Normal American politicians can be expected to say they admire Lincoln, or F.D.R., or Reagan. Not Donald Trump. “Meade ruled with an iron fist,” he said admiringly of Amadeo Henry Esposito, who ran the Brooklyn Democratic Party for 15 years, from 1969 to 1984.
Trump recalled Esposito having a baseball bat under his desk and, in his dotage, swinging a cane at uncooperative elements. Esposito, an old-time machine boss with a cigar perpetually clenched between his teeth, doling out threats, promises, and patronage, was the sort of leader Trump hoped to encounter in Washington and to become himself. “I figured,” Trump told Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, “that the Mitch McConnells would be like him in terms of strength.” Instead, he found the staid G.O.P.
The “Mitch McConnells” have powers many times that of a Meade Esposito, albeit in perhaps more subtle ways that Trump doesn’t appreciate. You can chalk it up partly to outer-borough provincialism that Trump’s model of absolute power is a local boss. When Esposito was caught, in the autumn of his years, on an F.B.I. tape bragging that he was once “boss of the fucking state,” it was more than a bit of an exaggeration, though the boast of having “made 42 judges” was probably true.
Even in his day, Esposito was a throwback, the last of the Mohicans. Born in 1907, the son of a saloonkeeper, he finished elementary school (“I didn’t wait around for my diploma, because the Dodgers and the Giants were playing that day”) but dropped out of high school. Nevertheless, Esposito liked to present himself as a tireless autodidact; one of his favorite lines was “I read everything from Mickey Mouse to Plato.” As a young man, he started his own Democratic club, which was quickly absorbed into the regular party organization.
He put his political ambitions on the back burner for 30 years, making a living as a wholesale-beer salesman and then a bail bondsman, where he made the acquaintances of prominent bosses, including Joe Colombo. Until, as he told it, a slur fired his will to power again. Harry Morr, an Irish-American district leader, called Esposito a “guinea bastard” and said you could buy an Italian with a beer. “I decided to get him,” Meade later recalled.