City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York.

CORRUPTION IN New York municipal politics is an old story. At the turn of the century, George Washingon Plunkitt offered his statement of a typical Manhattan politician's philosophy of government: "I saw my opportunities and I took 'em." A few decades earlier, William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, the grandest of Tammany Hall's grand sachems, is thought to have "earned" between $75 million and $200 million (in 1871 dollars). When asked why it cost several hundred thousand dollars to supply the new City Hall with brooms, Tweed replied, "There's a lot to clean." Alas, that was very true.

What makes the city's present embattled mayor an unusual figure is that, unlike Tweed and Plunkitt, Edward Koch has built his career selling himself as New York's Mr. Clean, a man determined to sweep clubhouse politics out of city affairs. As City Council reformer, congressman, and now mayor, Koch has claimed again and again to be a new kind of Democrat, unsullied by patronage and corruption. The truth, as Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett demonstrate in their passionate account of his 12 years in office, is that he has been used and manipulated to line the pockets of one Democratic boss after another-most notoriously Meade Esposito, party chairman in Brooklyn; Stanley Friedman, party chariman in the Bronx; and Donald Manes, borough president of Queens.

From 1977, the year he was first elected mayor, through the mid 1980s, the mayor's strategy was simply to dissociate himself from the corruption of his administration. Then Esposito was linked to Wedtech, and was revealed to have "appropriated" campaign funds for his personal use. Meanwhile, Friedman was convicted of siphoning millions of dollars ftom the city budget into a letterhead corporation, Citisource, in which he and Manes owned a majority of stock. Before Manes could be convicted himself, he committed suicide. As it became clear that Ed Koch would no longer be able to stand aloof from the activities of these men, the mayor switched strategies and took to portraying himself as the scandal's primary victim, an innocent under siege by events beyond his control. "You know," he once told a public gathering, "it's easy to become overwhelmed by the corruption of others and the feelings of betrayal. It's easy to start feeling sorry for yourself, and I try not to. But occasionally . . . I start saying to myself, 'Geez, what did I do to deserve this?'"

Yet it was Ed Koch who appointed Esposito cronies to key positions in city government even though more qualified candidates were readily available; Ed Koch who granted Meade Esposito the access to City Hall he needed to put his schemes into action; and Ed Koch who gave Stanley Friedman and Donald Manes his blessing to promote Citisource's contract with New York for millions of dollars' worth of hand-held computers that they knew, and everyone else in the administration suspected, the city would never see.

Perhaps the most damaging testimony in City for Sale comes from David Brown, an aide to Congressman Koch and Mayor Koch's first deputy mayor. Brown says Koch "is wrong to imply that no one could have figured out that the political conditions developing in New York City over the past eight years were likely to promote the kind of corruption that is now finally being uncovered." What Brown and many others see in Koch is a former reform councilman and representative now worried about retaining his political power, and eager to mend fences with the party regulars he might have offended on his way up. It is no coincidence that the core of the administration's legion of shame-including commissioner of transportation Anthony Ameruso, taxi boss Jay Turoff, city propertyleasing agent Alex Lieberman, and commissioner of parking violations Lester Shafran-came to the Koch administration primarily as holdovers from the Beame administration, their job applications actively promoted by the party bosses. If the bosses needed any proof of Koch's willingness to cooperate, they got it.

Indeed, during the Koch years, who you know has been far more important than what you can do. Even Donald Manes's next-door neighbor, a plumber, got a piece of the action, receiving a $20-million city contract despite the fact that at the time he had been charged, in a federal racketeering case, with laundering narcotics profits for a local crime family.

Newfield and Barrett have performed a valuable service in documenting tbe municipal corruption for the past 12 years, but their indignation is highly selective. Indeed, City for Sale may well be the long-awaited fourth installment in the Star Wars series, in which the five boroughs are the setting for an epic struggle between an evil Empire-led by Koch, Esposito, Manes, and Friedman-and a virtuous Rebellion-led by Rudolph Giuliani and Mario Cuomo.

Unfortunately, the major figures in New York politics fail to divide along so neat a moral axis. The authors report that the party bosses were uncomfortable with Mario Cuomo during his 1977 bid for the mayoralty. Yet the stoic governor emerged from the same Queens Democratic Party that produced Geraldine Ferraro, John Zaccaro, and Donald Manes. How likely is it that a man could have become a leader in the Democratic organization in Queens without playing ball with the party regulars?

As for Rudolph Giuliani, the former U.S. Attorney for southern New York -well, in the authors' minds, he has already been anointed successor to Ed Koch. His public statements, they say, are "devastating"; his tenacity "legendary"; his work-ethic "unrelenting." According to the authors, if Mr. Giuliani has made any mistake at all in his career so far, it was his decision to change party affiliation and become a Republican. Yet there