Stop Me Before I Vote Again

... sued me for libel , almost thirty years ago, for, what, a million dollars? Seven million dollars? I don't quite recall. Hey, a million here, a million there...

Kagan's dad was an Upper West Side lawyer named Robert Kagan. Based on the sketchy bio one finds online, I think this must be the same Robert Kagan -- shown above -- who was exposed as a first-class crook in a little community paper I used to edit, back in the late 70s-early 80s. The paper was called Heights and Valley News (HVN).

HVN was so obscure that it's not even online. We covered the landlord-tenant struggle on the Upper West Side -- a battle which the tenants notoriously lost, and the landlords won, with ample help from high-minded West Side liberals and their institutional excrescence, the Democratic Party.

Robert Kagan had a scam in which he "represented" tenants who were resisting co-op efforts, which were the great engine of gentrification in New York back then. As soon as Robert signed up to represent the tenants, he would form a partnership with other speculators and send the tenants -- his clients -- letters offering to buy out their "insider" rights, under some such soothing name as "Apartment Investors Associates".

Needless to say, the tenants had no idea that "Apartment Investors Associates" included their lawyer, who thus stood to benefit from losing their case -- not to put too fine a point on it.

There were other fiddles, too -- non-resident fictitious "tenants" who were sockpuppets of Kagan's, for example.

No doubt this all sounds very arcane, but it was a big deal at the time. Kagan was the chair of the local community board's "ethics committee" -- you can't make this stuff up. He was either dumped, or had to resign from that position of honor, and he sued me, me personally, for libel, and claimed damages to the amount of a lot of dollars. Millions. I don't remember how many. A few more than I had, anyway.

Of course we laughed the suit off, and it went nowhere -- a very sad and ineffectual attempt at intimidation. After all, we had the documents. There was no surmising about it.

I've scanned some of the old HVN stories and posted them on Tumblr, though the resolution isn't very good on some of them. Will try to find a better alternative.

What of it, you say? Dad is one thing, daughter's another.

But there has been a good deal of speculation on what Kagan's background might tell us about her. The conventional narrative is that she comes from an idealistic high-minded left-wing milieu; so maybe we're not completely fucked. Kagan pere, in particular, is invariably characterized as a "tenant lawyer", a man who fought for the little guy against the rapacious landlords, etc., etc. Here's a particularly gaga example:

Elena Kagan and Family: Best of the Upper Left Side, with a Pro-Union Brother

​It's about time that a child of Manhattan's Upper Left Side was nominated for the Supreme Court. There is no better school for debate than the corridors of upper Broadway and the aisles of Zabar's, where the opinions are stronger than the garlic bagels.

Obama nominee Elena Kagan, 50, has impeccable ULS credentials and genes: Mom Gloria taught public school's best and brightest at Hunter College Elementary School; dad Robert was a lawyer who represented tenants.

Now if Elena is in fact the daughter of my Robert Kagan -- and it seems pretty certain she is -- then this self-flattering West Side story needs to be brought more into line with what we old-timers know to be West Side reality. Elena was raised in comfort, and plied with all the garlic bagels she could eat, on the proceeds of real-estate speculation and a crooked lawyer's fraudulent dealings with his clients.

So if background means anything -- then I guess we're fucked after all.

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Update: I was originally somewhat tentative in identifying my Robert Kagan with Elena Kagan's father. It now seems clear that they are in fact one and the same -- see comment #1 -- so I've adjusted the language accordingly. --MJS