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It was the night of this year's New York primary, and when a billionaire like Mayor Michael Bloomberg holds a party to celebrate his candidacy, it's no small affair. The spacious ballroom of the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn was overflowing with free beer and pigs-in-blankets, and a band revved up the throngs of supporters. "We love Mike! We love Mike!" they chanted. Among the supporters was Alex Martins, a goateed Indian lawyer in a business suit and a Hawaiian shirt. He was flanked by three fellow Indians in shirt-sleeves who looked a little lost. Martins waved a big blue Bloomberg poster enthusiastically and joined in the chant; his entourage stood around silently. Martins's companions were wearing "Mike '05" buttons, but it was safe to assume that they had little clue what the mayor's political platform was. They were at the Marriott because, being relatively new immigrants, they wanted things "fixed" - visas, jobs, business permits - and Martins is a master at this. If Martins was attending the event, they would join him. They told me they don't have much trust in politicians because they had known the ones back home in India. ("Politicians are like creatures," one of them, a computer programmer from Mumbai, said. "They're like sharks.") But they were hoping that through their association with Martins, who is on the board of the New Era Democrats, a political club that has endorsed Bloomberg, they might see some results. Martins is a slim, dark man of 40 who looks understandingly at you over the top of his glasses as he speaks. "Within this week I will solve your problem" is one of his favorite phrases. When I first asked for his card, Martins gave me four. One identified him as an immigration and personal-injury lawyer affiliated with the firm Frenkel, Hershkowitz & Shafran. A second card testified to his role as C.E.O. of Ara Global Trading, "Importer and Distributor of Exclusive Wines." Two others actually belonged to his wife, Maureen Martins, D.D.S., of Bright Smile Dental Care in Flushing and Valley Stream, N.Y. ("We love to see you smile.") He frequently conducts business out of her offices. Martins is not a high-profile mover and shaker in New York City politics. But he does play a role in helping to meet the needs of many of the city's residents - particularly South Asian immigrants. He is a fixer, an expediter: a link between the vast, anonymous, forbidding face of the system and the immigrant cabby or student or maid, perhaps without papers, fresh off a long-haul flight at J.F.K. In the absence of powerful elected officials - there's not a single South Asian holding a major elected office in New York - the Indian community has to rely on other conduits to power. Martins fills that role by running a favor bank, brokering the barter of services - for instance, a largely Indian taxi company agrees to distribute campaign literature in return for his intervention with officials on the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Martins's fees are not made explicit, but the people who come to him are more or less aware of what they need to do to pay him back, because they come from countries where the trading of influence is necessary to survival. Historically, every immigrant group that has come to New York has relied on people like Martins: a man of connections, a man you call when your son is caught shoplifting or your cousin needs a visa or your nephew needs a city job. He is not a politician - not yet, at least - but he is a political creature. He is the representative who helps new immigrants reach their elected representatives. For the politicians whom Martins deals with, the benefits of helping a new immigrant are often not immediately apparent, because most of the immigrants are not citizens and can't vote. But some of these immigrants have money, and many of them will, eventually, become citizens and remember who came to their assistance when they were new to the country. The politicians are also keenly aware that New York's demographics are changing. This year, for the first time in history, non-Hispanic whites make up a minority of the city's voters. Which means that every New York politician seeking citywide office now has to form a coalition: no one can win on the basis of appealing to a single voting bloc, whether it's whites, blacks or Hispanics. Politicians will need the support of the Jains, the Catholics from Goa, the Sikhs - all the people who turn to Martins to get things fixed.
Shah was not paying Martins anything for the contact with Golden, though Shah did arrange for a free checkup for a friend of Martins's - a priest from Goa who lacked health insurance. And Martins was offering nothing to Golden, though in the past Martins has organized registration drives to get Indian and other minority voters, who typically vote Democratic, to cast their ballot for Golden, who is a Republican. After the meeting, Golden wrote a recommendation for Shah to New York Methodist Hospital. Eventually, Shah may be called upon to return the favor that Martins did for him. The payouts in Martins's favor bank are immediate; the fees and deposits can be claimed long into the future. Golden, it turned out, had recently returned from a trip to Israel, and Martins knew precisely when the senator left and when he came back. "Alex knows how to get a hold of me," Golden said. When a new immigrant faces problems, the senator explained, Martins is the man to call: "He knows the numbers to dial. There's nothing wrong with it - it has been part of the fabric of this country for 200 years." Immigrants learn about Martins through word of mouth, from family to family. As Golden put it, "They learn who are the can-do people." Martins grew up in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the son of an officer in the merchant marine. He started running a catering business at age 14. Then he started manufacturing bakery equipment ("kneaders, grinders and hollow waffle machines"). Later he ran a nightclub, and when his father, a devout Catholic, found out about the club, he threw Alex out of his house. "And that's why I left the country," Martins says. He had become friendly with the United States consul general in Mumbai, Harry Cahill, who introduced him around at the United States Chamber of Commerce and arranged for his American visa. Martins immigrated to New York at 18 and enrolled for a bachelor's degree in finance and marketing at Baruch College. His nightclub experience in India was useful when he got a job as the headwaiter at Michael's Pub in Manhattan. He realized that the city was teeming with business opportunities for immigrants like himself, and he soon opened a Nathan's hot-dog franchise near City Hall. But a couple of incidents made Martins realize that the place of immigrants in the city was still precarious. One day, as he recalled it to me, he was riding on the E train and the pages of the newspaper that he was reading brushed against the man seated next to him. The man launched into a diatribe against immigrants. "Go back to your own country!" he barked. Martins said that he felt intimidated but that he managed to speak up in his own defense; he said that America was a land of immigrants, and that his fellow passenger didn't have the right to tell Martins to get out. "Since that time I've wanted to be an immigration attorney," Martins said. He later got a law degree from N.Y.U. Martins has a keen sense of the hurdles that Indian immigrants face, especially in finding work in city government. When it comes to jobs in administrative offices, Martins says that he has seen that "always someone else is given a chance. There is always discrimination in the high-level offices. It's how the British and the Portuguese ruled us" - that is, by denying Indians higher-level positions in government. Martins decided that he wouldn't be just a run-of-the-mill lawyer; he would help immigrants by aggressively cultivating politicians. "In the Indian community," he says, "there was always a problem: people couldn't approach the politicians the right way. They're not confident." He would explain to the Indians he spoke with, "If they want our support, they need to get our work done." He also worked to educate the politicians about Indian culture: who is Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god? What is the Sikh religion? He often took politicians on visits to the Indian community's houses of worship. Martins quickly figured out that to deal with what former Mayor David Dinkins once called New York's gorgeous mosaic, you have to wear a gorgeous tie. He showed me a photo from a 2004 fund-raiser for the Congress of Italian-Americans Organization (CIAO), in which he appeared with one arm around Bloomberg and his other around a diminutive Italian grandmother named Mary Crisalli Sansone, the founder of the organization. Martins was sporting a particularly vivid tricolor tie. "It's not the Italian flag, in fact," he confessed, "but it's close." He has ties for his visits to every ethnic community, with an approximation of the colors of their national flags. When he went to meet Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, he wore a tie that sported the green, white and saffron of the Indian flag.
The Jains, though, had some highly specific demands, which they were not shy about expressing to Martins. "They want beef not to be served in the public schools that their children go to," he explained to me. The Jains are also opposed to the eating of eggs, as well as root vegetables like onions, garlic and potatoes, which cannot be uprooted without killing the entire plant. Martins was sympathetic but firm: "I said to the community leaders, 'This is not possible.' I said, 'It is very difficult to have an eggless cake for you.' " Martins often serves the function of gently explaining the limits of political power to the communities he works with - for instance, that New York City is not going to ban hamburgers in the schools any time in the foreseeable future. Still, he managed to restore the Jains' faith in the political system by arranging for city approval for parking outside their temple in Queens. New York politicians, knowing Martins's links with the Indian community, often reach out to him with opportunities for his constituency. The Democratic state senator John Sabini was recently walking along the street in Jackson Heights when he saw a Pakistani cabby driving a taxi that was clearly from New Orleans. Sabini flagged down the driver and discovered that the cabby was an evacuee and had his wife and 20-month-old baby with him in the car. Sabini found the cabby hotel accommodations through the city's marketing agency and a job through the owner of a taxi fleet. The taxi-fleet owner has since offered a job to any driver from the Gulf Coast. Shams Tarek, a Bangladeshi immigrant and top aide to Sabini, explains that Sabini's office will actively seek out Martins and ask him "if he knows any Sikh cabbies, or anybody from the South who's impacted by the hurricane." One of Martins's clients is a car service in Queens, whose drivers are mostly from the Indian subcontinent. He intervenes on their behalf with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, whose leadership Martins is well acquainted with. If you hired one of their cars on the day before the New York primary, you were handed, along with your receipt, a campaign flyer for Renee Lobo, one of the candidates for City Council that Martins is backing. It was a narrowly aimed form of campaign advertising, since the car service operates in her district. Despite his deft political touch, Martins has also had some frustrations with the Indian community. Of the community's older, less aggressive leaders, he says: "They are losers. They come to me when they need work; after the work is done, they forget about me. They are short-term-goal people." Still, Martins says that he is hopeful that this situation is changing. He cites the example of Representative Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, an Indian-American who had a realistic chance of becoming governor in the last election. "We have to get the young people volunteering for political campaigns," Martins says. "I would like to see an Indian mayor of New York." Some in the city are resistant to Martins's charms. "He's a great self-promoter," said a political aide to a state senator who spoke on condition of anonymity because his boss often works with Martins. "We think he's more talk than substance. He's a name-dropper. He loves to say he's got a direct line to our office. It makes him look good that he can tell someone, 'I can call the senator and it's done.' That's his shtick." And is it indeed done, I asked, when Martins calls the senator's office? "We try to help as many people as we can just for that rainy day when we might need help," the aide said. "We're just trying to build allies." Is self-promotion a bad thing in politics? I asked. "What kind of question is that?" the aide protested. "It's all about contacts, and your name getting out there. It's all about going to the dinner or the fund-raiser and someone seeing you across the room and recognizing your face."
The other man at the booth was Sam Gandhi, a cigarette wholesaler who is considering going into the dialysis business with Martins. Lewis told Gandhi, who is always on the lookout for a good business deal, about some economic development areas possibly opening in Harlem and near the junkyards behind Shea Stadium. Gandhi had another business idea: an all-in-one wedding hall for Indians in Jackson Heights. Martins, though, steered him away from the idea of Jackson Heights as a locale, citing the difficulties in arranging for city approval for the parking. Gandhi has experienced the benefits of being Martins's friend. He recently paid $100 to attend a fund-raiser for the New Era Democrats, organized by Martins, which was attended by Bloomberg and Raymond W. Kelly, the New York police commissioner. "I got my picture with Ray Kelly," Gandhi said. He put it up in his Queens office. "I think it works sometimes," he said. "If someone comes to rob me, it might help. If he knows Kelly, he might think, Let me get the hell out of here!" Martins took out two bottles of red wine from a bag. Both of the wines were Indian, and one had a picture of an Indian classical dancer on the front. Lewis sampled a wine and pronounced it "palatable." I asked Martins if he had ever considered entering politics himself. "If the time comes, I will take the challenge," he said. He said he could see himself running in a state or city contest, from neighborhoods like Richmond Hill, Ozone Park or Flushing, which have lots of South Asians. Gandhi observed that Martins doesn't charge fees from the people for whom he arranges meetings and does favors. "He wants to be in public office," Gandhi said, "and this is the way to start, by letting people know he's there for them." So this was the structure of Martins's life in the city: a little business, a little law, a little socializing, a little campaigning. "I am a wine drinker, and I love the concept of blending," Martins said. He brought out a bottle of his latest import, an Australian chardonnay. "In the day, I love to fight cases, and in the night I have my passionate business." As the level in the wine bottle descended, the conversational range expanded, and the group began discussing topics of national and then international importance. "I could find bin Laden," Martins declared at one point. This would be done, he said, by "squeezing the bin Laden family." He put a hand up in the air and closed his palm. The opinion of the table was that the Bush administration probably knows where bin Laden is but has a vested interest in not capturing him. Martins, though, it was agreed, could find him. If anyone could do it, he could. He could fix it. |
