Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello listeners, Molly Conger. Here, this is
Speaker 1: something a little different. It's not a new full length episode,
Speaker 1: but it's not a rerun either. It's just a tiny, little,
Speaker 1: bite sized story about a weird little guy. I'd like
Speaker 1: to try to do more of these, just a few
Speaker 1: minutes about various side characters I found in my research
Speaker 1: who didn't really warrant their own tangent in an episode,
Speaker 1: but they're interesting enough that you might like to hear
Speaker 1: about them, just for a few minutes. We'll see if
Speaker 1: I managed to follow through on that, but for now today,
Speaker 1: here's a little treat I recently found myself for normal
Speaker 1: work related reasons, combing through the campaign finance reports for
Speaker 1: David Duke's nineteen ninety six campaign for US Senate. There
Speaker 1: are obviously some names in there that I recognize. A
Speaker 1: donation from longtime clan lawyer Sam Dixon, salary payments made
Speaker 1: to a longtime Duke associate who happens to be the
Speaker 1: son in law of a guy who died in a
Speaker 1: shootout with US Marshalls, things like that. Some of the
Speaker 1: names on those forms or stories I'll tell you eventually,
Speaker 1: But as I was flipping idly through lists of small
Speaker 1: dollar donors. One line caught my eye, not because it
Speaker 1: was a name that I recognized, but because of his profession.
Speaker 1: Almost all of the people willingly putting their name on
Speaker 1: the record as a David Duke donor by nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: six were retired. Line after line after line donors list
Speaker 1: their occupation as retired, and for those who did work,
Speaker 1: they were almost all self employed. But on August twenty seventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, David Duke's campaign received a five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars contribution from a New York City Police officer. Nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six was a pretty long time ago at this point,
Speaker 1: so I was pretty sure there was no chance this
Speaker 1: man was still employed by the NYPD, But I was
Speaker 1: curious if his fondness for David Duke ever caused any
Speaker 1: issues for him in his professional life. That seems like
Speaker 1: a pretty safe bet, right, But honestly, it might not
Speaker 1: make him that much more racist than any given NYPD
Speaker 1: officer chosen at random. But it turns out that Officer
Speaker 1: Thomas Poppus did something else in the mid nineties that
Speaker 1: almost ended up in front of the Supreme Court. See
Speaker 1: In the nineties every year, the Miniola Auxiliary Police Department
Speaker 1: sent out mailings requesting donations to their McGruff, the crime
Speaker 1: Dog anti drug program. Most people throw that kind of
Speaker 1: thing away. Some people will write a check and put
Speaker 1: it back in the pre addressed return envelope to make
Speaker 1: a donation. But every year one envelope came back to
Speaker 1: that barvolunteer organization stuffed with anti Semitic cartoons, pamphlets with
Speaker 1: racist conspiracy theories, and materials published by a group called
Speaker 1: the National Association for the Advancement of White People. And
Speaker 1: by nineteen ninety seven, the volunteer organization receiving these mailings
Speaker 1: went to the police. After years of getting these hateful mailings,
Speaker 1: they'd hired a company to encode the reply envelopes. If
Speaker 1: someone mailed back one of these smaller donation envelopes, they'd
Speaker 1: be able to tell exactly where the original mailing had
Speaker 1: been sent. So when the racist flyers showed up that year,
Speaker 1: they used the tracking code to connect that envelope to
Speaker 1: a particular PO box, and when they went to the police,
Speaker 1: they were able to determine that PO box was registered
Speaker 1: to a New York City police officer, and so to
Speaker 1: test their theory, the Nassau County Police sent a fake
Speaker 1: letter to that po box soliciting donations for a charitable cause,
Speaker 1: and he took the bait, the stuffed reply envelope with
Speaker 1: racist flyers, and mailed it back. Nasau County then turned
Speaker 1: the investigation over to the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, and
Speaker 1: they too tested the theory. They mailed Thomas Papus a
Speaker 1: letter asking for donations to a charitable organization, and he
Speaker 1: returned the envelope full of anti Semitic cartoons. And when
Speaker 1: he was confronted with this evidence, he did eventually admit
Speaker 1: that he'd done it. He tried to be casual about it.
Speaker 1: At first he said it was just a hobby, and
Speaker 1: then it didn't mean anything, and then later in the
Speaker 1: same interview, he said it was a form of protest
Speaker 1: because he was quote tired of being shaken down by
Speaker 1: charitable organizations. And it turned out that while had just
Speaker 1: been the one organization who finally figured out where the
Speaker 1: mailings were coming from and went to the police, he'd
Speaker 1: done this hundreds of times over the years to countless organizations.
Speaker 1: After he admitted to the mailings in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: New York Times reported that he was probably going to
Speaker 1: be allowed to retire with his pension. After a full
Speaker 1: investigation and disciplinary hearing and a lot of public outcry,
Speaker 1: he was found guilty of prohibited conduct and fired, so
Speaker 1: he sued. He filed a lawsuit in federal court, naming
Speaker 1: New York City, the police commissioner and the mayor as defendants,
Speaker 1: which in two thousand makes the case citation Pappas v. Giuliani.
Speaker 1: Papas claimed he'd been unfairly terminated in retaliation for engaging
Speaker 1: in protected First Amendment conduct. The Southern District of New
Speaker 1: York disagreed. Pappas was absolutely within his right to mail
Speaker 1: people racist pamphlets, but that's not the issue here. He
Speaker 1: wasn't criminally charged for it, and there is significant case
Speaker 1: law that allows government employers to take disciplinary action when
Speaker 1: it comes to speech by public employees when there is
Speaker 1: a legitimate government interest in promoting the efficiency of the
Speaker 1: public services it performs through its employees. Papas may have
Speaker 1: had a better case here if he'd been engaged in
Speaker 1: speech that looked more like pro if he'd made any
Speaker 1: attempt to engage in public discourse, or if he'd mailed
Speaker 1: the flyers to parties who were engaged in public activity
Speaker 1: on the issues he claimed he was protesting, but he
Speaker 1: was just mailing garbage to any random organization unlucky enough
Speaker 1: to have sent him a pre addressed envelope. Quoting from
Speaker 1: the opinion, mister Poppus suggests that somehow, by anonymously sending
Speaker 1: his white supremacist literature to any charity with the misfortune
Speaker 1: of soliciting a donation from him, he was commenting on
Speaker 1: perennial matters of public concern, such as taxation, political history, race,
Speaker 1: and religion. This claim defies reason and the record. Although
Speaker 1: the First Amendments protection does not turn on the effectiveness
Speaker 1: of a speaker's media strategy, mister Poppas's purported strategy for
Speaker 1: addressing the matter of public concern is so plainly unreasonable
Speaker 1: it belies his claim that addressing matters of public concern
Speaker 1: was ever his intention. So his speed, which was, as
Speaker 1: the Court wrote, of relatively low First Amendment value. And
Speaker 1: then on the other side of the scale, there's the
Speaker 1: very real concern of the government employer that his activity
Speaker 1: could disrupt government business. His activities had become a matter
Speaker 1: of real public concern. People were very worried that this
Speaker 1: cop hated Jews and black people. So they can't fire
Speaker 1: him for being racist, for having racist ideas. They can't
Speaker 1: fire him for what's in his heart. But they fired
Speaker 1: him for being racist in public, out loud, and in
Speaker 1: a way that was damaging to the department's reputation and mission.
Speaker 1: And look, just for the sake of this legal argument,
Speaker 1: try not to laugh at the idea of the NYPD
Speaker 1: having a reputation that could be tarnished like this. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: after he lost this lawsuit, he appealed the decision up
Speaker 1: to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in two thousand
Speaker 1: and two, and they affirmed the lower court's decision, with
Speaker 1: one judge on that three judge panel dissenting. And the
Speaker 1: descent makes a number of arguments. You know, he wasn't
Speaker 1: a supervisor. He did this on his own time. He
Speaker 1: didn't do it at work. He did it privately, He
Speaker 1: did it anonymously, and most alarmingly. The dissent argues that
Speaker 1: if the department had never disciplined him in the first place,
Speaker 1: the public trust wouldn't have been damaged because no one
Speaker 1: ever would have known that it was a cop doing this,
Speaker 1: that the department itself is responsible for the damage to
Speaker 1: its own reputation, because I guess the proper course of
Speaker 1: action here would have been to cover up this policy violation.
Speaker 1: The case was back in the news a few years
Speaker 1: later when that dissenting Judge Sonya Soto Mayor was nominated
Speaker 1: to the Supreme Court. I found several op eds citing
Speaker 1: this dissent as proof that she was a fair minded
Speaker 1: defender of free speech, and these were largely attempts to
Speaker 1: counter right wing attacks on her nomination. But if you
Speaker 1: look back at the majority opinion in this case, for
Speaker 1: College Leaguess called her descent a misunderstanding of the law
Speaker 1: and seriously misguided. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety two, a policeman may have a constitutional right to
Speaker 1: talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be
Speaker 1: a policeman. So it turns out police departments really can
Speaker 1: fire a cop for being extremely racist in his private life.
Speaker 1: They just usually don't want to. We're Little Guys is
Speaker 1: a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research,
Speaker 1: written and recorded by me Wiley Coner. Our executive producers
Speaker 1: are Sophy Leuctriman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
Speaker 1: by the wildly talented Roy Gagan. The theme music was
Speaker 1: composed by Brad Did. You can email me at Weird
Speaker 1: Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
Speaker 1: read it, but I probably won't answer it. You can
Speaker 1: exchange conspiracy theoris about the show with other listeners on
Speaker 1: the Weird Little Guys supper at it. Just don't post
Speaker 1: anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Speaker 1: Little Guys