Revenge is a dish best served — on Brooklyn Paper Radio!
Exonerated Brooklyn lawyer John O’Hara — once disbarred and convicted of using the wrong election booth by a corrupt criminal justice system before being cleared of the charges earlier this year — is running for Civil Court for one reason: to stick it to the machine that stuck it to him.
During an hour-long, in-studio interview on Brooklyn Paper Radio, the man who was sentenced to a whopping 1,500 hours of community service, given five years probation, and fined $20,000 for voting in the wrong election district, told hosts Gersh Kuntzman and Vince DiMiceli that, yes, revenge is a motive for running himself and a slate of five other judges against party hacks.
“No … well, yes,” O’Hara said when asked point blank by DiMiceli, the editor-in-chief of The Brooklyn Paper, if he was looking to get back at the man.
The admission came deep into the scintillating conversation in which DiMiceli and Kuntzman — a Brooklyn legend and columnist at the New York Daily News who desperately wants DiMiceli’s job — probed deep into the mind of O’Hara and into the sordid the world of judicial elections. Here’s what they learned:
• To get on the ballot, O’Hara needs to get 4,000 signatures — known as petitions — which he and his team have one month to collect.
• Because members of O’Hara’s ticket, which includes one-time district attorney candidate Sandra Roper, are all Democrats, they will be lumped in on the ballot with all the other Dems. So O’Hara plans to hand out a list of the members of his team at voting sites across the borough.
• Gersh, like many people, “votes row ‘J’” when it comes to judges. “I usually look for Jews who are Democrats, because that tells me something about them.” That’s not uncommon, said O’Hara, who claimed when people vote for judges, they usually vote along ethnic lines.
• DiMiceli pointed out that voting for judges on ethnic lines is wrong simply because you can’t trust a system where everybody lies: “For instance, I may vote for a ‘DeBlasio’ for judge,” he said, “but I wouldn’t vote for a ‘Wilhelm.’ ” To which Kuntzman countered “Wow! Those guys are same person.”
• Kuntzman went out on a line and endorsed O’Hara for judge, with will inevitably result in the “Kuntzman bounce.” (Which way it bounces is unclear).
• O’Hara said the court room is no place for anti-Semitism. “Vince, there’s your headline,” Kuntzman said. “ ‘O’Hara on courts: No place for anti-semitism.’ “
The boys also chatted about the difficulty listeners — and DiMiceli — face when trying to buy a new or used car, and Gersh announced it is his last show.
Brooklyn Paper Radio is recorded and podcast live every week — for your convenience — from our studio in America’s Downtown and can be found, as always, right here on Brook