Newsday, Sunday, April 9, 2000

Plot Twist

Politics is just crime on a grand scale, argues cop-turned- novelist John Westermann. Which explains why, after four police novels, he wrote a mystery about Nassau County.

By Sidney C. Schaer
Staff Writer

IN THE FICTIONAL world of Long Island according to novelist John Westermann, Republicans are the bad guys who always win, cops (at least below the rank of captain) deserve our loyalty and respect, and life in the suburbs is filled with surprise, murder and mayhem.

Of course, according to Westermann, that's all true in the real world here, as well.

"Everybody knew the unexplainable happened with remarkable frequency on Long Island," he writes in "Ladies of the Night" (Pocket Books, 1998), his fifth book. All have been set within the villages and towns of Nassau and Suffolk Counties where he has lived his whole life, a life that began as a child of privilege in Huntington and included a dozen years as a village cop in Freeport.

"Bimbos shot housewives, nut-jobs riddled commuter trains, predators stalked the Internet, and planes fell from the sky," he writes. "Nothing you could do but clean up and shrug."

Except Westermann doesn't shrug. Instead, he uses fiction as a weapon. His targets have evolved from the corrupt cops, petty criminals and inept police brass of his first four books to -- of all things on which to base a mystery novel -- Nassau County politics.

That change was triggered by a life crisis: a diagnosis of liver cancer in 1995 that turned out instead to be a strep infection, but still potentially fatal. Before he recovered, he decided that he had to quell the demons of his political passions and attempt to write on a broader canvas.

"I wasn't being promised a long life, so I had this feeling that if I say it, I had better say it now," he said of his decision to write a novel of local politics. "I want to make this a really good bullet and I want to make it hit its target, and damage it. And to do that it had to be a perfect mystery. I had to have the atmosphere I wanted to write about."

Political stories, the 47-year-old has concluded, are even more juicy than crime stories.

"Politics has bigger crimes, better educated criminals," he said. "I think of it as crime on a grand scale."

His view -- cynical, even sardonic, sometimes bitter and full of bile, often raucously funny -- has been shaped by a life of detours. His father, a lawyer who grew up on Manhattan's Park Avenue and rose to be CEO of the local defense contractor Hazeltine Corp., had most wanted him to follow in his footsteps at Columbia, but he chose Princeton -- only to lose out on both choices. A dismal college career ended, and he became a bartender, then a security guard, then village cop, then writer of gritty mysteries and finally political activist playing out his personal real-life agenda in fiction.

It can be an extreme view; in a generally admiring review of "Ladies of the Night," the librarian's biweekly Booklist was agape at "the menagerie of crooks, thugs, stoners, idiots, geeks and creeps masquerading as public officials in this remarkable novel... Let's assume Westermann is exaggerating for effect."

But in Westermann's world, the reality and the fiction keep intersecting; everything he sees on Long Island is bound to appear either in a past book, or a future one. The old LeBaron convertible he's pushed beyond the 100,000-mile mark shows up as the car of choice for the Democratic candidate for county executive in "Ladies of the Night." After a grueling 22-hour shift, a homicide detective in the book arrives home on Westermann's own street on Strongs Neck.

Or take a recent journey into Nassau County -- his proverbial heart of darkness. In front of the Nassau County offices in Mineola to pose for pictures, Westermann is unexpectedly confronted with a demonstration of irate New York Islander fans in orange and blue team colors. "Down with Gulotta," they're shouting, angry because the county executive vetoed a deal for a new arena.

The Islander controversy figured in "Ladies of the Night," in which Westermann pits a three-time Republican incumbent county executive against a younger, charismatic Democratic opponent who almost wins. The novel's protagonist, Nassau police commissioner Frank Murphy, even makes reference to the real county executive and the team's disgraced former owner when he discusses a photo album of potentially embarrassing pictures that's part of a kidnaping investigation.

"'As good as Tommy Gullota in his Islander pajamas, climbing into bed with John Spano.' Murphy fondly remembered how a fraudulent amateur had damn near fleeced the wolves ... "

Despite his passionate antipathy for the Nassau GOP, Westermann didn't go so far as to depict the Democratic candidate winning his fictional race. "It was just too inconceivable to me," he said. Yet less than a year after "Ladies" was published -- and landed with a quiet thunk -- reality overtook Westermann's imagination and the Democrats in Nassau County took control of both the county legislature and the Hempstead town board, the heart of long-term Republican dominance.

For Gulotta's part, the county executive said via his spokeswoman that he's not familiar with the book. But Gulotta does know Westermann -- they are fellow alumni of Trinity College in Hartford -- and Gulotta took pains to point out to his assistant that while Gulotta graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Westermann flunked out.

And indeed that's what happened to Westermann in 1973. Ranked 312 in a class of 314, Westermann simply couldn't convince his father that it was worthwhile sending him for a fourth year.

So he moved back to Long Island, married his high school sweetheart and moved into uncharted territory.

"John is a contrarian, and he probably took the most improbable route," said his younger brother, David, a Garden City attorney.

Westermann -- identified as John Jacob Westermann IV in his Whitman High School yearbook, a clean-cut senior who lettered in football, basketball and lacrosse -- worked at a variety of jobs including tending bar in Greenlawn, trying a brief junior executive stint for Hazeltine, and working as a security guard. Within two years, he landed a spot on the 80-person roster of the Freeport Village police.

"Besides being a cop I was the son of a CEO, brother of a lawyer, brother of a doctor, a really privileged childhood," Westermann said. "I sort of failed my way to the police department."

And then out of it again 12 years later, in a way that helped form his view of local GOP politics. He could never rise beyond the rank of patrolman, even though he placed first three times in the civil service sergeants exam. "Not getting promoted spurred me to start writing," he said. "I was caught in a civil service trap ... I was going to suck it up and stay. Then I began taking notes."

He started with articles for a Freeport weekly, then The Blotter, a local police publication. And he began contemplating converting his police experiences into mystery fiction.

He schooled himself by reading how-to books on writing fiction, and after nine years, 11 rewrites and countless rejections, sold his first novel, "High Crimes," to Soho Press in 1988.

Three more police mysteries followed, all based on Long Island. His second novel, "Exit Wounds" (Soho Press, 1990), was optioned by Hollywood producer Joel Silver (of "Die Hard" and "Lethal Weapon" fame) in 1994 and is slated to star Steven Seagal. It's the story of a cop assigned to a precinct of misfits, but the story's sprinkled with observations of suburban life that go beyond its plot. An early passage begins:

"Orin Boyd walked backward along the shoulder of the Southern State Parkway with a knapsack on his back and his thumb in the air. Rush hour traffic in the parkway moved past him at a crawl... Drivers were preoccupied with a variey of tasks: last-minute touchups to the face and hair, telephone calls on their cellular phones, dashboard fast-food breakfasts. An alarming number were reading the morning paper... The Island was more and more like the city every day: an ordeal to traverse, impossible to afford. Clean water is running out and the garbage piling up. I gotta get away, Orin told himself."

For Westermann, the film option gave him the means to stick around in style, buying a sprawling ranch house on Strongs Neck.

But about the same time, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, and not given much of a chance to live. After surgery, it turned out his liver was not cancerous, but instead infected with strep. Westermann survived, and began his next book with a new direction. In the two years it took him to write the new book, his editor at Pocket Books got fired, and he says the project became an orphan. He had hoped it would not just have literary impact, but political impact; it didn't sell enough to have much of either.

But the intersections of fiction and reality persist. At lunch at the Newport Grill on Seventh Street in Garden City -- a hangout from his cop days when it was called the Hunt Room -- he's greeted by owner Bernie Del Bello and bartender Danny Patterson, both real people who have roles in two of his novels. Del Bello's character appears briefly in "Ladies of the Night" when a fictional reporter tries to ask him what's new in the case.

"The cops been over to chat yet? What'd they say? Any buzz?"

"Give 'em time."

"I bet you'll hear plenty over lunch?"

Bernie smiled and said nothing, as restaurant owners will. Charlie smiled back: No offense taken.

"Take care," Bernie said, turning back into his shop. "And come to dinner again, soon."

In the book, the block is the unlikely location of the abandoned Lexus of high-powered lawyer Beth Hopkins, the third of three powerful Nassau County Republican women to vanish.

"The street would have been quiet then, this boulevard where men with NBA rings shopped side-by-side with best-selling authors, and one frequently nominated daytime star. Here in Garden City, this flurry of police work was a barbarous anomaly."

Westermann doesn't say so, but the unidentified best-selling author -- familiar to Garden City residents -- is Nelson DeMille, who met Westermann when the novice author was celebrating publication of his first novel. DeMille -- who rented office space in the same building as Westermann's brother -- simply wandered into the party. Since then, they've become friends.

"You could count the number of professional writers working on Long Island on one hand," said DeMille, who admires Westermann's gritty writing style.

"But he's obsessed with local politics in a way that I'm not," DeMille added. "There are writers who look at the sociology of life here, but no one has really tried to dramatize its crazy politics." While DeMille himself has used Long Island as a setting for some of his novels ("Plum Island," "The Gold Coast," "The Talbot Odyssey"), he eschews local political intrigues.

But Westermann seems to revel in them. Describing a Bellmore political rally that opens "Ladies of the Night," he writes:

"It was the height of the silly season. Deputy Nassau County Executive Elizabeth Lucido stood at one end of the bunting-covered dais, wishing she were anywhere else. Her party, the Republican Party, had just needlessly introduced its current slate to its biggest contributors. The white politicians arrayed to her left were waving at the oft-fleeced faithful, graciously accepting their applause."

He notes the Republicans have little to fear from the Democrats, "who hadn't won a big race in Nassau County in thirty years -- largely due to the opposition of the remarkable Republican machine, currently owned and operated by its legendary chairman, Seymour Cammeroli."

And later in the opening scenes, just before Lucido is kidnaped, we are given a glimpse of her own cynical view of her colleagues in the Nassau GOP:

"She could ruin half of them, knowing what she knew of their sorry lives, their sordid hobbies, their endless ambition for the free lunch; and yet legions of developers, tobacco lawyers, and health insurance executives stood behind these thousand-dollar chicken dinners, cheering these bums as if they were truly the people's servants."

In the real world, Westermann himself has been a bit player on the political stage, as gadfly and activist. He helps with fund raisers -- Democratic ones -- and stuffs envelopes. And with former Suffolk Legis. Nora Bredes, he collaborated in organizing satirical political revues awarding certain political activists "backbone awards." These are certificates that recognize the efforts of those -- generally Democrats -- whom Westermann believes are willing to stand up and fight against entrenched political power.

"John gets involved, and I think he's a true believer," said Bredes, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress who heads the Susan B. Anthony Center at the University of Rochester. "John sees the potential for good, and he really gets angry because he sees it not happening."

In "Ladies," Westermann adapted a Bredes experience to create a familiar scene for Long Island politicians: the Hamptons fund raiser, in which the celebrity host -- in Bredes' case, actor Alec Baldwin -- was a no-show.

Among those honored by Westermann's satirical group, the "Bastille Day Players," are Tom Oberle, an unsuccessful candidate for Brookhaven supervisor, and Lisanne Altmann, a Nassau County legislator from Great Neck who was pivotal in unearthing a political scandal involving the county's health insurance program.

Altmann is another fan, especially of "Ladies of the Night." "It's obviously a caricature in part, but he certainly got the atmosphere and flavor right," she said.

Altmann said some of his descriptions of how power is wielded are, for her, all too true. She describes how the opponent she defeated in her first election to the legislature was rewarded with a job as a deputy county attorney -- making more money than she was.

Westermann says he doesn't disdain all Republican officials, and mentions Suffolk County Executive Robert Gaffney -- a former FBI agent -- as someone he likes. "Maybe it's the cop thing," he laughs.

And not all Republican officials want to string Westermann to a tree.

"He's a really sardonic writer," says Hempstead Town Councilman Joseph Kearney, a friend who has followed Westermann's career, first as a policeman than a writer. Kearney said he hasn't finished the book about Nassau politics but that he knows it's not completely off base. "The truth is somewhere in the middle," he said.

In his next book, Westermann promises, he actually skewers a Democratic candidate, along with socialites of Westhampton Beach and Manhattan. It's tentatively titled the "Best of Both Worlds," and Westermann, who officially retired from the Freeport police in 1996, is still trying to hold on to all the ones he inhabits.

"I loved chasing the bad guys," he says of police work -- and in a way, he's still trying to do it in his writing.

"Chasing bad guys is fun. The laughs are fun. The macabre and the silly. You sometimes can't believe what you just walked in on."