Page 40 - NYLS Magazine • 2016 • Vol 35, No. 1

WE SAW A HERO
Nicholas Wasicsko ’87, was honored at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards ceremony on January 10, 2016. Oscar Issac, who played Wasicsko, the Mayor of Yonkers, NY in HBO’s “Show Me a Hero,” won the award for best actor in a television film. In accepting the award, the actor stated “this is for the memory of Nick.”
Elected at the age of 28, the same year he graduated from law school, Nick was the youngest mayor of any major American city. The city, however, was under a federal court order to build public housing in predominately white middle class neighborhoods. To comply, Mayor Wasicsko needed the cooperation of the city council, but most of its members had vowed to resist forever. Nick appealed to high officials such as New York Governor Mario Cuomo to use their moral authority to bring the city council members around, but despite claiming to stand for high principles in government, they opportunistically stood aloof. As Nick told The New York Times, “I feel all alone.” The confrontation got played out on the front pages of nationally circulated newspapers and in courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I wouldn’t have forecast such a prominent role for him when I first saw him as a rather retiring student perched in the back row of my class in State and Local Government Law. He did, however, come alive when Mayor Ed Koch visited the class, putting tough questions to the mayor.
Not long afterwards, as a mayor himself and despite his busy schedule, Nick visited my Remedies class when the students studied the Yonkers litigation. He expressed sympathy with the white voters.They feared their homes, which were the repository of their life savings, would go down in value. But he also expressed sympathy with his minority constituents who felt shunned and were often stuck in bad housing. He told me privately that truer justice would come from building the public housing in the rich, exclusive suburbs that had, unlike Yonkers, never built any public housing, such as the one in which the federal judge who issued the order lived, but the message that he drove home to the students was that people must obey court orders.
Nick worked long, hard, and ultimately successfully to get the city council to obey the court order. That is why he is the hero of “Show Me a Hero.” The series title comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” In 1993, at the age of 34, Nick committed suicide.
We saw a hero and he walked among us. •
By Professor David Schoenbrod
38 NEw York Law ScHooL magazINE • 2016 • VOL. 35, NO. 1