Today, federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis is opening his court to those who object to his remedial order in the discrimination lawsuit against the FDNY. So many have signed up, he’s already had to extend the session to four days, even though he’s only allowing two minutes of testimony per person.
It’s still too little, too late: As a matter of simple justice, the Second Court of Appeals needs to grant New York City’s request to overturn Garaufis’ recent rulings, and hand the case to a different judge. He’s shown himself to be hopelessly biased as well as arrogant.
His ruling on Friday, allowing the department to hire off the city’s latest civil-service exam, doesn’t change that. Indeed, there are serious grounds to worry that the city watered down this test to a dangerous degree in order to comply with Garaufis’ outrageous dictates.
The evidence for Garuafis’ bias starts with the fact that he granted summary judgment in favor of the Vulcan Society’s claim that the city intentionally discriminated against minorities with its firefighter exam.
This was shocking, because all precedent says that summary judgment should only be granted if there’s no serious question of fact — and the city had reams and reams of evidence to disprove the Vulcans’ claims.
Simply put, Garaufis simply ignored the city’s expensive and extensive efforts to integrate the FDNY (including quota hiring in the 1970s and more than $20 million spent on minority recruitment since 1989). Because he doesn’t like the racial balance the tests produce, he declared the FDNY to be “a stubborn bastion of white- male privilege.”
This, from a member of the federal bench — which has about the same percentage of white men as the FDNY.
Add to this Garaufis’ overreach. In this stage of the overall case, Garaufis found fault exclusively with certain FDNY civil-service exams. The courts specifically refused the Vulcans’ request to bring in issues such as recruitment and the character-review process.
By precedent, this means that Garaufis’ remedies are supposed to focus exclusively on the FDNY exams — yet in fact his “remedy” ruling stretched to cover department recruiting and character review, among other issues.
To appreciate the great irony here, realize that Garaufis is clearly guilty of what he considers misconduct within the Fire Department.
It galls the judge that firefighters have a habit of recommending the job to friends and family — even though those friends and family still have to pass a competitive examination to qualify. (And even though the Vulcans do much the same with their friends and family.)
Yet Garaufis himself, in this very case, has named the partner of a friend to a lucrative position — without any sort of competitive vetting process.
Specifically, last November the judge named Mark Cohen as the special monitor overseeing the FDNY for the court, authorized to review and approve any aspect of the FDNY hiring process as well as to overhaul the procedure for investigating discrimination complaints.
Cohen’s name wasn’t submitted for consideration by any of the parties. In fact, the Vulcan Society — the main plaintiff in the case — objected to him. We don’t know why; maybe the Vulcans were worried that Cohen doesn’t have much civil-rights or labor experience. (Or maybe they disliked the fact that he has no background in firefighting or disaster relief.)
The judge gave Cohen the job anyway.
Cohen is a law partner of Lawrence Gresser. And Gresser and his wife, Carole, are very good friends of Nicholas Garaufis from the Queens political world. They’ve even attended the annual New Year’s Day party at the Garaufis home.
Also troubling is that, one week before Cohen’s appointment was announced, the law firm of Cohen and Gresser signed a 10-year lease for the 19th floor at 800 Third Ave., adding to their offices on the 20th and 21st floors. Cohen’s employment as special monitor is expected to last 10 years.
One more bit of insult: Garaufis has refused the city’s request to review Cohen’s billing for his special-monitor work, so no one except Garaufis knows what he’s done to earn the $855,000 he’s already charged the city’s taxpayers.
Let me close with one final bit of outrageous conduct that should get Garaufis tossed off the case: his attempts to chill the free speech of those who criticize his rulings.
Last August, the judge summoned Fire Commisioner Salvatore Cassano to his courtroom specifically to ask what actions the commissioner could take against “senior uniformed officials” who “were writing columns in the newspaper” or “criticizing the process or the litigation here.” The commissioner had to explain the obvious First Amendment issues to the judge.
If any more evidence were needed that Judge Garaufis has lost all objectivity in this case, that incident alone should do it.
Paul Mannix is president of Merit Matters, a group advocating equal opportunity and adequate hiring standards for the FDNY. He is an active-duty FDNY deputy chief, but these opinions are his own as a private citizen.