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Chapter Six

There is no shortage of stories for my column, only a shortage of waking hours to write about them and all the colorful characters who enjoy operating outside the law. Someone on the rewrite desk here once said that after people who are in public office finish serving their terms, they should go directly to jail for the same amount of time that they were in office. My sentiments exactly. In fact, on my wall I had a blow up of the “Go to Jail” square from the Monopoly board. Around it I arranged pictures of various felons who I had written about.

I was coming up in the elevator one morning when I overheard a conversation that made my ears perk up. An editor from the travel section was chatting with a colleague. He had just come back from St. Croix, he said, where he’d checked out some new resorts. He mentioned that he had seen someone that he knew from the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. The editor asked him if he was on vacation and he said no, he was there on business. They laughed about it, but I didn’t see the humor. Instead, my antennae went up. Business? Who was he meeting? And why in St. Croix? Call it my reporter’s instinct for a big story but I went back to my desk and started making phone calls.

I’d heard rumors some time back about Caribbean trips, but at the time I had been so swamped that I didn’t pay any attention to them. But now, if it came up again, it convinced me that it was something that I should look into. Were people in the mayor’s office on film purportedly meeting Hollywood producers to encourage them to bring big-budget films to the city? More and more these days, American films were being made in Canada because of the considerable financial savings due to the favorable exchange rate. But while the goals of people in the film office might have been honorable, there was no justification for spending taxpayers’ money for meetings in the Caribbean that could well have taken place in New York. Clearly, New York wanted and benefited from having movie studios use the city as home base for their filming. New York City’s Made In New York Incentive Program offered film and TV crews tax and marketing credits as well as customer services if most of the movies were made in the five boroughs. But there was a line between proper give-and-take and giving out bigger pieces of the tax-deduction pie to some studios and not others. City negotiators were not supposed to be for sale to the highest bidder.

And why have a meeting at a resort in St. Croix instead of a Lower Manhattan conference room, other than to acquire a tan? Couldn’t the information be gathered in writing or via conference calls? Was it really critical to go to the Caribbean? A colder view of it was that the city officials were taking their wives or girlfriends with them on free junkets that would turn into improper deals.

My phone book was filled with the names of disgruntled employees from almost every city agency, and I made my initial string of phone calls rounding up “the usual suspects”—people you can usually count on to talk in sound bites and give you dependable quotes and insights.

I heard snickers, guffaws, theatrical coughs. Did they know more than they let on? I imagined eyebrows being raised, but none of that could make an airtight story. Trying a different tack, I called officials from the previous administration and asked them about conferences outside of the city.

“Does Brooklyn count?” one aide responded. “Because that’s as far as I ever traveled on the city payroll.” Someone else pointed me to an airline employee who would check the passenger lists to see whether the mayor’s aides had flown regularly scheduled airlines—or instead hopped free flights on corporate jets belonging to Hollywood movie studios, which might be offered sweet deals to bring their crews into the city for months at a time.