By Greg Sargent

April 1, 2001 | 8:00 p.m

Watching City Comptroller Alan Hevesi go about his business

as the sober, wonkish, white-haired, bespectacled keeper of the city's books, it's hard to imagine that in a younger, wilder moment, he tried to legalize pot for New Yorkers over 18 years of age. But he did. The date was Jan. 28, 1975, and Mr. Hevesi was an ambitious second-term Assembly member from Forest Hills, Queens. Standing alongside State Senator Franz Leichter of Manhattan, he called for the creation of a state "marijuana control authority" that would license and regulate growers, producers and distributors of the drug. The agency would enforce regulations setting the potency of marijuana, which could then be sold at liquor stores. The proposal was bold enough to make the front page of The New York Times , alongside Senator Jacob Javits' gloomy pronouncements about the city's fiscal crisis and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's more optimistic statements about peace talks between Israel and Egypt. Fastforward26 years. Mr. Hevesi, now a candidate for Mayor, joined his chief political operative, Hank Morris, in the Harlem office of U.S. Representative Charles Rangel. Mr. Hevesi was hoping to win the Congressman's backing to build on his dangerously low support among black New Yorkers. Mr. Morris had entered the office first, bearing a large box. The box, it turned out, contained a saddle. "Hevesi said he understood that I didn't have a horse in this race," Mr. Rangel told The Observer . "And he said, 'Why don't you put the saddle on me and ride me to victory!'" There are two Alan Hevesis, and they have been trying, with varying degrees of success, to co-exist throughout his 30-year political career. There is the Alan Hevesi who tried to legalize pot in the mid-1970's -an energetic public servant with surprising, occasionally radical ideas; a serious student of policy; an outstanding orator who took bold stands on abortion rights and the death penalty. Then there is another Alan Hevesi, the political insider who offered to take Mr. Rangel for a ride-a man willing to go to startling lengths to win over the city's power brokers; an insider's insider; a politician who seems more preoccupied with wooing back-room political players than with getting his name known. To the puzzlement of some longtime colleagues, Mr. Hevesi has all but submerged the energetic, outspoken, compelling side of himself ever since he won election as Comptroller in 1993. Mr. Hevesi, who took on a host of controversial issues during 22 years in the Assembly, has in recent years been largely absent from the city's loud and discordant daily conversation. He has been reluctant to raise his voice to challenge Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, particularly on issues important to minorities. By his own admission, he was slow to respond to the most traumatic event of the Giuliani era for black New Yorkers, the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. (He acquitted himself better in the wake of the shooting of Patrick Dorismond.) All the while, however, Alan Hevesi the insider has been extremely busy, quietly building a formidable network of support over the years among party insiders, union officials and political clubs. Mr. Hevesi insists that his low profile in the 1990's has merely been a question of political style. "I was never a thunderer; I never shook the chandeliers," he told The Observer . "Politicians are measured by how loud they are, how many fights they get into. I never elbowed my way into the cameras. I never made a big fuss." Mr. Hevesi has held a number of press conferences to raise his visibility in recent days. But he still is saddled with low name recognition and is languishing in the polls. And he has been fielding calls from longtime friends who want him to reveal the aggressive and risk-taking political alter ego they admired during his days in the Assembly. "I called him and I said to him, 'What are you doing? You should be swinging for the fences now,'" said Norman Adler, a lobbyist who has been a friend of Mr. Hevesi's since 1970. "All he would say is, 'We've got a plan and we're working on it.'" To Mr. Hevesi's opponents, his sotto voce campaign is all part of a grand plan. The Comptroller, they say, has deliberately turned down the volume in recent years to position himself as a sober, reliable, managerial type in a field of loudmouthed, old-style liberal Democrats. They add that Mr. Hevesi has been deliberately mute on issues important to minorities-and has at times been harshly critical of black leaders like Al Sharpton and David Dinkins-in the hope of inheriting Mr. Giuliani's base of outer-borough white ethnics and conservative Jews. "There's no question that he has tried to run to the right," said Ester Fuchs, a professor of political science at Barnard College. "He thought he could reconstruct Rudy's majority coalition to win." Mr. Hevesi dismisses such talk. "Can I tell you something?" he said. "I'm an outer-borough white ethnic. I'm a Jewish Comptroller. Moderate, mildly progressive, Forest Hills–Riverdale Democrats-I don't need Rudy for that. But the press [and] Ed Koch say, 'Oh, he made a calculation to get Rudy's support.' Blatant falsehood. Never. I made the political calculation to be the best Comptroller." Mr. Hevesi was talking about the Mayoral campaign with The Observer on a recent Friday evening. In person, the 61-year-old Mr. Hevesi comes across as a serious, wonkish sort, confident and chatty. Yet he is a complicated man who eludes easy categorization. He has been at once an academic and an athlete. In Albany, he stood out because of his oratory and professorial demeanor, but he is more than comfortable hanging around in the political clubhouses of Queens. He often refers with pride to his Jewish heritage: His grandfather was the chief rabbi of Budapest, and 55 of his family members died at Auschwitz. But he married outside his faith; his wife, Carol Hevesi, is Catholic. And while he has been building a public career that will either reach a climax or end this fall, he has had to reckon with personal tragedy at home: Mrs. Hevesi has been battling a chronic back problem with painkillers that produced severe depression. She attempted suicide in 1994, slashing her wrists while Mr. Hevesi was out grocery shopping. You wouldn't know it from his low-key manner, but Mr. Hevesi has a surprisingly interesting story to tell. Who knew, for instance, that the 6-foot-3-inch Mr. Hevesi, a star forward for the Queens College basketball team in the late 1950's, was once scouted by the Boston Celtics? One night, Mr. Hevesi scored 25 points with a Celtics scout in the stands. Despite that performance, he never heard from the Celtics again, and all that's left of his basketball years are a few old battle scars. That's not all. In his early days in the Assembly, he offered some pretty adventurous proposals. In addition to suggesting the creation of a "marijuana control authority," in 1979 he proposed a bill that would have legalized pot and heroin for limited medical use. These days, Mr. Hevesi is more cautious on the subject of drugs. "Twenty years ago, medical experts believed that heroin was one of the best drugs for relief from extreme, severe pain, making legislation calling for further research prudent," he said. "Today, the availability of other modern pain-treatment methodologies, coupled with the highly addictive nature of heroin, makes its use for medicinal purposes imprudent." During his interview with The Observer , Mr. Hevesi also said that while he now opposes the "full legalization of marijuana," he does support the use of marijuana for medical purposes. But he answered carefully when asked about Mr. Giuliani's aggressive crackdowns on low-level pot users: "The law is the law; enforce the law …. I think marijuana's effect is negative, and we should discourage its use. But I don't think it's any more negative, in its own way, than tobacco." Asked directly whether people caught with small amounts of pot should be held in police custody overnight after their arrest, as they have under Mr. Giuliani's Operation Condor sweeps, Mr. Hevesi said: "Being caught with a joint? No. Selling and distributing? Yes. Since the law still criminalizes possession, a $25 fine is also appropriate …. It's appropriate that we de-emphasize the prosecutions for possession of small amounts of marijuana." Mr. Hevesi's dual political personality-the experimental legislator combined with the cautious, back-room horse-trader-is a product of the Forest Hills neighborhood where he learned his trade. The Queens clubhouses of Mr. Hevesi's youth were a career track for middle-class kids with an eye on a job in the district attorney's office or a desire to run for local office. At the same time, Forest Hills in the late 1950's and early 1960's was a liberal neighborhood, not yet thrown into turmoil by black-Jewish tensions and the escalating crime rates of the 1970's. The Milk Run After several years as an intern and then an aide in the State Legislature, Mr. Hevesi got a call from local leaders in 1971 offering him a shot at the Forest Hills Assembly seat. He won, thanks in part to a get-out-the-vote operation that could have been immortalized in a Jimmy Breslin column. "As we drove the old ladies to vote, we would let them pick up groceries on the way," said Michael Nussbaum, a longtime friend who worked on his first campaign. "We called it the 'milk run.'" Once in the Assembly, Mr. Hevesi quickly made a name for himself as a kind of house intellectual of Queens clubhouse politics. Perhaps his most notable moment came in the late 70's when, amid escalating crime rates, he gave a rousing speech against a move to reinstitute the death penalty in New York. "It was pretty heavy stuff," Mr. Hevesi recalled. "Son of Sam had killed two of my constituents. I got up on the floor and said, 'Ninety percent of my constituents support this bill-and they're wrong.'" Mr. Hevesi's rhetorical gifts have not always been put to such lofty use. In 1986, having emerged as the Queens organization's point man in Albany, he delivered the eulogy for Donald Manes, the disgraced Queens borough president who had committed suicide amidst municipal scandal. Mr. Hevesi also did a few things that might surprise people who have grown accustomed to hearing about his unpopularity among minorities. In 1985, he offered to escort Assemblyman Al Vann, an African-American who was running for Brooklyn borough president, into Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. The flamboyant Mr. Vann had been reviled as an anti-Semite in some Orthodox neighborhoods, and he was running against an entrenched Jewish incumbent, Howard Golden. "Al Vann was viscerally disliked by Hevesi's constituents," said Audrey Bynoe, Mr. Vann's campaign manager in the 1985 race. "That was a really courageous, honorable move." Failed Bid for Speaker Mr. Hevesi's first major disappointment came two years later, in 1987, when he made a bid for the job he had long sought: Speaker of the State Assembly. Although he spent years laying the groundwork for this moment, reaching out to numerous Democratic colleagues and playing basketball with wavering supporters, he was outmaneuvered by Mel Miller of Brooklyn. "He really assumed that when the rubber hit the road, he was just going to march in," said Mr. Adler, his longtime friend (and an aide to Mr. Miller). "He was wildly disappointed." Since a failed bid for a leadership slot is essentially a death sentence in Albany, Mr. Hevesi lingered for a few more years, then took a detour into municipal politics. He ran for City Comptroller in 1989, losing to Elizabeth Holtzman; sensing that she was vulnerable (and his was a minority opinion at the time), he targeted her again in 1993 and surprised pundits by winning a hard-fought campaign. Mr. Hevesi flirted with the idea of running for Mayor in 1997 but chose not to, both because he realized Mr. Giuliani was unbeatable and because of his wife's health problems. Now that Mr. Hevesi is facing what will surely be the toughest race of his career, the question is this: Will he resurrect his energetic political alter ego for the Mayoral campaign, or will he be content to campaign as the careful Alan Hevesi? Mr. Hevesi willingly concedes that his campaign thus far has not been flawless, but he insists that his experience, record and financial advantage will carry the day. "I'd love to be in first place with all my opponents dropping out-but it'll be fine," Mr. Hevesi said. "Yeah, sure, there are problems." He referred to a well-publicized skirmish he had with a black heckler during an event on Martin Luther King Day. "It allowed opponents to say, 'Oh, see, he has a black problem,'" Mr. Hevesi said. "I'm at 9 percent with African-Americans, [but] I'm at 9 percent with Hungarians. I'm at 9 percent with everybody …. Did [the campaign] slow down? Yeah, there were some endorsements that we thought we could get and they haven't happened yet, because people are nervous with the polls." He added: "Polls are about name recognition, and elections are about substance." Mr. Hevesi believes he has substance. It remains to be seen, however, whether he'll allow enough voters to see it.