uncooperative elements. Esposito, an old-time machine boss with a cigar perpetually clenched between his teeth, doling out threats, promises, and patronage, was the sort of leader Trump hoped to encounter in Washington and to become himself. “I figured,” Trump told Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, “that the Mitch McConnells would be like him in terms of strength.” Instead, he found the staid G.O.P.
The “Mitch McConnells” have powers many times that of a Meade Esposito, albeit in perhaps more subtle ways that Trump doesn’t appreciate. You can chalk it up partly to outer-borough provincialism that Trump’s model of absolute power is a local boss. When Esposito was caught, in the autumn of his years, on an F.B.I. tape bragging that he was once “boss of the fucking state,” it was more than a bit of an exaggeration, though the boast of having “made 42 judges” was probably true.
Even in his day, Esposito was a throwback, the last of the Mohicans. Born in 1907, the son of a saloonkeeper, he finished elementary school (“I didn’t wait around for my diploma, because the Dodgers and the Giants were playing that day”) but dropped out of high school. Nevertheless, Esposito liked to present himself as a tireless autodidact; one of his favorite lines was “I read everything from Mickey Mouse to Plato.” As a young man, he started his own Democratic club, which was quickly absorbed into the regular party organization.
He put his political ambitions on the back burner for 30 years, making a living as a wholesale-beer salesman and then a bail bondsman, where he made the acquaintances of prominent bosses, including Joe Colombo. Until, as he told it, a slur fired his will to power again. Harry Morr, an Irish-American district leader, called Esposito a “guinea bastard” and said you could buy an Italian with a beer. “I decided to get him,” Meade later recalled.
He got some unlikely help: the backing of the classiest of reformers, Herbert Lehman and Eleanor Roosevelt, who at the time were trying to make inroads into machine-dominated Brooklyn. Suffice it to say, Esposito himself wasn’t much of a “goo-goo,” as good-government types were contemptuously known by machine regulars. More than the support of Lehman and Roosevelt, what got him elected district leader was going around and offering to “take care” of people’s unpaid parking tickets. When his opponents cried foul, he revealed that he’d spent his own savings to pay them off. Another one of his unforgettably delightful cynicisms: “Today’s reformer is tomorrow’s hack.”
It was neither the iron fist nor the velvet glove but the helping hand that was the real source of Esposito’s power. At its peak, his Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club in Canarsie had 2,000 members, who could be called upon to go to the polls and swarm any challenge to his power. The club also provided a lively social world with dances and parties.
When Esposito was caught bragging that he was once “boss of this fucking state,” it was more than a bit of an exaggeration, though the boast of having “made 42 judges” was probably true.
Esposito provided for his people. Members could drop by the club and fill out an index card with their address, phone number, and problem. Everything from issues with landlords and trouble getting jobs to kids being bullied at school would come to his attention. He held court and doled out patronage at Foffe’s restaurant, in Brooklyn Heights, where a dish was named after him: veal Esposito. (The recipe, alas, is lost to time.)
What Esposito really did for Fred and Donald Trump is still unclear, but its outlines can be readily imagined: he served as a conduit between the worlds of legitimate business and politics and New York’s underbelly, with contacts in the unions and the Mob. Esposito regularly met on a bench in Marine Park with Paul Vario, the model for Paulie, the Paul Sorvino character, in Goodfellas. Return favors are more evident: Trump Village Shopping Center, in Brooklyn, was provided for a rally for George McGovern in 1972.
McGovern might seem like an unlikely ally for the Brooklyn boss, but the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club was not just a haven for deal-making and gray-area corruption; it was also a last bastion of New Deal liberalism amid a national rightward shift. Esposito became an early champion for gay rights. And the club could beat back challenges from the racial-backlash candidates that emerged in the 1970s.
As much as Esposito presented the image of an all-powerful boss in the newspapers, the power of the party machine was fading the whole time. Primaries killed the smoke-filled room, unions and professional associations had long ago killed the party’s role as an employment agency, and polling and electronic media had made the role of the party as an information clearinghouse and feedback mechanism redundant. In the mid-80s, Esposito retired. “There’s no more fun in politics,” he said. “It used to be a handshake, even a look in the eye was it.”
That he was under federal investigation may also have been a factor in his decision. A hard-charging federal prosecutor caught him on wiretaps giving free vacations to Bronx congressman Mario Biaggi. Esposito was given probation and a fine. When a second indictment for bribery landed, in 1989, the judge ruled the 82-year-old was too frail to stand trial. He never served a day in prison.
Esposito regularly met on a bench in Marine Park with Paul Vario, the model for Paulie in Goodfellas.
Trump, the lover of musical theater, misses the tough-guy performance. And the belief that he will run the country like a political boss, a type most voters only vaguely remember or learned about from the movies, is part of his appeal: the New York accent, the reassurances that he will take care of it all and knows how it all works. “He was menacing, funny, smart, tough, obscene. Machiavellian, volatile, sentimental, and quotable. He was devious but acted like a noble primitive, without guile or guilt,” The Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett wrote of Esposito. Now, who does that sound like?
Republican voters aren’t alone in their nostalgia: in the wake of their crushing loss, Democrats have wondered aloud, in think pieces and op-eds, how to get a strong party apparatus back, how to re-create a warm, engaging civic life in an era of electronic alienation. And when the candidates all turn out to be duds, you even hear open wistfulness for the smoke-filled room. Whether they know it or not, they want their Espositos back, too.
But the conditions that made Esposito and his club are gone. Trump might have the personality but lacks the organization; the Democrats have neither. We are now run by the literal machine—our compulsive attachment to computers and phones—which might be why the humanity of the old ways looks so appealing now.
Was it lust for power and money that made Esposito tick? In part, but it was also just for the fun of it all, to be a part of the game. “I like being part of the scheme of things. Politics is fascinating, vicious, unpredictable, demeaning, and it’s very satisfying,” he said. Part of the scheme of things. That’s what everyone still wants to be, in a way, but how to get it these days?
In a 1972 New York Times Magazine profile, Hendrik Hertzberg observed Esposito taking a phone call from a congressman. “This guy likes me to hold his hand sometimes,” he told the reporter in a whisper. More than an iron fist, we all want someone to hold our hand sometimes. Trump seems to only know how to swing the bat.
John Ganz is the author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. You can read his Substack here
