Christopher Brodeur (Rudy's Heckler) - His Letters to the Editor + a few snippets of articles

Christopher Brodeur is the jerk who heckled Rudy at the 9/11 O-Mission hearing today. Here are some of his "letters to the editor" over the years -- and snippets of a few larger articles on the guy. You will find these quite revealing.

How can the City Council consider the proposed law that would permit police to confiscate bicycles if their owners are caught riding on a sidewalk ["City Targets Cyclists," Feb. 5]? It's completely unfair.

The pedestrians, the motor vehicles and the bicyclists in New York City are all aggressive and selfish. To crack down on the cyclists is very lopsided. New York Newsday portrays cyclists as sidewalk kamikazes and cited 358 pedestrian-cyclist accidents in 1991. That's misleading. What percentage of those 358 pedestrians were hit when they were in the street as opposed to on sidewalks? I bet about 85 to 90 percent! As a constant bicyclist in Manhattan, the only times I've ever nicked or hit a pedestrian were when they were in the street! And I do ride on the sidewalks often.

Why not crack down on the 75 percent of pedestrians who jaywalk? I have no problem with jaywalkers as long as they pay attention. I whisk past cars and pedestrians all the time, and the only ones who can't handle it are the minority of paranoid tourists and seniors. Most New Yorkers are accustomed to the frenetic pace of city life.

The bicyclists in this town are very responsible. We waste neither electricity for subways, nor fuel for automobiles. Yet we have fewer rights than anyone else. If your laws won't respect us, then how can we respect your laws?

If we deserve a $ 100 fine for being on a sidewalk, then pedestrians deserve a $ 100 fine for being in the street. Deal?

Also, can New York Newsday investigate why traffic cops seldom ticket the numerous buffoons who get caught with a red light while still in an intersection? These drivers are thoughtless and should pay for their stupidity.

The "Fume Busters" article in the Sept. 17 paper was sort of funny.

If the city wants to crack down on vehicles emitting huge clouds of pollutants, they do not need to waste money on infrared tests. That's silly.

All they need to do is look at every city-owned bus, which spews a bigger, blacker cloud than any other vehicle in NYC. As usual, the worst offender of laws is the city itself.

Police Commissioner William Bratton says the NYPD will take over traffic control in Manhattan soon, but I don't see how they'll be any less incompetent than the Department of Transportation.

I'm a bike messenger, and in four years of being on Manhattan streets I've never seen either department once ticket a single vehicle that blocked a crosswalk or intersection, though I have often seen both departments help screw up traffic. Just yesterday I saw a huge truck block a green light while a traffic cop was in the intersection directing traffic! I figure if we took him off the payroll, the truck still would've blocked the intersection. At least, if he'd ticketed the driver, he could maybe pay his own salary. But no such luck.

If Mayor Giuliani is truly interested in consolidating city services for efficiency, let him give a broom and dustpan to every beat cop and they can sweep up the mess the Sanitation Department fails to clean. Only then will cops start to ticket all the people who litter because they'd have to pick it up.

Wayne Brooks once again makes some pretty good arguments in defense of the NYPD ["Why Cops Don't Make Collars," New York Forum, Oct. 3]. Unfortunately, they're not always legitimate.

He gives reasons aplenty why 24.3 percent of cops made no arrests during the first seven months of 1994 and challenges the widespread belief that cops are lazy. But he leaves out the most obvious and sensible explanation: If you were paid $ 30,000 to risk your life or $ 30,000 NOT to risk your life, which would you choose? As long as police are unaccountable for their performance, why should they risk their necks?

Crime statistics are nonsense. I would expect them to decline every year because, after reporting a crime once, New Yorkers learn to never repeat the experience. Probably a good 50 percent of crime is never reported!

The fact is the police department is a failure. Most reported crime is never solved. I stopped reporting crime after several times during which the police made me feel lower than the criminal. To tell the sad truth, in this city, crooks do their job well; cops do the opposite.

A man who the police said had repeatedly called the Mayor's press office and threatened his aides has been ordered by a Manhattan criminal court judge to undergo a psychiatric examination.

The man, Christopher Brodeur, 29, has been charged with making a series of harassing telephone calls to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's office. According to prosecutors, Mr. Brodeur would call the office that deals with media inquiries and berate and threaten Colleen Roche, the Mayor's press secretary.

Mr. Brodeur is charged with aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor. His lawyers have objected to the order for a psychiatric exam, saying it is a tactic to allow prosecutors to hold Mr. Brodeur without bail.

The complaint filed by the police said that Ms. Roche told officers that Mr. Brodeur had called more than 80 times between May and August of last year. She reported that Mr. Brodeur screamed obscenities and made threats, saying, "You are Nazis; the Mayor should be executed," and "The taxpayers will do the firing squad to you people." Ms. Roche said Mr. Brodeur also sent her a postcard at City Hall expressing similar sentiments, and included his name and telephone number. Jack Deacy, the Mayor's deputy press secretary, said that because the criminal investigation was proceeding, the office could not comment.

Prosecutors said yesterday afternoon that the police had recordings of telephone calls made by Mr. Brodeur as well as copies of letters he had sent to City Hall.

Mr. Brodeur was arrested at his Lower East Side apartment on March 5. If convicted, he faces up to one year in jail. At the prosecutors' request, Criminal Court Judge John Moore ordered Mr. Brodeur to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. The purpose of such an examination is to determine whether a defendant understands the criminal charges against him and can participate in a criminal defense.

Defense lawyers have strenuously objected to the procedure, saying Mr. Brodeur is clearly capable of participating in his own defense. Yesterday, a state Supreme Court judge upheld Judge Moore's decision, and defense lawyers announced they would appeal to the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court.

Last month, a Queens man, Leonard Schneider, was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment after the police said he called a radio talk show and threatened to shoot the Rev. Al Sharpton, a mayoral candidate.

Unlike Mr. Brodeur, Mr. Schneider was released without bail. Wayne Brison, a spokesman for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, said that the reason was the different circumstances of the case. "The charges against Brodeur are based on more than 80 direct calls over a matter of months, while charges against Schneider are based on one telephone call to a radio show," Mr. Brison said.
--snip--

OUR CITY IS LED by a mayor some expect to discover wandering the halls of Creedmoor once he leaves office, so citizens have spent a lot of time this year discussing sanity. Specifically, the mayor believes that you have to be nuts not to adore him.

So in the future, perhaps everyone in New York City will be arrested. But the case of Christopher Brodeur, an odd fellow arrested for the fifth time this week for complaining about the mayor, needs further examination.

"I wish I really was insane, then maybe I could understand the mayor better," Brodeur said yesterday. "Rudy keeps having me arrested because I tell people how much I hate him. That makes the mayor nuttier than me."

Brodeur, 30, stands accused of aggravated harassment. He has been ordered by a court to leave the administration alone and has been found competent to stand trial. He admits calling City Hall about 200 times and demanding answers about city government. He faces a year in jail.

"I'm an annoyance, not a maniac killer," Brodeur said. He can be quite loud and cantankerous. He sees corruption in every corner and violations of civil liberty in every corner not that far from the truth, actually. Anyway, he was arrested last year, and a judge waiting to be reappointed by the mayor forbade him from making any contact with the mayor's press office. No one protects the city from the press office ranting, but that is another matter.

"Rudy keeps having me arrested for saying he's a Nazi, but doesn't that just prove he's a fascist?" asked Brodeur, a video artist who grew up in suburban Massachusetts and lives on the lower East Side.

A world-class phone pest and letter writer, Brodeur also is restrained from contacting the City Council anymore. When he showed up on the steps of City Hall with a bag over his head to announce he, too, was running for mayor, he was arrested. He recalls: "Every time I get arrested, some cop in Central Booking always asks, 'What did he do?' The arresting officer says, 'Oh, he's been harassing the mayor.' And the cops all yell: 'He did? Don't arrest him. Give him a medal.' "

The lower East Side folk-hero stuff started a couple of years ago when Brodeur, who was thrown out of high school for asking too many annoying questions, began to call the mayor's radio show. Brodeur has talked to the mayor on the air about nine times, but the court has banned that form of expression, too. Still, before he was cut off, Brodeur made Rudy look silly on any number of topics from bike lanes and Rollerblading to the mayoral salary and police corruption. Sometimes he uses made-up names to get by the screeners. My favorite call was when he compared the mayor to squatters who work but live rent-free.

"I always asked Rudy legitimate questions," Brodeur said. "In the end, Rudy would hang up on me and call me a creep, jerk, pervert and idiot. He would tell his audience: 'Oh, that's Christopher. He's a nut.' "

The mayor says Brodeur "is in need of treatment" and added, "If you talk to him the hundreds and hundreds of times he's called different members of my staff, threatened them, you realize this is a man with some very serious sickness."

Personally, I'm not comfortable around the guy, but I can't find anything he has done that isn't covered by free speech. The guy talks a lot and too fast. He used to call David Dinkins' office and tell staff members they were louts and that they'd eventually be run from office.

Rudy, incidentally, loves to call his own press office and berate people. Staffers joke about confusing the screamers the mayor and Brodeur.

The defendant says things like all politicians are liars and should rot in jail. Or be executed by the voters. Of course, they usually are on Election Day. The mayor complained loudly last year that Brodeur's $ 2,000 bail was too low, too. A judge, however, declined to set bail this week and freed him, noting, "The problem isn't that Brodeur won't come back to court. It's that he comes back to court too often."

The mayor would like to crush disagreement.

He tried to outlaw Mark Green with a Charter revision yesterday. Instead of allowing people to see Brodeur as a First Amendment case, which it is, City Hall spins him out as a stalker.

"They always claim I'm harassing and threatening the women in Rudy's press office because that sounds better," Brodeur said. "They can say, 'He is abusing women, this animal.' But when I call, I talk to machines, mostly. I want answers. They get mad sometimes. I tell them, 'Just a second, don't I pay your salary?' "

CHRISTOPHER Brodeur may be nutty but he's not a nut like Tim McVeigh or some other dangerous wack. The mayor's office has twisted a discussion of postal workers and the Atlanta bombing into a threat on City Hall. Every Brodeur transcript is rolled and twisted into a stick of dynamite.

"Rudy doesn't need a bunker to protect himself from me," Brodeur said. --snip--

One day after a jury acquitted him of charges that he repeatedly threatened Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's press secretary, Christopher Brodeur infuriated Mr. Giuliani yesterday by calling his weekly radio program and asking for an apology.

Mr. Brodeur identified himself as "James from Murray Hill," and he began the call by praising the city's handling of Tropical Storm Floyd. But then he turned combative, referring to a statement that Mr. Giuliani had made earlier in the program that members of the media should apologize for criticizing the city's new emergency crisis center.

"I agree with you that if the press ridiculed you and it turned out they were wrong, they should apologize," Mr. Brodeur said. "But you ridiculed me on the radio and you just lost in court, and are you going to apologize to me?"

The Mayor had no such intention.

"Get off the phone, you crazy nut!" Mr. Giuliani roared. "I don't like you. I think you're perverse. I think the jury made a terrible mistake in acquitting you. And leave the women who work in this office alone."

Mr. Brodeur, 31, was charged in 1997 with making a series of threatening phone calls to the Mayor's press office and in particular to Colleen Roche, Mr. Giuliani's press secretary at the time. His acquittal in Manhattan Criminal Court not only dismissed the charges, but lifted court orders that had barred him from calling City Hall.

But while Mr. Brodeur did not hesitate to call the radio program, on WABC-AM, Mr. Giuliani had the last word yesterday. On the program and again during an afternoon news conference, he attacked Mr. Brodeur for calling his press office "at all hours of the night" and leaving "really sick" messages that frightened his aides.

"I'm convinced that there is something seriously wrong with him," Mr. Giuliani said on the radio. "Because a normal person doesn't do this. You don't start harassing somebody on the telephone and get involved in this kind of sick, compulsive behavior."

In dozens of rambling, late-night phone messages, Mr. Brodeur had criticized, ridiculed and at times mocked and cursed the Mayor and his staff. But after watching videotapes of Mr. Brodeur's protests outside City Hall and hearing him testify in his own defense, the jurors decided on Thursday that his actions were not criminally threatening.

In the messages, Mr. Brodeur made statements such as, "You are Nazis; the Mayor should be executed," and "The taxpayers will do the firing squad to you people."

Mr. Giuliani criticized the jurors yesterday for not taking the charges against Mr. Brodeur seriously. Sometimes, he said, juries "become delighted with perversion or irrationality."

Mr. Brodeur said after the verdict that he planned to sue the city for engaging him in a two-and-a-half-year legal battle during which he spent 32 days in jail and underwent many psychiatric evaluations, all of which found him competent to stand trial. And yesterday, the none-too-timid Mayor encouraged him to go right ahead.

"If they weren't able to convict him in court, I'll do it myself in terms of a civil lawsuit," Mr. Giuliani said on the radio program. "Sue me for defamation; sue me for slander. I'll prove that he's engaging in conduct that is really, really sick conduct. And now, let's move on to Ben in Brooklyn." --snip--

Christopher Brodeur

Love child of David Broder.

"Get off the phone, you crazy nut!" Mr. Giuliani roared. "I don't like you. I think you're perverse. I think the jury made a terrible mistake in acquitting you. And leave the women who work in this office alone."

LOL! Go Giulianai!

" She reported that Mr. Brodeur screamed obscenities and made threats, saying, "You are Nazis; the Mayor should be executed,"

So why the heck did they let him in the hearings?!!!

I knew his name sounded familiar. I heard some of his phone calls on wabc years ago.

Frankly he fits right in with the jersey widows.

I may be old enough to be a gramma, but this morning, as I watched the proceedings on Fox, I truly wished I could be in New York so I could risk jail by socking that jerk in the face. I'm not normally a violent person, but this guy....!! He was not alone in the heckling. Does anyone know who the rest of them are? (I had to leave just after Rudy's testimony was over.)

His unrequited love for Rudy has driven him to extremes. If only he could fulfill his wish-- a tender kiss, a soft word-- then maybe he could drive the lucious Hizzoner from his tortured, fevered dreams....

12 posted on 05/19/2004 2:12:26 PM PDT by Tijeras_Slim (From each according to his inability, to each according to his misdeeds - DNC Motto)

The incompetentcy of this committee just continues. They moved the circus from DC to NYC. Keane is an idiot who likely can't even control his bowels, let alone the political hacks on this committee. Let them continue as they have. Most Americans already have written off these buffoons.

He was a bike messenger, then a video artist. Either one alone is bad enough, but to be both of those things...no wonder he turned out rotten.

He has some mighty interesting items on his campaign platform: Legalize suicide; Mandatory organ donation...

This guy is a whack.

I don't know. Maybe during the periods that he fails to take medication.

He has good points about the obvious: Jaywalkers that cause traffic problems, [most] complaints about Bratton,
fixing buses, and cops that are loathe to collect "evidence" are legitimate issues.

Does he also have this fetish with others that have been or is the mayor?

Or is it just Giuliani?

Maybe he has a "broken clock" type syndrome and he overall is really a whack?

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