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PHIL REISMAN

Phil Reisman: Ernie Davis, the latest pol to stumble and fall

Phil Reisman
preisman@lohud.com

Federal prosecutors are like Jack Russell terriers. Once they get hold of your ankle, they don't let go.

Phil Reisman

Mount Vernon Mayor Ernie Davis has been under investigation forever, or so it sometimes appears.

"I think everybody seems to be after me," he told an interviewer last year.

However, it was never entirely clear what the investigators were after — whether it had to do with a shady, but modest, emergency relief fund Davis set up or if it concerned his myriad real estate holdings in New York, Florida and North Carolina.

"This is over and above," he told Bill O'Shaughnessy in a WVOX radio interview in 2013. "I mean, you would think I killed somebody the way they've gone through my properties."

Davis felt persecuted and hounded. He choked back tears and said that he was a victim of racism.

Asked if he was an honest man, he replied, "Oh … absolutely."

Mount Vernon Mayor Ernie Davis is pictured in this file photo speaking at Mount Vernon High School's graduation ceremony at the Westchester County Center in White Plains in June 2014.

"Nobody can tell you I ever stole anything from them," he said. "Nobody can tell you they paid me for all of this. But the other thing that is paramount … I am a black man. And I am popular in New York state among mayors. People who are in those positions like to bring down politicians because that elevates them."

Davis was roundly criticized for throwing down the race card — especially since he was just one on a long list of popular Westchester and Putnam county politicians who got caught in the cross hairs of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

A few years ago, at a press conference in Yonkers, Bharara pledged he was going to clean up the suburbs and it turns out he meant it. Jail sentences were meted out to Vinnie Leibell and Nick Spano, both of whom had once been powerful Republican state senators. Sandy Annabi, a Yonkers city councilwoman, is still doing time in federal prison for taking bribes in the Ridge Hill development scandal, as is Zehy Jereis, a former chairman of the Yonkers city GOP and a past flunky for the aforementioned Spano.

Last month, the U.S. Attorney's Office indicted Sam Zherka, a Manhattan strip club owner and publisher of a Westchester County weekly newspaper, on charges he falsified loan applications with three banks. Zherka, a self-styled maverick who loved to taunt politicians (including Davis), was a player in the county's Independence Party.

The accumulation of alleged and convicted rogues from the malls, sylvan lawns and cul-de-sacs of suburbia has earned Bharara a sobriquet: the Sheriff of Main Street.

And now, the latest entry on the court docket is Ernie Davis, who, at the moment, must feel every year of his age, which is 76. He claimed to be an honest man, but on Tuesday he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges that he failed to file corporate and personal income taxes.

One of the charges concerns a building at 14-16 Sanford Blvd. in Mount Vernon that he sold in 2003, but didn't report to the Internal Revenue Service. The other charge stems from his having not filed a federal income tax return in 2011.

These are far from capital offenses. And it's not as if Davis was directly stealing from the taxpayers of Mount Vernon. But everybody has to grit their teeth and pay their bills to Uncle Sam — and Davis screwed that up.

As Councilman Rich Thomas said Tuesday, "It is a very troubling breach of public trust and the people of Mount Vernon deserve better."

Davis is a proud man of great endurance who has made a number of personal and political comebacks in his life. He grew up in the segregated South, so he is eminently qualified to talk about the scourge of racism.

He once made an unforgettable observation on the subject.

"Human life started in Africa," he told me. "Everybody is African. You might be light-skinned now, but a long time ago, you were not white-skinned, brother."

That was classic Ernie Davis.

But in the radio interview from a year ago, he called out the feds, one of them by name — Perry Carbone. He was only a target, he repeatedly claimed, because he was African-American — as if racism played a role in his own failure to file a 1040 form.

"I consider them evil people," Davis said.

That line alone probably tightened their grip on the besieged mayor. It couldn't have helped.