BAD RAP FOR DRUG LAW REFORM?

So what went wrong in Albany recently that once again stymied reform
of the Rockefeller drug laws?

"I don't know, but it's terribly disappointing," says former State
Supreme Court Justice Jerome Marks, who has been battling the
dysfunctional Legislature for years trying to get the onerous laws
defeated.

Before becoming a judge, Marks was an assemblyman from the Lower East
Side in the 1960s.

"Shelly Silver now sits in the seat I once held," Marks says of the
Assembly speaker, one of the three men in a tub - the other two are
Gov. George Pataki and Senate Majority Leader Speaker Joseph Bruno -
who rule Albany.

But it was four men in a tub recently when multi-millionaire rap
producer Russell Simmons was invited by Pataki to a seven-hour meeting
behind closed doors that almost led to fisticuffs between former boxer
Bruno and Simmons when Bruno wanted to leave the meeting. The men were
trying to hammer out a compromise to take to the floors of the Senate
and the Assembly that would either revoke or reform the Rockefeller
drug laws, which went into effect in 1973.

It was one of the zanier moments for a politically dysfunctional body.
Here was a wealthy rap celebrity getting red carpet treatment while
Queens Assemb. Jeffrion Aubry, who wasn't invited into the meeting,
had to cool his heels.

Even more galling for Aubry is the fact that he has put in years
leading a movement to reform the drug laws, which give out ludicrous
sentences to low-level drug offenders. More than 15,000 of them are in
prisons today and each one costs the state $32,000 a year.

"I though we might have had a better chance this year than before
because of the fact that the economy is bad and the state has a huge
deficit," said Marks, "but I was wrong."

Aubry wasn't very happy either. He is a respected Queens politician, a
Democrat who represents a district that includes East Elmhurst and
Corona. He was elected in 1992 to replace Helen Marshall. She gave up
her seat to run for City Council and was elected Queens Borough
President in November 2001. "Yes, I am upset about this," he said in
an interview with me a few days ago.

"When Russell came out of that seven-hour-long meeting, he told me he
thought he had a deal. But I didn't think he did," says Aubry, who
knows the Alice-in-Wonderland aspects of the Legislature all too well.

"Those people [Pataki, Bruno, Simmons and Silver] were in that room
too long, and when they came out about 1 a.m. ... they walked out
separately. That's not what people do when they have a deal. They come
out together and pose for victory pictures."

He was right and Simmons was wrong. The so-called deal was dead even
before dawn broke the next day.

Simmons has made millions in the rap industry and is now trying hard
to become a political presence along the lines of Bono, the Irish
rocker nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and who is on a first-name
basis with former President Bill Clinton, and high-ranking members of
the Bush administration. Bono has for years worked to try to convince
the well-off nations to cancel the debts owed them by poorer countries.

Lately, Simmons has been working with Andrew Cuomo, son of former Gov.
Mario Cuomo and a former candidate for governor in the Democratic
primary, at rallies where the issue is how to alleviate the stiff
sentences handed out by judges whose hands are tied with mandatory
minimums. Many of the judges have told me that they don't think it's
right to take discretionary sentencing out of their hands.

Aubry has introduced legislation over the years to reform the
Rockefeller drug laws, but a Democrat facing a Republican Senate and a
Republican governor is generally an unrequited supplicant in Albany.

Simmons has been pictured as a babe in the political woods. On
Wednesday, I talked to David Grandeau, executive director of the New
York State Lobbying Commission, who is investigating to see if the
lobbying activities of Simmons and other groups violated state laws.

"We welcome people of means getting involved in political issues, but
we have to make sure they are playing by the rules," said Grandeau,
who added that that thus far he has not gotten much cooperation from
Simmons. Grandeau says there are fines of up to $75,000 involved as
well as jail time for lobbying without registering with the state.

Aubry sounded discouraged by the continuing deadlock on reform of the
drug laws when I talked to him. He also felt there was a chance that
the laws could be softened if not revoked.

"What next?" I ask him.

"I don't know," he said. "But it may be that we will have to wait
until a new governor is elected before we get something done."

That's not good news for the thousands of people in jail, mostly
poor, blacks and Hispanics locked in upstate prisons.

"But it's good news for the economy upstate," Marks said, "because
workers are needed to staff the prisons where drug offenders are a big
part of the population."