A SCHMEER ON DEAR

Not long ago, Brooklyn judge Gerald Garson began serving time for bribery. While Garson was marching off, Taxi and Limousine commissioner, Noach Dear was marching on.
On that is in his quest to be elected to a Brooklyn judgeship. With that election looming ever closer, one needs to take a look at Noach's checkered past. That does not include cabs with the same adjective.

Let's begin in the late 1980s, when then-Councilman Dear founded and ran a purported charity called Save Soviet Jewry. The state attorney general investigated and determined that Dear was improperly spending the charity's money on himself, for example, by flying himself and his young daughter to the Soviet Union. Dear said it was not a vacation and in fact they were going to save Jews from the Communists, but it was unclear how his daughter might do that, so not many people believed him. The charity also paid for lots of electronic equipment that was apparently kept in Dear's house on East 7th Street off Avenue I.

Dear insisted he'd done nothing wrong, but ultimately had to dig into his pockets to settle the case. Dear nearly lost his 1991 reelection bid to Robert Miller as a result of that scandal. This was all documented in the Bay News, archived at the Kingsborough Community College.

Dear's latest problem, rehashed by the Village Voice in its July 20 issue, involves $40,000 from 47 sequentially numbered money orders deposited into his congressional campaign fund. The Federal Election Commission, noticing the similar handwriting on the money orders, interviewed the 47 purported donors, who said they'd given nothing to the campaign. Auditors found two of Dear's campaign staffers had written the money orders, so the FEC filed a complaint in civil court. The FEC also found that Dear's campaign accepted $564,000 over the legal limit in the process of finishing third in the 1998 race won by Rep. Anthony Weiner.

The commission demanded repayment, and in 1999 Dear's committee filed papers saying it had refunded more than $300,000. But it hadn't, according to the FEC, which filed another complaint in June 2003 that Dear still owed more than $200,000 in refunds. It appears that Dear will escape with virtually no punishment other than bad publicity. While his campaign treasurer agreed to fork over $45,000 to close the book, Dear will only have to cough up what's left in two old campaign funds-all of $710, the Voice reported. Why doesn't the FEC garnish some of the $300,000 Dear has raised to run? It can't. The money's in a state campaign fund, out of the feds' reach (and also out of reach of the folks owed $148,000 by Dear's congressional fund.

Not only is Noach lousy at math, but equally challenged with spelling. The following is an excerpt from a Daily News article.

"As I wrote in my column today, Noach Dear's name-change (to "Noah," and only for mailings directed at black people) may be the least dishonest element of his campaign for State Senate.
I got this mailer from a couple I know -- he has an identifiably Jewish name, she doesn't -- who have been getting both the Yiddish-heavy Jewish mail from "Noach", all about funding Yeshivas, and the "Noah" mail, which features almost exclusively black faces."

YFP advises readers....."judge Noach before he judges you"