Serious business: Police Commissioner Ray Kelly — here testifying on terrorism before a US Senate committee earlier this year — has informal, confidential sources that must not become public. (Ron Sachs – CNP)
Who would have ever suspected that Ray Kelly leads two lives?
There’s Ray Kelly the former Marine and city police commissioner since 2002, hitherto thought to have been a model of rectitude.
And then there’s the Ray Kelly who all these years has been getting a surreptitious free ride at that notorious West 44th Street fleshpot, the Harvard Club, and failing to fill out the proper paperwork.
Or, more precisely, the Ray Kelly who has allowed an organization that exists solely to promote the best interests of the New York Police Department to kick in a few grand a year to . . . help Kelly promote the best interests of the New York Police Department.
And, not coincidentally, the well-being of the city itself.
That would be the Police Foundation, which has been raising money from private sources since 1971 to assist the department through tough fiscal times.
At the moment, among other things, it’s helping to pay for NYPD counterterrorism officers posted overseas who wouldn’t otherwise be there because the city employs so many social workers that it can’t afford the freight.
The foundation has been paying Kelly’s Harvard Club dues — $1,500 a year — and covering an apparently modest restaurant tab for the commissioner and his guests since at least 2004.
Kelly is required to report the details, and he hasn’t. So the hounds are baying.
Yes, Kelly’s guest list appears also to be immune to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act — but that may even be the point of the exercise. Kelly’s outside-of-channels anti-terrorism activities are extensive, effective — and absolutely should not, must not, be matters of public record.
But let me confess: Ray Kelly bought me a Harvard Club hamburger once. It was a fine sandwich, and it came with a delicious pickle spear — plus conversational insight into the dreary business of policing a city of 9 million people.
A business lunch, in other words.
And if Ray Kelly erred in failing to report it, and others like it, that speaks more to the inanity of the reporting requirements than it does to the integrity of Ray Kelly.
The current regulations date roughly from the Parking Violations Bureau scandal of the mid-’80s, and the subsequent creation of a conflicts-of-interest board in a 1989 city charter revision.
In brief, it became city policy that all high-ranking municipal officers file minutely detailed personal financial information every year.
The flaw here, of course, is that crooks won’t rat themselves out, so the forms are functionally useless. Certainly Kelly’s predecessor, Bernie Kerik, didn’t — and he’s now in prison.
But the reporting requirements rest on the presumption that the incumbent is a crook — and therefore not to be trusted with the office in the first place.
Just how many quality people have avoided public service because of the implied indignities that accompany such a choice is unknowable, of course. But one suspects that many have.
And yes, of course, the commissioner should have filled out the stupid forms. But if he resents the requirement, he’s entitled: There may be a straighter arrow in public life than Ray Kelly, but if so that person is in deep cover.
And there may even have been dumber scandals than this one, but none come to mind.