“There’s only one thing standing between Andrew Cuomo and City Hall,” the man next to me whispered. “And that’s Peter Arbeeny.”
David Kramer, a longtime Brooklynite, known in his circles as a wry observer of New York’s political scene, was talking about Peter Arbeeny, the tenacious HVAC contractor of 38 years who was standing at a lectern mounted on a block of Brooklyn brownstones.
It was Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Arbeeny had drawn a small but passionate crowd for a rally held in commemoration of the 15,000 nursing home residents in New York State who had died of Covid in the earliest phase of the pandemic. Mr. Arbeeny’s 89-year-old father, Norman Arbeeny, a Korean War veteran, was among those casualties, for which many families have blamed the former governor’s mismanagement.
An empty casket borrowed from a Cobble Hill chapel around the corner was brought in as a set piece. This was a reprise. In October 2020, Mr. Arbeeny staged a similar demonstration nearby, what he described to me recently as “a mock funeral for Governor Cuomo’s leadership and integrity because I knew he was lying about the death toll.” Three months later, a report from the state attorney general’s office would find that the death toll in nursing homes had been significantly undercounted. Mr. Cuomo then released the relevant figures, arguing that he hadn’t distributed them before because he feared a politically tainted inquiry by the Trump administration.
A coffin featured distinctively in that first protest too. It was filled with 6,400 printouts of the cover of the governor’s ill-fated book “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic.” (The number of printouts signified the number of Covid nursing-home deaths known at that point.) “People came up to me and said, ‘Can I put a picture of my mother in your coffin?’” Mr. Arbeeny told me. “And I said, ‘This isn’t my coffin; this is all our coffins.’”
The Arbeenys have been in Brooklyn for generations, and they are lifelong Democrats. The family patriarch, Mr. Arbeeny’s grandfather, owned the Near East bakery on Atlantic Avenue in the 1970s. His grandmother had pictures of two politicians on the wall: John F. Kennedy and Mario Cuomo. When Donald Trump posted a picture of the mock funeral on Twitter, they got calls from reporters around the world.
In the five years since the outbreak of the pandemic, the Arbeeny family, and Peter Arbeeny in particular, has been on an unstinting crusade to seek accountability for the deaths related to the explosion of Covid in nursing homes. Norman Arbeeny died of Covid in his house on Amity Street in Brooklyn in April 2020, 13 days after a three-week stay at the Cobble Hill Health Center, where he was recovering from a slipped disk.
Before all of this, Mr. Arbeeny told me, his only act of civic rebellion had been fighting parking tickets. For several years now he has devoted about 15 hours a week to untangling the intricacies of the nursing home debacle. The complexities of his father’s case have not deterred the family’s commitment.
Three years ago, Mr. Arbeeny’s brother Daniel Arbeeny led a class-action suit against Mr. Cuomo and various members of his administration over the executive order of March 25, 2020, which directed nursing homes to admit Covid patients from hospitals and prohibited those returning patients from being tested as long as they were determined to be “medically stable,” a vague term that the Arbeenys seized on. It was this order, the families of the victims have maintained, that brought about all the spread and death. In July 2020, the State Health Department issued a controversial report claiming that it was nursing home employees who were largely responsible for the transmission.
Earlier this year, a federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed Daniel Arbeeny’s suit on a jurisdictional technicality. But in its motion to dismiss the case, the Cuomo camp pointed out that the Cobble Hill facility did not take a Covid-positive admission until April 30, three weeks after Norman Arbeeny’s discharge and that later, at home, he was in the company of a round of caretakers. Still, the manipulation of data throughout the Covid crisis has left the Arbeenys distrustful.
“We understand Mr. Arbeeny’s pain,” Rich Azzopardi, Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman, said, “but evidence uncovered in the dismissed court case demonstrated the physical impossibility of any link between Department of Health guidance” and Norman Arbeeny’s death.
The Arbeenys said they have spent tens of thousands of dollars gathering data, establishing timelines, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, calling politicians and pressing for investigations. Whether their work will resonate with New Yorkers as they try to redirect their attentions from the consuming distractions in Washington to the current mayoral race are ultimately questions of resurrected rage and sentimentality. How much bandwidth is left for the grief and anger of the early pandemic days and whatever culpability Mr. Cuomo had in furthering it?
At the rally on Sunday, nearly every other contender in the race showed up. Each took a turn at the microphone to explain why Mr. Cuomo should not be elected to lead New York City, all of them running against the mood of inevitability that surrounds his campaign. In response, Mr. Azzopardi quickly issued a statement doubling down on the notion that this was not a contest of equals: “Being mayor of the greatest city in the world is a tremendous undertaking that requires experience, a proven record of accomplishment and management capacity,” he said. These were not traits, he added, that “these extreme MAGA or fringe” mayoral candidates had.
Among the candidates to appear at the rally was Brad Lander, the city comptroller. He has supported the Arbeenys from the beginning, when in addition to their father, they lost an uncle and two cousins to Covid in the same week of April 2020, one of them in a nursing home on Staten Island. “Had Andrew apologized and come clean, then this could have all been seen as a tragic mistake,” Mr. Lander said. He was talking about the order of March 25, 2020, which Mr. Cuomo has always said was issued in accordance with federal guidelines — guidelines for which the Arbeenys have continued to want visual proof.
Recently, Mr. Cuomo’s lawyers offered the Arbeenys a meeting in the former governor’s office, one to which they could bring their own counsel. The Arbeenys declined. They want Mr. Cuomo to meet them, without lawyers, at their father’s house. What Peter Arbeeny would seem to want is a validation of their years of Democratic loyalty, a return to a long gone, old-school politics of intimacy. “I’m a DINO, a Democrat in name only now,’’ Mr. Arbeeny told me. “When Cuomo resigned, everyone said, ‘You must be thrilled.’ But honestly? I was sad. The legacy was gone.”
The post The Family That’s Pushing Cuomo to Apologize Personally for Covid Deaths appeared first on New York Times.
