A Last Toast To 'Rocky,' A Brother Who Ain't Here

The New York Sun

July 24, 2003 Thursday

BY ERROL LOUIS

SECTION: FRONT PAGE; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1138 words

You could tell the people who knew the councilman for a long time: They still called him by his nickname, Rocky. His street name.

In Brooklyn, they will be drinking toasts to the memory of James Davis tonight, and tomorrow, and for a long time to come. The politicians will hoist glasses in restaurants and ballrooms. In Crown Heights, the folks who still called him Rocky will toast in the way you do it on the street corners: a small splash on the pavement, and a moment of silence for all the brothers who ain't here.

I was watching television on my so-called day off yesterday when the phones began exploding. First was my father, saying the radio reported that Councilman Davis had been shot at City Hall.

My first call after that was to Anthony Herbert, one of the people running against James Davis this year. I was calling to ask why he'd done it. When Tony answered the phone and seemed genuinely startled, I figured that the shooter was the other guy, the strange one I met last week.

Spend enough time around Brooklyn politics, and that's how you start to think.



I turned back into a human being, a neighbor and friend, when Ife-Sharon Charles called. Ife grew up around the corner from James Davis and works at the Crown Community Mediation Center on Kingston Avenue. She is, by temperament and by training, a cool and wise and sympathetic soul. I zoomed over to pick her up and we went to check on Thelma Davis, the councilman's mother.

After we got to the house on Brooklyn Avenue, shortly before 3 p.m., Ife started answering the house phone, hugging Mrs. Davis, and calling friends at NYPD to find out what was going on.
The Reverend Clarence Norman Sr. walked in. Politically, he had opposed James Davis for years, and had already thrown the support of his 5,000-member church behind Tony Herbert this year. But yesterday, he was his true and best self, the local minister coming to help a mother in need.

Four young cops from the 71st precinct showed up with a police van to get us all to the hospital. Rev. Norman led us in a short prayer, and then we rode in silence. Officer Johnson, the driver, did all kinds of impossible maneuvering, running against ongoing traffic on Atlantic Avenue and down Adams Street, with the sirens blazing.

I thought, along the way, about James Davis. We'd run against each other in 1997, both trying to unseat the incumbent at the time, Mary Pinkett. I got 29%, James got 20%, and Mrs. Pinkett crushed us both.
In 2001, I wanted to take another shot at the seat, but my parents were adamantly opposed. Politics is no place for an honest man, my father said. I said I wanted to clean up the system, but they weren't buying it.

They definitely had a point. Back in the 1970s and '80s, one of the slick old hustler-politicians, Vander Beatty, a state assemblyman and senator, had cut a strange and troubling figure in the neighborhood.
Vander Beatty dressed in fancy clothes, he carried a revolver, and seemed to have a hand in all sorts of shady dealings. In the early 1980s, he was convicted of an outrageous attempted vote fraud in a congressional race, and soon after spent 19 months in federal prison for embezzling funds from a community organization.

And ex-senator Beatty died like a gangster in 1990, shot to death in his neighborhood office where, at the time, he was planning a run for district leader to get back in the game. The man they think did it was acquitted at trial a few years later.

James Davis wasn't a crook. But he had that street style, and he was impulsive, even reckless, at times. He continued to carry a gun even though he wasn't a cop anymore, and would occasionally pull back his jacket to let people catch a glimpse of it.

He also had a bad habit, common to politicians, of thinking he could charm and outwit and outtalk anybody, even his enemies. Worse still, he had a habit of scooping up whoever happened to be around - strangers, constituents, members of the press - and treating them like long-lost friends, invited to accompany him to whatever his next function happened to be.

You'd see him at a political fundraiser or community event with a pretty, slightly confused-looking woman. It would turn out that the woman was a constituent who came looking for help in the late afternoon, and got scooped up and brought to Davis' next meeting.

It made people talk, and many of us warned him about it in private. We became friends in 2001, when I urged people in the neighborhood to choose him rather than a political hack sponsored by the county organization.

We became even friendlier when The New York Sun asked me to write about politics, for Davis loved three things to the depths of his soul: his family, his politics, and his name in the paper.

The councilman was in high spirits when I ran into him last week. It was nearly midnight, and he was at his campaign office on Vanderbilt Avenue, telling me about how he was going to knock Tony Herbert off the ballot for filing flawed nominating petitions.

Davis then introduced me to Othniel Askew, who went by the name Aaron. He was supposed to be challenging Davis, but here they were, hanging out together.

True to form, the councilman more or less shoved me into Aaron's fancy SUV, and we all went for a drive to Harlem. We were taking home one of James Davis' female campaign volunteers.

Along the way, I talked to Askew, who looked like a black man but said he was an Orthodox Jew, a Yale Law School graduate, and a real estate developer in Fort Greene. When I asked about his candidacy, he said: "The official story, for the record, is that I collected 2,500 signatures, but due to an error by a campaign worker, they were filed too late. That's the official story."

The unofficial story, I assumed, was that Askew was dropping out of the race in exchange for some kind of help in getting a piece of land, a zoning variance, or some such thing. Brooklyn politics at its best. I didn't give it another thought.

But thinking about the whole thing on the way to the hospital yesterday, I decided I had cracked the case: Askew and Davis had a political deal that went bad, and the result was the violence at City Hall. That, pending further information, is still my theory.

The scene at the hospital was chaos. Everybody tried to get into the emergency room at once, and Council Member James Sanders of Queens was doing his best to get things sorted out between the cops, the family, and the hospital staff. A few minutes later, a doctor came and told Mrs. Davis the news. We all cried together.

So Rocky, you finally did it. The front page of every paper, the lead story on every channel. There's been nothing like it in 300 years of city history, and they're saying your name today from coast to coast. I even got an e-mail from a friend in London, wanting to know more about James Davis.

To the brother who ain't here.