We mentioned several days ago that an old acquaintance was coming by >>> to our beachside bunker on the Atlantic Coast of Central Florida to gather some detailed notes about a very important time in his political career working for the Brooklyn Democratic Machine
He intends that his work principally will be autobiographical --- rather than journalistic or historical --- however, he does want to get the history right from a few different points of view
In addition, he wants his focus to be through a very unique Fresnel-type lens approach that will take his gaze and ours >>> and aim it at particularly salient moments in his life, especially his life in Brooklyn politics, and then generalize from that
One of those extended salient moments for our would-be autobiographical author was around the time that the final unwinding of Brooklyn DA Charles "Joe" Hynes was really getting started in earnest --- or actually a series of arcs or arches of events in time were converging at that moment --- like a Fresnel lens might momentarily focus a seeming infinity of separate photons from a powerful arclight through one lensatic portal, creating a powerful concentrated rotating beam, but then almost instantaneously shift to a different combination of concave and convex curves and prismatic bevelled edges to break up and diffuse that very same light source into a popping, dazzling instant --- creating the effect of a huge flashbulb on the reciprocal axis to the concentrated rotating beam
In essence, those extended moments were before, during and right after Brooklyn DA Hynes had succeeded in de-throning Clarence Norman and was trying to institutionalize that inquisitorial momentum into something that could be used as a permanent leash on whomever might be the Brooklyn Democratic leader >>> and that next momentary focus would be on Vito Lopez --- the Godzilla of Brooklyn's Williamsburg and points east as far as the Nassau County line
Here's our earlier comment on a prior comments thread about all of this:
"MAYBE WE'RE FEELING A LITTLE FULL OF OURSELVES, AND IT MIGHT MEAN NOTHING, BUT A VERY ACTIVE DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE DOWN-TOWN FOR SEVERAL YEARS JUST A FEW YEARS BACK IS INTERVIEWING US AT OUR FLORIDA RETREAT FOR A BOOK THAT HE IS WRITING ABOUT THE VITO LOPEZ ERA IN BROOKLYN POLITICS --- AND THE OVERWHELMING CHARLES "JOE" HYNES' INFLUENCE ON COUNTY-WIDE POLITICS AS HE LOOKED DOWN FROM HIS AERIE IN THE BROOKLYN DA'S OFFICE 'AT 350'.... When the once and future wannabee king-maker turned author mentioned that Vito Lopez and Charles Hynes are both now dead, we answered that neither one of them had looked well..... It's for keen insights exactly like that --- that this man traveled from the left coast of the USA to the East Coast of Florida to talk to us.... This man is both cryptic, deep and subtle (Yes, Tess, exactly that way !!!); and his questions have kept us as off-balance as a cheap lunch in Ensenada. You could have knocked us down with a feather, when he told us that his long-ago-adopted very western state had no coast line, but that he had experience with the Pacific waves, which came while he was doing his bit of LA lawyering...."
With the series of concentrated and occasionally adversarial interview sessions completed, our visiting interviewer seemed satisfied that he had extracted several golden nuggets by asking particularly poignant and intriguingly incisive questions, and by plying us with food and drink over the last few days. There should be at least one more session that our man hopes will be more of an open ended and freely associative retelling of the same stuff.
Our particular contribution was everything that we knew about DA Hynes' inquisition and thrice-repeated prosecution of John O'Hara, the Sunset Park Democrat; AND John O'Hara's generation long fight to get even with and undoo Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, once and for all. Our interviewer's questioning included several questions about what we were doing politically that informed our POV of the Hynes v. O'Hara and O'Hara v. Hynes saga.
However, our author intends to prove that whatever Hynes and O'Hara were doing or trying to do with and against each other, the fallout from their "Hundred Years War" was making and breaking the careers of too many other people all around Brooklyn, including folks like Dennis Quirk, Marty Golden, Clarence Norman, Jeff Feldman, Marty Connor, more than one of the Garsons and Lew Fidler, Ann and Joe English, Jim Brennan and several generations and branches of the John-Jack-John & Bob Carroll family, along with other key activists in CBID, and too many judges and judicial candidates to name --- culminating in the love-hate, hate-love mutually-assured-destructive relationship between DA "Joe" Hynes and Clarence Norman's successor as Democrat County Leader Vito Lopez.
Far from being the telling of some large local conspiracy theory, this autobiography intends to show that it wasn't Hynes and O'Hara playing at being Sisyphus and the rock that colored all of the politics for everybody else. Instead, it was Hynes and O'Hara that together WERE the rock, and everybody else, including our interviewer, had to play at being Sisyphus having to deal with more than one rock because of it.
