Former city councilman Hiram Monserrate once cut his girlfriend's face with glass and dragged her by the hair through their building. Later, he was convicted for using discretionary non-profit funds for political purposes and sentenced to two years in prison. Now, he wants his old job back.
"My errors, my sins that I have paid for and apologized for, are things in my past," Monserrate told WNYC in an interview. Hurting his girlfriend, he added, was an accident. "They are not things that I’m proud of, but they are things that I’ve learned from."
While Monserrate's attempt at political redemption might appear quixotic at first blush, his run is testing the power of the political class.
Pretty much everyone in the political establishment — including the mayor, the governor, the Queens borough president and the Queens County Democratic Party — have lined up against him and in support of Francisco Moya, a state assemblyman. Multiple high profile women politicians have held rallies in support of Moya, denouncing Monserrate and his past.
But the perception that the very same political establishment is actively working against Monserrate's unlikely run for the District 21 Council seat is the very thing galvanizing some of his more influential supporters.
Two of Monserrate's would-be opponents in the primary have endorsed his candidacy after they were knocked off the ballot. Lawyers for the Queens Democratic Party had challenged enough signatures on their petitions to have them disqualified.
One of those newly-minted Monserrate supporters, Erycka Montoya, blames Moya for the petition challenges. She says the assemblyman's supporters wanted to give women a stark choice between the establishment choice and an abuser of women.
"It's another way of being corrupt and suppressing voter choice," Montoya says. "I think the party has it out for anyone who they don't want."
She's not the only one who charges that the establishment is suppressing the democratic process in order to tilt the race in Moya's direction.
The onetime ACORN chief executive, Bertha Lewis, has also endorsed Monserrate. She and her current organization, the Black Leadership Action Coalition, sued the city’s Board of Elections after it moved a polling site from the middle-class LeFrak City to other locations almost a mile away.
Lewis says anecdotal polling shows the development, which houses more than 14,000 people, would vote heavily for Monserrate on election day. More importantly, she contends the board is suppressing the vote in a predominately black and Latino area of Queens.
"This is disenfranchisement on a massive scale," Lewis says. "I’m happy for the opportunity to let people know that this is in Queens, it’s the same thing you see in Alabama , Mississippi, Tennessee, and everywhere we’ve come to know."
The Board of Elections says it had to move the polling site because it wasn't compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Asssemblyman Moya says it's typical for his opponent to create false narratives to distract from his own shortcomings.
"We can’t go back to the failed leadership of the past where corruption and scandals keep us down," Moya told a crowd at a recent barbecue for a senior center in East Elmhurst. "We have an opportunity to have a fresh voice and leadership that will take us into the future."
Later during a one-on-one interview, Moya was even more blunt.
"We have a moral responsibility that criminals like him never ever can run for office," Moya said. "Where was he when all of these issues with polling sites were coming up? You never heard from him until now. Where was he? Oh, that’s right, he was in jail."
The assemblyman is well out in front in terms of fundraising and high profile endorsements. But without any public polls, it's hard to tell how a new face will stack up against an old one with a tarnished past.
