The Name Behind the Face

It began as a routine news story: In November 1999, an undocumented Mexican worker was killed when part of a condominium complex under construction collapsed in Brooklyn. He was on the third floor, which plunged to the basement, where he drowned in wet concrete 3 feet deep. He was 21.

Then the story, from a media standpoint, became sexy. Big names and deep-seated corruption were involved. The condos collapsed because the developer, Eugene Ostreicher, was cutting corners. New York City building inspectors’ warnings about shoddy construction went unheeded. Ostreicher and his son, Richie, were major contributors to then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign.

Giuliani’s chief of staff, Bruce Teitelbaum, a Jewish Republican, “was the major fund-raiser for Giuliani in the Hasidic communities.” The Hasidim, who fled Eastern Europe after the Holocaust, included Ostreicher, an immigrant from Romania. Teitelbaum, according to Jimmy Breslin’s brief but passionate account of the case, was “the connection, the pull, the clout, in the city administration ... there were no rules for a builder, particularly in Hasidic neighborhoods, other than putting up money on demand for politicians.”

Nor did Democrats look any better. Just down the street from the collapsed condos, another Hasidic sect--belying the otherworldliness implied by its black Old World garb--set up a phantom “university” in the ‘80s and bilked the federal government of $40 million in Pell grants. Some of the money was funneled to religious schools. Some went to the organizers’ bank accounts.

After a 1999 trial, four members of the sect went to prison but had their sentences commuted by President Clinton. The sect voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Rodham Clinton in her Senate race. This much--the celebrities, the scandals--we can imagine any competent reporter putting together. But Breslin does more. In 40 years as a syndicated columnist and as the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” and “I Don’t Want to Go to Jail,” he has shown a strong Populist bent. He’s a writer who would rather get out from behind his desk to mingle on the streets and in the saloons with ordinary people and hear their stories.

And so it is that “The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez” tells the story of the man whose death had previously been only a footnote: the Mexican construction worker. Breslin gives him back his name--Tomas Eduardo Daniel Gutierrez--and explains how he came to be lifting sacks of cement onto that third floor whose shaking, he’d confided in phone calls to the woman he loved, had frightened him for days.

Breslin visits Gutierrez’s birthplace, San Matias Cuatchatyotla, a dusty town near Puebla whose main industry is brickyards. Gutierrez started working there at age 4, lugging a single cement roofing slate at a time. Painfully shy, he never officially declared his feelings for teenage Silvia Tecpoyotti, whose own quest for “the Job” led her across the border to College Station, Texas, where she worked 65 hours a week at two restaurants, earning $420 (a rich person’s salary in Mexico) and thinking “it was glorious” until word of his death came.

Breslin interviews Guiterrez’s relatives and reminds us of how, to the Mexican poor, even substandard wages in the United States seem like a fortune. (Ostreicher was paying Gutierrez a third of union scale.) Breslin goes to the border and describes the flood of people trying to cross, the hardships they endure, the risks they run as stepped-up enforcement at urban checkpoints forces them into the desert.

Breslin weighs in on the immigration debate--squarely on the side of the immigrant. He scoffs at the government’s claims that it can stop the flood of people (much less the flood of drugs). “The Border Patrol,” he says, “is the most untruthful of government agencies after the White House.”

He fingers a central American hypocrisy: the “worship of commerce that piles money to the sky and makes all good people rich” accompanying “an older belief ... of the Puritans, who came to run the morals of a nation ... their teachings that dourness is good and laughter is bad still cause Washington to make the control of strangers of great importance. If they are not white, then they come from the devil.”

This isn’t impartial journalism, but it’s a precious kind that threatens to die out with Breslin’s generation. When only the celebrity chasers are left, who will tell of the next Eduardo Gutierrez--a young man whose life nobody bothers to protect because he’s “illegal” and brown-skinned, but who is “the most invaluable part of the economy of the world ... cheap labor”?