NYC's Computer-System Cash-Dump Disaster By Graham Rayman - Village Voice

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Photo-Illustration by Andrea Levy

In January 2009, a tantalizing and disturbing comment materialized on an Internet bulletin board about an expensive and controversial Bloomberg administration project to automate the city's payroll system, known as CityTime.


The anonymous author alleged that the project was hopelessly corrupt and out of control and had been for years. The writer, who claimed to have been employed on the project, went on to name three people he alleged were responsible for that corruption.


The commenter accused a consultant, Mark Mazer, of being "the most crooked person on the team," and said consultant Scott Berger was building a home in Florida at city expense.


"Mark Mazer and Scott had ONLY one main intent . . . to pocket the $/hr for themselves for as long as possible @ taxpayer expense," the commenter wrote. Referring to the former consultant later appointed to oversee the project, the commenter added, "The project in its 5th year was a failure and should have been canned, but Joel Bondy for some reason or another decided it must go on for another 5 yrs."


The comment went on to lay out in more or less clear terms exactly what was taking place in the CityTime project.


That posting appears to have disappeared into the depths of the Internet, but it turned out to be prescient.


Berger, who worked for a CityTime consultant called Spherion, Mazer, and four other people were indicted last month for defrauding the city of $80 million—a theft that made the Mafia's $6 million Lufthansa heist in 1978 look like a bodega stickup job.


Supposedly acting as "quality assurance" consultants, Mazer, Berger, and their accomplices are instead accused of falsifying payments to shell companies, pocketing the proceeds, and making up phony time cards for work they never performed. The defendants have pleaded not guilty.


Bondy, meanwhile, was suspended without pay following the indictments and forced to resign as the head of Bloomberg's Office of Payroll Administration. He could face indictment as well. Bondy, it emerged, not only was a former CityTime consultant, but had also worked with Mazer in the past, yet he didn't disclose those ties until years later.


Originally slated in 1998 to cost $63 million over five years, CityTime has cost the city more than $760 million over its 12 beleaguered years of existence. Despite all that expense, the system is operating in only about a third of all city agencies.


The cost overruns were caused by the vast complexity of the project and changes to the plans, claim Bloomberg officials and the company responsible for building the system, Virginia-based Science Applications International Corp.


Nonsense, says a union official who represents city architects and engineers, and has closely tracked the project.


"There's no way that any problems or changes they had could justify a cost increase of more than 10 times," says Local 375 vice president Jon Forster, who believes SAIC should face criminal investigation. "In 12 years, we haven't changed the number of agencies or the number of employees. My sense is that someone saw a gravy train here, and they said, 'Let's go for it.' "


Last week, federal prosecutors issued subpoenas to SAIC for documents related to the project—presumably to determine just what happened to all that money. There are, records show, a couple hundred other consultants on the project, and you have to wonder what they were doing.


But even after a year of revelations about CityTime, a lot of questions remain unanswered: How much money was wasted or stolen? How did this happen, in spite of red flags dating back to at least early 2003? And how did the city miss it for so long?


Mayor Bloomberg's comments on the scandal have been less than satisfying. Over the years, for one, his administration lowballed the true total cost of the project. And so far he has yet to offer a coherent explanation of how CityTime went bad. It didn't happen by accident, as the mayor appeared to suggest in some of his comments, especially when he called it a "disaster."


The definition of "disaster" generally includes a component of misfortune—as if the project was beset with bad luck. But in this case, there was intent. The indictment makes that clear enough.


In saying he wished he spent more time with the project, Bloomberg appeared out of touch, which is fairly disturbing for a man who cloaks himself as a great manager and technology expert.


He also suggested that the city's trust had been "misplaced." It was almost as if he was characterizing city government as a lover shocked to find out his spouse had cheated on him. The credo "Trust, but verify" comes to mind.


In December, once again seeking to minimize the scandal, he said, "Nothing goes without some problems, whether it's in your family, your company, your government, [or] the world."


Moreover, throughout his administration, Bloomberg repeatedly cut agencies, shrunk city staff, and recited this mantra: "We have to do more with less." But on the CityTime project, he or his aides appeared to have decided it was OK to do less with more.


And for that matter, what does it say about the city comptroller's office, which also had an oversight role on the payroll agency?


In fairness, the current comptroller, John Liu, has aggressively raised questions about CityTime. He was the one who persuaded Mayor Bloomberg to stop the open-ended payments to SAIC, and forced them to agree to a real deadline.


That decision magically accelerated the pace of the project. By last September, just 73,000 employees were on the system. By December, the number had shot up to 100,000 employees, proving that there's nothing like a little work incentive to get things done.


But Liu's success only makes one wonder why questions weren't raised much sooner by his predecessor, William Thompson.


Records indicate that along with the mayor's office, the comptroller's office approved all of the contract increases, but didn't audit CityTime until this year. 


That audit found, among other things, that the project was plagued by "poor management decisions." It was so bad, in fact, that there was no way to figure out just how many dollars were wasted, the audit said.


Forster, the Local 375 official, tells the Voice that his people approached Thompson's office in 2007 to request an inquiry on CityTime, but were politely rebuffed.


"It just seemed like they had too much on their plate at the time to take on something so massive," Forster says. "And then there was the election and that was sort of it."


Moreover, an SAIC competitor told the New York Post that he had been raising red flags for years, saying he spoke to both Comptroller Thompson's office and the mayor's office about his concerns.


Comptroller spokeswoman Sharon Lee said she couldn't comment on the Thompson era.


And what does the scandal say about the Department of Investigation?


DOI commissioner Rose Gill Hearn has been aggressive in pursuing CityTime this past year. According to the federal indictment, the investigation began in June 2010, when a former consultant told DOI he was being paid by a company that hadn't been approved to work on the project. The federal case appears to rely heavily on the DOI investigation.


But you have to wonder what, if anything, was done before then. It's hard to believe that not one person approached DOI between 1998 and 2010 to complain about the internal workings of the project.


In fact, in 2007, the Voice has learned, DOI did investigate CityTime, including interviewing several CityTime consultants and a few payroll affairs people.


In addition, the probe examined a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation into a number of former SAIC employees who had formally complained that after they blew the whistle on improper billing practices, SAIC retaliated against them by firing them, records show.


What DOI did with the information that was gathered remains unclear.


DOI spokeswoman Diane Struzzi declined to comment on any specifics because of the current, ongoing investigation into CityTime. "There have been a series of allegations going back several years—some have borne fruit and some have not," she said. "There is not a single complaint that came into this department that laid out the kickbacks, the money laundering, or the shell companies. DOI uncovered those crimes."


And, of course, there's the January 2009 anonymous Internet posting, which should have piqued someone's curiosity. It wasn't all that hard to stumble across it.


And then there's the City Council—the supposed check on the mayor's spending habits. While some Council members—like Letitia James and Joseph Addabbo—have sought answers, where was the council in the years when the project grew out of control? Isn't the council supposed to approve big contract increases?


While the council voted to approve the initial contract, James says that it did not get a chance to approve or disapprove the subsequent and sharp cost increases. In essence, she claims, the Bloomberg administration was able to do an end run around on the council's oversight role. Can it really be true that the council had no idea what was happening in the project?


Jamie McShane, a spokesman for Council Speaker Christine Quinn, did not respond to Voice questions.


In many respects, the local media was also behind the curve. Part of the reason was that the Bloomberg administration kept the true cost of the project under wraps. As a result, there was confusion in the press about just what the project cost. A New York Times article in January 2007, for example, set the project cost at $180 million, when, by then, the true expense was already much higher.


It wasn't until Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez began in late 2009 what would become a series of probing columns that the story began to emerge from the shadows.


Of course, CityTime isn't the first high-tech city project to go horribly awry—just the most expensive and allegedly the most corrupt.


City Comptroller Liu said in May that there were a series of high-tech city projects with cost overruns, missed deadlines, and incomplete or ineffective systems. A city personnel tracking system, for example, mushroomed from $66 million to $155 million.


Just last week, Liu said that a project to create two new 911 emergency systems for the police and fire departments had swelled from $380 million in 2005 to $666 million with no major alterations of the project plans. The project is one year overdue, and has been troubled by poor management and oversight by the contractor, his office said.


He rejected a new $286 million contract request from the Bloomberg administration and demanded a review. The central issue, he charged, was that, similar to CityTime, the project allows a kind of open-ended spending.


"This type of vague budgeting formula allows outside consultants to bill on an hourly basis and collect exorbitant fees, as in the case of the CityTime project," Liu said. "The program was troubled by findings of poor management and less than satisfactory oversight by the original vendor."


The history of CityTime goes back to 1996 and the Giuliani administration. The goal was to computerize the city's payroll system, which covers close to 160,000 workers. After another bidder dropped out, the contract was awarded to MCI Systemhouse. After two years, Systemhouse came up with a thick, heavily detailed, and comprehensive technical plan, or "scope of work," for the project, and estimated that it would cost $63 million and take five years.


In other words, it wasn't like someone just came up with the $63 million budget on a cocktail napkin. A great deal of thought and work went into it.


The proposal contained detailed deadlines that made clear the contractor felt it was possible to complete the job in five years, plus lists of thousands of pieces of high-tech equipment that needed to be purchased and dozens of deadlines listed in 30-day increments.


Even at $63 million, the contract provided fairly lavish pay rates for the contractors: more than $300 an hour for top managers, more than $200 per hour for mid-level people. Even the word processors would get $80 an hour. (A percentage is, of course, kicked to the company.)


Even taking the cost of inflation into account, if the project took 10 years, the finished product still should have cost only about $84.5 million.


Moreover, the contract contained a key provision that levied money damages for missed deadlines—a standard incentive that was irresponsibly eliminated a few years later.


But Systemhouse was bought by WorldCom and dropped the project, transferring its CityTime unit to a new firm, Paradigm 4.


In 2000, the city decided to add new elements to the plan, chiefly switching to a system with one central Internet server, rather than a separate server in each agency. The second of a dozen contract amendments increased the budget to $73 million.


The following year, the city hired Mazer's firm, Spherion, to do something called "quality assurance"—essentially to keep an eye on the project. That contract started at a cost of $3.4 million. Since then, it has been changed a dozen times and has ballooned to $51 million. As the Mazer indictment suggests, not only were they not watching the contractor, no one was watching the watchers.


For some reason, the contract was changed after five months to drop a requirement that Spherion examine and approve each piece of the project. As a result, the last record of such a review dates back to 2001, the comptroller's audit says.


Spherion was also supposed to supply regular summaries of the project's progress. The comptroller could not find any such summaries after 2001.


About a year later, the role of project manager was added to Spherion's contract. That meant that the auditor was now also involved in managing the project, according to the 2010 comptroller's audit—a clear conflict of interest.


By the time Mayor Bloomberg was elected, Paradigm 4 was out of the picture and SAIC had taken over the project. When the contractors changed, critics have said, the council should have had a chance to review it. There was no such review. SAIC was selected without competitive bidding.


And in a critical, and ultimately unfortunate, move, the contract was changed from one that levied penalties for failure to hit milestones to a more open-ended method of monthly payments based on hours worked. Ironically, the move was supposed to "streamline" the process. It caused the opposite effect, giving the contractor no incentive to make deadlines.


SAIC has won many millions in government contracts over the years, but it has also racked up its share of fines. In 1995, the company paid a $2.5 million fine for defrauding the government over a computer system for jet fighters. In 1998, the company paid a $1.1 million fine to the Defense Department.


A group of former employees accused the firm of retaliating against them for complaining about questionable billing practices on another job.


In January 2002, perhaps true to form, SAIC officials had the brilliant idea of trying to hire the city official overseeing them, Richard Valcich. In a letter uncovered from the city comptroller's office, Valcich expressed his dismay at the overture, published reports said.


Valcich said he was sorry "if I seemed rude and abruptly shortened your discussion on a future post city-employment position with SAIC." He added: "It is inappropriate to discuss any post employment with a company that I do business with."


By November 2002, another amendment made more changes to the project, and the approved cost rose again from $115 million.


Meanwhile, things between Valcich and SAIC weren't going so well. In what should have been an enormous red flag to the comptroller and the mayor, Valcich slammed SAIC's job performance in a February 19, 2003, letter released by the comptroller's office.


Valcich accused the company of cutting the city out of the project, creating needless delays, and wasting time and money. He said key personnel weren't showing up at meetings and records weren't being updated. He said the company repeatedly stopped work to "review" progress. He even questioned SAIC's credibility.


"SAIC's commitment to quality is almost nonexistent and is reflected from the top down," Valcich wrote. "This lack of commitment to quality permeates matters both great and small."


He added, "It appears to the city that SAIC seems to think [it] could take as long as possible to finish an activity. . . . The city of New York has spent approximately $35 million on CityTime and does not have a tangible system to show for it."


Despite the almost angry tone of the letter—written by the city's point man on the sprawling project, the man who had been shepherding the project since 1995—it did not appear to have any impact. No one from either the mayor's or comptroller's offices appeared to have jumped in to light a fire under SAIC.


The system kept becoming more complex, and at some point SAIC began to resist going forward. SAIC hired a consultant, Ariel Partners, who warned that the technology the city had paid for couldn't handle all the things the city wanted it to.


SAIC finally said it would go forward, but only if it was paid on an hourly basis, rather than a flat rate per piece of the element. The city agreed, which meant SAIC now had a kind of green light to spend whatever it wanted to make the system happen.


By 2004, Valcich had retired from the payroll post, to be replaced by Joel Bondy, a former consultant with Spherion, the company supposedly vetting the project for the city. Bondy had also worked with Mazer, the recently indicted Spherion consultant, at the city's foster-care agency.


The effort to redesign the system took two more years. An SAIC spokeswoman was now saying the two sides were "working well together, and approved our personnel, approach, and overall architecture."


In 2005, with the redesign complete, the city had a chance to walk away from the project. The city instead turned to Spherion for advice, and, of course, the conflicted firm said, "Let's keep going," the comptroller's audit said.


With a rough squiggle, Bondy signed off on a contract extension that gave SAIC another three to six years to finish the project. The amendment justified the extension only by saying it was needed because of unspecified "delays."


By February 2006, the official contract cost was now at least $225 million, triple the original project cost. This time the increase was blamed on "a major increase in the cost of deployment."


Meanwhile, the alleged fraud involving the Spherion consultants had already begun, the indictment said.


Mazer awarded big-money contracts to friends, who then kicked back $25 million to him. They billed the city for phantom work and squirreled the money away in shell companies. He and his accomplices allegedly pursued this fraud for the next five years, eventually stealing some $80 million.


Meanwhile, the public focus was on the effect of the payroll system on city employees. From 2006 through 2009, unions mounted a campaign to limit the system, especially palm scanners, which were seen as potential health hazards. They also charged that the system violated civil rights, and imposed unfair demands on employees. They held demonstrations, testified at City Council hearings, and spoke to the media. Forster's union filed an unfair labor complaint.


Also in 2007, a former SAIC employee on a federal contract alleged that he and several colleagues were fired for going to the feds to complain about improper billing practices by the company.


A city Vendex form indicated that in June 2007, the Department of Defense Inspector General began investigating SAIC based on those allegations.


Did that disclosure, now more than three years old, trigger any concern about SAIC in city government? It is unclear.


In May 2008, Bondy testified before the City Council. In his written remarks, tellingly, he expended not a word on the cost of the project. Not one word.


But behind the scenes, he repeatedly gave project contractors high performance evaluations in 2008 and 2009, The New York Times reported.


Over the objections of unions and some council members, Bloomberg kept the project going.


In January 2009, the anonymous letter floated onto that CNN bulletin board. In September 2009, Bloomberg added another $140 million to the CityTime budget—bringing the total to more than $700 million.


And then, columnist Juan Gonzalez started writing articles about the project, reporting on December 4, 2009, that Spherion consultant Mitchell Goldstein made $490,000 that year. The top 11 consultants, he wrote, made an average of $307,000 a year through 2012.

Living the good life: CityTime’s former overseer, Joel Bondy

On December 17, he reported that Bondy convinced Spherion to hire Goldstein—a possible conflict of interest because the two men had been business partners.


Gonzalez quoted a former consultant who said he hardly did any real work, but got paid $120,000 for it. "The unwritten rule was to keep billing for the hours you showed up, not the work you did," this consultant told Gonzalez.


And even after the disclosure that Bondy had close ties to the people he was supposed to be overseeing, Bloomberg left him in office for another year.


In January of last year, Gonzalez reported that a tech consultant who used to work for the city got millions from CityTime while running a full-time lobbying firm.


Public pressure began to take hold, and the story started to move forward rapidly.


In February, Liu rejected an $8 million Spherion contract, and launched an audit of CityTime. The budget was now $722 million. He called on the mayor to freeze all contracts, calling it a "money pit."


In March, Bloomberg made his admission that the project was a "disaster," but insisted such projects were rarely successful. A few days later, he said he wished he had "focused on it more."


On March 26, Gonzalez reported that the CityTime project manager made $650,000 in 2009, and there were 39 other people making at least $500,000 a year. He noted that the city laid off 510 public school aides to save $12 million, while earmarking $24 million to pay CityTime consultants.


"How can anyone justify firing $18,000-a-year school aides while hiring half-a-million-dollar computer geeks who can't even deliver a good product?" Gonzalez wondered.


But Bloomberg's people continued to defend the need for the project and granted it an extension through September.


In June, the DOI investigation began, with that complaint from the consultant paid by a company not approved to work on the project.


By last August, Bloomberg and Liu were sparring over the contract. Liu didn't want to approve another $176 million in spending; Bloomberg was threatening to withhold paychecks.


The city Independent Budget Office reported then that $641 million in capital funds were either spent or planned, along with $232 million in spent and planned operating funds. That added up to more than $873 million.


Last September, Liu refused to pay $32 million to SAIC until next June unless the company finished the project by then. Finally, there was a penalty attached to missing a deadline: $3 million per month.


The indictments came down on December 15. The six defendants were released on bail. Authorities seized some $850,000 from safety deposit boxes.


Bondy was suspended the following day and resigned three days before Christmas. The Spherion contract was suspended. The Department of Education suspended a separate Spherion contract. Bloomberg ordered a review of technology projects.


The state comptroller jumped on the bandwagon, rejecting an SAIC contract. 


And now, with the federal and city investigations still ongoing, more indictments could be coming. But taxpayers have already paid for everyone else's mistakes, inattention, and misbehavior.


grayman@villagevoice.com

Bloomberg Give Us the Cold Shoulder by Wayne Barrett - NYPOST.com

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Why does the mayor, so thoughtful in private, have so little empathy?

When my departure from the Village Voice after nearly four decades became news on Tuesday, I got a surprise call at my home office overlooking Windsor Place in Brooklyn from Mike Bloomberg. At first I thought it was a high tech robo-call to an imaginary enemies list.

I had done a phone interview with Chris Matthews just a few days earlier from the same window, detailing every unplowed flake still covering my block. I expected Mayor Mike to blast me as just another outer-borough whiner.

But the “get-over-it” mayor was solicitous. He told me he’d heard about the sudden and involuntary end of my Voice career. He recalled how he remembered the name of everyone who called him the day he was fired at Salomon Brothers, but couldn’t recall anyone’s name that called him when he was elected mayor. It’s the people who call you when you’re down, he said, that really matter. I wanted to remind him that Salomon gave him the $10 million severance that financed the creation of Bloomberg L.P., a sure antidote to despondency, but I kept my tongue.

Bloomberg made it clear a couple of times during the conversation that he didn’t agree with everything I wrote, a gentle understatement. But he added that I would be missed.

What’s odd is that, even when the mayor is doing a caring and intimate thing like his call to me, he sounds uncomfortable and terse. He reminds me of the uncle who arrives at the 6-year-old’s birthday party with the biggest present and the smallest smile.

We have found with the CityTime scandal and the blizzard bungle that Bloomberg has brought less of the corporate management style that made him a billionaire to government than we thought. But he does appear to have transferred to the public sphere the imperiousness of the corporate personality, a resolute and awkward distancing designed to insulate the boss from charges of soft-touch favoritism.

Bloomberg is just so much more able to empathize one-on-one than he is to connect with a suffering mass, unless you consider Wall Street bankers a beleaguered underclass. It’s not just the unplowed that can be dismissed as clatter by our crisp and sometimes contemptuous mayor — he has harrumphed over the complaints of transit riders, pothole pleaders, Con Ed customers without power, and even those who lost their subprime homes to foreclosure.

“You can also blame the people that took out the mortgages,” he said, though later noting how “very sorry” he felt for Dick Fuld and Lehman Brothers, subprime sewer plunderers finally foreclosed on by their own bankers. The polled public, which is apparently now giving him record-low favorability numbers, undoubtedly can’t recall the specifics, but there is a collective subconscious memory about Bloomberg’s double-standard boosterism, which extends beyond bankers to other class heroes. “Last time I checked, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t make a lot of money, its executives don’t make a lot of money,” was one gem. Cable companies seeking rate hikes: “They don’t make a lot of money.” And when taxpayer-aided bonuses became the hot issue in 2008, it was Bloomberg who declared that city workers, including cops and firefighters, “should be down there demanding, ‘Pay Wall Street people more.’ That’s where their salaries come from.”

Topping them all was the mayor’s Great Recession jewel that “the rich aren’t making any money” either. “We love the rich people” was a Bloombergism that never made it onto the big screen of his endless spool of 2009 re-election commercials, but it does encapsulate the anger people feel now, when his let-them-eat-ice chilliness during the storm left many who aren’t rich feeling very unloved.

It is hard to remember at these moments that this is the same mayor who sat in his office day after day calling the homes of every family that lost a cop or firefighter on September 11 and bleeding with them, even though it occurred months before he took office. This is the man who has quietly financed the legal defense of a dockworker and a horse trainer he believed were falsely accused of a crime, and was vindicated both times by the courts. When my mentor and onetime Post columnist Jack Newfield died in 2004, Bloomberg went to the memorial and stayed for the entire two-hour series of eulogies even though he wasn’t on the speaker list and was denounced by Jimmy Breslin from the pulpit for his supposed complicity in the Iraq War.

We seldom see this grace at his Blue Room press conferences, where he is more likely to carry a chip on his shoulder than let anyone cry on it.

I was at Bloomberg’s victory party at the Sheraton last year, one of a hundred political celebrations I’ve covered. It was the oddest. He came out on the stage alone. He saluted the women in his life, though none were standing beside him. The coalition that had just re-elected him was invisible. As was the administration he led. Behind him on a platform were multi-racial layers of anonymous and paid extras to lead the cheers. The ballroom itself was packed with the best-dressed assemblage of young professionals with free booze in their hands I’d ever seen at a victory gala, barely listening to his speech. The theme song might as well have been “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

Our other recent three-term mayor, Ed Koch, was a loner, too, in some ways. But he had an electric connection to people. If they keep a television camera in the operating room, he will never die. New Yorkers would willingly trade charisma for efficiency but we’ve discovered in recent days that we’re getting neither.

In a recent “Meet the Press” appearance, Bloomberg closed the door on a presidential campaign and said he just wanted to be the greatest mayor in the history of the city. Putting a GPS device on sanitation trucks for the next snowstorm won’t make him that. With three years to go, Mike Bloomberg has to open his heart to us, climb out of his cautious and caustic bag, and share himself with his city.

We don’t just miss him when he’s in Bermuda. We miss him, as strange as it sounds, when he is here.

Wayne Barrett, longtime Village Voice columnist, is now a fellow at the Nation Institute.

Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins Leave Village Voice by Jeremy W. Peters - NYTimes.com

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Wayne Barrett, 65, who had written for The Village Voice since 1973, said he was laid off from The Voice because his six-figure salary was too expensive for the paper. His last day was Dec. 31.

What becomes of New York’s most formidable muckraking paper when two of its greatest muckrakers are gone?

The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative weeklies, which enlivened political and investigative journalism in New York through its scrappy, hold-nothing-sacred approach, has lost Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, two journalists who helped define the paper’s modern era.

Mr. Barrett’s departure was a sign of the financial strain facing The Voice and print media: he said he was let go because he was too expensive to keep on staff. Mr. Robbins’s exit showed how unpalatable the professional choices facing journalists today can be: he said he would quit the paper at the end of January in a show of solidarity with Mr. Barrett, despite having no other job lined up.

The Voice without either man, some prominent New Yorkers said, is difficult to imagine. And their leaving raises questions about what kind of future the paper has in the city whose politics it fermented and culture it shaped.

“With the loss of Wayne and Tom, they lost Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle,” said Don Forst, who was editor of The Voice from 1996 to 2005 and edited the work of both men

Mr. Forst said their departures left the paper, which had already been downsized considerably in the last decade, greatly diminished. “It was a great institution for what it was,” he said. “It was not The Times. It wasn’t The Post. It was The Village Voice. And I think it was the role model for all folk alternative papers. I don’t know what they have left.”

Mr. Barrett has written for The Voice since 1973, was earning a six-figure salary and had minimal expenses and an unpaid staff of interns. He announced his departure in a column published on the paper’s Web site on Tuesday morning. His last day was Dec. 31.

“I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of The Voice. These will be my last,” he wrote. “I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new.” He will become a fellow at The Nation Institute, a liberal nonprofit media group.

Mr. Robbins, in an interview, said he could not bear the thought of staying on at The Voice without Mr. Barrett. “I think he’s a big loss for the paper, which is why I decided I thought I would move on as well,” Mr. Robbins said. “And I wish the paper well.”

Tom Robbins, who, like Mr. Barrett, was known for his energetic exposes of corruption, said he would quit The Voice at the end of January in a show of solidarity with Mr. Barrett.

Tony Ortega, the editor of The Voice, said it was painful to see both reporters leave. But he insisted there was no lingering animosity on anyone’s part.

“It is what it is,” a subdued Mr. Ortega said in an interview, adding that the financial pressures on the paper had forced him into a difficult position. “By now I think we expected the economy to be doing a little better. So I’m a little disappointed we haven’t grown. But we’re holding our own.”

The paper was in trouble before New Times Media, a national chain of alternative weeklies, merged with it in 2006, and it has been reduced considerably since then. Mr. Ortega said he had to cut about a half-dozen positions when the economy collapsed in 2008 — a small number but one that made a significant dent in a newsroom that now has only about 25 people.

Tumult in the editor’s chair has been just as disruptive. When Mr. Ortega, the former editor of The Broward-Palm Beach New Times, took over in 2007, he became The Voice’s fifth editor in little more than a year.

But through it all, Mr. Barrett and Mr. Robbins were fixtures — not only of their storied newspaper but also of the New York City press corps. Mr. Robbins, who first worked at The Voice in the mid-1980s, then departed for The Daily News and returned in 2000, is known for an encyclopedic knowledge of city politics and a big heart (he donated one of his kidneys to a friend). He earned a reputation as an equal opportunity exposer of corruption, regardless of political affiliation.

Mr. Barrett was also known for his digging. He was the first to uncover that Rudolph W. Giuliani’s father had gone to prison for robbing a milkman at gunpoint, and was once barred from interviewing former Mayor Edward I. Koch, the subject of a book Mr. Barrett co-wrote with Jack Newfield. It was titled — unflatteringly for Mr. Koch — “City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York.”

Mr. Koch, asked to reflect on Mr. Barrett’s work on Tuesday, said, “In terms of the quality of his reportage: superb.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was characteristically less effusive. “I can’t say we’ve always agreed, but Wayne’s voice will be missed,” the mayor said.

Despite losing both men, Mr. Ortega said his staff was highly capable and well equipped to carry on the paper’s proud tradition. Mr. Robbins will eventually be replaced, but Mr. Barrett will not. “People are just going to soldier on and do their stuff,” Mr. Ortega said.

Wayne Barrett: Time for Something New - Village Voice - Runnin' Scared

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Wayne Barrett retires from Village Voice...Tom Robbins Joins Him...

Ed Koch and I were inaugurated on the same day in 1978. He became mayor and I became his weekly tormentor.

I had written a few pieces for the Voice before I took over the Runnin' Scared column that January, going back as far as 1973.

But I was now inheriting a column that Mary Nichols, theVoice's editor-in-chief, had made famous, and that had been written by greats like Jack Newfield, Ken Auletta, and Joe Conason. A country kid out of Lynchburg, Virginia, where I'd founded the Teenage Republicans, I was suddenly occupying the first two pages of New York's counter-cultural crier.

Since then, I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of the Voice. These will be my last.

I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new.

If I didn't see that, others did.

The paper has always been more than an employer to me. I turned down other jobs that paid better three times to stay here. Though my mentor Newfield used to say we got our owners "from office temporaries," and though I worked for 14 different editors, the Voicewas always a place where I could express my voice. And that meant more to me than larger circulations or greater influence or bigger paychecks.

It is called a writer's paper because we decide what we will write. That is not a license to spout and I never took it as such. Across all these years, I almost never wrote in the first person and, even when I did, the piece was still packed with reportage. In my extended family, I have become the go-to guy for eulogies and I report every one of them, learning more about my mother, for example, by interviewing her sisters than she ever told me when she was alive.

When I was asked in recent years to blog frequently, I wouldn't do it unless I had something new to tell a reader, not just a clever regurgitation of someone else's reporting.
My credo has always been that the only reason readers come back to you again and again over decades is because of what you unearth for them, and that the joy of our profession is discovery, not dissertation.

There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth. Other professionals do sometimes tell the truth, but it's ancillary to what they do, not the purpose of their job. I was asked years ago to address the elementary school that my son attended and tell them what a reporter did and I went to the auditorium in a trenchcoat with the collar up and a notebook in a my pocket, baring it to announce that "we are detectives for the people."

When the Voice celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2005, I said "we thought a deadline meant we had to kill somebody by closing time," and that, as a liberal Democratic paper, we were "better at goring one of our own." It never mattered to me what the party or ideology was of the subject of an investigative piece; the reporting was as nonpartisan as the wrongdoing itself. I never looked past the wrist of any hand in the public till. It was the grabbing that bothered me, and there was no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the loot.

The greatest prize I've ever won for the work I've done in these pages was when Al D'Amato called me a "viper" in his memoir. Chuck Schumer, who ended D'Amato's reign after 18 years, ascribed his victory in a 2007 memoir to a story I'd written a decade earlier that devastated the incumbent Republican. What Schumer didn't say was that as soon as Hank Morris, Schumer's media guru, went up with an ad based on my revelations about D'Amato, Arthur Finkelstein, who was running D'Amato's 1998 campaign, aired a commercial about Schumer's near-indictment and flashed my nearly two-decade-old clips breaking that scandal on the screen as well. I was the maestro of a commercial duel.
Even as my scandal stories skewered David Dinkins in the 1989 and 1993 mayoral campaigns, I chronicled the devolution of his nemesis, Rudy Giuliani, from hero prosecutor to used 9/11 memorabilia salesman.

As awkwardly as I felt about it, Carl Paladino's toughest shots at Andrew Cuomo this fall were garbled renditions of two 6000-word exposes I'd done here about Cuomo's HUD record. For a week in the 2009 mayoral campaign, I couldn't turn on the TV without seeing a Bloomberg commercial drawn from my expose of Bill Thompson's conflict-ridden home mortgage. But I'd delivered one cover-story blow after another throughout the cycle about everything from the mayor's culpability in the Deutsche Bank fire debacle to his own governmental incest with Bloomberg L.P.

It was always the conduct that prodded me to write, not the person. And that is what I lived for, a chance to say something that revealed and mattered. To me, the story will always be the thing. It is all I can see.

I believe I have much left to learn, still armed with my notebook, and thus much left to tell you. It may be books or blogs or something in between. I hope to bring my trademark interns with me because they have, for more than 30 years, helped me think young, especially when it comes to the climate and water crises. The city and state beat are precious to me, but what is happening to our nation is also a frightening pull on me, so I don't know what I will wind up writing in this new life.

I have loved my bond with you and have never traded an inch of truth for a moment, or even a season, of access. I tell the young people still drawn to this duty that it is the most honorable one in America, and that I have never met a corrupt journalist. I even met one, Tom Robbins, so brave that when he heard I was leaving, he quit himself and didn't even tell me he was. "I'm going out with the guy who brought me to the dance," Robbins told me after he resigned, crafting a lede with the very fiber of his life.

"If a newspaper writes the story of its city without compromise or calculation," I wrote in that 50th anniversary piece, "it is as breathtaking as a ballet, each detail another artful step. Put us together as bound volumes in the memory of this grandest of cities and theVoice reads like a classic, ever passionate and principled."

I will pray it always does.

Reshma Saujani's Road to Congress? Right Down Wall Street. Let Me Be Your Guide. by Wayne Barrett - New York News - Runnin' Scared

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Pretend you're Reshma Saujani, 34, dazzling, born to an Indian family expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, a Harvard and Yale Law School grad who returned to Africa to help build Nelson Mandela's post-apartheid government.

It's late 2009 and everything you've done in your professional life since its idealistic launch has become so embarrassing you've taken to hiding long stretches of your resumé, which now reads more like blight than beacon, a six-figure career path as an obscure accomplice on the dark side of American finance in the worst of times. You might want to examine how you lost your way, rediscover your promise, put values ahead of ambition, and set yourself on a meaningful, perhaps even modest, new course.

Instead, Saujani decided she was ready to become "the youngest woman in Congress," as her campaign literature in the September 14 Democratic primary race against Carolyn Maloney proclaims she will be. Having spent the last five years at three hedge funds that blew up in scandal or speculative overdrive, Saujani insists she should represent Manhattan's eastside and parts of Queens in the House on the strength of a bio that features felons and foreclosures.

"It's our time" used to be the demand of the Jesse Jackson campaign in the 80s, shorthand for saying that the 80s were the moment for a black awakening in national politics. "It's my time" is the only rationale for the Saujani youth campaign, though none of the 17 city representatives in the House went straight there without prior public service, almost all elected first, like Maloney, to the assembly, state senate or city council.

These are the Saujani themes, as she has expressed them herself if quoted directly. If not quoted, I've inferred them from her half dozen negative mailers and the zeitgeist of her campaign, having discussed her message with several of her donors and allies. I've put it all in her voice:

I network — spectacularly, in fact, i.e. with Clinton queen bee Maureen White and Bloomberg queen Diana Taylor — therefore I qualify. Impressions transcend performance.

She is 64, I am very definitely not. I am Yale, she is Greensboro College. I am global, she is country.

I "respect the strong women who opened doors for me," except the one standing in my way.

Maloney was just two years older than I am now when she challenged the Barons of El Barrio, the notorious Del Toro and Rodriguez families who ruled East Harlem like a patronage and nepotism fiefdom, winning a council seat and ultimately driving them out of power. I know nothing about the racebaiting and threats she faced, or the groundbreaking work she did on corrupt contracts as chair of the council subcommittee, or the grit it took for her to take the Gold Coast congressional district away from the Republicans in 1992. Ten years of elected public service before going to the House is just so ancient. And what has she done recently in the House? Whenever I go to an ATM, Maloney's law requires the bank to disclose the fees I'm being charged. She thinks that's a big deal. Obama kissed her on the cheek when he signed her Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights, and USA Today says that will save consumers $5 billion in fees this year. But all of that is history. This is about "new leadership." I'm destined.

I was "shocked to learn that a majority of pro-choice Democrats in the House had voted to take away my reproductive rights" in the fight over the Stupak amendment, and believe that "women in New York deserve better" than the "silence" we got in that debate, but "support the passage of the recent health care reform law." This means I have already mastered the Washington art of attacking someone else for a compromise I would have made myself.

I come from Wall Street, got half of my hundreds of thousands in campaign cash from Wall Street, but nonetheless point the finger at my opponent, chief sponsor of a law Wall Street hates, as its captive. Maloney "sides with the special interests she's supposed to regulate." Who cares that the Washington Post called Maloney "one of the Capitol's leading advocates for tough new restrictions on the banking and credit card industries"?

She's "taken $2.5 million in special interest corporate PAC money," with "huge sums from Wall Street," while I have taken only from individual bankers and their spouses and coterie in amounts unprecedented for a New York congressional challenger. Did I forget to mention that the $2.5 million is a total for 18 years, or that Maloney's current list of biggest political action committee givers includes bricklayers, plumbers, teaching hospitals, postal supervisors, federal employees, letter carriers, machinists, teachers and trial lawyers? Did I also forget to mention that she's received a paltry Wall Street PAC total in this campaign and, in fact, returned thousands in contributions from banks until they repaid TARP?

My own favorite big donors are Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn and wife; Steve Rattner, who's still under investigation by Andrew Cuomo in the state pension fraud case even after his firm paid $12 million in fines; the wife of JP Morgan's CEO Jamie Dimon; and Morgan Stanley honcho John Mack and wife, who maxed out at $2,400 apiece and also hosted a private fundraising party in March for me. Morgan Stanley brass, at $38,100, have given more than any other donor, with Goldman Sachs, at $36,700, a close second.

I started my finance career in 2005 at Carret Asset Management, whose co-owner, Hassan Nemazee, pled guilty this year to swindling $292 million from banks, some of it while I was the chief operating officer of the small company's India Fund subsidiary. Then I became assistant general counsel at Blue Wave Partners, a risk-intense spinoff of the Carlyle Group, which, like Rattner's Quadrangle, paid $20 million in fines as part of Cuomo's pension fraud case. Like Carret, Blue Wave collapsed, "hurt by investments in residential mortgage backed securities shortly before record U.S. subprime-mortgage defaults sparked a global credit crisis," according to Bloomberg.

When I started this campaign last fall, I was deputy general counsel for Fortress Investment Group's "Liquid Markets business."

I went to Fortress even though the New Orleans Times-Picayune had reported in 2005 that its affiliate had tried to hold a 67-year-old Katrina victim in default on a subprime loan two months after her home was flooded out. I went even though its association with John Edwards made major national news months before I took the job, with the Washington Post linking it to predatory and subprime lending, as well as Cayman Island tax avoidance, and the Wall Street Journal identifying 34 New Orleans homes suffering through Fortress foreclosure. I stayed there two years, "personally unaware" of the firm's well-publicized problems. Fortress and Blue Wave executives have combined to give $35,300 in contributions to my campaign. That's what friends are for, though I did forget to mention Carret and Blue Wave in my official bio.

My policy paper condemns "the property owners and financiers" of the Stuy Town deal that put one of the city's "biggest providers of affordable housing at risk,", but I never mention that my most recent employer, Fortress, managed and partly owned Newcastle, an investor in the mezzanine mortgage debt that financed the disastrous purchase of the residential complex. Neither do I say that the wife of Jerry Speyer, the owner that put together the purchase that was predicated on mass evictions and rent escalations, threw a $2,400-a-head fundraiser for me at his townhouse.

I hate "the shadowy practices of derivative trading" but didn't say so while I took home paychecks from Carret's Global India Fund, whose Dubai joint venture partner had its own Capital Semi-Exotic Equity Derivatives business, or from Carlyle, which says it"specializes" in derivatives.

I also now hate the kind of "mortgage-backed securities bundled, packaged, and hidden through complex financial instruments and unclear practices" that Blue Wave and Fortress peddled.

I am running against those who are "demonizing Wall Street" and simultaneously using a 2000 news clip to prove that Maloney was once accused of doing its bidding. That decade-old clip suggests that she "advocated for risky subprime mortgages" at a time when most of America thought they were a door-opener for low and moderate income families. I, on the other hand, worked for a firm like Fortress that marketed them when they were already a scandal.

I actually wrote that the Wall Street collapse is "not about corporate transgressions and greed," and assailed Congress for "implying" that it was "by threatening to tax executive compensation." I say we "need to extend a hand rather a fist to Wall Street." Save the fist for Maloney, who's a moving target, having just been called "the most active" member of Congress by U.S. News & World Report, which cited the 70 bills she's introduced this session.

"I spoke at an event recently on job creation" and "someone asked me if I was really a Republican," as if "job creation is the territory of the GOP." I am not "pro Wall Street, I am pro-jobs."

I posted a web ad blasting Maloney for ducking debates, charging that she's "not talking to New York," and my spokesman told the Post it was because "she doesn't want to discuss her questionable fundraising." But when Chris Matthews asked me why I was attacking Maloney's donors when all "the gold plate" firms are "giving you money," all I could say was that "the business community" had lost faith in her, a tongue-tied contradiction of my claim that she was a corporate PAC queen. That's why I turned down a subsequent Voice request to discuss "the irony that Matthews pointed out." My press guy Jimmy Allen came up with the genius idea that anyone straightforward enough to express interest in my flip-flop must be biased, so we emailed the Voice that, since it "indicated from the outset" that it would "be writing a piece about how Reshma's criticisms of Maloney are hypocritical," we didn't "see any reason to provide you with an interview." So much for talking to New York.

The Voice may think that asking questions about an irony isn't the same as announcing one's intent to write a piece about hypocrisy. But I will only talk to those parts of New York who appreciate the audacity of entitlement and evasion, packaged by consultants who once plowed Iowa for Obama. Besides that, doesn't this piece prove I was right to duck questions I can't answer?

When the Voice asked for copies of my solicitation letters to potential donors or invitations to fundraisers, I made sure they couldn't see what I actually have been saying to attract all that banker loot. I instead sent them an invite to a Johnnie Legend fundraiser that didn't target my corporate donors and copies of a Maloney invitation to a Carole King fundraiser that I continue to use as a weapon against her, even after Factcheck.org gave my misuse of the issue the only "F" I've ever gotten.

Factcheck noticed such piddling discrepancies — like I'd already raised twice as much from the financial sector as Maloney, including PAC money, when I made the charge, and that I'd implied that Maloney was one of eight House members under investigation for hosting fundraisers while financial reform legislation was under consideration when she wasn't one of the eight. I am still just ignoring Maloney's contention that the fundraiser was announced months before the conference committee was created or Maloney was named to it. It still happened while Maloney was sitting in the catbird's seat. Wink, wink, I would have shelved it.

Since no one really expects me to beat Maloney, and I'm running now to lay the groundwork for either a second shot or an alternative "star" candidate, as Steve Rattner's eastside provincial princess Maureen White so delightfully put it, I was especially happy with a prediction recently offered by City Hall Magazine. "If Saujani can win at least 40 percent of the vote against Maloney," the logic went, "then it will unleash a flurry of interest in her kind of insurgent candidate: young, tech-friendly and no enemy of Wall Street." I will be back to my trailblazer days.

Additional research by Gavin Aronsen, Michael Cohen, Nicole Maffeo, Adam Schwartzman and Jenny Tai.