Word: cuomo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cuomo, the paterfamilias, gives new meaning to the term hands-on management. Consider this for supervision: his longtime aide Tonio Burgos walks into the Governor's Manhattan office with a memorandum. "What's wrong with your collar?" asks the Governor. The tips of Burgos' collar are pointed up like butterfly wings. "Come here," orders Cuomo. The Governor reaches into his desk, takes out a paper clip and twists it. He then puts a hand on Burgos' shoulder, lifts up his collar and inserts the paper clip so that it acts as a collar stay. Same thing on the other side...
...this year, his staff counseled him not to bring up the death penalty, which he passionately opposes and has vetoed four times. In the middle of the speech, however, he put aside his notes, leaned across the lectern and said, "I know what people say. This mushy-headed liberal Cuomo, who read a book once. These macho guys who want to burn people, fry them." He drops his voice. "I know how you feel." He does. Cuomo's father-in-law was paralyzed by a mugger's attack. "Look, my mother wants revenge." Cuomo does not. He tells them that...
Later, at his office, Cuomo dials a familiar number. After several rings, a low voice answers. "Mamma," Cuomo says, "I've been talking about you." He begins to tell her about the speech, but his mother interrupts, talking furiously in Italian. Cuomo translates for a reporter. Three women had been murdered the day before in Brooklyn. Animals, she calls the killers; they deserve to die. The Governor manages to calm her, then says an affectionate goodbye in Italian...
Andrea and Immaculata Cuomo came to America by boat from Naples. They had little money and no English. Mario, their fourth and final child, was born in the urban equivalent of a log cabin, the room behind his father's grocery store. Cuomo has turned his early life into a sepia-tinted parable of a polyglot neighborhood of hard work and love. He can spin out stories about everyone on the old block: Lanzone, the baker; Kaye, the Jewish tailor; Kelly, the Irish scrap dealer...
...Cuomo remembers his father working, always working. The store was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Young Mario often helped out at night, preparing sandwiches for the early-morning construction crews. "All he thought about was working for his family," Cuomo says of his father, who died in 1981. "I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years of life what my father taught by example in one week...