Justice served

A half-dozen suburban teenagers decide to go ‘Mexican-hopping’ on weekend evening, by which they mean hunting for Hispanic dishwashers to beat up. They hit upon Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, who unexpectedly fights back. One of the marauding kids pulls a knife and stabs him. He dies.

After a rash of disturbing verdicts that emboldened a racist undercurrent in our allegedly pluralistic city, such as the ‘oops!-we-accidentally-shot-him-50 times’ Sean Bell case involving NYPD officers and the lesser-known John White conviction in Port Jefferson, the jury did the right thing in convicting Jeffrey Conroy, 19, of manslaughter as a hate crime. He’s facing a sentence of 8 to 25 years, long enough perhaps to think about what caused him and his buddies to turn into racist thugs.

Here’s an idea for Conroy to consider: Steven Levy, former Suffolk Couty supervisor who just left the Democratic Party so that he could run against Mario Cuomo for governor. Levy is now a credible Republican because he has spent the last decade immigrant-bashing and pandering to the worst instincts of his suburban constituents.

Levy’s district includes the notorious Farmingville, subject of a devastating PBS Point of View program that meticulously shows how the community’s upheaval over the sudden influx of Latino workers was pumped up into a racist backlash. The documentary ends with the inevitable attempted murder of two Mexicans chosen at random—that was in 2002 when Jeffrey Conroy was 11.

Levy knew a winning political posture and continued to throw red meat at his white majority even after the Lucero crime, which he downplayed as unimportant. He continues to crack racist jokes about immigrants and encourages county cops to act as immigration agents.

Given the Arizona legislature’s recent descent into overt racial profiling despite the state’s continued dependence on the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor, it’s no wonder that Levy would be a credible Republican candidate this year. But the Republicans will pay a long-term price for embracing the latest version of Orville Faubus trying to keep ‘those people’ out of Little Rock High School.

It was reassuring to see the mostly white jury reach a fair verdict, endorsing the obvious hate crime aspect but refusing to convict Conroy for murder since it wasn’t clear that he meant to kill. That won’t bring Marcelo Lucero back, but it’s a reminder that the Hispanic population of Long Island will soon become middle-class Americans that can’t be so easily hounded through the streets.

Meanwhile, Republicans thinking of climbing on the Levy bandwagon should think about whether they want to be remembered as modern Klansmen in white hoods.