The Sixth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, the greatest city in the world, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If you’re new I’d recommend listening from the beginning - to my podcast, don’t listen to the mayor’s, it’s bad - there’s an explanation of at least some of why this is happening in the first episode, though I mean, why’s anything happening. Of course, you should do what feels best for you. Today, I’m talking about the 6th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E06 - Former Model with A Heart of Gold Empowers NYC’s Women in Need, released April 6th 2023.

Quick trigger warning. The mayor’s podcast never includes trigger warnings when he discusses difficult or painful subjects, but at one point they discuss, and therefore I discuss their discussion of, intimate partner violence and child abuse and injury. I’ll give a heads up when I’m about to talk about what they talked about.

The mayor is interviewing Debroah Koenigsberger, a former fashion model who’s opened several boutiques around the city, and who employs homeless and at-risk women at her clothing store, The Thrifty HoG, all of which the producers of the podcast are kind enough to finally include in the show notes, though of course they don’t include links and don’t you dare fucking ask about transcripts.

The mayor tells us one of his trademark vague stories: that he met this person just on the street “One Sunday”, was moved by their story, happened to be near their place of business and so he went in, and bought a tie.

He asks her story, noting that she’s Black, has a German last name, born in Jamaica. “You’re more than just a thrift shop,” he says to a human person.

She says her parents did the typical immigrant story, and then, yep, it’s the story we’ve heard a couple times here, and it’s a fine story, you know, there’s reasons that it keeps getting told and I’m perfectly happy to hear it, but I’m just gonna note that the entire time this has been happening, the Mayor has been literally telling refugees not to come here, and calling New York a hellhole because he feels too many of them are now here.

Deborah paints her childhood in broad strokes and just says that they grew up in the Bronx, and service was important, but she doesn’t get particularly specific, aside from the fact that her dad would dig out snowed in motorists when he came upon them. She went to NYU, and started modeling and majored in foreign languages because she wanted to be a translator. Immediately after she says this the mayor asks her what she majored in.

She went into modeling and learned a lot about fashion. Worked in retail. “I kept moving around” she says.

“Were they home owners” the mayor asks, very weirdly, out of nowhere, about her parents.

Apparently so. Good for them. Adams talks about how his mom drilled into him that he needed to own his own home.

Look man. I rent. I lead a pretty comfortably upper middle class life. I popped open Zillow and the cheapest one bedroom apartment in my neighborhood is $300,000. If you buy that on a 30 year mortgage with all taxes and fees you’re looking at roughly $3000 a month, which is not only more than my current rent, but just facially insane. The mayor of New York, a landlord who has been repeatedly fined for the rat situation in the brownstone he owns, must know how nuts it is to be implying that home ownership is a way to solve a problem most people living here have: unless you’re already wealthy, or at least unless you can guarantee your ability to pay the mortgage for 30 years, buying a house is like going to college, a large number of the people who do it wind up chained to debt.

I’m not a financial advisor so don’t take this as anything but my insane opinion.

“I had a lovely childhood, I studied abroad” Deborah tells us and there’s something that’s not adding up here, because Deborah is presenting the Immigrant Story, which doesn’t need to be miserable, by any means, and being poor isn’t inherently virtuous, it’s just that she keeps talking about her parents as if they’d been poor and not talking about how they afforded NYU and sending her to Paris.

They talk about how everything in your life that seemed negative isn’t. You just need to keep moving and…

Look. In every culture there are people who are simply lucky. Because we live on a capitalist planet, they’re most often highly aligned with capitalism. It’s hard to be a lucky Marxist or Anarchist these days because within capitalism you need to be a capitalist to be lucky, because luck is weighed in capital. You get to own a home with capital. You get to own a business with capital. You get to be a philanthropist with capital. You either gather that capital, often via luck, or you inherit it, which is also just down luck.

Those lucky people are not particularly incentivized to note their luck, they’re incentivized to tell you how they became successful, which must mean they did something different than the unlucky, but have you noticed that they never seem to specifically say what that is? To them, the answer cannot be how lucky they were, the answer must be they did something special, and typically they say it’s that they worked hard, as if the women I see every day frantically going from recycling bin to recycling bin fishing out the metal cans in all weather at all hours aren’t working incredibly hard themselves.

When you listen to their stories with that in mind, the holes and the ways they don’t add up - suddenly someone who tells us their parents did every menial job and didn’t go to high school is taking a semester abroad from NYU to study in France - well, maybe you start to take notice of that sort of thing. It’s quite possible all of that is true, but at the least it requires that several unmentioned things happened in the gaps between the stated facts.

So I’m a cynic. The good news is: it doesn’t make me happy.

So the next thing that happens is she asks her mom for money to open her own store. Her mom offers her about 30k against the value of her home. Deborah calls her - up until now never mentioned - friend John and says she can only get 30 and they need 300. John says don’t worry about it. AND BUILDS HER A STORE.

Sure, completely normal shit. Everyone has someone they can reach out to for a storefront in Chelsea. Oh, apparently he was the managing agent for this building’s retail? Cool cool cool. And he didn’t want rent initially? Well that’s peachy.

Look, very nice people exist. Maybe this happened as presented. Best case, if it did, “know a guy who’ll give you a rent free space in Chelsea” isn’t a particularly repeatable strategy for business success and it’s not a story that I, a small business owner myself, find particularly inspiring.

Deborah says that her secret to success came from modeling and therefore knowing how clothing should look on someone and I can’t help but note that she just got done saying she didn’t have to pay rent.

Anyway, people respond to her sense of style so suddenly she’s making whirlwind tours of Europe to buy fashion and import it for her boutique.

In 1994, she is inspired by a Stevie Wonder song, meets Bobbi Brown at a resort in Florida, and finds out there is a shelter near her store. These things are talked about as if there’s a connection between all of them but it’s not really explained. Also she drops in that she was working with Ivana Trump at this time.

I don’t know man. I’m trying to make sense of this story and it just sorta keeps slipping away. This woman talks really fast, jumps from subject to subject, and the mayor is a terrible interviewer, he cannot shape the conversation or ask her questions designed to lead her in any particular direction.

The mayor also almost never says “I didn’t understand that.”

After telling the listener this almost a story for about three weeks she says she raised money with fundraisers, and her fundraising efforts grow, she started fundraising for many shelters. She stared a charity called Hearts of Gold to handle all of this in a non-profit, and she opened another standalone thrift store, the Thrifty HoG, to employ the homeless.

Now she says something very interesting at this point, to the mayor. She mentions that one of the benefits of her model is this: mothers in shelters need to show that they’re employed for 90 days before they can get a housing voucher, to rent an apartment and leave the shelter system. But these are mothers, often single mothers, who are working. The obvious problem here is that being a mom - she doesn’t put it this way - is its own job, and you constantly need to take time off from the job that pays you because your kid’s sick, or you need to take them to get vaccines, there’s always something kid related going on. And most employers won’t put up with that. They’ll fire that mother and she and her kids will reset the 90 day clock and be stuck in a shelter with no housing voucher. Understanding this, she allows mothers who work in her store to take whatever time off they need.

Now one thing is, I’m taking her word for this rule, but the only time I’ve seen a 90 day rule in effect with regards to shelter is a rule that you have to be in shelter for 90 days before you get a voucher, no employment is referenced in that rule that I’ve seen. And the mayor eliminated that rule in June.

It’s now that I’m going to warn you that for the next couple minutes I’m going to be talking about the things I gave the trigger warning for at the top of the show, intimate partner violence, child endangerment and childhood injury.

Anyway, the mayor asks for an inspiring anecdote about one of the horrifying things that happened to one of Deborah’s immiserated employees, and she tells the life affirming story of a woman who I’ll call L - Deb gives more information than that, but I don’t know how L would feel about either of us relating these details. L, while at work, finds out her one year old had an accident. He’s in a coma. L’s pregnant, and has suffered abuse during the pregnancy, so, Debroah says “we didn’t know what she was going to give birth to.”

I’m just the reporter here. Deborah is the one who said that. Those were her exact words. Here, I don’t make a policy of playing clips from this show, but here.

A clip from The Get Stuff Done Cast Plays: Deborah says “we didn’t know what she was going to give birth to.”

Deborah tells us that she did… stuff… vague stuff… to help. Like maybe take L to the hospital, and now, because of that L is happily married, living elsewhere and has been through nursing school, and Deborah tells us that L would tell us that the only reason L is anything is Deborah. It’s unstated if L’s kids are ok. And Adams doesn’t ask.

And that’s more or less the interview, so what did we learn about the mayor here? Adams is often compared to Trump and it’s a comparison that has some merit, but I think it’s a little oversimple, and misses some important things about both of these goobers, but one way in which there’s some interesting overlap is this:

Trump is said to prize loyalty, to Trump. But, if he likes you, he’ll also defend you publicly to the hilt. And that’s not because he’s loyal to you, because at the same time he’ll be busy stealing everything you own and making sure you take the fall for his crimes. It’s because he likes you. Trump can’t be wrong. He’ll never admit it, so he’ll just keep digging in on supporting you.

Adams hears a person say one of the most casually horrible things I can possibly imagine them saying about a child violated by their parent and he puts on his podcast with no push-back, or attention called to it. He doesn’t have it removed in the edit. He doesn’t give her an opportunity to say how much she cares about this kid or to clarify her statement. And, look, I don’t need for this woman to be a monster. It’s very possible that, in a moment of extemporizing off the top of her head, in a setting where she was nervous and not fully in command of her own voice, she spoke insensitively, but not because of any malice in her heart. I’ve done that certainly, I’m sure most people have.

But we just don’t know, because this is the only thing we have to weigh her with. Well, this, and the fact that Eric Adams likes her. And that, for Eric Adams, is enough. Adams doesn’t have to explain anything else about this person. In his telling they don’t even know each other well, he just happened upon her, dug her store’s vibe, listened to her story and decided she should be on his podcast (I’m relatively sure that there’s more backstory, but this is the only backstory he gives us). So his investment is limited and there’s nothing wrong with being like “oh, my first impression was that you weren’t heartlessly cruel but guess that was wrong” or, probably the better way to go here “my first impression was your humanity and it doesn’t really come through in what you just said, so I’d like to give you the chance to clarify.” But Adams likes her, and, like Trump, he’s not wrong. Never wrong. His vibe-dar is perfect. He knows who’s good and who’s a hater. The fact that she’s there is all the evidence you should need, listener.

Ok, so a few things I want to wrap up with here. I cannot assess the work Deborah does or the impact it has on the lives of homeless New Yorkers, I don’t have the resources. I did do, to the extent that I can, with the resources and time I do have, a little research.

Deborah’s clothing boutique, Noir Et Blanc, has a nice website. Her vintage store, The Thrifty HoG, does as well. Hearts of Gold also has a website. Their gala will be hosted by Soledad O’Brien and tickets start at 500 dollars.

Donate NYC, which is a government effort through the Department of Sanitation, listed the Thrifty HoG as a partner location where New Yorkers could donate their used clothing as recently as 2021, but it does not currently list them on their partner page.

And Charity Navigator gives Hearts of Gold Inc. 2 out of 4 stars or a 64% rating. They do not currently assess the impact the charity has had, they note that the charity doesn’t appear to have an independent board and Charity Navigator has no financial statements for them. No conflict of interest policy, whistleblower policy or document retention policy is available on CN’s site. These are some of the things that Hearts of Gold is downgraded for. For all I know the problem isn’t on their end, but a similar charity in NYC that has a similar mission, is Housing Works, which, among the extensive work it does, in advocacy and provision of healthcare for the homeless and folks living with HIV/AIDS, operates several thrift stores in the city, staffed by folks they support. Their CN rating is 4 out 4 starts, 90%.

But Soledad O’Brien is doing their fundraiser. Listen, I worked for about 5 years in the education department at one of the most well known non-profit entities in this godforsaken city (their CN rating is 92%). Our own board didn’t know what we did, just that it had something to do with teaching kids. If our board didn’t know, the celebrity speakers at our galas certainly had no damn idea. One year, the keynote speech, given by an extremely famous person who might have had a few before taking the stage, opened with, “What the hell is this a fundraiser for?”

The mayor likes telling stories. He likes hearing stories. The first thing he often asks his guest is a version of “tell me your story.” It’s vague and most folks don’t do very well with it. But that’s what the mayor is going for. Lincoln loved telling stories. Lincoln also wielded the political power he’d gained. Which is, I guess, the difference between someone they carve into stone and a bullshitter.

The mayor also seems to hang out with people who seem a little… flexible in their ethics. I don’t bring this up for any particular reason, but while we’re here, let’s just make a quick little list, shall we?

Philip Banks the third is the current Deputy Mayor for Public Safety. It’s been reported that he’s the reason the first female police commissioner of the NYPD resigned. Adams appears to have installed Banks to act as a shadow commissioner to make sure the NYPD is doing what he demands. This would normally be the sort of behind the scenes sausage making that no one particularly pays attention to, except that in 2014 Banks resigned from the police department after 27 years on the force after being named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a bribery scandal for which the FBI investigated the presence of 300,000 dollars in his bank account that appeared to have no reason to be there.

Banks’ brother David Banks is the schools chancellor, and while I’m not aware of any indication that David Banks is dirty, it’s weird.

Eric Ulrich was appointed Senior Advisor to the Mayor, and then Commissioner of the NYC Department of Buildings. He resigned after being served a search warrant, and a little less than a year later, was arrested and charged with 16 felonies that paint a picture of one of the most corrupt individuals imaginable.

Ingrid Lewis-Martin is chief advisor to the mayor, and in that capacity she has given an interview where she called on the federal government to close the borders, and, after a republican city council member bought a gun to a protest with the intention of intimidating the leftist protesters, an act for which the council member was arrested, Lewis-Martin had a sit down tea with the member, who tweeted a photo of herself with Lewis-Martin with the statement “we have true friends in this administration.”

Timothy Pearson is a public safety advisor, which is a six figure salary. It’s unclear to me if this is still the case, but for a time after being hired, he was still drawing a salary from the casino where he was formally head of security, and still drawing his NYPD pension. Recently he made news for assaulting a couple of guards working at a migrant shelter when they barred him from entering when he refused to show ID. He had those guards arrested.

There are also six people who’ve been charged with running a straw donor scheme for people with business interests before the city, who were attempting to maximize their donations in exchange for political favors. Because the city matches small donations 8-1, if you own a business, you could, say, make small donations in every one of your employees names and then pay them back. The total sum wouldn’t have recieved the 8-1 match if you had donated it on you own, but because it’s all small donors, every dollar becomes 8, and you gain that level of influence. It’s illegal, of course, and also there’s no reason for anyone to orchestrate such a thing without telling the person they’re attempting to buy influence from. Anyway, one of the people arrested is a former NYPD commander who knew the mayor for decades.

The mayor hasn’t yet been in office for two years, and that’s an awful lot of smoke for just two years time, but as the mayor noted after the FBI raided the home of the 25 year old he’d put in charge of his campaign’s fundraising, “where there’s smoke, there’s not always fire” and frankly, the saying “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is the saying “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” because where there’s, smoke there actually invariably is fire. That’s what smoke means.

I’ve bought up the fact that this podcast has 1) no downloads and 2) nothing to recommend it content-wise, and the fact that this doesn’t make sense. Most podcasts have no downloads, because most podcasts aren’t done by incredibly powerful, vain people. Most podcasts done by the vain and powerful are in fact pretty bad. But. The powerful can get ready access to distribution networks, there’s whole companies that do podcast distribution, and a hungry one would absolutely do the Mayor of NYC’s for a very reasonable price, if not free. That would still mean that no one was listening, but the number of subscribers would be more in line with the vanity of the office holder. Additionally, the powerful make shitty content because it’s safe. It’s rare for a high level elected official to be unguarded in their speech, but with the mayor’s podcast it’s very clear that there’s no pre interview or research or really anything at all that stops him from nodding along when his guest says something truly vile. I’ve struggled, and continue to struggle with how to explain this, but I’ll note that, while I am by no means accusing anyone of anything, if money was being disappeared into a “production services” company that was actually just a guy someone powerful wanted to enrich for the reasons a powerful person might want to do that, the results might look something like this. I am, again, not saying it’s the case, but I am also saying that I have tried to figure out what else might be the case, and the only other plausible explanation I’ve come up with is that the mayor is incredibly weird. Considering it’s the simpler of the two, it’s probably that he’s weird. Probably.

Alright, as always, before we go, here’s what was going on with the mayor between the date the previous episode was released, March 22, 2023 and this one, April 6th, 2023. To do this I lean heavily on the reporting of two fantastic New York City outlets, The City, and Hell Gate, both of which I support financially, and I encourage you to do so as well. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

He continued his advocacy for people to go back to the office, despite you know, people with traditional office jobs not needing to work in an office for any reason at all.

He ordered the third round of the budget cuts I’ve mentioned a few times here. This round was 4%, across the board, and including the NYPD, which is uh interesting and no one seems to have noticed that the guy who ran on the issue of making sure that police funding is increased is, in fact cutting funding to the police.

And he met with leaders of the extremely strange cult that owns a bunch of South Williamsburg and said that the city shouldn’t be in the business of enforcing basic standards of education for the schools the cult runs.

If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it, but I refuse to believe that liking it does anything, and reviewing it will just take up moments of your life that you could be telling a friend or, I don’t know, learning to do that rock balancing thing, what’s it called, making cairns? Learning that.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.