New York

His Mind Helped Rebuild New York. His Body Is Failing Him.

Published

1 year ago

September 6, 2023

His Mind Helped Rebuild New York. His Body Is Failing Him.

The man pulls the buttoned blue shirt down over his head and waits. His hands, bony, cratered, have lost their strength, so the shirt flutters open at the sleeves and neck. His wife walks into the bedroom. She takes his left hand in hers, and closes the button around his wrist.

“I did succeed in shaving this morning,” says the man.

“Without cutting yourself?” says his wife.

“Without cutting myself.”

The man built so much of this city. Look around. The World Trade Center, rebuilt from a mangled hole in the ground? He led that. The High Line and Hudson Yards? He led those, too. Barclays Center, Citi Field and the new Yankees Stadium? Parks on Governors Island and the Brooklyn waterfront? The East River skyline from Williamsburg to Long Island City? Him, him, him.

Once, and it wasn’t so long ago, Dan Doctoroff had more power to decide what got built in New York City than anyone since Robert Moses. Now he is diagnosed with A.L.S., a neurodegenerative disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s that attacks the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, causing patients to lose control of their voluntary muscles. A.L.S. turns the body into a prison. Only the eyes and brain remain mostly unaffected. Death comes by lung failure and suffocation, usually within three to five years of diagnosis.

Mr. Doctoroff is 65. He was diagnosed almost two years ago.

As a powerful man loses authority over his own body, how does he change? And what remains?

It is winter, 2005,

and Mr. Doctoroff is thinking ahead, to a summer day seven years in the future. He is deputy mayor of New York, charged with rebuilding the city after 9/11. His job is to dream the future, and then to marshal the city’s gargantuan bureaucracy to get those dreams built. His boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has even compared Mr. Doctoroff to Mr. Moses: both master builders, both at once respected and resented for their relentlessness and their impatience.

But even Mr. Moses never tried to bring the Olympics to New York.

Mr. Doctoroff visits corporate suites, hotel conference rooms and newspaper editorial boards to give his pitch. In his mind, the 2012 Olympics are already about to start. Ferries cross the East River in a parade. The boats carry athletes to a gleaming Olympic Village, built in Queens atop the ruins of empty warehouses and falling-down piers.

Come, he says. Dream with me.

How many times has Mr. Doctoroff given this spiel? A hundred? As he repeats it, he worries. He feels trapped between his imagined future and the onrushing now. His mind jumps again, to the six emergencies erupting across his desk. He feels pulled in so many directions, it’s hard to be present with people. Do they notice?

He’s right to worry. People notice. A journalist who hears the Olympics pitch describes Mr. Doctoroff as a man whose eyes “gaze past you, out towards the horizon.”

Why this constant drive? Why does he find it so difficult to be present? For years, he doesn’t know. His brother Andy says Mr. Doctoroff should be more introspective, and who knows. Maybe Andy is right. Mr. Doctoroff is aware that he graduated Harvard aimless and lazy. Wound up in New York by following his wife, Alisa, who got a job in town. Bluffed his way into a job on Wall Street. Discovered he enjoys spinning numbers into stories, stories with grand ambitions, like a highly leveraged company with hidden potential, or why New York must host the Olympics.

“You could tell he’s very bright, and very competitive,” recalls Stephen Ross, founder and chairman of the real estate development firm Related Companies, who heard the pitch, dropped his own Olympic bid and joined Mr. Doctoroff’s team.

It is hard work seeing the future, and so Mr. Doctoroff puts everything into the job. But peering into the future makes it hard to see the present — hard to be home with his wife and children, hard to really see them. He leaves his townhouse on the Upper West Side each morning in darkness. He rides his bike down the Hudson River trail. He arrives at City Hall before sunrise, even in summer. He starts dozens of development projects, from the Bronx to Staten Island. He flies around the world, advancing the Olympics bid. He runs on discipline and work and depths of ambition that seem — even to his very successful friends — a little freakish.

His staff, mostly Ivy League types 20 years his junior, try to keep up. They fail.

“‘Don’t tell me no. I don’t believe in no,’” Sharon Greenberger, Mr. Doctoroff’s first chief of staff in city government, says of his worldview back then. “Barriers are temporary. And we just keep going.”

At city hall, no project goes smoothly. Each elicits an angry petition, a news conference, a lawsuit from neighbors or a state senator. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver kills Mr. Doctoroff’s plan for a stadium on the west side of Manhattan, and with it the entire Olympics bid. Governor George Pataki and leaders at the Port Authority rebuild the World Trade Center with office towers, overruling Mr. Doctoroff’s push for a mixed-use neighborhood of apartments and restaurants. Apartment towers and a basketball arena rise in Downtown Brooklyn, but local residents and the 2008 recession force developers to abandon Mr. Doctoroff’s larger plan for 17 high-rises, many up to 50 stories tall.

Mr. Doctoroff’s impatience grows. Ms. Greenberger invents the Doctoroff Mood-o-Meter, advising staff whether to approach or hide. Mr. Doctoroff’s tantrums cause Mr. Bloomberg so much joy, the mayor stops working, eats popcorn and watches.

“Dan’s team at City Hall was very familiar with his impatience and demanding style,” Mr. Bloomberg says of those days in an email, “but they would have run through a brick wall for him.”

Opponents accuse Mr. Doctoroff of “unmitigated arrogance,” according to an editorial in The New York Post. So do allies, including Senator Chuck Schumer.

“He was a bulldozer,” Daniel Goldstein, the leader of a group of neighbors fighting Mr. Doctoroff’s plans for Downtown Brooklyn, tells The Village Voice.

“I just think I was a little out of control,” Mr. Doctoroff says. “I was jet-lagged constantly, probably in a bad mood, which is why sometimes I would yell at people. Which I regret.”

Only Mr. Doctoroff’s closest aides know his mother is fighting cancer. Then his father is diagnosed with A.L.S. Every three weeks for eight years, Mr. Doctoroff travels to his hometown near Detroit, first to care for his mother, then for his father. Both parents die. His uncle dies, also from A.L.S. Mr. Doctoroff creates a nonprofit called Target ALS, raises tens of millions of dollars for A.L.S. research.

It is 2017,

and Mr. Doctoroff looks down from his office on the 27th floor of a tower in Hudson Yards, a neighborhood he named. He sees the glass-capped entrance to the 7-train station, New York’s first subway line extension in decades.

He is now the chief executive of Sidewalk Labs, a start-up Mr. Doctoroff founded with Google after running Bloomberg L.P. for six years.

“Just as we hoped, Midtown leapt to the west and West Chelsea burst to the north, creating a new neighborhood in Manhattan’s last frontier,” Mr. Doctoroff writes in his autobiography.

His schedule slows a little. Mr. Doctoroff finds a therapist to figure out how to spend his extra time. He digs into his childhood in Birmingham, Mich. His father, Myles, drove a blue Chevrolet station wagon to work at a no-name law firm. His mother scolded her husband. Why can’t you be more ambitious?

He remembers his mother’s anger, her need for prestige. He watched his father rise to become chief judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

“I didn’t want to disappoint my mom,” Mr. Doctoroff says. “That has been the major motivating force in my career. And I didn’t even know it.”

Years later, he and Alisa vacation in Iceland. He walks up a hill and loses his breath — strange, he thinks. Back in New York, in October 2021, a doctor offers a diagnosis: The same disease that killed Mr. Doctoroff’s father and uncle; the same disease he had already raised millions to fight.

Mr. Doctoroff had always tried to predict the future, and sometimes it seemed like he could. But that was just his hopes underpinned by his confidence. Now he can see the future with a measure of certainty, and it is finite and hard: This is how he will die.

He calls Manish Raisinghani, the chief executive of Target ALS. He delivers the news, and an order.

“He said, ‘I want to grow this organization. Don’t think small. Think really big. And let’s move really quickly,’” Mr. Raisinghani recalls. “I’m stunned. But he’s not missing a beat.”

Mr. Doctoroff decides to fund partnerships between scientists, biotech companies and venture capitalists during the earliest stages of research. Hopefully this will encourage drug companies to weather the expensive and risky process of seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

He figures he needs $250 million. A year and a half later, he has only $22 million to go.

“They’re going to have a ton of money,” Jeff Rothstein, a former Target ALS board member who directs the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, says of its current trajectory.

Mr. Doctoroff’s body fades quickly. He wakes one morning to find his abdominal muscles have disappeared in the night. His whole life, people described him as athletic and good-looking. He enjoyed that. Now his belly falls over his belt like a basketball. He jokes that this is the worst part of A.L.S. He lands the joke by setting his eyebrows to show it is not entirely a joke.

The disease attacks his lungs. Breath comes raggedly, turning his powerful voice into a soft, pausing tremolo. Central Park stands across the street from his house. The nearest train station is three blocks away. Both too far, now that he loses breath on a short flight of stairs.

“There is some upside to having A.L.S.,” he says. “I don’t have to walk the dogs.”

Adapt. Optimize. Take a complex situation and make it better. The disease will have his body. It will not claim his optimism. Can’t ride the subway? Buy a Vespa. Can’t walk without losing breath? Buy hiking sticks, use them to squeeze air into the lungs. A black brace over his right calf prevents Mr. Doctoroff’s foot from dropping as he walks. Black pants prevent people from noticing.

“I’m right-handed, but now I eat with my left hand. I’m getting good at it!” he says. “I find, actually, adaptation is fun. There’s got to be a better way. I can do it. I can look at it as a positive thing instead of a negative.”

It is May 7, 2023,

and Mr. Doctoroff sees 600 scientists, investors and drug company executives in a hotel conference room in Boston for the annual meeting of Target ALS. They discuss the first drug ever to reverse symptoms of the disease.

“We’re in a new era for A.L.S. research,” Mr. Doctoroff says.

He no longer tries to see the future. He is here, present, and it’s simple. With A.L.S., there’s no time to worry about time. He flies to Puerto Rico, Knoxville, Detroit and Provence with family or friends from high school. He rides his Vespa to meet his rich friends. He delivers his Target ALS pitch, wins a handshake and a promise for $200,000 or a million. He’s still on the board at Bloomberg Philanthropies and the University of Chicago, still gets dragooned into helping the mayor and the governor plan New York’s future. For a normal person, this is a busy career in full bloom.

For Mr. Doctoroff, it is retirement. His dread is replaced by a calm that surprises him.

“You worked so hard when we were growing up,” Ariel Doctoroff says to her father. “We talked about how you were never around, basically. Except for on Saturdays.”

“That’s not true,” Mr. Doctoroff says.

“I know. It’s not true,” Ariel says. “And you tried extremely hard to be present.”

Now, at last, he is.

“I never enjoyed any achievement or anything we accomplished because I was always on to the next thing,” he says. “I’ve changed dramatically since my diagnosis. It’s funny. I just don’t think about the future much. And that has made me more patient. It has made me, I think, a nicer person.”

His voice grows weaker. His peace grows stronger. His will remains. It is 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday in August. The man places both palms on the windowsill of his home gym. He groans, and allows his knees to drop to the floor. A tangle of ropes and rubber bands hangs from hooks on the nearest wall. A physical trainer, connected by Zoom, instructs Mr. Doctoroff to grab the thinnest, lightest band.

“I can do the heavy one,” Mr. Doctoroff says.

“You sure?” says the trainer.

“Yeah.”

New York

Rudy Giuliani, Slow to Transfer Assets to Election Workers, Could Be Held in Contempt

Published

3 hours ago

January 3, 2025

Press Room

Rudy Giuliani, Slow to Transfer Assets to Election Workers, Could Be Held in Contempt

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, was grilled for hours in federal court on Friday after missing several deadlines to hand over $11 million of his prized possessions to two poll workers he defamed after the 2020 election.

Mr. Giuliani avoided, for now, being held in contempt of court — a charge he has been threatened with at various times during the case and that could include jail time.

But for most of his time on the stand, Mr. Giuliani frustrated the judge and the plaintiffs’ lawyers with a spotty memory and vague answers that slowed to a crawl proceedings that were already bogged down in minutiae.

For much of the seven-hour hearing, lawyers on both sides were preoccupied with the question: Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

One of the central items of Mr. Giuliani’s collection of sports memorabilia is a jersey signed by Mr. DiMaggio, the Yankees legend, that hung over the former mayor’s fireplace. On Friday, Mr. Giuliani said he had no idea where it was.

That was not the only missing Yankees great.

“There is no Reggie Jackson picture,” Mr. Giuliani said, referring to the right-fielder known as Mr. October. He had previously said in court documents that the picture would be handed over to the plaintiffs. But now, the photo didn’t exist, according to Mr. Giuliani. “The picture was Derek Jeter,” he said. “I was kind of confused about it.”

The judge, Lewis J. Liman, appeared skeptical of Mr. Giuliani’s puzzlement, noting that such a rare collectible, especially for an avowed Yankees fan, would be top of mind.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Giuliani said in response to questions about the collectibles, and a number of other items that were expected to be found in his New York apartment. “When I looked, this is what I found.”

At the heart of the contempt charges he continues to face is whether Mr. Giuliani, 80, has been uncooperative with the handover of his personal assets, which will serve as a small down payment on the $148 million defamation judgment that he owes the plaintiffs, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss. Mr. Giuliani said, repeatedly and without evidence, that the women helped steal the presidential election from Donald J. Trump more than four years ago.

The assets include a 10-room apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; a 1980 Mercedes-Benz convertible; a collection of 26 designer watches; and rare Yankees collectibles, the most valuable of which might be the signed and framed DiMaggio jersey.

More than two months after a federal court judge ordered Mr. Giuliani to hand over the items, the former mayor and his lawyers contend that he has tried to comply fully, but that the process has been onerous.

“Mr. Giuliani is an 80-year-old man who has been hit by a whirlwind of discovery,” said Joseph M. Cammarata, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, who specialized in divorce cases before joining the defense team. Mr. Giuliani is also facing civil and criminal charges in other cases, stemming from his time as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.

In roughly three hours on the stand on Friday, Mr. Giuliani repeatedly responded that he could not remember details about his personal items or their whereabouts.

While pressing Mr. Giuliani, Meryl Governski, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, turned her attention to a checking account subject to the seizure.

“Where does it say that you turned over the cash?” she asked Mr. Giuliani, pointing out an omission in a recent letter he wrote to the court.

Mr. Giuliani, flipping through a bulky binder of materials, appeared flustered. “Are we talking about the Mercedes now?” he said.

As the hearing dragged on, lawyers on both sides seemed to test Judge Liman’s patience. After a long series of objections by Mr. Cammarata, nearly all of them overruled, Judge Liman chastised the defense.

“If you have one more speaking objection, sir, you’re going to have to sit down,” he said. “You know the rules.”

On Thursday, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer asked if his client could appear virtually, because of medical issues related to his left knee, as well as breathing problems attributed to Mr. Giuliani’s time spent at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But Judge Liman, who had a testy exchange with Mr. Giuliani about the case in November, said he would not accept Mr. Giuliani’s testimony unless he attended in person. So the former mayor, in a dark blue suit and glasses, walked into the 15th floor courtroom on Friday with a visible limp and a dry cough.

The transfer was originally scheduled to take place in late October. But one deadline after another has passed, and lawyers for the women said they have received only a fraction of the property.

The women have yet to receive legal possession of Mr. Giuliani’s apartment, once listed for over $6 million, in part because paperwork has not been updated since his divorce from his ex-wife Judith Giuliani, according to court filings. The title to Mr. Giuliani’s convertible, which he said was once owned by Lauren Bacall, has yet to be transferred.

But Mr. Giuliani raised eyebrows on Election Day, when he appeared in the passenger seat of the same convertible, more than a week after the initial turnover deadline. On Friday, he said he has requested a copy of the title to the car three times, but has yet to receive it.

In November, Mr. Giuliani’s original lawyers withdrew from the case, citing an undisclosed professional ethics reason.

In a recently unsealed letter explaining their departure, one of the lawyers, Kenneth Caruso, a longtime friend of Mr. Giuliani, said his client was not cooperating in the discovery process related to a condominium he owns in Palm Beach, Fla., and was withholding access to his electronic devices.

The judge will determine on Monday whether Mr. Giuliani was uncooperative during the discovery process. A separate hearing will be held to discuss his turnover efforts.

Later this month, Mr. Giuliani also faces the possibility of contempt charges in a Washington, D.C., court, where he has been accused of continuing to publicly make false claims about the two Georgia poll workers.

On Jan. 16, Mr. Giuliani is expected back in court to argue that his Palm Beach condo, as well as three personalized Yankees World Series rings, should be excluded from the handover.

Outside the courthouse, at a prepared mic stand, Mr. Giuliani, who typically appeared energized and combative, demurred.

“It would be inappropriate and unwise to say a darn thing about this case right now,” he said.

New York

9 Plays to Warm Up Winter in New York

Published

14 hours ago

January 3, 2025

Press Room

In New York, Broadway hits its winter lull in January, as Off Broadway and beyond burst into activity. If most of the tourists have gone home after the holidays, many of the visiting theater artists have arrived from all over, for the annual festivals that draw a tantalizing breadth of new work.

The venerable Under the Radar festival (Saturday through Jan. 19), now in its post-Public Theater era, is blossoming lushly again, with some of the city’s major companies participating. The Prototype Festival (Thursday through Jan. 19) has a full menu of interdisciplinary opera, while the Exponential Festival (through Feb. 2) centers local emerging experimental theater makers. There’s also the International Fringe Encore Series (through March 16), whose lineup includes “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” one of two Gwyneth Paltrow-focused shows at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

It’s a bountiful month, on festival stages and elsewhere. Here are nine shows worth keeping in mind.

‘Blind Runner’

In this hourlong play by the Iranian writer-director Amir Reza Koohestani, a political prisoner in Tehran asks her husband to help a young woman, who was blinded in a protest, to run a marathon in Paris. The more dangerous race is the one they undertake from there: trying to cross the English Channel through the tunnel without being hit by a train. A two-hander performed in Persian with English supertitles, and presented with Arian Moayed’s company, Waterwell, it’s about surveillance, oppression and the insistent pursuit of freedom. The critic Michael Billington called it “mesmerizing.” Part of Under the Radar. (Saturday through Jan. 24, St. Ann’s Warehouse)

‘Wonderful Joe’

The Canadian puppet artist Ronnie Burkett is a marvel to watch, manipulating populous casts of marionettes all on his own. Too seldom seen in New York, he arrives this month for a brief run of his new play, which landed on The Globe and Mail’s top-10 list of 2024 shows. The story is about an old man, Joe, and his aged dog, Mister, who lose their home to gentrification and hit the streets, approaching misfortune as adventure. This is not puppetry for little ones, though; audience members must be 16 or older. Part of Under the Radar. (Tuesday through Jan. 12, Lincoln Center)

‘Dead as a Dodo’

The company Wakka Wakka (“The Immortal Jellyfish Girl”) descends into the underworld with this sparkling puppet piece about a pair of skeletons: a dodo and a boy. Their ancient bones are in the process of disintegrating. Then, out of nowhere, the bird grows a new bone, sprouts fresh feathers — and is apparently not dead as a dodo after all. Directed by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage, who wrote it with the ensemble, this show is recommended for ages 7 and up. But be warned: Wakka Wakka does not shy from darkness. Part of Under the Radar. (Wednesday through Feb. 9, Baruch Performing Arts Center)

‘Old Cock‘

American history and politics are Robert Schenkkan’s dramatic bailiwick. He won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Kentucky Cycle” and a Tony Award for “All the Way.” And Brian Cox starred as Lyndon B. Johnson in Schenkkan’s most recent Broadway production, “The Great Society.” For this satire, though, the playwright teams up with the Portuguese company Mala Voadora and the director Jorge Andrade to tell a distinctly Portuguese story, pitting the rooster that is a symbol of that country against António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who ruled it for decades. Part of Under the Radar. (Wednesday through Jan. 19, 59E59 Theaters)

‘Grief Camp’

Eliya Smith, a master of fine arts candidate at the University of Texas at Austin whose previous forays into New York theater include the intriguingly strange, fragmented elegy “Deadclass, Ohio,” makes her Off Broadway playwriting debut with this world premiere. Directed by the Obie Award winner Les Waters (“Dana H.”), it’s about a group of teenagers in a summer cabin in Hurt, Va., confronting loss. And, yes, even this camp has a resident guitarist. (Thursday through Feb. 16, Atlantic Theater Company)

‘Show/Boat: A River’

The experimental company Target Margin Theater does not pussyfoot when it comes to re-examining canonical classics. Adapted and directed by David Herskovits, this interpretation of “Show Boat” aims to reframe the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II musical from 1927, about the entertainers and others aboard a riverboat on the Mississippi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Groundbreaking in its time for its themes, including racism and interracial marriage, “Show Boat” has long been accused of being racist itself. The content advisory warns: “The production includes racially offensive language and incidents.” Part of Under the Radar. (Thursday through Jan. 26, N.Y.U. Skirball)

‘A Knock on the Roof’

The Golan Heights-based writer-performer Khawla Ibraheem plays a Gazan woman rehearsing what she will do if she hears a low-level warning bomb — a “knock on the roof” by the Israeli military — which would mean she had only minutes to evacuate her home before an airstrike escalated. Directed by the Obie winner Oliver Butler (“What the Constitution Means to Me”), who developed the play with Ibraheem, it won awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer. Part of Under the Radar, this production moves to the Royal Court Theater in London in February. (Jan. 10 through Feb. 16, New York Theater Workshop)

‘The Antiquities’

Jordan Harrison’s new play imagines a history of the Late Human Age as told by the “nonorganic beings” who will succeed us. Starting on the night in 1816 when Mary Shelley told her ghost story, it hops through time to 2240. Building on themes Harrison contemplated in “Marjorie Prime,” it’s about what it is to be human, and whether we’ve sown the seeds of our destruction. Produced with the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where it is slated to run this spring. David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan direct. (Jan. 11 through Feb. 23, Playwrights Horizons)

‘Vanya on Huron Street’

The writer-director Matthew Gasda, who first gained traction a few years back with his scenester play “Dimes Square,” now stages an adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” created with its actors over the past year. Bob Laine, a star of “Dimes Square” (which makes a fleeting return this month), plays the title role in “Vanya,” opposite fellow “Dimes Square” cast member Asli Mumtas as Vanya’s longed-for love interest, Yelena. (Jan. 14 through Feb. 4, Brooklyn Center for Theater Research)

New York

Video: Adams’s Former Chief Adviser and Her Son Charged With Corruption

Published

2 weeks ago

December 19, 2024

Press Room

Video: Adams’s Former Chief Adviser and Her Son Charged With Corruption

new video loaded: Adams’s Former Chief Adviser and Her Son Charged With Corruption

transcript

Adams’s Former Chief Adviser and Her Son Charged With Corruption

Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who resigned as Mayor Eric Adams’s chief adviser, and her son, Glenn D. Martin II, were charged with taking $100,000 in bribes from two businessmen in a quid-pro-quo scheme.

: We allege that Ingrid Lewis-Martin engaged in a long-running bribery, money laundering and conspiracy scheme by using her position and authority as the chief adviser of — chief adviser to the New York City mayor, the second-highest position in city government — to illegally influence city decisions in exchange for in excess of $100,000 in cash and other benefits for herself and her son, Glenn Martin II. We allege that real estate developers and business owners Raizada “Pinky” Vaid and Mayank Dwivedi paid for access and influence to the tune more than $100,000. Lewis-Martin acted as an on-call consultant for Vaid and Dwivedi, serving at their pleasure to resolve whatever issues they had with D.O.B. on their construction projects, and she did so without regard for security considerations and with utter and complete disregard for D.O.B.’s expertise and the public servants who work there.
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