Who's Kidding Who: Dinkins Stank as Mayor- A Personal Memoir

Above: NY Mayor DeBlasio...well...pandering


There is a full scale "revisionist" agenda by "Progressives" to whitewash the horrible days we had David Dinkins as mayor. Get this bit of baloney from the NY Times:

But through it all, his administration made advances unmatched by succeeding administrations. He joined with Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and poured money into assisted housing for the mentally ill homeless. 

As a result, the city’s shelter population fell to its lowest point in the last 20 years. The shelter population in 1991 stood at less than 20,000; today it stands near 38,000. 

And through the years of recession, as the city lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, the mayor spoke of his successes and failures, often with brutal candor. His successors have pruned the statistical reports of some negative indicators and tend to place a relentless emphasis on the positive.

Hogwash.

The Dinkins era coincided with the worst era of my life, when my free lance career went bust ( almost entirely because of forces beyond my control) and I actually landed in the NYC Bellevue Mens Homeless Shelter.

Before I became destitute, signs of chaos and decay were all around us.

African merchants put their tacky rugs on Fifth Avenue's main strip to sell junk items despite the cries of anguish of the store owners there. 

Crime in the subways and chaos everywhere were never worse.

The AIDS crisis was at about its heights, and handled with amazing ineptitude by the City.

The Mafia was in its "salad days."

The shelter where I lived got its food (terrible) through a contract with a Mafia company in Brooklyn, which also sold to other City outlets.

This was common knowledge.

Suicides and murders in the homeless shelters were hushed up. Leftist celebrities came to celebrate their concern for the homeless, while  winter coats donated for the homeless were systematically cherry picked for the best ones which were taken by Dinkins appointees in the program and the rest of the best were sold to be shipped to other countries.

As to the shelter itself, it was a looney bin run by sadists. Sick people were thrown out into the snow in the winter on the whim of sadistic "social workers", many of whom were from Haiti etc and whose citizenship was dubious.

When Giuliani took over, he saw the mass of men huddled in a snowstorm at the gates of the Bellevue shelter ( which would not allow them in until the prescribed time), went into the building and fired the absurd, creepy little director on the spot.

I talked to people who were in the shelter right after that time. Everything improved dramatically the minute Giuliani came in. ( I had escaped just before Giuliani came into office).

Drug gangs and corrupt security personnel were no longer allowed to run the shelter.

The worst of the social worker head sadists was dragged into court by a Vietnam veteran who had found a sympathetic lawyer..

She immediately fled back to Haiti.

"For the moment," this man said. " She'll soon be back, under another name."

Through all this, David Dinkins lolled through his term, spending a lot of time playing tennis and-- well, doing what?

He had a gang of ideologues as his advisors who ran the city for him.

Ran it into the ground.

So enough of this revisionist crap and the usual untrustworthiness of the NY Times when it comes to rewriting history.

I was there, and believe, the reign of  Dinkins in NYC was sheer hell. Anybody who tells you different is either a liar or a fool.