I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein

a hearing and arbitration, he had to pay to put the doorman in rehab, then rehire him. So the doorman goes back to work, and in a couple of weeks the same thing starts happening again, so there’s another set of hearings and more rehab - all out of his pocket. No exaggeration, it took four years before he could finally get rid of him - with a year’s severance.

      Of course, there is a hierarchy of victimhood. Gay definitely trumps female and even elderly. I saw this firsthand with a case where a gay guy went up against a psychotic old woman. She lived below him and was making his life miserable, constantly complaining he was making too much noise - banging the ceiling with a broom or ringing his doorbell in the middle of the night. The gay guy was so terrorized that he was afraid to go to the bathroom at night and took a pee bottle to bed with him. So the landlord sides with him to try and get her out of the building. This miserable woman was no fool. She shows up in court with an oxygen tank, one of the huge ones, on wheels! Fortunately, we had one of the decent judges, a woman who knew bullshit when she saw it. Plus, the gay guy gets on the stand and starts crying. Plus, we had some terrific testimony from the previous tenant in the gay guy’s apartment. When he was up for a government job, she told the government interviewer he was a pedophile and a drug dealer. So we, the gay guy and the landlord, win the case!

      But you think that’s the end of it? The gay guy goes back to court demanding a rent rebate for all the time he couldn’t make noise and had to pee in the bottle - and he wins! The landlord has to waive eight months’ rent, in addition to paying the attorney’s fees!

      There’s tons of people in New York trying to scam the system, and feeling completely justified about it. Why shouldn’t they, when they’re only screwing a landlord? The city’s No Heat Line offers all kinds of opportunities for unscrupulous tenants - a quick call claiming inadequate heat, and an inspector shows up at the apartment and takes a reading. Tenants who are old hands at this just open up the windows before the guy arrives. The landlord gets a Class C violation - the most severe kind - and the tenant gets a rent abatement.

      Anyway, it’s not like the city doesn’t do the same thing. Basically, as far as the city is concerned, the whole system is about one thing: making money for the city. They use this militia, inspectors, to go into buildings and look for violations. And if there’s nothing there, they’ll find something: a yogurt cup in the wrong recycling bin; trash cans put out too early; or the sanitation guys ripped open a bag and left stuff all over the sidewalk. God forbid there’s a snowstorm and someone leaves a patch of ice!

      As for tenants, if they’re dishonest enough, it’s almost possible to live in New York and never pay rent. Some of these cases drag on literally for years. There was one guy, a CBS sports producer, who wouldn’t let anyone into his apartment to do repairs, then claimed he was living in a slum, and used this as an excuse to not pay rent for six years! We’re talking a two-bedroom apartment with a forty-foot terrace at Fifty-fifth and Sutton Place.

      You soon realize that the people who yell loudest about other people’s greed are almost always a lot greedier than the ones they’re yelling about. They say it’s hard to vote Democratic when you have a Republican lifestyle - not in New York. Because when you’re a liberal in New York, no matter what else you do or how you behave in your own life, your politics make you a good person. I see it all the time. Someone’ll lie, cheat, take advantage of people, but it doesn’t matter, because supposedly the ends are right. It’s a great moral racket they run.

      In most of these cases, it’s not like these people don’t have the money. We’re talking Wall Street guys, movie stars, people in television. The attitude in New York is that housing is a right. You shouldn’t have to pay for it. I once had to evict Bozo the Clown.

      Some of the most outrageous cases involve non-primary residence. I’m working right now with a landlord who has a woman with a very cheap rent-stabilized apartment. The woman lives in Greece - basically, she uses the apartment as a cheap hotel room when she’s in New York. Theoretically, this is illegal, so when her lease expired, the landlord filed a non-primary-residence suit. Being in Greece, she kept filing for adjournments, until finally even the left-wing judge got fed up. For about five minutes, it looked like my guy might actually win - except now she’s got it in the Court of Appeals and, of course, they keep giving her more time.

      Does all this piss me off? Hey, if I let it, I’d be in a constant state of rage. Because, believe me, I am a certified expert on the breadth and depth and infinite variety of liberal hypocrisy in this city. But the only way to do it is to fight the bastards with everything you have, seeing them for what they are - and to keep your sense of humor. There’s one landlord friend of mine who has it exactly right. I happened to bump into him right after he’d seen Rent, which at the time was being celebrated by every lefty in New York, and I asked him how he liked it. He gave me this long deadpan look, and said, “Like it? It’s the musical version of the Bronx Housing Court!”

       Kids in the Clutches of the Left

       OR, HOW GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER GOT TO BE THE FATHER OF OUR COUNTRY

      AT FIRST GLANCE, the story in our local weekly looked to be one those light features that serve as filler on a slow week. It was about the visit of an author to a nearby middle school - one Rosalind Wiseman, seen in the accompanying photo as a smiling, attractive youngish woman in a jaunty scarf.

      But less than a paragraph in, the terrible truth became apparent. This was not the kind of visiting author many of us recall from our own school days back in the bad old days of the Fifties and Sixties, the sort who’d maybe read from her latest work of whimsical fiction or offer insights about some aspect of history or science stumbled upon in the course of research. No, the personable, thirty-nine-year old Ms. Wiseman had something entirely different in mind. She is the founder of a curriculum called “Owning Up,” and goes around to schools explaining to kids “how power and privilege relate to unethical, cruel, dehumanizing and bullying behavior.”