00:00:00 Speaker 1: Then, Matti Haaffer here, before we get into this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can hear all episodes of Revisionist History The Staten Island problem ad free right now. By signing up for Pushkin Plus. You'll also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks, and other binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors. Plus, your support helps independent shows like us continue making the stories you love. Sign up and save on the Revisionist History Show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm slash plus. Use the code R twenty five for twenty five percent off an annual subscription. All right, let's get into the series. 00:00:39 Speaker 2: A while back, my colleague Benaedaf Haffrey came to me with a story about a strange little island that no outsider every visits, forgotten, overlooked, reached by boat across an expanse of turbulent water, where the locals practice their own unique customs, engage in their own strange variety of politics, and where incredibly, everything that is happening currently in America already happened long ago Staten Island. And so today we bring you a new series, The Staten Island problem in it. Ben is going to take us back in time to the nineteen nineties, when a young real estate scion named Donald Trump was chasing models in downtown nightclubs, when the subways were covered in graffiti, and when the homicide epidemic was at its peak and Staten Island decided enough already. Ben will share what he's discovered deep in the distant corners of New York's archives and tell the story of a civil war within the Five Boroughs, a secessionist movement, the rise of Rudy Giuliani, the Wu Tang clan, and ultimately a parable for what we're all living through right now. How a country that thought it was united comes apart. What was it? Hemingway? One set of bankruptcy. It happens two ways, gradually, and then suddenly. I promise you that at every turn in this bizarre story, you will say to yourself, I didn't know that, and then oh, that's how we got to where we are today. This is the first of what will be five episodes. You can expect new ones in your feet every week, or you can subscribe to push kid Plus and binge the whole series. 00:02:27 Speaker 3: Right now. 00:02:31 Speaker 1: Over to Ben, Let me say up top that I am not from Staten Island, though many people I spoke to for the serious scene to think I am. I'm from Boston. But when I was a kid, I used to dream about moving to New York. I used to watch Fantasia two thousand all the time. Well, actually, just this one sequence about New York City set to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. It opens as the clarinet plays that iconic du and a pensil draws in the skyline of New York City, and the whole thing is just romantic and idealized in hyperkinetic I fell in love with the idea of this place. I used to draw that skyline. I used to ride my bike around with a tape player bungee to the rack, listening to Gershwin, thinking about my first apartment where I live, what I'd do? Who cares that the cartoon was set in the Great Depression. I was a total dufis, But in all my reveries I never thought about the most remote part of New York City, Staten Island. New York is made up of five burroughs, each of which is like its own little city queens. The Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, where I live now, and then the farthest away and smallest at least by population, Staten Island. And as I've come to learn, Staten Island is a kind of uncomfortable fact of New York City. It's the butt of the joke always. I mean, listen to this recent Mayor oal debate. 00:04:00 Speaker 4: I'll start with you, mus Adams. 00:04:01 Speaker 5: Which borough have you spent the least amount of time. 00:04:04 Speaker 3: In Staten Island? Miss l A, Staten Island. 00:04:09 Speaker 6: Mister Lander, Stotton Island, Mister Mom, Donnie. 00:04:13 Speaker 7: The beacon of free transit, Staten Island, Mister Myrie, I'd stan out, mister Stringer. 00:04:19 Speaker 3: I've been doing this, I've been everywhere. 00:04:23 Speaker 1: It was almost a sweet I learned about Staten Island after I first moved to New York City. That summer, some friends invited me to a Staten Island Yankees game, their old minor league baseball team. When I looked up how to get there, I learned that I would have to take a subway to a ferry, a literal ship. I got on board. There was a bar, huge windows, twenty five thirty minute ride where you see the statue of liberty out the right side, and then you just keep going. The New York City skyline recedes into the distance, and then you land in a place that just is not New York City. New York City is all shoe box apartments. Staten Island is single family homes. New York City is liberal, Staten Island is conservative. New York City at large is mostly people of color. Staten Island is mostly white. New York City is defined by its subway. Staten Island has a single, dinky railway, and everyone drives a car Anyways. New York are words that convey prestige and power the world over, the center of finance, the center of media, the largest city in the country, the kind of place George Gershwin rhapsodizes. Meanwhile, a member of the College of Staten Island board of trustees told me he once suggested they drop Staten Island from the name of the college because it made people take it less seriously. Once Staten Island was supposed to get the world's largest fairest wheel, it did not. You was supposed to get connected to New York subway. Once they broke ground on a tunnel, and that was the end of it. For all these reasons and more, Staten Island calls itself the forgotten borough, the least beloved, the most ignored. It was once the place where New York City put most of its trash, literally the largest landfill on the planet. But starting in the late nineteen eighties, Staten Island had decided it didn't want to be dumped on anymore. It didn't want to be forgotten anymore. So it began a movement to secede from New York City, leave do its own thing, become an entirely different place, something that, if it happened, threatened to destroy New York. So why am I telling you this? Because it all seems so familiar to me. Every political arrangement includes some disgruntled minority, someone or some place that feels left out, forgotten, like they don't matter. I think that problem is at the very heart of what's going on in our country today. So I began to investigate the Staten Island problem. You're listening to Revisionist History. I'm Ben Mattahaffrey, and this is our series about an overlooked and misunderstood movement in the nineteen nineties to break up the largest and greatest city in the country. This summer, the United States is celebrating the anniversary of its founding by an act of secession, e quibble over taxes and representation that defied an empire and created a country which has altered the course of human history. All of which is to say, I think it's the right time to ask what do you do when that democracy looks like it's about to fall apart? This is the Staten Island Problem, Episode one, the Mayor versus the borough President. To start, I've got to take you back in time to the New York City of long ago. 00:08:12 Speaker 2: When I moved here for the Washington Post. I got hardship pay really yeah, like it was not compared to Washington, DC. Yes, I got a special cost of limit allowance, which was essentially like take a cab compensation for the fact I was going to a hell hole. 00:08:30 Speaker 1: Local reporter Malcolm Gladwell was on the scene in that era. 00:08:33 Speaker 2: Was that the Washington Post and I had been there since eighty six thirty seven, and the New York Bureau I had an opening. The bure chief was leaving, and I applied. As it turns out, I was the only person who. 00:08:50 Speaker 1: Applied how many people worked at the Washington Post, probably a thousand reporters. Nobody wanted the person who wanted to be the bureau chief of New York City. 00:08:58 Speaker 2: Nobody but me. He wanted the job. It was the sweetest set up in the world. You had, like, you know, a credit card, you could put anything you wanted on it. You had like an assistant, You had an un lovely office in the newsweek building. 00:09:12 Speaker 1: I don't know why, but I was like. 00:09:14 Speaker 2: I want that job, such a good job, so much fun. But no, the perception was why we didn't want want to go to New York the place that you that you left. You didn't voluntarily voluntarily go there. 00:09:29 Speaker 1: This was the version of New York that a man named David Dinkins was going to run as mayor. 00:09:35 Speaker 8: He was, by temperament, a conciliator, a pleaser, a guy who wanted to make peace among different constituencies, and kind of represented in his body and his pastor and his affect kind of he really did appeal to people's better angels. 00:10:01 Speaker 1: He really was that. Marcia Smith was a high ranking official in the Dinkins administration. She'd first started working with him back when he was campaigning for Manhattan Borough President. The borough president is like the mayor of each borough. 00:10:15 Speaker 8: As it happened, the whole policy unit in the Borough President's office was all women. He used to call us cupkicks. 00:10:24 Speaker 1: She'd watched his rise to become the first black mayor of the city in nineteen eighty nine. 00:10:29 Speaker 8: The election of David Dinkin's Remember this was on the heels of black mayors being elected in other major cities. But this was like New York was like last. But it was a very optimistic moment. This was a big moment. I felt it as very hopeful. I could also feel, of course, the skepticism that felt like there was a lot at stake. 00:10:51 Speaker 1: A lot of eyes on you guys, a lot of eyes. But contrary to most people who become mayor, Dinkins hadn't really wanted the job, and. 00:11:06 Speaker 9: He shied away from the idea of running from mayor, and he was convinced to run for mayor. 00:11:11 Speaker 1: Ruth Messenger became Manhattan Borough President after Dinkins. Around the same time, the city became majority minority, more people of color than white people. Those demographics were why people thought Dinkins should run. 00:11:24 Speaker 9: But here's a Blackborough President with some knowledge of state government and city government. For sure, perfect candidate for mayor. And I promised you that he was pushed to make that decision. 00:11:42 Speaker 1: Dinkins was a lifelong New Yorker. He grew up shuttling between his mom's place in the city and his dad's in New Jersey. His parents had split when he was young. His father was a barber, his mom was a maid. When he grew up, he went to college at Howard University and met his wife. Her father was Harlem political royalty, and that's at the course of Dinkins's life. Dinkins died in twenty twenty. So I spent a lot of time talking to people about him, and everybody had a Dinkins story, most of them about how fastidious he was. He would shower multiple times a day. He was often in tennis whites. A lawyer named Richard Emery remembered going to his office to ask him questions for an affidavit in a case. Once they were in the bowels of the municipal building, and all. 00:12:29 Speaker 5: Of a sudden, David Dinkins gets up from behind the desk and he takes his pants off. I think his jacket was still on, and he had garters and boxer trousers, and I wanted to ask him, what are you doing? And he puts them up like this, holds him with one hand and takes a steamer and starts to steam the pants. 00:12:54 Speaker 1: So that the crease is really nice. 00:12:56 Speaker 5: And he stands there and he's answering my question and said he's steaming pants. 00:13:03 Speaker 1: Dinkins didn't like a crease out of order. I have to imagine that's part of why being the mayor of Chaos City was not necessarily his dream job. When Dinkins was elected, his dad told the press, I wouldn't want the job for a billion dollars. But Dinkins knew this was his chance to make history, and he did. 00:13:23 Speaker 10: I stand here before you today as the elected leader of the greatest city of a great nation to which my ancestors were brought, chained and whipped in the whole of a slave ship. 00:13:37 Speaker 1: In January of nineteen ninety, David Dinkins took the oath of office on the steps of city Hall. 00:13:43 Speaker 10: And this year this city has given powerful proof of the proposition that all of us are created equal. 00:13:52 Speaker 1: Dinkins had a vision of what the city could be. 00:13:55 Speaker 10: I see New York as a gorgeous mosaic of race and religion, faith, of national origin, and sexual orientation of individuals whose families arrived yesterday and generations ago, coming through Ellis Island or Kennedy Airport, or on buses bound for the Port Authority. 00:14:17 Speaker 3: In that spirit, I offer this fundamental. 00:14:21 Speaker 10: Pledge, I intend to be the mayor of all the people. 00:14:26 Speaker 3: Of New York, from City Island to Staten Island. 00:14:33 Speaker 1: New York City has always been deeply segregated into ethnic enclaves, the Dominicans of Washington Heights, black people in Central Harlem, Italians and Jews and Canarsi. The mosaic was Dinkins's way of reconciling those facts. It was his way of saying that diversity is not a problem, it's an asset. But if you cleared away the buildings he faced as he spoke, he would have been looking straight at the peace of the mosaic that had recently decided it no longer fit Staten Island. After Dinkins was elected, Staten Island had pushed forward its bill to secede from New York City. It had been in the works for years. At that point, but it's hard to imagine. Dinkins didn't take it personally. His colleague Marcia Smith thought that for Staten Island, this was all about Dinkins. 00:15:25 Speaker 8: Oh my god, what are they thinking? And well, of course they're thinking that because they don't want to be governed by a black mayor. 00:15:32 Speaker 1: So it immediately seemed racially tinged. 00:15:35 Speaker 11: You. 00:15:35 Speaker 1: Absolutely, Dinkins knew Staten Island was threatening to secede, but he didn't know how seriously to take it. Then one day his finance commissioner began looking into the matter and determined this was a bigger deal than anyone realized. The administration looked into it. If Staten Island succeeded, New York could be in a financial crisis. The city would, who is almost twenty percent of its land, including crucially its last operational dump, with a smaller population, It would get way less than federal and state aid. It would lose possibly the thousands of government workers who lived on Staten Island, including thousands of police officers in the middle of a crime wave, and it could leave the first black mayor with the legacy presiding over the city's destruction. Could Dinkins keep the biggest, most fractious city in the country from breaking apart. He had to scare Staten Island out of doing it, So the city launched a task force, and Dinkins decided that he personally would set sail for the island to argue the case himself. We'll be right back one night. A few weeks before David Dinkins went to Staten Island, a police officer named Michael O'Keefe was patrolling the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights in an unmarked car. He saw a young man tugging a jacket around his waist. It was July, not jacket weather. He thought he was probably hiding a weapon. O'Keefe pulled over. The kid was a suspected drug dealer named Keiko Garcia. O'Keeffe got out and tried to arrest him. Garcia resisted. What happened next was fast and unclear, but it was a warm evening and there were witnesses on the street. They said they saw the cop beat Garcia with a walkie talkie, take out his knees, and shove him into the lobby of an apartment building. They said they heard him screaming mama, mama, they are killing me in Spanish. Then two shots. When more police arrived, they found O'Keefe's standing of Garcia dead, a bullet in the stomach, one in the back. That night, the riots began. 00:18:09 Speaker 3: Eighties. Bottles and bricks are being thrown. Several cars have been set on fire. 00:18:14 Speaker 8: Some of their occupants have been thrown from the cars. 00:18:17 Speaker 1: The building across from the shooting burned. There was fire everywhere. 00:18:25 Speaker 3: Oh shoo. 00:18:27 Speaker 1: A police helicopter hovered overhead. Someone shot at it. In the lobby of the apartment building where Garcia was killed, someone used his blood to write Kiko, we love you on the wall. One man threw a bottle at some cops, then ran away across the rooftops. When they chased him, he fell five stories to his death. Protesters burned pictures of the police. 00:18:50 Speaker 7: Police officers watching their image burn didn't want to talk on camera, but told me later they thought it was disgusting and were frustrated by orders not to interfere with a demonstration. 00:19:00 Speaker 1: People listening in on police radio said they heard cops joking that if they saw Al Sharpton protesting, they should shoot him. Phil Caruso, head of the police union took to the news. 00:19:11 Speaker 6: Of course, we don't approve of it, we don't condone it, but it's something that is sort of a reaction on the part of police officers under a lot of stress. I think what we should do is start focusing on the so called victim. In this case, it was a known drug dealer who was wanted under a warrant because he violated his parole. 00:19:35 Speaker 1: So, yes, the cops were annoyed with the protesters, but they seemed even more annoyed with the mayor. 00:19:42 Speaker 4: I came to pay my respects and offer my condolences to the family and to assure them that everything that can be done will be done thoroughly investigate the circumstances of this debt. 00:19:55 Speaker 1: From the start, Dinkins seemed suspicious about what had happened. He met with Garcia's family and consoled them. He invited them to Gracie Mansion. He paid for Garcia's body to be shipped back to the Dominican Republic for a funeral. He walked the streets of Washington Heights and met with people. He told them, I promise you justice, I beg you for peace. 00:20:21 Speaker 3: I used to live up here I love to come to this neighborhood. 00:20:24 Speaker 1: The cops felt Dinkins had sold them out, that he'd sided with the family of a drug dealer, and somewhat important agreed. 00:20:33 Speaker 7: And my god, if you're going to pay for that funeral, there's that place, thousands and thousands of funerals not paid for. 00:20:38 Speaker 1: I'm all city today. 00:20:39 Speaker 7: It would be more justification clothing than that. 00:20:41 Speaker 1: One earo President of Staten Island, Guy Mullinary, the. 00:20:46 Speaker 7: Mayor has not bested with the responsibility of giving religious comfort to the family of. 00:20:51 Speaker 3: Somebody killed who's a drug dealer. 00:20:53 Speaker 7: And I think, I think, but that was very badly played. 00:20:57 Speaker 1: And I think mull and Aary had got his start as a real estate lawyer on Staten Island. Then he got into politics and realized he was really good at it. He used to just open up the phone book and call random people on Staten Island to talk. He was beloved, polarizing in extremely old school. This is him talking to a WNYC reporter defending himself the time he said a lesbian shouldn't be Attorney General of New York. 00:21:23 Speaker 7: Not one editorial ever took her a task for her going out and asking for goats because she was a lesbian, not a single look. Do you think there's a difference between that and say you are having a fundraiser with who's the Italian Americans? 00:21:40 Speaker 3: Sure? 00:21:41 Speaker 7: Sure, what's the Italian American agenda? 00:21:44 Speaker 3: She had a gay and lesbian agenda. 00:21:49 Speaker 1: Mullinary's philosophy was that the only rules in politics are what the voters think, and his borough was full of people who did not think much of New York City. Staten Island was a essentially the last outpost for people who would like to leave the city but couldn't because they worked for the city and therefore had to live within its boundaries. There were a lot of police officers on the island, to the point where when I bought a used copy of Mollinary's memoir on eBay, it showed up with the inscription blue lives always matter. To put it mildly, this was not Mayor Dinkins's crowd in the weeks after Garcia was killed. It was Mullinary who took a stand against Dinkins and how he handled everything. He wrote the police precinct in Washington Heights that quote, I know that your morale has taken quite a beating in recent weeks, and the actions of Mayor Dinkins have undoubtedly contributed to your present feelings. However, I did want you to know that there are some of us in government who hold you in the highest esteem. Dinkins learned about the letter just before his trip to Staten Island. He was furious. Mollinary said that Dinkins's leaked it to the press, and. 00:23:02 Speaker 7: My letter never would have been made public except that he chose to make it public. 00:23:07 Speaker 3: So if you made it public, then how can you make the. 00:23:09 Speaker 7: Accusation that I'm trying to stir things up an acre to listen in our city. 00:23:12 Speaker 6: I'm not. 00:23:13 Speaker 7: I didn't want to be standing before all of you talking about this issue. 00:23:16 Speaker 3: Was just a private letter, I. 00:23:18 Speaker 7: Said to the Minimument of the Precinct, who needed a look from somebody in government. 00:23:22 Speaker 2: Nobody else was doing it. 00:23:26 Speaker 1: But at that point Dinkins couldn't call the trip off. So one hot summer morning, David Dinkins finally got on a ship and set sail for Staten Island. We'll be right back. The mayor boarded a ferry in Lower Manhattan and charted, of course, a half hour out to sea until it reached Staten Island, Dinkins got off the boat and made his way to Borrow Hall. A small crowd awaited. 00:24:05 Speaker 7: Him, and I would like to greet you all this morning to mark Mayor Dinkins's week long visit here on Staten Island. 00:24:14 Speaker 1: A camera crew followed Dinkins on his week out on the island. The tapes are in the city archive and they are kind of amazing. You see Dinkins in a baby blue suit on the steps of Staten Island Borough Hall. Then a short man with big glasses and white hair steps in front of him. Staten Island's Borough President, Guy Mullinery. 00:24:35 Speaker 7: Mayor Dinkins, distinguished guests and fellow Staten Islanders. 00:24:38 Speaker 3: Good morning today. 00:24:40 Speaker 7: I'd like to speak to you all about the borough. I have represented an elective office for seventeen years and whatever the problems have been the last few days, I'm going to forget them and hope they didn't exist. 00:24:52 Speaker 3: And I think the. 00:24:52 Speaker 7: Mayor and I, whatever our differences are, we'ved up it before, just as I have with the mayor before him and the mayor before him. 00:25:00 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:25:01 Speaker 7: Well, when you represent you Stun Island, it goes with the terrifight thing to a certain extent. But we'll try to put those differences aside, at least I will, and I'll speak only for myself. 00:25:12 Speaker 1: It was a hot day. The mayor stood in full sun behind the borough president, looking deeply displeased as he wiped sweat from his brow. Then Molinari's daughter, susan congresswoman for Staten Island, took the mic. 00:25:28 Speaker 3: Well, I know it, excuse me. 00:25:30 Speaker 4: It's customary during most trips when you have special guests coming to either the city or the island. 00:25:36 Speaker 6: I'm sure you've done it. You give them a special key to the city. 00:25:41 Speaker 3: Well, today it's my great pleasure. 00:25:44 Speaker 1: In Staten Island's own way, it presents you with an unofficial lock to the garbage dump. She and her dad held up a gigantic sign that said Moulinary Landfill Locke. Dinkins did not look happy. Minutes in, it was clear that this would be a very drying week for David Dinkins. He took the lectern. 00:26:10 Speaker 4: Let me just say a word about Guy Molinary. Uh. He knew, he knew I was going to be here today, just like I knew. 00:26:31 Speaker 3: That he would be here to greet me about There was no doubt about that. 00:26:36 Speaker 1: Both Dinkins and Mellinary were ex Marines, but only Moullinary had seen combat. What Dinkins got from the Marines was a love of rules and decorum. He was proper and patrician. What Mollinary got from the Marines was a killer instinct. He was a street fighter. The very public feud between the two of them was making it hard for Dinkins to focus on the task in hand. The letter kept coming up. 00:27:00 Speaker 4: I hope that that's the last time I will address this subject for now, because what I want to do is get about. 00:27:06 Speaker 3: The business of government here on Staten Island. 00:27:10 Speaker 1: Denkins tries to reset to his real purpose stop seceession, and I was. 00:27:15 Speaker 4: Asked, well, what do you hope to accomplish here on Staten Island? 00:27:18 Speaker 3: I said, if nothing else, If nothing else. 00:27:21 Speaker 4: I hope that I can convey to the people of Staten Island that I deeply care about them and about all of them. If this were a political visit, why in blazes would I come. 00:27:31 Speaker 3: I mean, I know the number of votes that were cast. 00:27:34 Speaker 4: For me in nineteen hundred and eighty nine, so I'm. 00:27:38 Speaker 3: Not here for political reason. 00:27:40 Speaker 4: If I were to come for political reason, might I not then reason, I'll come to Staten Island for two days because you have less than five hundred thousand people, and they got two and a half million people in Brooklyn. Why not go to Brooklyn for eight and nine days. 00:27:55 Speaker 3: And come here for two days. But I'm here for seven days. 00:28:00 Speaker 1: At this one imagines his knees buckled. 00:28:02 Speaker 4: Seven days, not in Monday to Friday, not simply Monday to Friday, Monday through Sunday. So I don't care whether you agree with me on all issues or not. If you are reasonable people, you have to say to yourselves, well, by God, he does care. 00:28:25 Speaker 1: Seeming more than a little pissed off, he began his pitch for the city of the Mosaic. 00:28:30 Speaker 4: But you know, the glory of Staten Island does not in any way confine itself to the past. In fact, the island of the Seven Hills may well have been the first part of New York that European explorers cited. 00:28:44 Speaker 1: Dinkins has clearly had his speech writers dig deep for some nice things to say about Staten Island. 00:28:50 Speaker 4: The Staten Island Ferry oldest surviving free Black settlement in the United States only zoo and American incidentally, to exhibit all thirty two species of rattlesnakes. 00:29:01 Speaker 1: Pouring sweat from his brow, David Dinkins limped to his finish a line about how Staten Island maybe was the first place his favorite sport, tennis, was played in America. 00:29:12 Speaker 3: So thank you, Staten Island, you have given me that. 00:29:19 Speaker 1: Finally, he addresses the elephant in the. 00:29:21 Speaker 12: Room, and I hope that that I will be able to persuade the people of Staten Island that this government, and I am the representative of this government, that this government does care about Staten Island. 00:29:36 Speaker 4: I'll be speaking to this question of secession, but just so to give you some advanced notice, y'all ain't going nowhere. 00:29:47 Speaker 1: He was right and he was wrong all at the same time. 00:29:51 Speaker 3: God nice, you keep the faith. 00:29:57 Speaker 1: And with that the mayor's seven day vis it to the forgotten borough began. Borough President Guy Mullinary had Mayor Dinkins trapped on Staten Island for an entire week. He could control the narrative about many things in that time. The dump with that lock gambit, but even more urgently, the increasingly tense relationship between Dinkin's and the cops after Washington Heights. Here's a reporter asking Mollinary about all that. 00:30:30 Speaker 3: You think he shouldn't go for a place to the feuderal. No, absolutely not, absolutely long. 00:30:34 Speaker 7: I mean that I think basically tote we disagree with that, And I think as the weeks go by and to day is going by, and you'll see the reaction of the police community, and I think you'll. 00:30:41 Speaker 3: Find out that I was right. 00:30:44 Speaker 1: In case you're wondering why the borough president of Staten Island was even talking about Washington Heights. 00:30:49 Speaker 7: According to Millinary, a lot of the drugs that were sold in Washington Heights wind up in this borough. 00:30:55 Speaker 1: Dinkin's toward the island all week. He kept trying to reach higher, only to be dragged out on my reality. He gave speeches invoking the Civil War. He quoted Lincoln comparing Staten Island to the South, Seceeding he made his pitch. Secession undermined the very principle of democracy. We're supposed to be able to argue about things and come to a compromise. You can't just leave when you don't like something. But Staten Islanders we're having none of it. 00:31:23 Speaker 2: My question is why you allow one deputy mayor to direct you down a path of destruction. 00:31:32 Speaker 1: Here he is at the local newspaper's editorial luncheon, staring down at his plate, trying to eat. I have to say he looks totally miserable. The path of destruction this woman's asking him about is a reference to the dump and how his administration had no real plans to close it. 00:31:51 Speaker 4: Us genuine a minute, but just interrupt the flow, just to sit here and listen to you give some conclusions that are really not accurately a little painful. 00:32:01 Speaker 3: I'm here because I tear and I represent all of the people. 00:32:04 Speaker 4: We have a very difficult and knotty problem with respect to the disposal of solid waste, and experts do not all agree. 00:32:10 Speaker 1: That Dinkins was in an unwinnable situation, being accosted while he ate his lunch, standing in the sun all around the island, being blasted with unpleasant questions as he sweat like crazy. 00:32:22 Speaker 4: The main thing is getting out of the sun. Boy, I cannot understand united a space inside. They just could have been right in there, you know, in the car. 00:32:33 Speaker 1: His week there was building to a climax when Dinkins would finally visit the infamous dump fresh Kills, the largest landfill in the world, which yes, smelled terrible, but also seemed possibly to be highly toxic. This was the kind of place the fastidious David Dinkins really did not want to be, so when he took his tour by car and then gave a press conference, it did not go over welly. 00:33:00 Speaker 7: Like you were going to get out and take a walk around some of the landfill area everyfore, and. 00:33:04 Speaker 3: I looked like, and what was that body language? How did it it was? 00:33:08 Speaker 11: How? 00:33:08 Speaker 3: How did you determine? 00:33:09 Speaker 2: It was? 00:33:09 Speaker 7: Our understanding when the motive caate stopped and I was going to get out and to take a walking. 00:33:16 Speaker 1: Mulinary roasted Dinkins about it all in the press quote after forty years of Staten Islanders living near an ever increasingly large dump, David Dinkin spends forty minutes reviewing his own data and declares it's safe. The message was clear, too clean to walk around trash Island. Huh, mister mayor. 00:33:35 Speaker 7: I was wondering what it was that it made you shape your mind. 00:33:39 Speaker 4: What I'm doing is has taken me to be briefed by Commissioners Lloyd and Jurling, which we have been able to do, and and. 00:33:47 Speaker 3: Throughout the ride, I was getting breathed as we were writing. 00:33:55 Speaker 1: The week soon ended and Dinkins went back to Manhattan, seeming to have made matters worse. And what would soon become clear is that Moullinary had much bigger plans, not for Staten Island to leave the city, but for Staten Island to take it over entirely. When I started reporting this series, a historian told me America happens first in New York City, And now that I spent way too long learning about a borough that did its best to leave that city, I have to say I agree. This is a story about what happens when neighbors feel like they have nothing in common anymore, when they had these irreconcilable differences, and they just don't think they can be part of the same place anymore. Back in the nineteen nineties, a chess game was being played for, yes, the fate of the largest city in America, but I think the stakes of it are much higher because the more I looked into the story of Staten Island's secession and where that split came from, the more I understood how we got to where we are today. Coming up on the Staten Island problem. 00:35:10 Speaker 7: Will you trust your friends and neighbors and the people in Staten Island or you trust the people five miles overseas. 00:35:17 Speaker 13: There's a lot of Donald Trump and the Gui Moultiner style of politics. They're they're very dominating, and they're intolerant of people who disagree with them, Absolutely intolerant. 00:35:29 Speaker 10: For Rudy Giuliani to urge them on, as it were, demonstrates an irresponsibility on his behalf. 00:35:36 Speaker 5: Can't you just deal with the secession thing when you're at these debates? 00:35:40 Speaker 1: You got to turn a wedding into a secession debate? Did you think of it when you when January sixth happened? 00:35:46 Speaker 8: Absolutely? There was much chatter among the Dinkins alumni about three parents. 00:35:52 Speaker 1: We've seen this before. 00:35:54 Speaker 11: Yeah. 00:36:11 Speaker 1: The Staten Island Problem is written and reported by me Ben Mattapaffrey. It was produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Schakerjee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Russick, Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky. Original music by Stellwagon, Symfinet, Luis Gara and Jake Gorsky. Special thanks to Todd Reynolds for his track The Solution from the album Powder Burrow, and to the College of Staten Island and the New York City Municipal Archives for all of the amazing tape. And thanks of course to Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Ben Mattaphaffrey, suit of