New York Newsday broke a blockbuster story on January 20, 1988.
Headlined “The Minister and the Feds,” the article by Bob Drury, Robert E. Kessler and Mike McAlary reported that the Rev. Al Sharpton Jr., “one of the city’s most vocal and visible black activists, has been secretly supplying federal law-enforcement agencies with information on boxing promoter Don King, reputed organized crime figures and black leaders and elected officials, according to sources.”
The 33-year-old Sharpton had admitted in an interview with Newsday that he “carried concealed microphones in briefcases” and joined federal agents who were wearing body mics as they met with people under investigation. He even let the feds put a tap on a phone in his home in Brooklyn but denied “supplying incriminating evidence on fellow activists or King.”
Sharpton went on offense after the story broke, appearing on Gary Byrd’s show, The Black Experience, on WLIB. He called the Newsday story a “setup” aimed at “either killing me or scaring me into running out of town. But I won’t back down. When God made me, he forgot to put reverse in my transmission.”
Rev. Al was speaking just for himself, but he might have been inventing a rallying cry for his fellow bold-faced names in the 1980s. Many of them also had only a forward gear in their transmissions, as Jonathan Mahler makes clear in his new book, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990.
Mahler weaves the threads of those four extraordinary years into a pulsating narrative of scandals, outrages, tragedies and triumphs that helped set the stage for the America we live in today. And he does give Sharpton some credit: “The reality was that no one else could do what he could: get crowds out into the streets, transform news stories into protracted media spectacles, deliver power to people without it,” such as the bereaved father of Yusuf Hawkins, the 16-year-old black youth who was killed in a white neighborhood in 1989.
Trump and the tabloids
It’s sobering to reflect on all of the 1980s New York characters who are still active in 2025.
Those years were the time when Donald Trump perfected his formula of hype, audacity and illusion to dominate the tabloid front pages.
Al Sharpton recently celebrated the 14th anniversary of his MSNBC show PoliticsNation.
Curtis Sliwa, the red beret-wearing founder of the Guardian Angels, is the Republican candidate in this fall’s election for mayor of New York City. That’s despite Sliwa’s admission that the Angels’ “well publicized mugging interventions,” as Mahler put it, were staged. In November, 1992, David Gonzalez reported in the New York Times that Sliwa “has admitted that six of his group’s early crime-fighting exploits were actually faked and former and present associates contend that even more of the group’s activities were publicity stunts.”
Rudy Giuliani used his powers as U.S. Attorney to bring some audacious, and some dubious, prosecutions in the late 1980, raising his public profile. He benefited from New York’s racial tensions to vault into the mayoralty and became “America’s mayor” as a result of his tenacity in leading the city following the 9/11 terror attacks. Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign fizzled (Joe Biden famously said that there were only three things Rudy needed to make a sentence: “a noun, a verb and 9/11”). Giuliani has been a fervent supporter of President Trump and abetted his false claim that he beat Joe Biden in the 2020 election; Trump recently promised to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
All of them are characters in Mahler’s story. But it is in one short passage that Mahler sums up the consistent approach Trump — and the others — took to scandals that would have been career-enders for most other people:
In the late ‘80s, “Trump had learned the power of publicity, but he had also learned the power of shamelessness. Bankruptcies and scandals hurt you only if you let them; if you acted bulletproof then, in a sense, you were.”
That attitude prefigured the events of the following decade, when President Bill Clinton faced a scandal that led to his impeachment. In a 2017 Washington Post opinion column about Alabama Republican Roy Moore, Marc Thiessen argued that it was Clinton who was responsible for the “end of shame in America”:
“During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton figured out that if you have no shame and ignore calls to resign, you can survive any scandal. All you have to do is lie repeatedly (‘there is nothing going on between us’) and show no remorse when you are caught doing so. When more women come forward with more allegations, deny them, too, and create just enough doubt that your supporters will feel justified sticking with you. Blame your opponents for conducting a political witch hunt to run you out of office.”
But shame died well before Clinton’s scandal convulsed Washington, and the nation, in 1998. And it died in New York.
The Brawley case
After Sharpton’s side gig as a federal informer was exposed, it was dwarfed by a bigger story: the increasingly untenable claim that a young black woman, Tawana Brawley, had been abducted and raped.
As Mahler noted, a seven-month grand jury investigation “found no reason to believe that Tawana was abducted or attacked. During the four days that shed claimed to have been held captive, she’d actually been hiding out in her family’s old apartment, afraid to return home and face the wrath of her mom’s boyfriend. She had smeared herself with feces and written racial epithets on her own body, perhaps with the help of an accomplice, and lied to doctors, social workers. the police, and the media. Sharpton, [Alton] Maddox, and [C. Vernon Mason] had taken it from there.”
Brawley’s three backers had turned New York State’s politics and legal system upside down, smearing innocent people, in their relentless effort to perpetuate what turned out to be a hoax.
The episode sank the legal careers of Maddox and Mason. But Sharpton overcame it, along with fraud and tax evasion charges (of which he was acquitted), to retain his role as an activist and eventually become a TV host.
Buying spree
In the four years chronicled by Mahler, Trump piled up nearly $2 billion in debt as he went on a manic spree of buying hotels and casinos in Atlantic City, along with a 282-foot yacht, the Eastern Airlines shuttle and New York’s famed Plaza Hotel.
Mahler observed, “Trump had started 1987 as a New York celebrity but was ending it as a national figure, the personification of modern American wealth. General Motors was preparing to roll out a $65,000 ($181,000 in 2024 dollars) Trump-branded stretch limousine, the Cadillac Trump Edition, with Italian-leather seats, a wet bar, two pull-out desks, a paper shredder, three car phones, a fax machine, a hidden safe, and a gold-plated Trump name plate.”
Trump refused to fade away after his casino companies filed for bankruptcy. And with the help of NBC’s show “The Apprentice,” starting in 2004, he managed to convince people he was indeed the all-powerful tycoon he had claimed to be in the 1980s.
As Michael D’Antonio noted in his Trump biography, Never Enough, Trump had learned the lesson taught by lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn.
Trump and his father hired Cohn when their outer-borough real estate empire was targeted by federal authorities for alleged racial discrimination in rentals in the 1970s. “Few landlord defendants responded to the Justice Department with a countersuit like the $100 million claim Roy Cohn filed on behalf of the Trump’s,” D’Antonio wrote. “Cohn also complained that federal officials were ‘storm troopers’ who had used ‘Gestapo-like tactics.’”
“As Donald managed the firm’s dealings with the federal government,” D’Antonio noted, “he established a template for most of the legal disputes he would face in the future. Whenever possible he would, in Roy Cohn style, go on the offensive. He would admit no wrongdoing and define a conflict to insist that he was the victim, and not the perpetrator of some immoral or illegal act.”
Hate lives on
Much of the success of Jonathan Mahler’s book comes down to his ability, through copious research, to get inside the heads of many of the era-defining figures: Mayor Ed Koch, police commissioner Benjamin Ward, director Spike Lee, sex crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein, AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer, future mayor David Dinkins and Sharpton himself.
The author wisely lets two incomparable newspaper columnists do some of his work for him. Mahler views some of the era’s outrages through the eyes of Murray Kempton and Jimmy Breslin. I had the privilege of working with both of them at New York Newsday.
In one way, Breslin and Kempton couldn’t have been more different: the bard of working-class Queens Boulevard vs. the bookish patrician from Baltimore. Breslin once told me that there was one thing which motivated him above all: rage. By contrast, Kempton searched for the good in people like Richard Nixon and John Gotti (though he couldn’t bear Bill Clinton).
But the two writers were alike in one important way. Locked in a tense but genial rivalry, they were always working, always thinking, always writing, in their minds, if not on keyboards. They were trying to come up with the one lasting definitive line that would win the approval of their peers, if not of the whole city.
They both weighed in when Donald Trump bought full-page ads in four daily papers after five black youths had been charged in the spring of 1989 with raping and beating a white investment banker who was jogging in Central Park.
“Headlined in the all-caps style of the tabloids—Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!—it was the most unequivocal denunciation of the Central Park suspects yet, pointedly calling for their death,” Mahler observed.
“I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them,” Trump wrote. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
The five were later exonerated.
Breslin blamed the media for enabling Trump:
The curious thing... is not that he destroyed himself yesterday, for all demagogues ultimately do that, but why he became so immensely popular with the one group of people who are supposed to be the searchlights and loudspeakers that alert the public to the realities of such a person. That would be those who work in the news business... With the one quality Trump has, amazing brashness —’ I just bought the sky!’ — he has overwhelmed the newspapers and television more than any one we ever have had in this city.
Kempton kept the blame squarely on Trump:
The man demeans anything he touches, which is any place where he can leave his name permanently engraved and any cause whose sponsors are shameless enough to sell him the privilege ... To boast of hating used to be an embarrassment for the worst of people .... Time was when people who sent hate letters had the shame to keep themselves anonymous. But Donald Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock’s feathers.
Kempton’s words seem truer now than ever. At last weekend’s memorial for Charlie Kirk, killed by an assassin’s bullet on a Utah college campus, his widow Erika said she forgave the shooter. But Trump, noting that Charlie Kirk “did not hate his opponents,” added:
“That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent,” he said. “And I don’t want the best for them.”
The tabs
Breslin wasn’t wrong in pointing a finger at the media for elevating Trump. In the four years covered by Mahler’s book, the city was in the throes of its last big newspaper war, and Trump was among those who took advantage of it.
“Just a few decades earlier,” Mahler noted, “New York had had ten daily papers vying for the city’s attention. But with the rise of the modern media — first radio, then television — most of them had long since folded. The only ones left now were the News, the New York Post, Newsday, and The New York Times. The paradox was that those surviving papers were more influential than ever. Together, they determined which stories would command the city’s attention.”
In assembling their front pages, the tabloids focused on selling their copies on newsstands rather than through home delivery, where the paper isn’t an impulse buy.
People walk fast in New York, and as they pass by newsstands, only bold, emotional, and even visceral front-page headlines could prompt more of them to drop a few coins and pick up a paper. Photos of love-em or hate-em celebrities like Trump, Sharpton, Giuliani and Koch helped enhance the appeal.
The front page headline was called “the wood,” after the wooden type that was once used on traditional printing presses (metal type was used for smaller fonts). Editors would spend hours drafting and discarding potential woods, looking for the one irresistible phrase.
Some became classics:
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD
HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR
and in a reference to Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples:
Marla Boast to Pals About Donald: BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD
It didn’t detract from Trump or Sharpton’s candidacy for front-page treatment that they had endured controversy. As long as people were still interested in them, still had strong feelings one way or the other, they could be recurring characters in New York City’s ongoing tabloid drama.
Mayor Ed
Ed Koch was another one of those figures, a reliable stirrer of controversies during his 12 years as New York City mayor. A classic Greenwich Village liberal, he tacked to the right after widespread looting broke out in the New York City blackout of 1977. Rupert Murdoch, who had bought the New York Post in 1976, awarded him the paper’s endorsement.
Koch’s egocentric refrain of “How’m I doin’?” became the signature of his three terms in Gracie Mansion, the last of which was marred by scandals involving many of his appointees.
When Koch lost his bid for a fourth term in 1989 to David Dinkins, a chastened Koch wondered what he would do with the rest of his life.
But there were plenty of opportunities. After all, New York City was not only the nation’s financial capital, but its media capital.
As Mahler wrote, Koch “would be a partner at a midtown law firm, a visiting fellow at NYU’s graduate school for public service, a columnist at the New York Post, and the co-host of a Sunday morning interview show on the local CBS station. He’d be a pitchman, too, for the Ultra Slim Fast diet; as part of the deal, he had to lose forty pounds and keep the public posted on his progress. And he already had his next book planned, a collection of his most acerbic letters. He was going to call it All the Best.”
He also gave lectures, served as the judge on The People’s Court and hosted an online movie review show.
Koch died of heart failure in 2013 at the age of 88, but he lives beyond the grave. If you drive into Manhattan on the 59th Street Bridge, you are traveling on what is officially the “Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.”