Harrison J. Goldin, who as New York City’s comptroller for 16 years became enmeshed in the city’s brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s, and who openly feuded with Mayor Edward I. Koch before unsuccessfully seeking to take his place, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 88.
His son Daniel confirmed the death, in a hospital. He did not specify the cause.
Known as a combative number cruncher and familiarly known as Jay, Mr. Goldin was first elected comptroller in 1973, the same year Abraham D. Beame, who had been comptroller, was elected mayor. Mr. Beame was ousted after one term as the city neared insolvency, a key factor in Mr. Koch’s successful race to succeed him in 1977.
Mr. Goldin, though he was the city’s chief financial officer as the fiscal crisis unfolded, was re-elected three more times, in 1977, 1981 and 1985. Mayor Koch was also re-elected, twice, setting the stage for their battles.
When Mr. Beame and Mr. Goldin both took office on Jan. 1, 1974, the city faced a $1.5 billion deficit. Previous administrations, especially that of Mr. Beame’s immediate predecessor, John V. Lindsay, were said to have overspent and then masked the dangers of doing so through gimmicks in their annual budgets, like inflating anticipated revenues and paying operating expenses with borrowed money.
Mr. Beame’s efforts to deal with the situation were not enough to persuade a worried bond market to lend more to the city by purchasing more of its bonds. A year later, the city was sliding toward financial disaster.
Gov. Hugh L. Carey, working with the State Legislature and with leading bankers and municipal-union leaders, stepped in to create the Municipal Assistance Corporation, to borrow for the city, and the Emergency Financial Control Board, which had veto power over the city’s budgets and its costliest labor contracts.
The city survived financially, but the fallout for Mr. Beame and Mr. Goldin continued. In 1977, two weeks before the Democratic primary in which they were seeking nominations for second terms, the staff of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission charged in a report that as the crisis had been building over five months, the two men had knowingly “misled” investors about the city’s dire plight while it was selling billions of dollars worth of its securities.
Mr. Beame and Mr. Goldin disputed the finding. Mr. Goldin declared that “on more than 50 major occasions, in increasingly grave and urgent language, I warned the public” about the city’s budget practices and the worsening fiscal situation.
“To say I did not disclose the city’s fiscal condition is like saying that Ralph Nader did not warn consumers about unsafe cars,” he said.
The report was extremely damaging to Mr. Beame, who deemed it a major reason for his loss to Mr. Koch in the 1977 Democratic primary, but it had no impact on Mr. Goldin’s longevity as city comptroller. He was already running unopposed in the primary when the report was issued; in a city where Democratic nominees usually win the general election by wide margins, he gained his second term easily.
But a year later, Mr. Goldin failed in an effort to become the state’s comptroller. Arthur Levitt, the longtime and widely admired incumbent, was retiring. But though Mr. Levitt was a fellow Democrat, he gave no blessing to Mr. Goldin, who had become a rival — and whom Mr. Levitt disliked personally. In fact, days before the general election, Mr. Levitt publicly praised Mr. Goldin’s Republican opponent, Edward Regan, the Erie County executive. Mr. Regan won with 52 percent of the vote, becoming New York’s only Republican statewide winner that year.
Mr. Goldin easily won third and fourth terms as city comptroller. While it is not unusual for mayors and comptrollers to clash — a prime role of the comptroller is to audit the spending and performance of city agencies — the exchanges between the equally pugnacious Mr. Koch and Mr. Goldin were often nasty and personal.
Mr. Koch accused Mr. Goldin of using Nazi propaganda tactics to criticize him and asserted that Mr. Goldin lacked credibility “in anything he says.” He also declared that Mr. Goldin was envious that “I’m mayor and he’s comptroller and he’d love to be mayor.”
Mr. Goldin called Mr. Koch “very mean” and “not trustworthy.”
Andrew J. Stein, the City Council president at the time, said in 1988 that was “difficult to know what is substantive and what is hatred” in the men’s criticisms of each other.
In 1989, rather than seeking a fifth term as comptroller, Mr. Goldin took on Mr. Koch more than verbally: He entered the Democratic mayoral primary, in which Mr. Koch was running for a fourth term.
Mr. Koch had been battered by corruption scandals in several city agencies during his third term, and though he was not implicated in the wrongdoing, he was similarly seen as vulnerable by two others who entered the primary: David N. Dinkins, the Manhattan borough president, and Richard Ravitch, a prominent builder and former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Mr. Goldin, portraying himself as more than a narrow numbers man, stressed that he would attack crime and drug use — a crack cocaine epidemic was raging — by, among other things, creating compulsory work camps for users.
But he and Mr. Ravitch were also-rans as Mr. Koch, battling to remain a New York institution, and Mr. Dinkins, seeking to become the city’s first Black mayor, left most voters indifferent to the two alternatives. Mr. Dinkins won 51 percent of the vote, Mr. Koch 42 percent, Mr. Ravitch 4 percent and Mr. Goldin 3 percent.
While his dismal finish was disappointing, Mr. Goldin had foreseen it. Days before the voting, he said that he and Mr. Ravitch were “in the basement” — though he called it “a very distinguished basement.”
(Mr. Dinkins beat the Republican, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in the general election. Mr. Giuliani defeated Mr. Dinkins in a rematch four years later and then won a second term.)
As comptroller, Mr. Goldin was generally praised for helping to restore the city’s borrowing prowess after the fiscal crisis. He was also the focus of two criminal investigations, although he was exonerated in both.
In 1981, federal prosecutors and the city’s Department of Investigation concluded after a 30-month inquiry that there was insufficient evidence to establish that Mr. Goldin had committed a crime when he sought and received a campaign contribution from a businessman who was trying to obtain a bus-shelter franchise from the city.
In 1987 and 1988, federal and state prosecutors said they had found no basis for bringing charges against Mr. Goldin after examining his financial relationship with Ivan F. Boesky, a Wall Street speculator who pleaded guilty to charges related to an insider trading scandal.
Harrison Jacob Goldin was born in the Bronx on Feb. 23, 1936, to Harry and Anna (Eskolsky) Goldin. His father was a physician.
Jay Goldin graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, Princeton University and, in 1961, Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Law Review. He married Diana Stern in 1966.
Wall Street firms courted Mr. Goldin on his graduation, but he chose to work as a staff lawyer in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice.
In an opinion essay for The New York Post recounting the legacy of John Doar, an assistant U.S. attorney general in the John F. Kennedy administration, Mr. Goldin recounted trips they took into the Deep South to gather evidence and interview Black American victims of segregation.
“We ventured alone, unarmed and exposed, to brutally unreconstructed bastions of unforgiving segregation in the Deep South,” Mr. Goldin wrote.
He left the Justice Department in 1963 and entered private practice in New York before becoming active in Democratic politics in the Bronx.
Mr. Goldin was a 33-year-old state senator when, advertising himself as “the young dynamo,” he first ran for city comptroller, in 1969. He and two others lost in the Democratic primary to Mr. Beame, who won the general election. Four years later, Mr. Goldin succeeded the mayoralty-bound Mr. Beame by beating three opponents in the decisive party primary.
After his 1989 mayoral run failed, Mr. Goldin left politics and, the next year, formed Goldin Associates, a financial advisory business focusing on aiding troubled companies. It was purchased in 2020 by the global consulting firm Teneo.
In addition to his son Daniel, he is survived by his wife; their two other sons, Matthew and Jonathan; a sister, Jessica Stern; and seven grandchildren. He lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Goldin’s experience in the Deep South helped shape his career in city politics. While he was at the Justice Department, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy assigned him to room with James Meredith, the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi.
Mr. Meredith’s admission had provoked a harsh response from protesters and left a lasting impact both on the nation and on Mr. Goldin.
“I never had the slightest, remotest idea that I would have a career in public service,” he said in 1989, “until the transformation in my life goals that occurred during that time in Mississippi.”
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