Just off Brighton Beach Avenue on 6th Street is where they moved Sammie’s things. Amongst the dozens of burning candles and brightly dyed flowers are a full bottle of Colt 45, a small bottle of vodka and a carton of Muscle Milk. A neon green poster-board is taped to the brick wall of Brighton Deli, with short messages scrawled on it like a page out of a yearbook: “RIP Sammy. U was the last one we expected. U was the golden child of all this mess.”
Just around the corner is the door to 607 Brighton Beach Avenue, where Samuel White was shot and killed by the police on September 12th. This is where Sammie’s memorial used to be. A few photos of him remain—olive skinned with buzzed hair, wearing a big, brown hooded fur coat. A sign used to hang here that read, “Fuck the pigs.”
Samuel, or Sammie, White was 20 years old. To the people who knew him, he was the least likely die in this way. They call him a good, sweet kid who stayed out of trouble. But after his death, the newspapers called him a cop-stabbing thug.
In a small storefront in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, a tiny television is tuned to ‘Judge Judy.’ The no-nonsense judge yells at the plaintiff from behind her desk in typical stern fashion, “She has to get a job! She’s LAZY!”
Behind a similarly large wooden desk—with the addition of a “herd” of decorative elephant figurines—sits Pat Singer, the founder and director of the Brighton Beach Neighborhood Association.
“She’s my idol,” Singer said of Judge Judy. “I like how she’s tough. I hate the court shows where they’re talking back to the judges.”
Pat Singer is an equally tough woman in a velour tracksuit, with short, fiery orange hair and shocking blue eye shadow. She started the BNA in 1977, when the neighborhood was, as she puts it, “going down the tubes.”
“There were problems with drugs, problems with prostitution,” Singer explained. So, after the twelfth mugging on her block, she gathered hundreds of residents to march in protest. “We circled, like covered wagons, and held traffic for four hours,” she said. “And being a drama queen, I played ‘Exodus’ over the loudspeakers.”
On a Monday evening in October, hundreds of elderly, Russian-speaking residents of Brighton Beach met under the crystal chandeliers of The National restaurant in support of their favorite 2009 mayoral candidate, Mike Bloomberg—or rather, “Mishka” Bloomberg.
Raisa Papernaya, in head-to-toe blue sequins, placed a Bloomberg pamphlet written in Russian on each table setting, next to lavish platters of beef tongue and pirozhki. She sees a lot to like in New York City’s current mayor. “Very business man. Very communication man,” she explained forcefully in a heavy Ukrainian accent. “Very handsome man!” she added, laughing. For Raisa and the other guests, his third consecutive run for mayor isn’t given a second thought. “Only Mike Bloomberg!” she boasted.
Bloomberg, whose parents are children of Russian immigrants, certainly has no shortage of volunteers and support in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach.
“I think a lot of people look at the mayor’s story and see the American dream,” said Brian Honan, director of Brooklyn field operations for the 2009 campaign. “It’s corny but it’s true!”
