March 2001 -- Habitat Magazine

BIONDI SPEAKS
The Former Board President Talks about the Beekman Hill House Case

By Tom Soter

Biondi: "You don't institutionalize yourself as a victim."

Nick Biondi is a man pursued by the furies. "I'm not a racist," he says over and over against during the course of a recent 90-minute talk. He is obsessed with proving his innocence, of showing that he is no bigot. For Nick Biondi carries a heavy cross: in 1997, he was branded by a federal court as acting in a discrimintory manner when he voted to deny Gregory Broome, a black man, a sublease to an apartment in Biondi's East Side cooperative. Biondi was then found personally liable for a $125,000 judgment.

"This is a story about the devastation that occurs when a person is unjustly accused of race discrimination," Biondi says in a memo that he wrote after the interview. "This is a story of reverse discrimination. It is a story about how easy it is to win a discrimination suit against ethnically profiled Italian-Americans. Too often, Italian-Americans are ethnically pro-filed as b1ue-collar, racist, and bigoted. It is a story of a poor Italian-American boy who dreamed of living in Beekman Place and [of how] his dream turned into a nightmare."

He sees himself as a tragic innocent, a street-wise fighter who got caught up in the legal wheels of a corrupted system of suits and counter- suits. "He has become crazy over this," observes one of the former board members who also paid a fine. "He calls me now and then and wants me to join him in a lawsuit against someone or other and I say, 'Nick, forget about it. Get on with your life."'

But he can't. Every fiber of his being seems to cry out for vindication. During his interview, Biondi speaks with animation, flitting from memory to lecture, frequently jumping from his chair to quote trial testimony and then asking, "Can you believe that?" Like a character out of Dickens, all he can do is bemoan the hurt he has suffered. Like the wrongly convicted Richard Kimble in television's The Fugitive, he is an unjustly accused man searching for the facts that will clear him. "We didn't discriminate against this guy," he insists, "We had other black owners in the building. We know that we did not discriminate."

The facts of the case have become almost irrelevant, shrouded in a "he said/she said' sort of debate. Did Broome call on Friday morning or was it Friday night? Were phone records altered? Did someone lie on the witness stand? These are the issues of Nick Biondi's life, as he rummages among his files during his conversation with a visitor; these are the talking points as he takes out articles and letters he has seen or has written about his case. At times, he speaks in a hushed voice but more often than not sounds off in booming tones, punching out words for emphasis. "I think it's a good idea that the boards resign," he argues at one point. "Look, the risk is too great."

He paints himself as a crusader for justice, through circumstance, not by choice. not by choice. "1 feel like 1 would like to inform people," he explains. "That is why I'm doing this interview. I feel that the basic public service part of me hasn't stopped. I guess it must be a gene in me, a faulty gene, but I feel that I've learned a lot. I learned, in my opinion, that in many instances discrimination suits are started because of the huge monetary damages that can be collected even though, in many instances, there is no actual discrimination." Nick Biondi feels he has been wronged for doing what he says was common sense; he sounds, not surprisingly, a bit paranoid as he tries to draw lessons from his personal case. Like any conspiracy theorist, he sees the system out of control, out to get little guys like him. "Since '95, practically every city, every state, every municipality, every school district, every police department has been sued for discrimination. They're criminalizing an entire leadership...There are so many [lawsuits]. They are trying to use a law that was designed to help people but, many times they are abusing that law and, in fact, hurting many innocent people."

Growing up in the 1940s in Manhattan's East 40s near a slaughter house, Biondi knows about fighting. Although he eventually became an insurance broker, the young man had dreams of becoming a boxer. "I started out very poor," he remembers. " I lived and grew up in a fourth-floor walk-up...I used to be a Golden Gloves [amateur] boxer when I was a kid."

As the son of Italian immigrants -- his father worked for the New York Central railroad and his mother was a housekeeper -- he says he frequently faced discrimination himself. "You know, it was the usual thing: you couldn't go to certain places when you were looking for a job... I just felt that I couldn't go to [certain colleges] because I might not be accepted, but you just lived with it. You don't start yelling...I felt the words were then guinea, dago, and wop. Today, the words are racist, bigot, and prejudiced. The words change, the hate is the same. That's how I feel. But you don't make a career about being a victim. You don't institutionalize yourself as a victim. You try not to even think about it. But it has great coin today."

Biondi eventually attended New York University law school for two years on a scholarship. Then, "I just left. It was overwhelming. I was broke. None of my friends finished high school. They were all working. I only went because I had a scholarship.. I said, 'To hell with it,' and just walked away from it, so I got into this [insurance] business." He married and moved to a Queens co-op but says that his dream was to live in Manhattan.

In 1981, he moved into Beekman Hill House, a 66-unit rental. It went co-op in 1986, and Biondi was a driving force in the conversion. An aggressive, take-charge individual, he fought with the sponsor, Lawrence Wiener, to get the best deal for the tenants. After the conversion, he served in various positions on the board before being elected president in 1990.

Biondi admits he did the job because few others wanted it. Of the five active board members (an additional two were sponsor seats), only Biondi and Michael Silverman actually lived in the building. "People were apathetic," he says. "You know how it is: I did the work because I had to. No one else wanted the job."

Ultimately, Biondi feels wronged because he says he wants to be remembered as a do-gooder not a bigot. "This is criminal," he says, almost forlornly. "You feel like you've been mugged - like you've been mugged by people with suits. The world doesn't care."