Meade Esposito

His grandfather came to America from Italy in 1885.

His father followed his grandfather in 1900 and arrived in America at the age of 18.

Giuseppe became a saloon owner.

Meade lived with his two sisters above the saloon and claimed to have started working as a child.

Esposito grew up in Brownsville (then a predominately Jewish neighborhood with smaller Irish and Italian populations) and received his nickname "Meade" during elementary school.

He briefly attended Park Slope's Manual Training High School, now known as the John Jay Educational Campus, but dropped out at the age of 14.

He married at the age of 18 and became a father by 19.

Despite his dearth of formal education, colleagues lauded Esposito as a keen autodidact "who read everything from comic books to Plato."

After dropping out of school, Esposito found employment at an insurance business (a field he would return to throughout his career) operated by Jim Powers, a former United States Marshal and local Democratic leader.

Amadeo "Meade" Esposito was born in the subsection of Ocean Hill, Brooklyn (alternatively characterized as part of Bedford-Stuyvesant or Brownsville) in 1907.

He was the son of Giuseppe and Felicia Esposito.

There, Esposito met Hyman Schorenstein, another Brooklyn Democratic leader who went on to secure the presidential nomination for Al Smith at the party's 1928 Democratic National Convention.

Although Schorenstein was illiterate, his blunt, transactional management style would profoundly influence Esposito.

At the age of 18, Esposito "got a couple of dozen of the guys together" and started the Progressive Democratic Club on Fulton Street.

During the Great Depression and the early postwar era, he primarily worked as a beer salesman and bail bondsman.

He met many of his future connections through the latter business.

Esposito cultivated ethnic and community ties that encouraged more Italian Americans to move into politics.

Amid redlining and white flight-driven demographic shifts in Ocean Hill-Brownsville and adjacent East New York throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Esposito's predominantly Italian and Jewish base gradually migrated to southeastern Brooklyn's semi-suburban belt of Canarsie, Flatlands and Mill Basin, culminating in the formation of the gerrymandered 39th Assembly District to represent these constituencies in 1972.

He launched the political career of prominent Brownsville-based haberdasher Abe Stark (who served as New York City Council President from 1954 to 1961 and Borough President of Brooklyn from 1962 to 1970) and assisted in electing longtime New York State Assembly member Alfred Lama, best known for co-founding the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program.

As early as 1958, Esposito ran for Democratic district leader in Canarsie on a ticket with co‐leader candidate Shirley Weiner.

Although they lost by 200 votes, Esposito was ultimately elected to the post in 1960 after being endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman.

During this period, his influence continued to grow in tandem with the Canarsie-based Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, which served as his primary political base for the remainder of his career.

Throughout the 1960s, Esposito began to personally select many judges and politicians in Brooklyn.

From 1960 to 1970, he also served as assistant vice president of the Kings Lafayette Bank (which was subsumed by the Edmond Safra-led Republic New York in 1966) for an indeterminate period of time "despite no apparent experience" in the profession.

Jack Newfield would later report that Esposito sought the position to distance himself from his bondsman career to better ensure his political ascension, while "the single biggest depositor in the bank" during his incumbency "was the [Anthony Scotto-affiliated International Longshoremen's Association], which many law enforcement agencies believe is Mafia-dominated [...] It is suspected that the ILA used its influence to get Esposito the job."

Esposito served as chairman of the Kings County Democratic Committee from 1969 to 1984.

As a leader, he was known as a political fixer, and honored loyalty, running a citywide patronage system involving gratuity exchanges that ultimately resulted in multiple municipal corruption scandals.

Although he ensconced himself in the tradition of urban "Regular Democrat" machine politics, Esposito personally identified as a political liberal in marked contrast to many of his successors, frequently speaking of his admiration for George McGovern (whom he supported at great political risk in the 1972 United States presidential election) and Eleanor Roosevelt.

He also was a vociferous supporter of New York City's first (and ultimately unsuccessful) LGBT rights bill.

As the apex of his power coincided with historic population declines in New York stemming from decades-long white flight, Esposito moved beyond his white ethnic base in southeastern Brooklyn to collaborate with leaders of nascent African American and Hispanic and Latino American communities throughout the borough, such as City Councilman Samuel D. Wright and his successor, Enoch H. Williams.

Following the election of Ed Koch to the mayoralty in 1977 (an outcome facilitated by Esposito's support, which was obscured by mutual agreement due to Koch's political origins in the postwar, Manhattan-based "Reform Democrat" movement), Esposito emerged as New York City's paramount political leader and de facto shadow mayor, with a multiracial sphere of influence that encompassed such disparate figures as Bronx political leaders Stanley M. Friedman, Stanley Simon and Ramon S. Velez; Brooklyn Assemblymen Stanley Fink (who also served as Speaker of the New York State Assembly at the peak of Esposito's influence) and Anthony J. Genovesi; Queens Borough President Donald Manes; Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden; Brooklyn Representatives Shirley Chisholm, Leo C. Zeferetti and Fred Richmond; conservative fixer Roy Cohn; real estate developers Fred and Donald Trump (the latter would ultimately serve as the 45th President of the United States from 2017 to 2021); and American Mafia leaders Anthony Scotto and Paul Vario.

Critics called him a "medieval king holding court with his barons by sections of the press".

By the early 1980s, several Brooklyn-based elected officials with national ambitions—most notably Kings County District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, liberal internationalist Representative Steve Solarz and future Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—had either directly repudiated or distanced themselves from Esposito's influence, although Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett reported that Schumer met publicly with Esposito for lunch on at least one occasion.

In 1983, investigations into his activities mounted; this, along with a thwarted leadership challenge from erstwhile protege Genovesi (who Esposito believed had been "openly salivating" for his departure ) would prompt his retirement in January 1984.

Three years later, he was convicted of giving an illegal gratuity in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, having given Bronx Representative Mario Biaggi a spa vacation in Florida.

As a result of this and related scandals (including Manes' suicide and Friedman's conviction on federal corruption charges) amid the political emergence of reform-minded rivals David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, the Esposito machine effectively collapsed.

During this period, several fledgling African American politicians also withdrew their support, precipitating the 1990 election of Clarence Norman Jr.. as county chairman of what had momentarily descended into a "largely vestigial structure".

Esposito was respected and feared for his street-style management, intimidation tactics and criminal connections.

He became known for running politics similar to a junket.

Amadeo Henry "Meade" Esposito (1907 – September 3, 1993) was an American politician who was a Brooklyn Democratic leader and political boss.