At the quaint level of public service where appearances of corruption to the public are considered, we find a great contrast with the steady news diet of stories of elite misbehavior. As you read, remember that not one financier has ever been deprived of a day’s freedom for the 2007 global economic meltdown, nor has even one politician been tipped out of his chair by any financial oversight committee.

During the summer blackout of 2003 I was working on the ambulance and ran all night long. That night we must have climbed over two hundred flights of stairs.

We helped evacuate the Metro North passengers down a nearly rusted-apart folding emergency staircase on the Park Avenue wall.

We made friends with building staff who helped us carry a lady whose power went out on her ventilator down eighteen flights. We had to keep her alive with a squeeze bag the whole time. We got her to laugh with her face only, since her voice box device had to be left behind. Nobody was sleeping in the heat and people had the stairs marked in candles. We managed to get down to Times Square and saw it silent and dead. I got to shake my fist.

Unfortunately, people were also calling 911 and making us walk up a dozen flights of stairs to check their blood pressure.

Near dawn we carried down a serious asthmatic with a pair of police officers. We were all overwhelmed by the heat, soaked through. It was the kind of hot where you deliberate the worth of spending the energy to wipe the sweat from your nose. The owner of a bodega in the building was out minding his shop, somehow smoking, and said “Wait, wait, I have something for you!” He offered us the last cold can of Coke on the Eastern seaboard, one he had cultivated in a way way back part of his freezer, snuggling it in the last little bit of ice. He seemed like the sort to believe God would show him what to do with it.

It was one of those few finest things I’ll drink in my life, and I don’t even like Coke. My partner and I deliberately divvied sips. When we got to the cops, though, they said they couldn’t have any. They could take nothing from the store owners, because NYPD eyes were everywhere. Yes, tonight, especially tonight with everyone weak with temptation, eyes were on them.

We had some good yucks about the contrast with politicians back then, but now it’s like looking through an upside-down microscope where the bottom germ colonies are neat and tidy, but the body is gangrenous from the head. That is corruption for which the NYPD does not have eyes.

I remembered an earlier episode: an ice cream shop banishment. When I was in Harlem there was an ice cream shop where the owner gave the police ice cream at cost. Two cops politely declined, trying hard to pay the owner, but the owner’s back was up, he felt it a matter of honor. So the police left, leaving the remainder of the money on the counter. The shop owner followed them out with it, and the officers got in trouble. During the discipline the officers were allowed to keep their jobs because of their honorable record, but the NYPD told them the right application of the law would be to refuse the ice cream altogether. They were lucky not to be dismissed. Henceforth and forever, that shop was off limits to NYPD. Off-limits businesses are among the things that are read to police officers in their morning briefings.

This is totally reasonable; other shopkeepers will make assumptions when they see cops getting ice cream for fifty cents. Those assumptions accelerate the trends towards police corruption, no quid pro quo should need to be proved. But, somehow, such assumptions evaporate as we get up into the rarified political air. At the political level, a quid pro quo would have to be heard on tape and notarized in triplicate. Assumptions should be made about how, for John Corzine, it was quite acceptable for him to publicly declare that he simply did not know where that 1.2 billion dollars of client money up and went off to. This was in testimony to the Department of Agriculture, somehow.

He never attracted the attention of a criminal justice court. His financial faux pas was one of the largest in the history. Now that the quaint part is passed, now that the point of view is no longer from innocent municipal simpletons, it is almost eye-rollingly pedantic to point out that:

• Yes, he was a huge donor to the Democratic machine in a Democratic machine state where he was once senator and and governor.
• Yes, he was a superhero fund raiser for President Obama.
• No, oddly enough, he was not a donor to the Republicans.

Ah, the wars I’ve seen over ice cream and Coke. What is the corruption is what is tolerated, not what is considered corrupt. The scandal is in what is legal, not what is illegal.

As Thomas Jefferson, in his extra-quaint eighteenth century way, noted:

Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

• About the Author

About Eugene Darden Nicholas

Eugene Darden (Ed) Nicholas is from Flushing Queens, where he grew up sheltered from the hard world, learning the true things after graduating college and becoming a paramedic in Harlem. School continues to inform and entertain in all its true, Shakespearean glory. It's a lot of fun, really. In that career, dozens of people walk the earth now who would not be otherwise. (The number depends on how literally or figuratively you choose to add). He added a beloved wife to his little family, which is healthy. He is also well blessed in friends and colleagues.