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The New York Times
U.S / Region
From a Bright Past to
a Cloudy Future
By ALAN FEUER,
nytimes.com from the Web, May 10, 2008
When Vito J. Fossella Jr., the
soon-to-be boy congressman, stood beside the young girls of a cheerleading squad
at the Excelsior Grand catering hall in 1997, it seemed a particularly vivid
version of Staten Island pageantry. Mr. Fossella — 32 and with Al Pacino
looks — was on his way to becoming the sole Republican in New York City’s
Congressional delegation at a spirited party billed as an evening of “pasta and
politics.”
George H. W. Bush and Senator Bob Dole were there that night, strolling past the
steaming trays of ziti and charging donors $1,000 each to pose for pictures.
Sonny Bono was on his way from California to stump with them the next day.
Mr. Fossella, the man of the hour, raised his hands, quieted the crowd, then
launched into a rousing speech on cutting taxes and championing school choice.
The spectacle that evening — Reaganism as seen through the Italianate lens of
Richmond County — was a dizzying distance from Mr. Fossella’s latest public
appearance, at his Staten Island Congressional office last week. The high
school marching bands were gone, replaced by the granite visage of his wife.
There were apologies this time, not promises of victory. The questions in
the air did not revolve around impending election results, but whether or not
there might be a five-day jail term resulting from his drunken-driving charge.
In the nine days since the 43-year-old Mr. Fossella, who has served five terms
in Congress, was arrested and charged after running a red light in Alexandria,
Va., things have gone from not-so-good to pretty bad, with only a slender thread
still staving off the worst.
Within days of his admitting that he was on his way to visit “some friends in
Virginia” when he was stopped by the police, the New York tabloids began raising
questions about the woman who came to retrieve him from custody, a former Air
Force lieutenant colonel named Laura Fay. Then, on Thursday, he released a
clipped statement from his office, saying that he had fathered a daughter, now
3, in an extramarital affair with Ms. Fay.
The topsy-turvy transformation from young buck candidate to repentant politician
is a well-blazed trail, but one that nonetheless caught his allies by surprise.
“He had a great future politically with the background he had,” Guy V. Molinari,
a former borough president and Republican congressman from Staten Island who was
Mr. Fossella’s political mentor and spiritual father, said in an interview
Friday. “I felt very bad for him personally. I also said, ‘My God,
he had such a bright future ahead of him.’ He’s a good-looking guy, very
down to earth.”
As a graduate of Fordham Law School and the scion of a noted Staten Island
political family, Mr. Fossella was, in many ways, biographically predestined to
enter the world of Staten Island politics. Most of his forebears were
Democrats, but Mr. Fossella, charmed by the ascendant conservative ideal, became
a Republican at 25.
His great-grandfather James A. O’Leary was a New Deal congressman who also
represented Staten Island, from 1935 to 1944 and voted to create Social
Security; his father, Vito Fossella Sr., led the city’s Board of Standards and
Appeals under Mayor Edward I. Koch; and his uncle, Frank Fossella, served the
borough on the City Council for several years, losing his seat in 1985 to Mr.
Molinari’s daughter, Susan, who would come to play a role in the younger
Fossella’s rise.
Mr. Fossella was serving as a city councilman from Staten Island himself when
the luck of good timing grabbed him by his political lapels. Ms. Molinari,
who had moved on from the Council to Congress in 1990, shocked the local
establishment in 1997 by resigning her seat to become an anchor with CBS News.
Her father and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor at the time, backed Mr. Fossella
in a special election to fill the vacancy she left. He ran for the seat
against another well-known Staten Island politician, Assemblyman Eric N.
Vitaliano, in a race that drew national attention and celebrity proxies like
President Bill Clinton and former President Bush. Mr. Vitaliano lost and
went on to become a federal judge.
Mr. Fossella, victorious with 62 percent of the vote, was so intent on getting
to Congress that, according to The Staten Island Advance, he flew to Washington
from Newark carrying the morning papers proclaiming his own victory only 10
hours after it was announced.
Once there, he established himself as a reliable member of his party. He
voted to impeach President Clinton, followed President Bush’s war policies in
Iraq, voted to eliminate financing for Planned Parenthood and supported a
constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Democrats accused him of not
pushing the Bush administration hard enough to release $20 billion in
reconstruction money for the city and state. Republicans said the Democrats were
playing politics with the issue.
And yet many of his Democratic colleagues did not regard Mr. Fossella as an
ideological warrior. There were even times when he reached across the
aisle within the New York Congressional delegation. The most recent
example was his effort with Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney and Jerrold
Nadler, Manhattan Democrats, to urge President Bush to expand health care
benefits for firefighters and police officers who developed a variety of
ailments after working at ground zero.
At various times, his party has looked on Mr. Fossella as mayoral timber, a
reflection partly of his charisma but also of the relative dearth of prominent
Republican politicians in New York. He is also clearly a celebrity at
home, where The Advance chronicles his personal and political milestones with
the avidity of a paparazzo.
In 1995, for instance, the paper greeted the birth of his son Dylan with a
gossip item containing the essentials of weight and time of birth as well as the
fabulistic detail that, moments after being born, the infant advised the shocked
delivery room to vote Republican. It must have come as a bitter moment,
then, on Friday when The Advance published an editorial scolding him for his
affair and calling on him to resign.
To some lawmakers from New York, however, Mr. Fossella is and always has been
the embodiment of the heavily working class district he has long represented.
Representative Peter T. King, a Republican from Long Island, recalled how Mr.
Fossella was ready to cancel a recent fund-raiser that Vice President Dick
Cheney planned to attend on his behalf on Park Avenue after Mr. Cheney’s staff
objected to the congressman bringing along some friends from his district.
“The vice president’s office took the position that they only wanted paying
customers at the event,” Mr. King said. “Vito insisted on bringing friends
from Staten Island. He was ready to call off the event.”
Eventually, Mr. Fossella’s friends were allowed to attend, and apparently made
an impression.
“There were three guys from the neighborhood that he got into the event but who
he had to tell to buy suits,” Mr. King recalled. “He said, ‘You are going
to meet the vice president. You’ve got to have a good suit on.’ ”
Raymond Hernandez, Sam Roberts and Carolyn Wilder contributed
reporting.
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