Anatomy of a shakedown

What a shady land deal in Queens says about politics and race in New York City
By HEATHER HADDON

It was a bold political move that fell flat once the music changed.

In 1994, state Sen. Frank Padavan appealed to his Republican base in Queens with a controversial report entitled, “Our Teeming Shore: A Report on Federal Immigration Policy and Its Impact on the City and State of New York.” The 72-page missive estimated that immigrants drain $5.6 billion a year statewide by relying on welfare, clogging up public schools and committing crimes. It bluntly recommended a moratorium on new immigration to the US.

“The financial support of immigrants is not being shouldered equitably,” Padavan wrote.

But that report and a subsequent one by the veteran statesman did little to ingratiate himself to his future constituents — immigrants.

Today, his eastern Queens district has shifted from a bastion of white conservatives to a destination for foreign-born residents. The abrupt ethnic flip presented one of the first serious challenges to Padavan, a 38-year statesman whose age-old slogan was “Nobody Cares Like Frank.” In 1998 and 2000, his Democratic challengers, Morshed Alam and Rory Lancman, attacked him as a racist.

Around 2000, an opportunity to regain political currency emerged. An influential Indian church was on a hunt for land to build their own community center. Members of the St. Gregorios Malankara Orthodox Church started whispering in the ears of state officials and pulled out their checkbooks. Padavan took the cash and acted.

Padavan helped sell the church — through a non-profit it started — two parcels of state land through a no-bid deal that shortchanged taxpayers out of millions of dollars from the true market value. Now the deal is drawing scrutiny, but the Indian-Americans who lobbied Padavan say any suggestion that this was improper is motivated by bias.

What happened in Queens is New York City politics writ small. An ethnic group looking to exercise political power. A “non-profit” with political ambitions. A politician willing to spend taxpayer money for votes. And above all else, the lesson that any criticism of any relationship or deal, however improper, can be waved away by crying “racism.”

Queens State Senate District 11 is more suburbs than city. The eastern reaches of New York is dominated by small detached homes that has traditionally been a bastion of middle-class Italians, Germans, Jews and Irishmen. They found a friend in Padavan, a second-generation Italian-American who grew up in Elmhurst and was an Army reservist. He was elected to the seat in 1972 and handily remained there by supporting popular issues like senior centers and volunteer ambulance services.

In 1990, whites still made up two-thirds of the population of the district. But by 2000, the population of Asians — primarily Indians — jumped to 26%, while whites dropped to 49%. Padavan faced a serious challenge from Alam, a Queens activist originally from Bangladesh, who cornered 40% of the vote despite poor financial backing in 1998. His 2000 Democratic challenger, Lancman, raised much of his $110,000 campaign loot from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants. (Lancman’s wife is Iranian.)

While many Queens Indians are Sikhs and Hindus, some are Orthodox Christians. They congregate at the St. Gregorios Malankara Orthodox Church just over the Long Island border in Floral Park. Group leaders went to officials for help securing a parcel of state land around 2000, but got little traction. So they incorporated a group called the Indian Cultural and Community Center in 2003, with the sole membership coming from their diocese, according to the non-profit’s bylaws.

A young hotshot lawyer from Queens Village, Sanu Thomas, 35, incorporated the group. Thomas’ father, Koshy, immigrated to the area in the ’70s after serving as an officer in the Indian army. Koshy Thomas landed good work at NYC Transit, eventually becoming a train supervisor and lay leader of the Orthodox Church. His son — a successful lawyer at law firms like Willkie Farr & Gallagher — joined local Community Board 13 in 2003, just as the non-profit was incorporated. He signed up for six board committees, including land use and ethics, and became the executive secretary in 2009. The Queens borough president also appointed him to a task force to get borough residents counted by the US Census.

Then, in 2009, Thomas’ name was floated as a possible replacement for City Councilman Mark Weprin if he ran for the state Senate. That opportunity never came to pass, but he found another way to wield influence.

Padavan isn’t shy about acknowledging his outsized role in selling off state land to groups he deemed worthy. There’s the Daniel Wieder Center for children with cerebral palsy located on “Senator Frank Padavan Way”; the Padavan/Preller Ball Fields on the old Creedmoor campus; and the “Frank A. Padavan Campus” situated further north on the sprawling Creedmoor property.

Padavan chaired the state Mental Hygiene and Addiction Control Committee from 1977 to 1987, when the state began selling off property from old state psychiatric facilities. If you wanted to get a piece of state land, Padavan was the go-to guy.

“He treated the land like it was his to give away,” said one Queens political insider.

Members of the Indian cultural group, including Koshy and Sanu Thomas, went to Padavan and pitched a community center to hold “community activities and social gatherings,” including picnics, dances, weddings and holiday celebrations. They targeted two chunks of land on Creedmoor’s 98-acre campus and drew up plans.

Padavan needed their money and, even more crucially, their votes. Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the district by more than 2 to 1, and whites were now in the minority. Group members were closely aligned with Padavan and promised to help campaign for him, Queens political sources said.

"They did a good job in getting in politicians’ faces,” one source said.

In 2006, Padavan tucked a measure to sell the group the two parcels for “not less than the fair market value” into a voluminous omnibus budget bill. Former Gov. George Pataki vetoed it, arguing it was unconstitutional to slip in a local matter in the budget.

So Padavan and then-Assemblyman Mark Weprin (D-Queens) rammed through separate legislation to OK the sale through a three-day message of necessity. That passed in July 2006. When the sale took longer than expected, Padavan and Weprin authored another bill in 2007 to extend the timetable for the sale by a year.

The group showered Padavan and Weprin with campaign contributions. Members donated at least $2,850 to Padavan and $2,510 to Weprin for his City Council and Assembly runs between 2000 and 2009. Group members also gave $1,600 to Assemblyman David Weprin (D-Queens), Mark’s brother, for his 2009 city comptroller bid. Sanu and Koshy Thomas shelled out the lion share of the group contributions.

Padavan, whose daughter-in-law is Indian-American, went on a crusade to get the land sold. He hounded state dormitory authorities to approve the deal without the usual attorney general review, according to state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Queens). Sale of state land is usually conducted through an auction to the highest bidder, or granted to public entities. Since 2006, the Creedmoor parcels were the only sale of state Dormitory Authority land to be pushed through with special legislation, according to state records.

The deal required two independent land assessors to estimate a fair market value for the land. The state Dormitory Authority and the cultural group hired appraisers, and they settled on a price of $1.8 million. The actual market value for the parcels last year was $7.3 million, according to state property tax documents.

Still, despite all his faithful support, Padavan lost his seat to Avella after 20 terms in office in 2010. Democratic interest groups had campaigned hard against Padavan — who is pro-life and voted against gay marriage — and the powerful teacher’s union didn’t endorse him. The political calculus changed for the Indian group, but they just looked elsewhere. They had started courting support beyond Padavan.

The humble community center was morphing into a different beast. The group’s plans now included two, nine-story apartment towers with 126 apartments. The original two parcels were landlocked, and now they wanted a third plot to provide access to the future housing complex. So they opened up the checkbooks.

They went to Assemblywoman Barbara Clark (D-Queens), whose district contains a sliver of Creedmoor. Indian group members funneled at least $2,351 in election cash to Clark in 2010. That was 13% of the entire amount she collected from individual donors that year.

Last year, Clark introduced a bill to sell the group a strip of property to give them access to Union Turnpike, and it passed. But former Gov. David Paterson vetoed it after state mental health officials blasted the proposal. It would leave Creedmoor with a patchwork of properties that would be difficult to sell at a later date, while still keeping the state on the hook for maintenance. It would also impede traffic flow on the Creedmoor campus for the existing psych services.

So Clark introduced a bill in January to grant the group roughly 6 acres to eliminate the state’s concerns about the patchwork of property. Last month, as the legislative year was winding down, she and Assemblyman Weprin visited Avella in his office and asked him to co-sponsor it. When he refused, she got downright “threatening,” Avella said, and later publicly slammed a “freshman senator” for not knowing his place. Clark then went to Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) to co-sponsor a bill, which he did last month.

Local civic associations are up in arms over the development’s monstrous apartment buildings, which are slated for area seniors. The towers are too tall for the area’s zoning, and the group is trying to get a variance by using obscure examples from those granted in the dense sections of the South Bronx.

It’s not a difficult to see, in Sanu Thomas, the beginnings of a New York politician in the mold of Pedro Espada or Vito Lopez. Espada started a non-profit health clinic in The Bronx, then, when elected to office, steered millions in contracts to it, enriching himself. He will now stand trial for embezzlement.

Lopez started a non-profit senior group in Queens that serves two political purposes. It allows him to pay his girlfriend and campaign manager hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money, and it gives him a large base of elderly voters who, leaked audiotapes show, he threatens when they don’t back his hand-picked candidates for judgeships and other positions.

If the Indian Culture and Community Center gets its land, it could be a low-cost way for Thomas to have a non-profit that “gives back to the community” while it potentially pays his friends and cultivates voters that put him on the City Council or in state government. Decades from now, will Sanu Thomas be steering taxpayer “member items” to these groups?

Thomas already has learned one lesson of New York politics. Any criticism is not motivated by the misuse of public funds, or suspicion about private deals, but racism.

As attacks mounted, the group has fought back. They hired Patricia Lynch Associates, a high-powered lobbying firm, to work on the state and local leaders earlier this year. Thomas enlisted the help of his friend, political operative Patrick Jenkins — who worked on the campaigns of Gov. Cuomo and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman — to deal with damage control. They also blasted off an angry letter to civic association leaders for not clamping down on what they call racist attacks against them.

“This tone and divisive spirit has no place in this process and all elected and appointed officials should refrain from articulating such sentiment,” the letter stated.

“When you have a bad hand, play the race card. That gives you a shield. It distracts the conversation,” said Baruch College political analyst Doug Muzzio.

It also squashes a full democratic vetting of a project’s merits, Muzzio said. “It’s not good government. In this case the system is corrupted. It is failing to work the way it’s supposed to,” he added.

The bill for the third parcel for the Indian group has been tabled, but the Indian Culture group is going forward with their applications for city permits to build. The battle has opened a rift between Democrats Avella and Clark, but Avella said he will continue to fight the land giveaway.

“The people of the 11th Senatorial District elected me to help clean up the dysfunction in Albany. They can rest assured that I will continue to work towards that end regardless of how some politicians such as you feel,” he wrote to Clark.