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" To read Cory Booker&amp;#039;s rebuttal to this story, please read &amp;quot;Cory Booker&amp;#039;s Angry Letter to Esquire&amp;quot;. ***** Nearly 275,000 souls live in Newark, New Jersey -- twelve miles from New York City -- served by a grand total of one movie theater, where Cory Booker, Newark&amp;#039;s mayor, sits on a Sunday night, hand-holding with a leggy Jersey City beauty and surrounded by various City Hall colleagues watching Will Smith in I Am Legend trying to save Manhattan from zombie hordes by devising a cure for the plague that has zombified them and wiped out most of the human race. Goddamn zombies. Smith&amp;#039;s hero is ideal for his task -- a medical doctor and a lieutenant colonel, a man of bold action and great learning, a brilliant scientist and a deadly shot, a warrior and a healer and a paragon of muscular virtue, virile, brave, selfless. Early in the movie, he&amp;#039;s seen on a Time magazine cover headlined &amp;quot;Savior?&amp;quot; -- exactly what he becomes, naturally, though he&amp;#039;s self-martyred at the end, via hand grenade, in his basement laboratory, mobbed by peevish, famished zombies. Goddamn zombies. And Cory Booker, who&amp;#039;s just a regular Joe -- well, apart from once being an All-American tight end, plus his degrees from Stanford, Yale Law, and Oxford, the last as a Rhodes Scholar, where he also was copresident of the L&amp;#039;Chaim Society, a Jewish student group, although he himself is an African-American and a devout Baptist -- hey, you know what? Cory Booker&amp;#039;s no regular Joe -- not even close. He is Will fucking Smith, right down to the eight-year-old real-life issue of Time that, years before he became its mayor, asked, &amp;quot;The Savior of Newark?&amp;quot; and his starring role in Street Fight, an Oscar-nominated film documenting Newark&amp;#039;s 2002 ugly mayoral beat-down, when Booker&amp;#039;s idealistic young hide was scorched by an old-school ghetto despot named Sharpe James, who bled the city dry for thirty-odd years -- Sharpe drove a Rolls, sailed a yacht, and, in the hallowed tradition of New Jersey politics, will be sentenced in late July for fraudulent land deals involving one of his concubine harem -- and buried Booker by campaigning on a platform of calling him a white, gay, Jewish Republican funded by the KKK.  None of which Booker is, mind you, although he is guilty of wearing lousy suits, and he&amp;#039;s prone to dropping names like Cincinnatus, Maimonides, and Gandhi as if everybody at the North Ward Three Kings festival or the winter-coat giveaway down at the Seth Boyden projects were gathered in the parlor at Queen&amp;#039;s College for a pinkies-out bull session.  Anyhow, that 2002 butt-kicking discouraged Booker no more than the goddamn zombies did Will Smith; he took 72 percent of the vote in 2006 -- Sharpe James knew what was coming and quit the race -- and all Booker has to do now is save a city racked by decades of ruin, a town known only for murder, blight, and feckless negritude. To Cory Booker, this is possible -- &amp;quot;To be America&amp;#039;s leading urban city in safety, prosperity, and nurturing of family life&amp;quot; is emblazoned on so many City Hall brochures and posters that he might have had it inked on his tawny skin -- for at age thirty-nine, raised in a plush white north-Jersey suburb by two civil-rights foot soldiers on a diet of Thelonius Monk&amp;#039;s piano, Richard Pryor&amp;#039;s stand-up, and the oratory of Martin Luther King, Booker&amp;#039;s not unused to dreaming big, nor blind to the path of righteousness a wannabe savior must walk.  &amp;quot;Before they came after me in 2002,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;they offered me every job imaginable. McGreevey&amp;quot; -- that&amp;#039;d be disgraced former New Jersey governor and self-described &amp;quot;gay American&amp;quot; Jim McGreevey, a Sharpe James ally -- &amp;quot;offered me Secretary of State, Secretary of Commerce, or Secretary of Labor. They said, &amp;#039;The county bosses will give you the line for the Essex County Executive -- you&amp;#039;ll be the first black county executive&amp;#039; -- all that kind of stuff.&amp;quot;  His voice goes from matter-of-fact to plummy with passion in a heartbeat. &amp;quot;These people don&amp;#039;t understand what this is about. This is not about a position -- it&amp;#039;s about a mission, and a city that should be so much further along than it is.&amp;quot; As the movie credits roll, Booker mounts the slope of theater carpet with a jock&amp;#039;s whooshing stride -- six foot three, he&amp;#039;s packing 250 or so pounds, &amp;quot; &amp;#039;Twofitty,&amp;#039; as they say,&amp;quot; Booker says, making him one of the world&amp;#039;s bulkiest vegetarians -- and as he stops in the near-empty lobby, his green eyes are shining bright, his smile a mile wide.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d gladly take a grenade,&amp;quot; says Cory Booker, beaming, &amp;quot;if it meant saving Newark.&amp;quot; Goddamn hero. The grenade thing? He means it. As a law student at Yale, Booker commuted from Newark to New Haven -- a three- or four-hour haul, depending on I-95 traffic -- and moved into Brick Towers, one of Newark&amp;#039;s nastiest human warehouses. If it was a publicity stunt, as political enemies have claimed, it was bizarre unto insane: He moved to town two years before he ran for any office -- Booker won a Newark City Council seat in 1998, ousting a sixteen-year incumbent -- and he stayed for eight years, leaving only after the drug- and crime-infested place was condemned. Like Will Smith, Booker was the last human resident to go.  &amp;quot;There was a small point in my life in law school,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;right before I moved to Newark, when I didn&amp;#039;t know what I wanted to do, and I felt so lost. I said, Well, where I want to be is Newark -- let me move to the worst street I can find and just be there, a young lawyer. Be there. For people.&amp;quot;  Where I want to be is Newark. I&amp;#039;ll tell you what: I&amp;#039;ve lived in a leafy north-Jersey borough about five miles from Newark for more than ten years, and I&amp;#039;ve never heard anyone else anywhere in the world express that wish in any form. I have dined well in Newark -- world-class Portuguese -- shopped and visited the museums there, and never had an uneasy moment. But Newark is also the front line of a war America can&amp;#039;t or won&amp;#039;t find the will to fight -- against poverty and crime, drugs and disease, all-encompassing despair and early death. The zombies are everywhere you look. Lousy housing? Check. Rampant unemployment? You bet. Shitty schools? Bingo. Gang warfare? My, yes. Newark may have only one movie house -- and zero new-car dealerships and big-box stores -- but it has what might be the world&amp;#039;s only Toys &amp;quot;R&amp;quot; Us knockoff Ebonically named Wee Bee Kids, close to City Hall. Everybody with the means to flee fled long ago -- and by &amp;quot;everybody&amp;quot; I mean the white folk and nearly all the middle-class blacks -- and what was surrendered on the way out of town was any sense that the people left behind truly matter. I leave Newark and feel nothing except happy that I don&amp;#039;t live there -- a state of spiritual and moral zombiehood that belies all lip service, however heartfelt.  But Cory Booker is right where he wants to be -- in the second-row seat of an unmarked police SUV, an Eddie Bauer Expedition with tinted rear windows and a Kevlar vest of his own hung on a hook behind him. These days, he rents the top half of a Bayonne Box -- Jerseyese for the crap two-family cages that crowd the sidewalks here -- in a sector of the lawless South Ward that leads Newark in shootings, and he spends a few late hours nearly every night rolling with a pair of NPD plainclothes detectives from his security detail, rousting the zombies and hugging Brick City to his nurturing bosom.  &amp;quot;Where will we know there&amp;#039;s drug-dealing tonight?&amp;quot; he asks. He&amp;#039;s wearing his cheap dark-blue suit, which he rotates with his cheap black suit, and he sounds as eager and earnest as an Eagle Scout on a hiking trip.  &amp;quot;Right now?&amp;quot; says Santiago, hunkered behind the wheel. &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;Pick a place in the city where we know there&amp;#039;s drug-dealing. South Orange Avenue?&amp;quot;  Up front next to Santiago, Lewis grunts. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d say Stratford Place.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; says Santiago, apparently the chatty one. &amp;quot;You wanna go to Stratford, boss? You&amp;#039;ll see it from the Chinese restaurant right around the corner -- Stratford and Clinton.&amp;quot;  And there, sure enough, in the yellow glow of the only lit window in a row of decrepit storefronts, stands a man with his hands hidden inside his hoodie -- just passing the time of night, under a frigid late-December half-moon.  &amp;quot;Maybe a lookout here,&amp;quot; says Santiago. &amp;quot;Keep goin&amp;#039; down.&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;Just drive through it. What sector are we in, guys? Let&amp;#039;s find out the boss.&amp;quot; He means the police supervisor on duty tonight, and when he finds him -- Lewis radios to arrange a side-street rendezvous -- Booker and Lewis jump out of the Expedition. With Lewis standing by, Booker ducks into the other unit for a heart-to-heart. You can see the supervisor&amp;#039;s face when Booker opens his passenger door and the dome light comes on. Gloomy at best.  &amp;quot;Look at this kid,&amp;quot; Santiago says. &amp;quot;A young Hispanic sergeant. We&amp;#039;re out doin&amp;#039; volunteer work, tryin&amp;#039; to clear these corners. We picked up five homicides in a seven-day stretch -- he said, &amp;#039;We gotta start doin&amp;#039; this, keep it under a hundred.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Booker&amp;#039;s specific mission this week is ending Newark&amp;#039;s 2007 with no more than ninety-nine homicides -- eight fewer than the year before -- because while Newark needs every goddamn thing, what it needs more than anything else is to believe that it can survive as something more than a killing floor. Booker swore -- and was elected -- to stop the slaughter. But even though 2007 did end with a mere ninety-nine cold-blooded killings, 80 percent of them drug related, numbering the corpses was no salve. Early last August, four young friends -- all Delaware State University students, all Newark kids home for the summer -- hanging out on a Saturday night in a grade-school parking lot in one of Newark&amp;#039;s nicer neighborhoods, were set upon by six of the living dead.  Even by Newark&amp;#039;s macabre standards, it was a horror show, and it made headlines around the globe. Led by a twenty-eight-year-old day laborer prowling the streets on bail after being charged with raping a five-year-old girl, armed with a gun and machetes, they killed three of the college kids. They hacked up the fourth -- before shooting her in the face. She somehow survived. But most of the hope Newark had for its young superhero of a mayor bled out on the asphalt with those kids. And Cory Booker knows that his only chance to get it back is to put his cops on notice and his own Rhodes-scholar ass out on the street. Santiago and Lewis rotate with four other two-man teams on Booker&amp;#039;s crew, each pair working sixteen-hour shifts for two days, with five days off, an around-the-clock arrangement dating to the days before his inauguration, in response to a plot hatched by an imprisoned Bloods chief to have Booker killed before taking office. &amp;quot;New guy comin&amp;#039; into town,&amp;quot; Santiago says. &amp;quot;The one before&amp;quot; -- he means Sharpe James -- &amp;quot;was here for twenty years, and they loved it. And they loved him. This is change, so they don&amp;#039;t want it.&amp;quot; When Booker hops back into the SUV, I mention that the young sergeant looked shook. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not drivin&amp;#039; our guys,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and we gotta drive our guys. Look, everybody in Newark who knows the streets can tell you the five top drug-dealing and violent streets -- and if you have no calls coming across, then your job is to confront the conditions that create the violence. The guys standing out there so brazenly -- unless you keep them off-balance, they think they own the streets. Well, it&amp;#039;s time for the community to own the streets.  &amp;quot;For me, it&amp;#039;s a leadership issue -- and if I have to stay out on the streets till four o&amp;#039;clock every morning, I&amp;#039;ll do it. I know we can do this. The city as a whole, I know we can solve our problems -- they&amp;#039;re not bigger than we are. I believe in my heart -- and I have no right to believe otherwise, because human history is a testimony to it -- that we can change things. The question is, can we muster the collective will? King said it more eloquently: The problems today are not the vitriolic words and the evil actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s one hell of a speech -- perfectly paced, each phrase framed and fraught with a passion that feels absolutely authentic -- ending just as Booker spots another citizen huddled in the middle of a block not far from Stratford. &amp;quot;Pull over on the side a little bit,&amp;quot; he tells Santiago. &amp;quot;Stop, stop, stop, stop.&amp;quot;  Booker powers down his window, and the man -- small, red-eyed, ageless, shriveled with cold -- squints at him and says, &amp;quot;CoryBooker,&amp;quot; a single word, like Tinkerbell, with gravel and wonder in his voice. &amp;quot;How ya doin&amp;#039;, man?&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;Why are you out here in the freezin&amp;#039; cold in the middle of the night?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t remember me -- I got dreads now. But my name is same as yours. An&amp;#039; my cousin Samantha used to work for you.&amp;quot; Drunk. Or high. Or crazy. &amp;quot;Yeah, yeah, yeah,&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;What the hell you doin&amp;#039; out -- it&amp;#039;s freezin&amp;#039; out here.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m gon&amp;#039; see my old lady now.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s she live?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Dayton Street. Senior-citizens&amp;#039; buildin&amp;#039;. I come to see ya. I just came back -- I need a job, man.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Go to 990 Broad Street tomorrow,&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;Ask to speak to Rod -- oh, you just came back.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Just came home, man.&amp;quot; From prison. Which hardly makes him unique: Almost 15 percent of Newark&amp;#039;s population carries a rap sheet. Booker asks Lewis for a business card and a pen, scribbles something on the card, and hands it to the guy. &amp;quot;I want you to call this woman tomorrow,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;She has a program especially for guys who just came home.&amp;quot; The guy takes the card and says, &amp;quot; &amp;#039;Cuz I don&amp;#039;t wanna go back to my old.&amp;quot; Booker nods. &amp;quot;I want you to get the hell off the streets so you don&amp;#039;t get hurt, man.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Samantha&amp;#039;s doin&amp;#039; good, man. The one with the green eyes, Mexican . . .&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I know who you&amp;#039;re talkin&amp;#039; about,&amp;quot; says Booker. &amp;quot;So you gonna promise me you gonna call this woman tomorrow?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Hell, yeah. I need a job.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And you&amp;#039;re gonna say you talked to me tonight, and that I sent you -- and then whatcha gonna do is, you&amp;#039;re gonna go down there. Don&amp;#039;t pooh-pooh it, man. The first job you get might be just makin&amp;#039; seven, eight dollars an hour, but it&amp;#039;s a start -- you gotta start somewhere.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t care what it is. I need a job.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And you have my card, so that you can reach out to me. And, man, get off these streets. Your hands are freezing. Get indoors, okay? Promise me, man.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Cory and Cory.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;All right, man,&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;Be well, Cory.&amp;quot; Up goes the window, and on through the night rolls Newark&amp;#039;s savior. And this goes on for hours -- down goes the window, and voil\u00E0! CoryBooker reveals himself. The bad guys see the SUV creep by, and vanish into doorways, while the others, clutching every last shred of manly pride, share their shame despite themselves. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll get my vote.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Thank you, brother.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My name is Leslie Reginald Richardson.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You know what I&amp;#039;d rather get, Leslie? Get you a job. Where you workin&amp;#039; right now?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;They keepin&amp;#039; me down because of epilepsy.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;How serious are you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m serious.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So you wanna make a bet? I&amp;#039;ll make you a twenty-dollar bet.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Whaja-hoo? Twenty dollars ain&amp;#039;t gonna make me or break me -- what&amp;#039;s the bet?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll bet you don&amp;#039;t show up at my apartment tomorrow for information about a job.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll be there. My word is my bond. You give me a job if I show up?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, I won&amp;#039;t promise you that, man. Because I don&amp;#039;t know what your thing is. I sent thirty guys to a job -- thirty guys . . .&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Tell me where. Just tell me where.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Hold up for a second. Only fifteen showed up. And only three could pass the piss test.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I could pass the test right now.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s be honest. C&amp;#039;mon -- you smoke some weed.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, I don&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;C&amp;#039;mon.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No. I don&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My brother, when&amp;#039;s the last time you smoked weed?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Earlier.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Earlier tonight?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah. I wouldn&amp;#039;t lie to you.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I respect your honesty. I gotta give you a hug.&amp;quot; And Booker steps out of the Expedition and pulls Leslie to his chest for a long embrace. When he gets back in, I ask if he ever felt called to preach. &amp;quot;Yeah. I debated between law school and divinity.&amp;quot; How long was the debate? &amp;quot;It was long in the sense that I think I&amp;#039;ve always wanted to be a part of a spiritual revolution. You can&amp;#039;t have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation. But my views of religion are very expansive, so I still feel like I&amp;#039;m -- hopefully -- living a life of spirit.&amp;quot; Preachers wear better suits. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve ripped a lot of suits recently,&amp;quot; he laughs. &amp;quot;And in ignominious ways. I caught one on a door and ripped the pocket. This one, the crotch wore out, so we had to send it out to put a patch on. The truth of this is, it&amp;#039;s just not high on my priority list.&amp;quot; You think Leslie will show up at your place? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll say that to a hundred guys,&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;Maybe 10 percent will follow through.&amp;quot; After Santiago and Lewis drop the mayor at home, they give me a lift back to where I left my car, not far from the looming hulks of Brick Towers, ready for the wreckers. &amp;quot;See that group to the left with the red colors?&amp;quot; says Santiago. &amp;quot;They know they&amp;#039;re not gonna be challenged by the guys that&amp;#039;s workin&amp;#039; -- this is what needs to be instilled in them. Before he moved in, this was all narcotics. He lived here eight years.&amp;quot; The guy seems fearless. &amp;quot;He is fearless,&amp;quot; Santiago says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s why we gotta be with him. He opens the window, I&amp;#039;m always watching. Hands. I don&amp;#039;t like people with their hands in their pockets.&amp;quot; Most people&amp;#039;s lives -- even politicians&amp;#039; lives -- are not the stuff of legend. Will Smith doesn&amp;#039;t truck to Trenton to beg for a few more Urban Enterprise Zone dollars and a ticket tax to help Newark pay for extra cops at the new hockey arena -- and if it seems bizarre to build a $350 million puck palace in the middle of a city stuffed with brown and black people, with a jobless rate twice the national average and a public-school system so hapless that the state has been running it for much of the decade, you just need to imagine Newark as a small Third World nation newly freed from the iron grip of a Mugabe manqu\u00E9; a city that fails to graduate half of its high schoolers also sports the Sharpe James Aquatic Center. And what Cory Booker spends a goodly chunk of his time doing -- even from the second seat of the Expedition -- is cadging money, goods, and services for a long-neglected citizenry. Between his final bear hug and his drop-off -- after a brief stop at an all-night Dunkin&amp;#039; Donuts, where he slides behind the counter to help wait on customers -- Booker calls one of his advisors to chat about prying a few million in end-of-the-year charity deductions out of the wampum warriors over at Goldman Sachs to help spruce up the dung heaps passing for parks in Newark. &amp;quot;We have the State of the City address,&amp;quot; he tells her. &amp;quot;And to say something that Goldman Sachs did would be great. I think that a million is easy. I think two million would be the big ask. If Goldman did one of the marquee parks -- Jesse Allen or Hank Aaron -- in the heart of the Central Ward, that gets us a lot in terms of cachet.&amp;quot; After hanging up, Booker&amp;#039;s still crusading, stormy with passion.  &amp;quot;Once you set a goal for yourself, if you focus on nothing else, you&amp;#039;re always going to find a way to get it done. The things we call city parks are an embarrassment. You&amp;#039;ll see kids playing football on a field that does not reflect their beauty, their genius, their greatness. Couches, car seats -- this is where kids play football. We are going to find a way to transform parks in the city. We&amp;#039;re going to find a way to do it. &amp;quot;So we start reaching out to people. I sat in a Goldman Sachs conference room with these amazing guys, all my age, all probably pulling in $10 or $20 million a year. It&amp;#039;s a different world -- I can&amp;#039;t imagine getting a bonus for $10 or $15 million, but here are all these great guys, very market-oriented thinkers -- and it&amp;#039;s flattering, because one of &amp;#039;em was saying, &amp;#039;I heard you were coming, I had to talk to you.&amp;#039;  &amp;quot;I think the point most of them left with is that there&amp;#039;s no place more fertile to demonstrate that change can be made than Newark, because it&amp;#039;s got so much going for it. They were like, &amp;#039;Getting involved with you is a way to make a tremendous difference in our lifetimes -- we could actually see a city transformed in ten years.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Preach on, Brother Booker. Not that he needs any urging. &amp;quot;Of the top ten most important American fights, this is it. People don&amp;#039;t realize that the soul of our nation is in jeopardy unless we come to grips with what&amp;#039;s happening in our cities. And of all the cities -- I don&amp;#039;t think America understands how much it needs Newark.&amp;quot; You can almost envision the collection plate passed from hand to manicured hand, right there in the Goldman Sachs conference room. It&amp;#039;s more than slightly harder to imagine Newark transformed. In fact, it&amp;#039;s impossible -- except as a leap of faith. And Cory Booker -- a very smart, very savvy guy -- knows this. He knows where the money is -- and I imagine that he has imagined how much a young African-American gifted with his gifts and pedigree might be hauling down in the gilt towers just across the Hudson River -- and because he grew up among those bonus babies and is in most ways precisely like them, he knows how to light them up and how to inspire a belief so strong that they&amp;#039;ll grab his meaty hand and take that leap. Booker&amp;#039;s mojo travels. It works at Goldman Sachs, and it works at Seth Boyden, a Newark housing project infamous for the scope and ferocity of its criminal behavior, including the 2007 rape of a pit-bull puppy. See the many hundreds of residents -- family and friends in tow -- in line on a wind-raked sidewalk on a bitter-cold afternoon. And witness Cory Booker behind a long table in an overheated basement room handing over winter jackets to screeching, laughing, clawing clumps of Newarkers being let in, three or four at a time, by a cop at the door. His mojo has everything to do with the joyful greed of the masses, especially when they discover that their new free coats are not rummage-sale shmattas, that they are -- no other word will do -- fabulous. Each appears to be unique in color and pattern, and each is subtly, hiply emblazoned with an &amp;quot;Ecko Unltd&amp;quot; logo.  And this isn&amp;#039;t the sole miracle wrought at Seth Boyden by the Booker magic, because here is the small, bewhiskered fashion guru himself, Marc Ecko, n\u00E9 Milecofsky, squeezed against a wall amid the chaos. Ecko, a Rutgers dropout who started selling T-shirts when he was a teenager, has reached a realm of affluence so stratospheric that he laid out three quarters of a million dollars for Barry Bonds&amp;#039;s 756th home-run ball and then ran an online poll asking fans to decide whether the ball should be defaced with a large asterisk or fired into deep space. The asterisk won. You ever do anything like this before, Marc? &amp;quot;Uh, no. But Cory is a very unique, special person -- I solicited him. I&amp;#039;m a Jersey guy, from Lakewood, about forty-five minutes south of here, and I followed what he went through during Street Fight, that whole thing. Cory&amp;#039;s the real deal -- when I met him, I said, &amp;#039;Lemme be purposeful for you, in any way.&amp;#039; I believe in him -- I have a real kind of kismet, electric connection with him. It&amp;#039;s so authentic, inside and out, with him.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m around a lot of really smart people, but this guy? He could be a Fortune 500 CEO, could be runnin&amp;#039; a billion-dollar corporation right now. It has to happen here -- he needs to prove the model here. I know there&amp;#039;s a lot of cynicism in politics, particularly in Newark. And people&amp;#039;s expectations of wanting it done tomorrow? It took thirty years to fuck it up -- it&amp;#039;s gonna take a minute to fix it. Give this guy a minute.&amp;quot; You don&amp;#039;t need much time with Booker to feel what Ecko feels -- that bond of brotherhood and inspiration -- although it surely helps to be Caucasian. I heard the same romantic sentiment from a grizzled pol-turned-lobbyist in Trenton who called himself a Booker &amp;quot;disciple,&amp;quot; from \u00FCber-rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who befriended Booker at Oxford, and from a young Booker aide, a skinny white boy who not only took a job at City Hall but also rented a house on one of Newark&amp;#039;s meanest streets. I felt it myself. Like Barack Obama, Booker embodies a promise kept, a deferred dream finally come true, living proof that the stain of slavery, our original national sin, might yet be lifted from our collective soul. Booker knows this, too -- he has shown up in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, and elsewhere as Obama&amp;#039;s surrogate during primary season -- and he is fully capable of embroidering the cloth of Dr. King&amp;#039;s soaring rhetoric with his own echoic stitch.  In truth, Cory Booker is eager to do so. And when he proclaims, &amp;quot;We need a prophetic leader -- somebody who can raise us above our baser angels and show that truly we are all tied in a common garment of destiny,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;s speaking not only of Obama but also of himself, of King, of Gandhi -- Booker&amp;#039;s a huge Gandhi fan. But unlike Obama, whose knitted brow, faraway eyes, and dry, bony passivity rub thinner day by day, Booker fairly bursts with adolescent energy, fueled by his athlete&amp;#039;s physique and streams of caffeine and testosterone. To a Goldman Sachs guy, and to Marc Ecko, he&amp;#039;s not merely the longed-for fruit of the seeds of racial equality, he also is the captain of the varsity team, Henry V leading the charge, and Will fucking Smith, all formed into one hearty, brainy, humble stud. To many Newarkers, however, Booker is none of the above -- he&amp;#039;s a creature they&amp;#039;ve never seen before, and they can&amp;#039;t quite believe he&amp;#039;s real. This is understandable. For while Marc Ecko makes a sweet winter coat, his parsing of Newark&amp;#039;s history is a trifle off -- it took much longer than thirty years to well and truly fuck the city up. Urban rot -- in Newark and other once-proud towns -- grew roots in post-World War II highway, housing, and mortgage-loan policies, all of which made it both easy and socially and financially attractive for the average Joe -- and his job -- to move out of town. Destiny and disease did not loot Newark -- or Cleveland or Baltimore or Detroit -- of its critical mass of solid citizens with steady jobs, and if the consequences of dicing the inner city with interstates while simultaneously selling suburbs as a healthier, happier place to live and work were unintended, they were no less nasty for that.  The Newark myth, promulgated by nostalgic expats like Philip Roth and cemented forever into place by -- pardon the redundancy -- lazy journalists, is that the city was some kind of strivers&amp;#039; paradise until July 12, 1967, when a pair of white cops pounded the living shit out of a black taxi driver, whereupon the angry Zulus erupted in a five-day paroxysm of murder and mayhem, turning Newark&amp;#039;s milk and honey to blood, followed immediately by the departure of everybody and everything that once had made the place great. Goddamn Zulus. Never mind that the myth glibly reverses cause and effect, that the &amp;#039;67 riot was the result of Newark&amp;#039;s slow slide toward abandonment and decay rather than its source, and that much of the mayhem -- and almost all the homicide -- was the work of city cops, New Jersey national guardsmen, and state police. Of the twenty-three people killed in those five days, twenty were blacks gunned down by cops, and fewer than a handful of them were doing anything illegal at the time of their demise. Folks were strafed on their front stoops and sidewalks; one fifty-three-year-old woman was killed by a bullet as she sat in her second-floor apartment. Officials blamed most of the killing on unknown &amp;quot;snipers,&amp;quot; not one of whom ever was identified, let alone arrested, owing mainly to the fact that they were imaginary. But the special grand jury empaneled to investigate the slaughter came to the same conclusion in every case: no cause for indictment.  What remained of Newark after the riots -- after the last loyal holdouts, too, left town, and after the political clout shifted from the Italians to the blacks, and after the blacks now running the city proved to be as uncaring, incompetent, and corrupt as the Italians; each Newark mayor over the last forty years has ended his public career as a convicted criminal -- was a toxic brew of hopeless rage, rancid pride, and bitter need. Little wonder, then, that when Sharpe James taunted Booker during the 2002 race by saying, &amp;quot;You have to learn to be an African-American, and we don&amp;#039;t have time to train you,&amp;quot; the crowds roared and Newark voters returned James to office for a fifth four-year term. God knows what would&amp;#039;ve happened had James run for a sixth term -- Sharpe rode his bicycle to the elections office on deadline day to deliver his petitions, which turned out to be stacks of thousands of photocopies of a single page -- but Booker raised more than $6 million for the 2006 race, outspending his opponent twenty-five to one. And sure enough, that $6 million became a campaign issue, with Booker painted again as not black enough, a light-skinned sweet-talker flush with white folks&amp;#039; money -- their frontman and silver-tongued tool. It didn&amp;#039;t work this time: Booker waltzed into office, nailed photos of King and Gandhi to the wall, and vowed that his first priority was to tackle the zombies. He hired a hotshot police director, one of New York City&amp;#039;s top cops -- a white man, no less, upending Newark&amp;#039;s carefully crafted custom of balancing an incompetent black police director with an inept Latino police chief, or vice versa. But the August school-yard slaughter brought out the wolves howling for Booker&amp;#039;s blood. The local newspaper -- The Star-Ledger, which had erased &amp;quot;Newark&amp;quot; from its title long ago and snoozed through the Sharpe James decades while the city was plundered -- suddenly was quoting folks who found Booker guilty of being willing &amp;quot;to allow bodies to keep falling on the streets of Newark.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m taking personal responsibility,&amp;quot; was Booker&amp;#039;s response. &amp;quot;This breaks the heart of our city -- but I know that my city will heal, and that it will be stronger in the future.&amp;quot; Bullshit. If Booker has a fatal flaw as a politician -- and I don&amp;#039;t claim to know what happens in his bedroom when the lights go down, although he clearly is a man with a powerful charisma and appetites to match -- it&amp;#039;s the chasm between word and deed. In a place that long ago lost faith in miracles, is Cory Booker a visionary, or a bullshit artist?  Then there was that uglier, parallel question: Is Booker black enough -- is he sufficiently real -- to free a city yoked for forty brutal years to a self-devouring paradigm of racist thought and cannibal violence? God, again, knows -- and what passeth for God in this city, in terms of his omniscience, anyway, is Clement Price, a history prof at Rutgers-Newark, where he joined the faculty in 1968. &amp;quot;I was told when I came here, the blacks destroyed the city,&amp;quot; Price says. &amp;quot;Part of me said, &amp;#039;I didn&amp;#039;t know we were that efficient,&amp;#039; &amp;quot; -- and, launching into an Amos &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; Andy dialect, he adds, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s sho&amp;#039; fun bein&amp;#039; black -- tear down an entire city and it only took five days.&amp;quot; Price&amp;#039;s office features no photos of Gandhi or King; he has Coltrane and Willie Wells -- a Negro League shortstop who played with the Newark Eagles -- on the wall. A massive plaque commemorating the takeover of this very building in 1969 -- one of the students&amp;#039; demands was to desegregate the faculty -- is leaning against a file cabinet. Price grew up in Washington, D. C., but his love for this city -- &amp;quot;Pick a fight with Newark, my dukes go up,&amp;quot; he warns -- is strong and deep. He knows the mayor well, and he knows the questions that dog Booker even better. &amp;quot;He rattles what might be called the cage of authenticity,&amp;quot; is how Clement Price phrases it.  Nicely put, sir. &amp;quot;Oh, I&amp;#039;ve been working on Cory, the phenomenon,&amp;quot; he chuckles. &amp;quot;What is a black guy at the end of the day? We haven&amp;#039;t seen a lot of people like Booker in the post-civil-rights era; we actually saw more of them in the segregated era, when black people created an extraordinary hierarchy of well-educated, well-spoken, and noble men and women.  &amp;quot;In the post-civil-rights-movement era, we see them and they suddenly don&amp;#039;t strike us as being authentically black -- because they can move very, very easily within the white world. One of the things that I think gets Cory into trouble is the extent to which he&amp;#039;s beloved in the white community. I saw him speak at Newark&amp;#039;s last synagogue. When he spoke Hebrew, the Jewish women on the first two pews, I thought they were having an orgasm. He&amp;#039;s good. He&amp;#039;s good. &amp;quot;What happens in American society -- the more whites lavish their affection on blacks, the more skeptical blacks are of such blacks. And since race so deeply defined Newark, the affection for Cory is to some extent off-putting. Blacks held in high esteem by whites will historically face the distrust of an element of the black community.&amp;quot;  Price doesn&amp;#039;t challenge Booker&amp;#039;s sincerity or authenticity. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s genuine,&amp;quot; says Price, &amp;quot;and I&amp;#039;ll tell you why I take that notion to the bank: I&amp;#039;ve spent some time with his dad, and his dad is almost incapable of raising a bullshit artist.&amp;quot; But Price does have a bone to pick with Booker&amp;#039;s heroics -- the apartment in Brick Towers; pitching a tent to conduct a ten-day fast in 1999 to shame Sharpe James into providing more police and better city services to his ward; his 2000 move into a battered motor home that Booker drove to the city&amp;#039;s darker corners for campouts -- and with the Heart of Newark Darkness tales Booker tells and retells.  Like Booker&amp;#039;s T-Bone story, about the zombified Brick Towers drug pusher who once threatened to kill Booker but who, many moons later, wound up sitting in Booker&amp;#039;s car, pouring forth his pain, weeping as Booker let him cry it out before going off to prison.  T-Bone&amp;#039;s actual earthly existence has been fodder for public debate, leading Booker to admit that although T-Bone&amp;#039;s corporeal being is &amp;quot;1,000 percent real,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;s an &amp;quot;archetype&amp;quot; of an aspect of Newark&amp;#039;s woe whose actual nom de crack may not actually be T-Bone. Which pisses off a historian like Clement Price. &amp;quot;Black men, almost by their very nature, have to perform. And Cory -- to some extent, the blackest part of him is that performance ethos. This guy he talked about in some of his speeches -- was it T-Bone or Tyrone? -- was not a real guy. T-Bone the drug dealer. T-Bone the guy on High Street. As a black man, I say, &amp;#039;Of all the creations you&amp;#039;re gonna come up with to depict Newark, why this guy? Why contribute to that mythology?&amp;#039; I never spoke to the mayor about this -- I just said to myself, I wonder if Cory&amp;#039;s youth and upbringing are so privileged that, not unlike whites, he has an imagined view of blacks which is shot through with contradictions. &amp;quot;I thought he was crazy when he would pull these civic stunts -- living in Brick Towers, living in a crack-infested neighborhood, living in a tent. I saw that -- I come from a wholesome black family life; I went to church, never got in trouble -- and I said to myself, Why is he doing this? Is he out of his fucking mind?&amp;quot; Yep. It takes a lunatic -- or a prophet, or both -- to honestly believe that Newark can be saved. Booker&amp;#039;s father is voting lunatic. I met him in the mayor&amp;#039;s office one day, a lanky drink of water with a puckered wit and the wry smile of a man who didn&amp;#039;t go to Stanford, Oxford, or Yale, but who has lived in -- and lived through -- a history his son has only heard and read about. &amp;quot;Stupid,&amp;quot; he rasps when I ask how he feels about Cory&amp;#039;s wee-hour tours of duty. At least he&amp;#039;s with a couple of detectives. &amp;quot;A bullet don&amp;#039;t know that.&amp;quot; Still, it&amp;#039;s very inspiring. &amp;quot;To who? That&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s so inspiring: It&amp;#039;ll show you how crazy he is.&amp;quot; Mr. Booker&amp;#039;s joshing, I think, and there&amp;#039;s surely more pride than irony in the laugh that follows. And I&amp;#039;m not joshing -- there is something inspiring about Cory Booker&amp;#039;s courage, about him rolling down his window to chat about piss tests and tell a pie-eyed ex-con, whose life plan is to get his ass home before he wets his pants, not to say pooh-pooh to a minimum-wage gig.  You think Will Smith ever had balls brassy enough to say &amp;quot;pooh-pooh&amp;quot; to a goddamn zombie? No way. You think anybody ever asked Will Smith if he was black enough to save a city?  &amp;quot;I am a black American,&amp;quot; Booker says. &amp;quot;Pure and simple. Who has come from a very black-American experience -- if you look at the black northern migration, that&amp;#039;s my family. It&amp;#039;s an American story, it&amp;#039;s a black-American story. It&amp;#039;s who I am. Being black isn&amp;#039;t about the music you listen to. It&amp;#039;s not about the food you eat. To me, it&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;Are you continuing the legacy of struggle for justice?&amp;#039; Not black justice: the justice that this country is still in pursuit of.  &amp;quot;People say white people have difficulty speaking about race? America has difficulty speaking about race. People -- black and white -- who can&amp;#039;t fit me into their comfortable paradigm for how I should be get uncomfortable. I&amp;#039;m going to continue being me. I&amp;#039;m going to be as authentically and unapologetically me as possible. I love this world that we&amp;#039;re living in now, that I live in a city that&amp;#039;s very soon going to become a place where nobody has a majority -- blacks still are 54 percent, but soon it&amp;#039;ll be a city where we have a plurality of people.&amp;quot; You think anyone ever mistook Will Smith&amp;#039;s bravery for insanity? &amp;quot;Look,&amp;quot; says Booker, &amp;quot;I just want to live my life as best I can, in consistency with the values that are at my core. I just want to be able to say that I lived a life of integrity -- but also that I was audacious, that I took risks, that I was never willing to be satisfied with what I had but was willing to put it all on the table again to gamble in order to win the big fight.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m willing to put myself in danger. If I took a bullet tomorrow -- I don&amp;#039;t mean to be dramatic about it -- I&amp;#039;m not afraid of death. I&amp;#039;m done. But I&amp;#039;ve had a great life. God has used me in a wonderful way.&amp;quot; Not every lunatic is a prophet, of course. But lunacy in the service of prophethood? Hell, that&amp;#039;s an Old Testament requirement.  &amp;quot;All my life I&amp;#039;ve fantasized about fighting the good fight,&amp;quot; Booker tells me during my second or third ridearound -- it&amp;#039;s a cool way to spend a few hours, frankly -- when I tease him about urging zombies to remake themselves. &amp;quot;I am a raging idealist, and I think that&amp;#039;s a good thing. It&amp;#039;s all about energy, and the more you throw positive energy and unconditional love in the world, the more it&amp;#039;s gonna hit and stick.&amp;quot; And then Booker launches another homily, this one about visiting a funeral home and getting hugged by a grateful ex-junkie who told him, &amp;quot; &amp;#039;I was hooked on dope and you talked to me. It stuck with me, man -- I cleaned up my act.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Me, I wonder if Cory Booker ever ran across Mencken&amp;#039;s line about how &amp;quot;a good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.&amp;quot; Or Aristotle&amp;#039;s ancient tip about creating believable drama -- &amp;quot;Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.&amp;quot; Because Booker has had more epiphanies than I&amp;#039;ve had bowel movements, and he won&amp;#039;t stop the I-am-legendizing. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter if T-Bone is real. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter that back at Stanford Booker talked a suicidal student off of a roof and felt God&amp;#039;s grip as he clasped the man&amp;#039;s hand and led him to safety. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter that Booker&amp;#039;s big arms cradled a bullet-riddled teenager in front of Brick Towers as he died. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter that during the brief time before he began his Newark mission, when he felt lost, his mother told him the Bible story about the talents, and then Booker went to visit a girlfriend living on an island off the Carolina coast and went hiking with her and found a long-abandoned church whose lectern still held a dusty crumbling Bible open to -- go ahead, guess. Correct: the story of the talents. Goddamn prophetic leader.  Finally, when Booker tells me the story -- for the second time -- about being seated alone in a row on an otherwise full airplane when, just before takeoff, a woman boarded with her two screaming children, and Booker recalled how Viktor Frankl, recounting what he learned as a prisoner at Auschwitz and Turkheim, wrote about the crucial freedom of choosing one&amp;#039;s attitude toward one&amp;#039;s circumstances, however grim, in his brilliant Man&amp;#039;s Search for Meaning -- goddammit, I&amp;#039;ve heard enough. You do realize, Mr. Mayor, that you&amp;#039;re invoking Frankl&amp;#039;s death-camp experience to describe a crowded flight? Booker roars with laughter.  &amp;quot;Have you ever been on a cramped airplane? With the airplane food? They&amp;#039;re not tryin&amp;#039; to put you to death?&amp;quot; Then he turns serious. &amp;quot;Look, these stories, which I tell often -- these are anchors to me. I look for things that prove my theories of life -- and these are all stories that prove my theory of life.&amp;quot; Fine by me. But what matters -- the only thing that truly matters, because Booker isn&amp;#039;t Will Smith, and Newark is no soundstage -- is what he does as mayor. Story hour is over, but Booker, for all his bounteous gifts, often sounds as if he may not yet grasp the simple truth that rhetoric can&amp;#039;t put a patch on reality. Clement Price certainly does. &amp;quot;If he doesn&amp;#039;t do great things in Newark, he ain&amp;#039;t goin&amp;#039; nowhere. No. Where. That&amp;#039;s American Urban Politics 101.&amp;quot; And then a most profound and amazing thing happened. Or, rather, didn&amp;#039;t happen. It happened, and it didn&amp;#039;t, while Cory Booker made a speech. And a great speech it was -- in February, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. I sat up in the balcony with my little tape recorder, and before it started, a Booker aide -- a thirty-two-year-old guy raised in East Orange, New Jersey, and Brooklyn -- asked me if Obama was like Bobby Kennedy, and I started talking about 1968, before Booker was even born, and what it felt like then to have hope and to feel inspired, and how it felt in America when Martin was martyred in April and Bobby was killed in June and what it feels like now, which is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- lousy.  Goddamn 1968. And maybe that softens me up for Booker&amp;#039;s speech, which isn&amp;#039;t really all that great until he gets to his windup and starts in with the revival preaching, and folks whoop and cheer along as he shouts, over and over, &amp;quot;I believe in Newark&amp;quot; -- not just as himself, Cory Booker, but in the name of the Puritans who founded the place in 1666, and the immigrants pouring in still, and the migrating waves of southern blacks, all those who came, and are coming, here -- here, to godforsaken Newark, New Jersey, full of belief. &amp;quot;We must honor those who came before us,&amp;quot; he pleads now, &amp;quot;by unceasingly, unyieldingly, stubbornly believing in our city.&amp;quot; Then, a cry in his voice, he says, &amp;quot;There is a boy in Newark who went to school today who needs to hear all of us say, &amp;#039;I believe in your dreams.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  And it hits me then: He&amp;#039;s right. This is no soundstage. He isn&amp;#039;t Will Smith. And while I may not have to live in Newark -- thank God -- I surely don&amp;#039;t want to live with more faith in the zombies than in that boy. Booker&amp;#039;s voice is booming now, his cadence taut, his muscled arms curled in at his sides. There is a grandmother kneeling in prayer. There is a man in a prison cell about to come back home. And at last -- &amp;quot;There is a victim of crime frustrated and angry in our city right now -- she needs to hear us say, I believe in your cries for justice.&amp;quot; The whole place goes nuts, and not just because everyone in the hall knows that Booker means the Delaware State student who survived last August&amp;#039;s slaughter -- Natasha Aeriel, who lay in a hospital bed under police guard when she identified the animal who murdered her classmates. They also know that there are nearly 275,000 people in Newark -- and all of them are victims, too.  Booker hears them roar and lifts himself behind the podium, one fist pumping the air, filled with the fury of his faith.  &amp;quot;There is a city in New Jersey,&amp;quot; he roars back, &amp;quot;larger than them all, with the eyes of the nation now upon it. We must let the world know that we -- as a city -- believe. We believe. We are Newark, New Jersey, Brick City -- believers in life, love, and liberty.&amp;quot;  Goddamn right. And then my throat starts to ache, and a tear rolls down my cheek. Which is neither profound nor amazing, though it certainly shocks the shit out of me. This guy is good. But the amazing and profound thing -- the thing that happened and didn&amp;#039;t -- was this: For the first time since 1961, six years before the riots, Cory Booker&amp;#039;s city went forty-three days without a murder. Through the first week of May, there have been a total of twenty-two homicides in Newark, a drop of more than 30 percent.  And -- all due respect to Will Smith, and to Yahweh, too -- that&amp;#039;s a goddamn miracle. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4732/cory-booker-0708/>