My father Dominick L. DiCarlo was the last really good politician because:
Outside compensation has always been a potential channel of political corruption. While in office, though he shared a space in a law office in downtown Brooklyn, my father had no work there to speak of. We lived on his salary. One of there reasons he didn't want my mother to get a job is that he didn't want to owe any favors to anyone. As a result, while we always had a decent roof over our heads and plenty to eat, there was no money for things like summer camp (except for boy scout camp, which was only $40 for two weeks), skiing, or other expensive luxuries. With one or two exceptions, there was also no money for vacation travel, except for some memorable tent-camping around the east coast. Dominick DiCarlo did not care about possessions or leisure. Politics was his passion, and he did his best to share it with us.
My father knew that you can't take big money from someone and remain your own man. The problem was how to win elections without much money, the answers were organization, issues, and ingenuity.
My father could afford to be honest because he did not take money from special interests. When the New York Public Interest Research Group, which was part of Ralph Nader's organization, conducted a study of the New York State legislature, they reported to their credit that Dominick DiCarlo, a conservative Republican who opposed their positions on most issues, had far and away the greatest reputation for integrity and competence in state government. Gilbert Chesterton once said that, based on the large numbers of war heroes and the dearth of honest politicians, that "it seems easier to die in battle than to tell the truth in politics." My father did not always speak, but when he did he told the truth, even in politics.
This was an easy one, because we didn't have and couldn't afford any polls. Regardless, my father always had the same response to anyone who argued that he should vote a certain way because that was what the people in his district wanted. "I have a duty to my constituents to exercise my vote in accordance with my best judgment," he would say, "not in accordance with their opinions."
My father did not shirk hard and unpleasant fights if he thought they were important. During the 60s, he led the fight in New York to prevent the legalization of abortion, which began long before Roe v Wade was decided.
Because my father didn't owe anything to any special interests, he was subjected to less pressure than many, but there were times. Most memorable among them was when he, a man who had built his career on a reputation for being tough on crime, led the fight against Nelson Rockefeller's drive to impose mandatory life sentences even for the smallest sales or gifts of drugs. That story is told below.
My father, who graduated first in his class from St John's Law School, had the kind of first class intellect that enabled him to bring order out of chaos. His advice was sought by many. He terrified people with his ability to see instantly the weak spot in an argument and to detect a concealment. Once, when I visited him with a school friend who was seeking a job as a lawyer, my father gave a quick glance at my friend's resume and asked him when he had became a member of the Communist Party. My friend, who I learned at that moment had in fact briefly joined the party in his youth, never quite got over the shock.
My father knew politics, and he knew his district like the faces of his children. On election night, as soon as the first returns came in, he generally knew who would win and who would lose based on past results from those districts.
At my father's wake, I was surprised at the large numbers of people who lined up to tell me essentially the same thing about a man who was generally perceived as gruff, if not fierce. They wanted me to know about some occasion when my father had gone out of his way to help them without any expectation of return. One said he was having problems when he was new on the job and dad guided him through them, another that dad had helped a friend or relative, another that dad had given him a second chance of one kind or another.
When, during a critical leadership battle that he knew would decide the fate of his political career, my father could probably have prevailed if he had been willing to trade dishonorable promises for votes, he stuck to his principles, lost with honor, and went into what he thought would be permanent political oblivion.
My father's grandfather Cipriano arrived in the United States by
boat, I think in about 1917, with his wife Anna and 17 year old
Vincenzo, who was generally called Jim. Jim is more
American, right? The family story is that Jim went into
business with a partner selling hot dogs from a hot water cart
under the boardwalk at Coney Island behind Nathan's. As the
story goes, Jim was struck by a young woman who bought a hot dog,
but he failed to get her name or telephone number. She did
not come back that summer, and Jim spent the next year regretting
his lack of initiative. Finally, the following summer he saw
her again, approaching the cart for another hot dog. Struck
dumb with fear, Jim reached into the water for a hot dog.
His partner, to whom he had confided his infatuation, held his arm
and whispered urgently in his ear, "Not that one; it's been in the
water all day. Get her a fresh one." The spell was
broken, and Jim finally discovered that the name of his enamorata
was Mae, which she generally used informally instead of
Michelina. More American, right?
Jim and his partner must have done pretty well on the overflow
business from their better-known neighbor, because by the time Jim
was ready to ask Mae to marry him, he was able to tell her that he
had enough money either to buy either an engagement ring or a
delivery truck for his business. When he asked Mae whether
he should get the ring or the truck, she did not hesitate a
moment: "Get the truck." Eventually, Jim and Mae opened two
grocery stores which supported, and provided employment for, their
growing family. Dominick DiCarlo was their first child,
followed by Anna, Rose, Vincent, James, Constance, Michael, and
John. As a result, there were never any labor shortages in
the family stores.
All Dominick's brothers, and some of his sisters or their
spouses, went
into the food business at one time or other. Those
businesses included, among others, Uncle Danny's Ravioli
Store, in Mastic Beach, Long Island, Wickers Restaurant, in
Hicksville, Long Island, DiCarlo
Foods in Holtsville, Long Island, and Foodies Gourmet.
This family connection with the food business actually goes back
to Italy. Cipriano and Anna DiCarlo had come from a small
town outside Naples called Santa
Maria la Fossa. For as long as anyone remembers, the
main product of the town has been buffalo milk mozzarella, which
is made from the milk of water buffaloes raised on surrounding
farms. When he was still living in Italy, Jim DiCarlo
apparently learned to make fresh mozzarella and, when he opened
his grocery store in Brooklyn, he made it there with curd from
cow's milk, and taught his children to do the same. Most of
my generation also eventually learned to make mozzarella. We
still occasionally make it fresh for family parties. When I
visited Santa Maria la Fossa several years ago, the mozzarella
factories were still operating on the main street of the
village. After I told the workers at one of them how the
craft had been passed on down through the generations in America,
they invited me to make mozzarella with them, which I gladly did,
though my skills were clearly a little rusty.
When dad graduated from Saint John's night law school, he was
ranked first in his class, but was unable to find work as a
lawyer, so he and two of his friends from Saint John's got jobs as
insurance adjusters. Dad got an LLM. from NYU in 1957 and,
in 1959, and appointment as an Assistant United States Attorney
for the Eastern District of New York where, as Chief of the
Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, he got what he believed
to be the first conviction ever for counterfeiting in a case where
none of the counterfeit money was ever offered in evidence, and
gained a reputation for formidable trial skills. Dad's
special appointment ran out in 1962. By then he was involved
with what later became the Seergy club, and got a job as counsel
to Angelo
Arculeo, another member of the club, who had been elected to
the city council. Dad was elected to the state assembly in
1965, filling the seat that had been held by Luigi
Marano, who was also a member of the club.
My father could not have been the kind of politician he was
without the Edmund G. Seergy Republican Club, or without Ed
Seergy, after whom the club was named, Virginia Mallon, its
co-founder, and many other men and women who created and sustained
it. Some of these were elected to office or party
positions. Others were unsung heroes, like Lawrence
Mattiello, my father's campaign manager, John Walsh, his trusted
friend and adviser, Nicholas Silletti, his occasional strategist
and copywriter, and Tony Palazzolo, tireless block captain
extraordinaire. I used to say you could guarantee control
of the Republican party in Brooklyn if you could only get 25
Tony Palazzolos. The clubhouse, which was financed largely
on its annual dinner-dances, including advertisements for a book
that was distributed to those who attended, and an annual card
party, provided a place to work, a force of block captains who
canvassed door to door, and the all-important phone banks for the
get-out-the-vote campaign.
The Seergy Club became a powerhouse in Brooklyn, and came to be
known as the mighty 49th. It covered the 12th assembly
district and, after reapportionments in 1965 and 1966, the 49th
assembly district, which included most of what had been in the
12th. The club was founded in 1955 and, with the election of
William
Conklin to the state senate in 1957, it started electing
Republicans from an area in which registered Democrats outnumbered
Republicans by two or three to one, during a time when voting a
party ticket was common and made easy by voting machines that
allowed you to cast such a straight party vote by pulling a single
lever. At one point, the state assemblyman, state senator,
and city councilman from this heavily Democratic district were all
Republicans. The reason its city councilman had the august
title of minority leader was that he was the *only* Republican
city councilman in the whole city of New York who was elected from
a district, as opposed to the at large members, of whom there were
then two from each borough, a Democrat and a Republican.
My father knew that you can't take big money from someone and
remain your own man. The problem was how to win elections without
much money, the answers were organization, issues, and
ingenuity. The expenses of my father's individual campaigns
were, from today's perspective, when it is not unusual to see
several million dollars spent to win a seat in the state
legislature, almost unbelievably low. I recall that the campaign
budget for DiCarlo for Assembly in 1965, my father's first race,
was about $5,000. Some of that money was spent on about 50,000
palm cards, which was our basic campaign literature.
One of the largest expenditures of the campaign was for pizza and soda to feed the friends and family who turned out on Saturdays to distribute the palm cards from house to house. My father also bought two large speakers for a sound truck that cruised the district with a tape recording of him asking people to vote for him and the rest of the Republican ticket and, when money was available, fliers with pictures of our family, and ads in the Home Reporter and the Spectator, two neighborhood newspapers. The money for the campaign was raised by another dinner-dance, for which there seemed to be a greater appetite back in those days before the internet replaced physical social interaction.
What the campaign lacked in money, it made up in personal involvement. During the campaign season, the block captains, armed with voter registration lists, went door to door to talk to their neighbors, ask for their votes, distribute literature, and record their opinions concerning whether the voters in the house were for us or against us. On Saturdays, squads of kids went door to door delivering palm cards. Every workday, my father was up at 4 a.m. and went to a subway stop, where two associates would hand commuters a palm card and funnel them toward the candidate for a handshake.
Because there was no money for paid political consultants, my father and his associates had to exercise their own ingenuity and knowledge of their district to develop their issues and methods. I remember my father and his associates sitting at the dining room table agonizing over the wording and design of our palm card, which was a great improvement over what other local candidates were using at the time, and was later adopted by others.
The loudspeakers that were being used then on the sound trucks of the other candidates were about a foot long and made a distorted and indecipherable noise. My father wanted none of that. He found some honking big horns of the kind you've seen in movies of fights at big arenas that could be heard loud and clear for blocks. Rather than let the drivers improvise, he used a looping tape of his own resonant baritone voice with short, repetitive, punchy messages that could be heard from start to finish as the cars carrying the loudspeakers drove slowly down each block. Fifty years later, old timers from the neighborhood will still smile when I imitate my father saying "This is YOUR assemblyman Dominick DiCarlo...."
During the 60s, my father led the opposition in New York to
efforts to legalize abortion, a fight which began long before Roe
v Wade was decided in 1973. I disliked talking about abortion, and
I'm sure my father did too but, believing as he did that aborted
children were human beings with the same right to life that he
had, it was a battle he could not decline. For a while it seemed
as if the only time we ever got to see dad on television was when
he would debate Al Blumenthal on abortion. Dad's efforts, and
those of the colleagues he rallied to the fight, managed to stave
off the legalization of abortion in New York until 1970, three
years before the Supreme Court discovered a constitutional right
to abortion. According
to New York Magazine, during those three years, 350,000
abortions were performed in New York state on nonresidents who
traveled into the state to obtain them and, according to statistics
compiled by William Robert Johnston, 304,000 were performed
on residents, for a total rate of 218,000 per year. Assuming that
about 10% of those would have occurred even if abortion had not
been legalized, and that my father's perennial fight postponed
legalization by even one year, it seems reasonable to estimate
that there are about 200,000 Americans in their 40s today whose
lives were saved by my father and those who stood with him. That's
more than Schindler, more than Wallenberg, more than Schweitzer,
and more than a lot of other heroes whose memories are justly
celebrated.
During the 70s my father often (ok, almost always)
found himself opposing groups like the National Organization for
Women. The thing is, he generally opposed them because he
thought their proposals hurt women. Every year, these
self-appointed spokesmen for women rated state legislators based
on how they voted on the legislation they were promoting. We
got pretty used to seeing dad identified as their least favorite
assemblyman in New York. One year, another assemblyman tied
dad for last place. I didn't realize dad was a little
annoyed to have company at the bottom until the following year,
when he was clearly pleased to regain solitary possession of the
lowest place. He had voted against a bill to lower the
minimum age for girls to deliver newspapers from 16 to 14.
He didn't want any 14 year old girls out before daylight
delivering newspapers, and it didn't matter that the minimum age
for boys was already 14.
“Will the gentleman yield for a question?” [DiCarlo] asked in tones that suggested an invitation to he the featured player at a funeral. Mr. Stavisky agreed he would.
“Mr. Stavisky.” Mr. DiCarlo asked lugubriously, “is a lobster an animal?”
Mr. Stavisky ducked. “It's a crustacean,” he replied.
Mr. DiCarlo with weary patience, continued, as to child: “But is it an animal?” Mr. Stavisky agreed that a lobster was an animal.....
“Mr. Stavisky, if Julia Child wanted to make movie about cooking that involved boiling a live lobster, would she have to go to New Jersey to do it under your bill?”
New York legislators are sensitive about anything, from bond brokers to the New York Giants, leaving for New Jersey, but Mr. Stavisky had to concede that Mrs. Child would have to take her doomed lobster there, too. As he continued, Mr. Di Carlo sounded as though the world's problems rested on his shoulders:
“Mr. Stavisky, if someone wanted to make a movie called ‘Coney Island,’ and the movie involved opening a clam, would that he illegal under your bill, too?”
"Mr. Stavisky had had enough. He withdrew his bill to amend it."
I think one reason dad was so good at debate was that he was
constantly practicing on us at home. He would start an
argument just for the fun of it and then, when he had soundly
defeated us, switch sides and win for that side, too. Other
men have coming of age memories of the first time they defeated
their fathers at arm-wrestling, handball, a footrace, or the
like. I remember winning my first debate. Those
legislators who faced dad in the assembly had it easy. At
least they only had to get into the ring with him once in a blue
moon.
When it came to the law, my father was no respecter of persons--a
good idea was a good idea, and a bad idea was a bad idea, whether
it came from a Republican or a Democrat, and he was happy to work
with his colleagues across the aisle, regardless of which party
was in control. As a result, some of his former Democratic
colleagues still
tell stories about his fair treatment of their legislative
proposals when, from 1971 to 1974, they were in the minority and
he was the chairman of the Codes Committee, which was responsible
for criminal legislation.
My father often spoke admiringly of Peter
Preiser, a distinguished lawyer with whom he was honored to
work while on the Codes Committee and who I believe was
responsible for many improvements in New York's criminal statutes,
but seems to be so modest that I am so far unable to give him
proper credit.
Imagine Nelson Rockefeller as Henry VIII being opposed, not by
his lord high chancellor Thomas More, but by some shabby unknown
country magistrate. Henry...I mean Nelson, was not
pleased. Dad was not content to cast his vote against
Rockefeller's monstrosity and call it a day. He proposed
a sensible alternative bill and found enough Republicans
brave enough to risk the governor's wrath to keep the governor's
bill bottled up in his committee. Rockefeller cajoled and
threatened to no avail. He was forced to amend his bill
until enough of the
worst of its provisions were omitted that dad's Republican
allies could no longer continue to stand with him in opposition to
the governor. In the end, my father was the only
Republican assemblyman who voted against the bill.
After the vote, he was given a standing ovation by both the
Democrats, who had all voted against the bill, and the
Republicans, all the rest of whom had voted for it.
Dad's favorite part of the whole fight was when, at one point
during the struggle, he read in a newspaper that Rockefeller was
complaining that his drug bill was being held up by the entrenched
political establishment. Dad was so tickled he wrote a
letter to the governor saying how proud he was to be living in a
country where a Rockefeller could call a DiCarlo the entrenched
establishment. He kept a copy of that letter, and the
clipping that had provoked him to write it, until his death.
Rockefeller's drug law, even after it was amended, was in fact a disaster, and was not finally repealed until 35 years later.
Like every politician, Dominick DiCarlo was always ready to run
for president. But first he had to become governor. And before
that he had to become the minority leader of the New York State
Assembly. It was in that last race that he suffered his greatest
career disappointment. After having been considered the favorite
simply because everyone knew he was head and shoulders above
anyone else in the legislature, he
lost that race to a man who did later run for governor.
After his loss, dad was exiled by the new leadership. He
was replaced as chairman of the Codes Committee, he had no
prospects for legislative action, and his plans lay in ruin, with
no apparent path forward. He had been politically
crushed. I had never seen him so down in the dumps.
As happens to so many, my father's loss of what he wanted most led to another door opening. Lacking much to do as a defeated candidate for leadership in the assembly, in 1979 or early 1980 dad agreed to act as Ronald Reagan's New York State co-chairman, when even Reagan's nomination was considered unlikely. I reminded my father of the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and the Marchi campaign of 1969. I told him that, while there was no harm in his joining Reagan's campaign to have some fun, Reagan was too much of a right-winger to have any chance at all in the general election, even if he did manage to win the nomination. When I was proved spectacularly wrong by the Reagan landslide, another man, Alphonse D'Amato, whose campaign manager, John Zagame, had sat in the New York State Assembly at the desk next to my father's, was swept into the United States Senate along with Reagan. As a result, dad had the opportunity to be appointed assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters, and then to the U.S. Court of International trade. So turns the wheel of fortune.
In 1981, my father was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for
International Narcotics Matters by Ronald Reagan. His
mission was to eradicate the worldwide production of opium that
was ending up being supplied to heroin addicts in the United
States and he pursued this seemingly impossible goal with a
determination that some, including Washington Post columnist Jack
Anderson, considered
excessive. Undeterred, dad pressed on and, in May
1982, apparently managed to convince Thailand to undertake a military
action that drove notorious opium warlord Khun Sa out of
the country, at least for a while. Dad left the state
department in 1984 after being appointed to the United States
Court of International Trade. If Khun Sa was not finally put
out of the opium business until at least 1996, and the
international trade in narcotics is still with us, it wasn't
because Dominick DiCarlo didn't give it his best try.
Dominick DiCarlo was nominated by President Reagan to the United
States Court of International Trade in 1984. Before his
confirmation hearing in the senate, we talked about how he might
answer a question about why he wanted the job. I suggested
that the best answer might be because it would make him happy in
the Aristotelian sense of making the best use of his greatest
abilities. As usual, dad wisely refrained from quoting
Aristotle to the committee, and was confirmed without incident.
Once on the bench, dad proved to be an outstanding judge.
He really loved the law, believed in it, and applied everything he
had to serving it faithfully. He had a horror of deciding
cases based on his own biases or personal opinions, and was
happiest when he believed he had found a sound legal basis for a
ruling, even when the law was not as he would have wished.
He knew he was not infallible. Therefore, he tried to decide
issues as narrowly and carefully as possible, based on the
clearest applicable legal principles, and he loved jury trials in
part because he preferred deciding the law to finding the
facts. He relished a good legal argument or discussion, and
sometimes called to talk about evidence or procedure.
As I recall, a year or two after dad's appointment to the Court
of International Trade, he was asked whether he would be willing
to be nominated to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit,
and we discussed the question over lunch. I pointed out
that, once on the Second Circuit, he would be an obvious candidate
for the Supreme Court and that the country needed someone like him
at our highest. This was before the appointments of Scalia,
Kennedy, or Thomas, so I also pointed out that the traditional
"Catholic seat" on the bench was or might soon become available.
Dad was not moved. After all he had done, he was no longer
interested in prestige or power. He loved his job, he
said. Due to a shortage of district court judges in the
Eastern District, whose courthouse in near City Hall was next to
his, he frequently presided over motions and trials there, as well
as in his own court. He liked the variety and knew that the
job on the Second Circuit would be a never-ending grind of nothing
but reading memoranda and writing opinions. Finally, he said
that, no matter who you or where you were, the Supreme Court could
never be anything but a longshot, and "only suckers bet on
longshots." He declined the nomination.
After six years at the Court of International Trade, in 1991 dad
became the chief judge of the court. With his
characteristically disinterested sense of duty, one of the first
things he did was set a term limit for himself as well as future
chief judges to ensure some fresh blood in the position at least
every five years. In 1996 he took what the federal judges
fondly call "senior status," which is a kind of flexible
semi-retirement that allows them to work as much or as little as
they like. Dad liked to work, and handled many interesting
cases, including one in which he permitted
the release of financial records belonging to Ferdinand
Marcos, former ruler of the Philippines. As usual, he based
that decision, not on broad subjective policy considerations that
didn't need to be reached, but on solid technical legal grounds.
Dad liked his colleagues in the courthouse, and they seemed to
like him. So, seemingly, did the trade bar. As of
2016, the John J. Marshall School of International Law was still
holding a memorial
lecture in his honor.
My father died suddenly but not unexpectedly when one of his
coronary artery bypass grafts failed just as he was about
to charge the jury in a celebrated case
alleging that the CIA had caused a man to kill himself by spiking
his drink with LSD. Friends who spoke with dad in the weeks
before his death said he seemed not to be expecting to live long
and to be at peace with himself and with God. Several
hundred people attended his three-day wake, including many of his
former political opponents. Many of those who came seemed
eager to tell me about times my father had helped them in some
way, or inspired them simply by being what he was:
--a politician who took no money from special interests, could
not be bullied or bought, chose defeat rather than dishonorable
victory, steadfastly upheld what he believed to be right, and told
the truth in politics,
--a civil servant who lived on his salary and did his best to
accomplish an impossible mission, and
--a judge who ably and honestly applied the law.
Dad, admirable though he was in many ways, was not perfect, and
he was not always right. When I think of his faults, known
and unknown, I like to remember the words of the late great
Congressman Henry Hyde, speaking of all who, like dad, defended
children from abortion,
"When the time comes, as it surely will, when we face that
awesome moment, the final judgment, I've often thought, as
Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness.
You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God
-- and a terror will rip your soul like nothing you can imagine.
But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not
be alone. I think there'll be a chorus of voices that have never
been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly
in the next world -- and they will plead for everyone who has
been in this movement. They will say to God, 'Spare him, because
he loved us!'"
May you rest in peace, my dear father, and may we meet
again where "[a]ll shall be well, and all manner of thing shall
be well." In nomine domini nostri Jesu Christi.
Corrections and contributions of additional material for this
page are welcome, and may be sent to the author at vdicarlo at the
domain that hosts it (ending in .com).
Wikipedia Article "Dominick L. DiCarlo"
Nomination to be Assistant Secretary of State
Biography Directory of Federal Judges
The Black Silent Majority and the Politics of Punishment, by Michael Javen Fortner
Legislators
Get Women's Ratings, Linda Greenhouse, September 5, 1974
Dominick
L. DiCarlo Recreation Area