By Doug Miller
People typically begin with, "This is all off the record," as if what they are about to say will shock. Then they follow with, "Did you know that she's a convicted felon?"
Omeara is the 5-foot-nothing proprietor of South Shore Realty and the building manager and leasing agent of the Sea Pointe Tower on the boardwalk. She is a leader of the Long Beach High Rise Association, and a ward heeler for the local Democrats. She is an Orthodox Jew who says she donated the $500 she won on the Super Bowl to the Mesivta of Long Beach. She can inspire the type of hateful hyperbole usually reserved for the most divisive of public people.
One long-time ally of hers asked if this story would be a "hatchet job." When the ally was told no, the follow-up was, "Why not?"
In interviews, nearly every story Omeara tells has an angle that is so fantastic that it inspires head-scratching. An innocuous example: Her street nickname is "Chickie." When asked where it came from, she replied, "From when I was in Roller Derby. The New York Chiefs? You don't remember?"
Omeara has made herself a very public person again lately, railing against development projects in Long Beach: first the Atlantic Hotel refitting, then the Jackson Hotel mercantile permit applications, and most recently the Brighton Hotel sale. She has stood up at Zoning Board hearings to denounce these projects by insulting just about everybody involved. She has bought large, expensive ads in the Herald promoting her views - ads that were published only after extensive scrutiny by the paper's legal staff.
The ads contained the same blunt language usually used by people describing her.
So this is your life, Ellen Omeara.
The public-record is out there. Yes, she is a felon, convicted in the early 1970s of selling stolen heavy construction equipment. She wasn't the one with the ski mask and gloves and skeleton keys. She was the one working the phones looking to move the stuff. An organizer, even then. It cost her 46 months in Bedford Hills.
She likes to talk about her family. Not her current family in the various shuls in her district, but her original family, from Astoria, Queens. She's the daughter of an Irishman named O'Meara and a grand-niece of the gangster Vito Genovese. When her parents split she was sent away to Sacred Heart Academy in Sag Harbor. The result of that cloistered adolescence was that when she came home during holidays, her cousins called her a hick.
"I was a little square," Omeara concedes.
So with something to prove, she said, she went to work for a bookie relative, learning the business. She boasts today about the various CEOs who would call her from the beach in the Hamptons. She loved it. It wasn't a perfect racket, since by her estimate she was arrested 20 times, but she beat them all. She dated gangsters, lots of them, and today she name-drops by insisting the names are too big to drop. She describes them instead by their affiliation, as in "He was a Bonanno guy." She only occasionally kept up with church, she said, and went to the next parish over for confession.
'An incredibly hopeful heart'
Eventually it came to an end. Omeara was rounded up with 10 guys involved in the heavy-equipment ring. In the holding cell, each of them waited to be released, one at a time. Her name was never called. A man who worked for her turned state's evidence, she said, and she was off to prison.
She said she was given an opportunity to take classes while in prison with West Publishing, a publisher of law books, and began to help fellow inmates. She said her work caught the eye of Ed Lowe, then a Newsday columnist, who wrote a column about her good works that led to a job with state Sen. Karen Burstein.
When told this version of events, Burstein muttered, "Everyone wants to rewrite history ...
"I was teaching at Hofstra Law, and a student did a piece about women in prison that included her," she said. "Obviously we saw that she was a special woman."
When Omeara's prison term was up, Burstein said, she hired Omeara to work for her in Albany. Burstein was on the Crime and Corrections committee, and her crusade was battered women. Her office fielded pleas for clemency from women in prison, and she put Omeara in charge of weeding out the liars from the true victims. "She was amazingly good at it," Burstein said, "because she knew every scam in the book and had an incredibly hopeful heart."
When Burstein left the Senate, Omeara came to Long Beach and got involved with the Democratic party. In the mid-1980s she was elected a member of the Nassau County Democratic Committee. Her district was to include many of the high-rises along the beach, and the large Orthodox Jewish community behind them. She went to work for the city's supervisor, Hannah Komanoff, who she said asked her to drive her each week to Temple Israel.
Komanoff, along with Burstein, told Omeara they knew she was still taking bets, and still dating gangsters. "Why don't you go back to church?" she said they asked her. She refused. They had her talk to the rabbi. "He said 'You do so much for the temple, why don't you consider joining?'"
Omeara said she started going occasionally, then sat in on some classes, then started observing the Jewish holidays. Her conversion was gradual, and didn't take the first time. She kept driving on the Sabbath, she said, and taking bets. And there was the time she told a rabbi he'd look cute without a beard and invited his sons to watch the Pro Bowl with her in her office.
It was time to get serious, they said. She was given a book, "This is My God, the Jewish Way of Life" by Herman Wouk, and she said it made a difference. She went through a formal conversion, joined Young Israel in Long Beach and adopted the Orthodox as her family. She studied halacha.
No more "Conserva-dox" practices, she said. She dropped the apostrophe from her name, stopped driving on Saturday and retired (again) from bookmaking. Just the occasional hundred-timer on the Super Bowl.
"It was seven points. I mean, come on..." she said.
'I register all their boys'
"[Omeara] had a lot to do with the school board election I was in," says Jannine Laskas. It was 2000, and there were three candidates for two spots: Laskas, a Point Lookout native whose family owned Laskas Flowers on West Park Avenue, and two incumbents whose standing as Democrats was unimpeachable.
"I ran on the fact that as a parent, I thought I could bring something good to the table," Laskas recalled. "It was sad to see what [Omeara] would do to these people in the Atlantic, the Brighton, the Grandell. I was amazed just how far some people would go to bring in a vote."
Of course, all is fair in love and politics, but Laskas called Omeara's handling of the senior citizens "abusive." Omeara doesn't deny that she worked the nursing homes hard for votes, in that election and several others.
Through the work of the Long Beach League of Women Voters, it came to light that Omeara had given a bag of absentee ballots from the adult homes in her district to the clerk hours after the deadline. The clerk retired as a result, according to League President Estelle Sealine, but Omeara was not disciplined.
New York State law was changed as a result of the Laskas fracas. Now all absentee ballots at nursing homes must be filled out under Board of Elections supervision.
Of course, the obvious question is what Democratic operatives like Omeara were doing working school-board elections, which are supposed to be strictly nonpartisan. The Democrats were led at the time by Eugene Cammarato, who insisted that his organization was not involved in that or any other school election. He readily concedes that he relied on Omeara as his liaison to the Orthodox community, but denied any knowledge of her work in the nursing homes.
"Of course they're saying she fixed elections, which she didn't," Cammarato said. "Just like they say I'm a thug. People talk and word gets out on everything. ... She never fixed an election. She may have told people she fixed an election ... but I have never been involved in a school board race. Regardless of what Jannine said."
Meanwhile, Omeara's work with and for the Orthodox community as a whole, and for the Mesivta - an all-boys Orthodox school - in particular has helped keep the Orthodox community voting as a bloc. "Any community is important," Cammarato said. "But that community is growing and has been growing. They support the people who work for and support them. Generally, over the years, they've been very supportive of the Democrats."
There have been exceptions. The Orthodox community has rejected Hillary Clinton ever since an Associated Press photo emerged of her giving a friendly kiss to Yasir Arafat's wife. Omeara's self-described tepid support for the Democrats in the 2003 city council election, she said, helped keep the Orthodox away in droves.
Meanwhile, as district leader, she said that among her responsibilities is making sure the mesivta and the Orthodox community are treated fairly. In exchange, she said, "I register all their boys."
In recent years, when Burstein has been a two-time candidate for New York's attorney general, Omeara has pitched in. In 1998, when Burstein lost to Dennis Vacco, a New York Post article was circulated by her opponents saying Burstein had a Mafia moll - Omeara - working on the campaign. Asked about that article, Omeara boasted that it helped Burstein win Long Beach's West End. "They love gangsters there," she said.
But on the issue of the Atlantic Hotel, Omeara has maintained that she got involved because she thought the issue was bad for the high-rise community.
Meanwhile, a partner of hers, Norman Toporovsky, was a spurned potential buyer of the property in a deal that would have been worth $100,000 to Omeara's South Shore Realty had it gone through. Toporovsky is suing the City of Long Beach and the Atlantic Hotel's owner in an article 78 procedure to overturn the variances that were granted to the eventual buyer, David Shokrian and Sun America Development. That case is pending.
Omeara said she had no financial stake in the deal.
Like just about every other marginalized politico in the city, Omeara claims she supported the coalition City Council candidates - Mona Goodman, Tom Sofield Jr. and James Hennessy - in the 2003 council election. If true - and the coalition members said they doubt it is - then it is a friendship that has since been scotched. To wit: Goodman has publicly called Omeara the "mistress of mudslinging." Omeara, in her typical fashion, replied with a full-page ad in the Herald that said the three coalition council members make "the former city fathers look like priests - and the five families like saints."
Goodman said she had trouble enjoying the irony of being compared to Mafiosi by a reformed gangster. "I take terrible exception to the reference to the Mafia," she said. "I'm not usually at a loss for words ... but I'm really at a loss for words."
Comments on this story? DMiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.
