NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1970S WAS A CULTURE OF OPEN CORRUPTION.

EVERYONE WHO WAS ANYONE WAS IN ON THE GRIFT.

Ford to City: Drop Dead

It’s the most famous tabloid headline of all time (with apologies to “Headless Body in Topless Bar”).

It also supplied the narrative that came to be accepted as truth regarding the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975—an uncaring, hapless, accidental President Ford abandoning America’s greatest city in its hour of maximum need.

This narrative—honed in 1975 by wily politicians like House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and New York Governor Hugh Carey, assisted by one of the craftiest spinmeisters of them all, PR master John Scanlon—is, to put it mildly, nonsense. The counternarrative—that corrupt, spendthrift liberal politicians spent the city into bankruptcy with giveaways to unions and welfare cheats—is equally misleading. Acclaimed financial historian and attorney Richard Farley makes the case that the New York City fiscal crisis was a bipartisan affair, with the establishment elites of both parties behaving badly and feathering their own nests and the nests of their insider cronies.

Everyone who was anyone was in on the grift. The characters include politicians like Mayor Abe Beame, governors Hugh Carey and Nelson Rockefeller, House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, and President Gerald Ford; fixer lawyers like Roy Cohn, Bill Shea (of Shea Stadium fame), and Bunny Lindenbaum (Fred Trump’s fixer); bankers like David Rockefeller and Citibank/Citicorp CEO Walter Wriston (the most influential commercial banker of his time); and real estate developers like Fred Trump and his son Donald.

Drop Dead is a cautionary exposé that amply demonstrates how the game of politics, banking, law, and real estate was played in New York City in the 1970s. It is a warning for those playing the same games today for even higher stakes in every city, nationally and internationally.

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