Excerpts from a NY Post exclusive:
Assemblyman Vito Lopez bullied and cajoled eight little old ladies during an arm-twisting session aimed at getting them to back his candidate in a Brooklyn judicial race, a shocking audiotape obtained by The Post reveals.
“I’m not a fool or stupid, all right?” the Democrat railed at the elderly community leaders. “I can’t always give and get smacked, give and get smacked . . . I am the political leader.”
The May 2005 conversation, captured on a hidden recorder, not only exposes the 69-year-old Lopez’s heavy-handed tactics in dealing with his core elderly supporters but also offers a rare glimpse into the backrooms of bare-knuckle Brooklyn politics where Lopez reigns.
“I’ve been around a long time,” Lopez tells the women. “And the only thing that’s worth credibility — the only thing I have that’s worth something — is the politics. That’s how I get the money.”
Lopez called the hourlong meeting at his district office to get the women to support civil court judicial hopeful Richard Velasquez — once a lawyer for the senior-center nonprofit empire Lopez founded — in his race against lawyer Marty Needelman. The election was seen as a leadership test for Lopez, who was on the verge of becoming the Democratic Party boss for all of Brooklyn.
He explosively references this power play — and the competition between Hispanics and Hasidim in the area over housing — at one point blurting, “If no one respects my leadership, how do I fight the Hasidim?”
The Spanish-speaking women all came from South Williamsburg, where Needelman was popular with Hispanics. Lopez explains he needs Velasquez to win because “I made a pledge to people that the next [judge] would be Hispanic, right? To balance it.”
The women aren’t swayed, telling Lopez that they like Needelman and that voters don’t care about race or, for that matter, the fact that Lopez is “Italiano.”
Lopez uses strong-arm tactics, repeatedly mentioning two upcoming taxpayer-funded trips he hosts, suggesting only supporters can go.
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3 Responses
In golus all goyim are anti-semits at heart.
Where is Yonason W. and his defense of the left and his assertion that there is anti-semitism on the right? So far in the last several decades starting with FDR’s refusal to allow Jewish emigration from Nazi occupied Europe, most of it came from the left.
Interesting. I thought only the Tea Party was racist.