Rep. Charles Rangel, a sleazy old-school politico whose power as House Ways and Means chair proved elusive when he was forced to step aside for a list of things too long to lay out.
Highlights though included living in 4 rent-controlled apartments (an impossible luxury normally only enjoyed by characters in 90s NBC sitcoms and very well-connected politicians) while failing to pay taxes on his villa in the Dominican Republic.
And also using one of those apartments as a campaign office.
While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers.
Mr. Rangel, the powerful Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence.
Mr. Rangel, who has a net worth of $566,000 to $1.2 million, according to Congressional disclosure records, paid a total rent of $3,894 monthly in 2007 for the four apartments at Lenox Terrace, a 1,700-unit luxury development of six towers, with doormen, that is described in real estate publications as Harlem’s most prestigious address.
The current market-rate rent for similar apartments in Mr. Rangel’s building would total $7,465 to $8,125 a month, according to the Web site of the owner, the Olnick Organization.
“There are families who manage to get two, when one tenant marries another, things like that,” said Dov Treiman, a lawyer who publishes The Housing Court Reporter, a legal trade publication. “But I’ve never heard of any tenant managing to get four.”
Not every tenant was a powerful politician.
Rangel was recently forced to temporarily step aside as Ways and Means chairman following the announcement of an investigation of several allegations, including failure to pay taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic.
He has also admitted a failure to report several hundred thousand dollars in assets on federal disclosure forms.
In addition, he is under scrutiny for the purported misuse of a rent-controlled apartment for political purposes, as well as for allegedly preserving tax benefits for an oil-drilling company in exchange for donations to a project he supported at the City College of New York.
And that was all she wrote.
In a rambling statement before the House ethics committee on Thursday, Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel admitted to “irresponsible behavior” but was adamant that he was not corrupt.
Rangel asked the committee to discount allegations that he is “a crook” and “corrupt,” arguing that “in all of this there was no request or suggestion…of corruption.”
Now, Rangel has gone to the great rent-controlled apartment… elsewhere.
The same media that slimes dead conservatives remembers him as a great political leader, not the man he really was, but it’s worth telling the truth about Charlie.
