The fathers of Newark

Steve Adubato and Bill Payne
On the day she faced the cameras for the first time in campaign headquarters on Bloomfield Avenue, M. Teresa Ruiz’s voice broke with emotion as she remembered her late father, a proud Puerto Rican who raised his daughter in the North Ward. The candidate paused to collect herself, summoning her resolve as she vowed to uphold the name "Ruiz." Her voice drawing strength from the crowd’s applause in the packed room, Ruiz promised to honor the name, that it might live on in tribute to her father.

These North Ward fathers make their mark as they carry pride bigger than themselves and bigger than their families, a responsibility that inevitably puts them at odds, as it has Steve Adubato and Assemblyman William Payne.

They are two proud patriarchs, these men who were born and raised in the North Ward, whose stories cut through the same times and turf, who are now bound up with Ruiz’s emerging story as they face each other on opposing sides of this district 29 senate campaign.

They attended Barringer High School, Payne and Adubato, and beat separate but always converging paths through the dockyard days of WW II, the city’s manufacturing meltdown in the 1950's, the riots that pitted their respective races against each other in the late 60's and the aftermath.

In their mid-70's now, these two cunning street operators who thrill to words and history and the logic of politics, are not fat or slow or tired or anxious to stand down from their mutual epic called Newark. They’re so spry, in fact, so intent on their separate roles as power broker and elected official, they look like they could go 15 rounds with the devil.

In the meantime, each will settle for the other as a warm-up act.

As they unite around their African-American patron, the Payne men young and old remember the struggles too well to yield. Of their number it’s the eldest Payne, one-time assistant truck driver for the Newark Public Library, who in the words of his nephew Assemblyman Craig Stanley, set the earliest and continuing example of "leaving it all out there."

At a fund-raiser Tuesday night for his underdog district 29 senate bid against Ruiz, the white-bearded Payne kicked off his remarks with an impassioned promise of his own: to remain "unbossed." The guests in the room right away knew it was a dig at Adubato, the power behind the rival candidacy.

"Go after the white guy," said Adubato on hearing of Payne’s familiar voice calling from the Central Ward this week. The trouble is the Payne strategy won’t work, said Adubato, as he rattled off the names of a mixed-race coalition that includes Sen. Nia Gill, the Rev. Reginald Jackson, Mayor Cory Booker and Council President Mildred Crump – all African-American elected officials - who also back Ruiz.

Payne flatly denies he’s objecting to Adubato because the boss is white, a characterization he calls "obscene." His chief concern, he says, is that Adubato helped select a candidate for the state Senate who has no experience in elected office, and who in her mid 30's could not - even on her best day in Trenton - escape the sense of being beholden to such a powerful figure.

State Senate candidate Teresa Ruiz, with Newark Mayor Cory Booker"A political neophyte," is Payne’s expression for his county co-worker. Ruiz and Payne have been placed on administrative leave until after the election.

"Anybody who knows Teresa would laugh at that," said Adubato. "Her mistakes and her greatness will be her own."

Even as he contends with older forces, Adubato insists the battle is less about two men than it is ultimately about time, and a woman.

A social studies teacher who taught in the same high school as U.S. Rep. Donald Payne when the younger of the two Payne brothers taught school, Adubato says as a lifelong Newark Democrat he’s learned how to adapt and thrive within the city’s changing ethnic tides. At no time was the change more jolting than after the riots. While other Italian-Americans were jumping into their sedans and hightailing it out of the city for the suburbs, the third-generation Adubato was holding territory in the North Ward.

When other Italians were backing Anthony Imperiale against a re-election bid by the city’s first African-American Mayor Ken Gibson in 1974, Adubato yielded to the changes and, in his role as North Ward Chairman, joined Payne in backing Gibson. Already badly hobbled but defiant in the face of shifting demographics, Imperiale attempted to run for re-election off the line in the 1980's as an independent and was beaten by the line A Democrats, Adubato notes with an ironic nod toward Payne’s current independent bid.

Once the North Ward was mostly Italian. Today the number of registered Italian voters in district 29 is 3,224, out of a total 77,000. There are Khmers here, and Greeks, Jewish holdouts from the old days, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese and pockets of former Soviet State immigrants, Laotians, Thais, Arabs, Persians, Turks and many other groups. But registered voters in district 29 finally can be broken into two main voting blocks: African-Americans, registered voter population: 27,585, and Latinos, who number 24,939 registered voters. The blacks have had their Senate representation in district 29: notably the legendary nine-term Sen. Wynona Lipman, and currently Sen. Sharpe James. The city is home to African American Sen. Ronald Rice in the neighboring 28th district.

But Newark has never had a Latino senator, much less a Latina, and M. Teresa Ruiz would be the first at a time when the Latino population is growing. Adubato’s point is it’s time for Payne to yield and recognize the demographic shift in their city, and the rightful play by Hispanics for power.

"I find what he’s done very questionable, not recognizing the Democratic nominee," Adubato said of Payne, who went off the line to run as an independent to avoid a primary battle. "If he had run with us he would have had the full support of the county chairman. It’s a big mistake for the Payne family to reject the Democratic Party. He should have run as a Democrat."

Donald M. Payne has represented Newark in Congress since 1988But that long march up from the streets, that clench of political power in Newark where there was none before him, didn’t take Payne to a point where after nine years in the Assembly he would want to give up a shot at senatorial courtesy in favor of a rookie candidate coming straight out of the Adubato stronghold. Payne felt his own story, a story of civil rights battles fought and won, was too important, too relevant, too hard. He went to Adubato a few months ago and asked the boss for support in a Senate bid, but he found a reluctant warlord, who’s also waited too long and worked too hard building community ties and enduring the agonies of the Sharpe James era to now give up a chance at having that old political trophy: the upper hand.

For all of the alliances and energetic race relations, that wouldn’t be like Adubato of the North Ward."What you have to understand about the urban politics up here," a heartbroken North Jersey operator recently told a stranger off the record in a bar, "is that it’s always about ethnic rivalry."

"There’s an animus among these groups?" was the attempt at clarification.

The voice was tired as the source knocked back another beer. "It’s not animus," he said, his tired face fighting off impatience. "It’s rivalry."

And it wouldn’t be like Payne, Payne of the North Ward, to back down.

In the pre-war years, each Newark neighborhood had its distinctive ethnic pride: Weequahic in the South was Jewish, the East Ward was Slavic and Polish, the Irish had the West Ward and blacks held the Central.

Then there was the North.

"I was born in Doodletown, and it was interesting," said Payne of his roots. "The community we grew up in was predominantly Italian. But there were blacks and Italians, and it was not uncommon to find families of both races occupying a four-family house. Other parts of Newark were not that way, and so it was a unique experience we had."

Adubato grew up in another section of the North Ward.

When Payne became old enough to vote he looked around and saw a district that was one-third African-American, but when he walked down to the 12th district North Ward polling place in a church he found only whites.

"How come there are no African-Americans here?" he asked the district leader.

"I don’t want any blacks working here," was the grumbled reply.

The 21-year old Payne went home and told his kid brother about the incident. Then he told the future Congressman that he was going to run, which he did. He ran against the organization, and won.

"I became the first African-American committeeman in the North Ward," said Bill Payne. "I remember years later this gentleman came up to me and said, ‘You know, you don't remember me, but I was a police officer and I lived on Lincoln Avenue in the North Ward, and I remember your first race.’ He was marveling that this young kid was challenging the old guard guys."

That’s a memory that stands out to him now as he again finds himself up against the organization. Payne would go on to serve as state chairman of the NAACP and later as commissioner of the Newark Housing Authority.

Adubato has his own hard-knocks story to tell, and talking to him one gathers he’d fight endless political wars before he’d turn soft or leave the city.

"Well, I've been around for a long time," he concedes.

President George W. Bush repeatedly refers to Latino immigrants "doing the jobs Americans won’t do," and Adubato, the perennial student of history, doesn’t have to summon a quote from a 1889 newspaper advertisement - "Italians have taken their place because the Irishmen have found something better to do" - to know his people fought their way out of the basement and won decisive New World battles for respect right here, in Newark. 1880 census records document 407 Italians in Newark, a number that jumped to 20,943 by 1910, according to Newark historian John Cunningham, before they scattered.

The work one group leaves behind, other immigrant groups shoulder, and the power comes from securing the foundation. Who stays, stands - and that’s Adubato.

When the big shifts came in the wake of the riots in the 1970s, the Payne political operation stretched its Newark roots into the South Ward where the African-American community was concentrated, where the family strengthened and expanded their hometown ties. After a failed 1978 bid for county executive, and following two unsuccessful attempts in the 1980s, Donald Payne, in his own words enjoying the "trail-blazing efforts of his older brother," finally wore down and forced U.S. Rep. Peter Rodino into retirement in 1988.

Bill Payne ran against Sharpe James for mayor in the early 1990s and was, by Adubato’s recollection, "annihilated." But the determined elder Payne ran off the line with Lipman for Assembly in 1997 and won.Frozen out of Newark’s inner sanctum in the James year, Adubato consolidated power in part as a backer of candidates beyond the frontier, extending his reach into Essex County most successfully with the hard fought election of County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo. He maintained good relations with the Paynes.

"When this is all over, I want to be very clear, we support Donald Payne for Congress," said Adubato. "This thing with Bill is tragic. It’s tragic. But politics is tough."

DiVincenzo likewise reiterated his support for the Congressman.

"I am supporting Donald Payne 100%," said the county executive. "One election has nothing to do with the other election. First of all, he's been a great congressman. He’s also supported me. I support him, our county chairman supports him."

There’s party and there’s family, and when Donald Payne, the one-time kid brother turned Congressman, remembers William coming home outraged all those years ago from committee headquarters, he doesn’t hesitate to embrace his brother in this latest dogfight.

"I think what’s important about my brother is what he went through," said the younger Payne, who flew in from Washington, D.C. to emcee the fund-raiser Tuesday night. "He remembers the city when it was a bustling city and he felt the decline after, he was part of the election of Gibson and the strides forward with James after Gibson stabilized the city."

They are remembrances shared by Adubato, who is not family, who looked up in the North Ward during the primary season to see the billboards he paid for that show the young, smiling face of M. Teresa Ruiz, whose story is connected to his and to Payne’s, in a legislative district where - black, Hispanic, or white - the numbers of female registered Democratic voters outnumber the men, 61.4% to 38.3%, and where today two-thirds of the voting households are fatherless.

Whatever happens in November, they fight as they go forward, Adubato and Payne, neither standing down, connected and passionately convinced after all the wreckage that they are part of something - the history of a city, a rebirth, and to the end, the duties of a patriarch.