Boss of the Beach

the beach, get a tan, talk to girls.” Braverman is now preparing a civil suit against the city under the New York Child Victims Act, signed into law last year, which extends the statute of limitations for sex crimes.

In interviews with more than two dozen lifeguards, none ever suggested Stein had been sexually inappropriate. “His thing is about power, being in control,” one said. “Fucking with people’s lives. I think he gets off on that.”

In retrospect, Stein and Janet Fash had always been on a collision course. Over the decades, she grew angry as bodies washed up. Her own lieutenant was unqualified, she says, but loyal to Stein. September 2, 2004, was Fash’s day off. That afternoon, a rip current sucked 17-year-old Mahin Iqbal out to sea; his body surfaced two days later. An investigator determined that Fash’s lieutenant had deployed too few lifeguards when Iqbal drowned. Fash raged at Sher and demanded he give her inept subordinate a job at an indoor pool and “get her the fuck out of here.” Sher complied, in part: He rewarded the subordinate with a year-round job, though he still permitted her to work the beach during the summer.

Fash’s breaking point came in 2006. Rockaway parents had started a program to train teens for lifeguard jobs, and on swim-test day, 19 of 20 failed, despite their coach having regularly timed them passing. Fash was outraged. The program, she suspected, constituted a threat to Stein’s need for total control.

So she started making noise. She met with Community Board 14, which covers Rockaway Beach. Residents were angry— about beach closures, too few lifeguards, and now their kids’ being failed on the test. They set up an ad hoc committee and pestered the City Council. In 2007, Oliver Koppell, a city councilman from the Bronx, began to scrutinize the lifeguard program after hearing Fash’s concerns. “The whole thing was controlled by Stein, and Parks commissioners ceded control to him,” says Koppell, who had himself worked as a lifeguard at Orchard Beach for a summer in the late 1950s. “We broke into his universe.” But after concluding oversight hearings and a tour of the West 59th Street pool, he was content that the lifeguard program had made adequate reforms. He moved on.

Stein retaliated by sending Fash half as many lifeguards. He wanted to make her anxious that someone would drown, she alleges. She pressed on, testifying at a City Council oversight hearing. But Liam Kavanagh, who oversees the lifeguard program for the Parks Department, wasn’t interested in Fash’s allegations of favoritism and chronic safety lapses. He declined to hire an independent monitor, he told the Times, “for a couple of unsubstantiated rumors.”

Kavanagh has consistently defended Stein and Sher to the City Council and the press. “All of the indicators are positive,” he says. “There are some terrific people who run different aspects of the program year in and year out.” Former Parks officials heap praise on Kavanagh, calling him a squeakyclean product of Catholic schools whose 39 years of experience make him indispensable. But others argue that his longevity has become a liability; so many misdeeds have occurred on his watch that his legacy is now tied to Stein’s. Kavanagh did acknowledge that Stein’s dual roles in the union and Parks Department have been discussed. “It has come up. We have looked into it. No one brings up, despite concrete examples, how that comes in or how that affects the operation. I don’t know of any specifics,” he says.

The Parks Department declined to make Stein or Sher available for comment. “Parks, like society, has evolved and we take all allegations of misconduct, particularly any reports of sexual harassment, very seriously,” said a Parks Department spokesperson, Meghan Lalor, in a written statement. “We require our lifeguards to take sexual harassment training annually and investigate everything that is brought to our attention and discipline accordingly.” When pressed on the myriad allegations in this story, she objected only to Fash’s claim that Stein provided her with too few lifeguards.

For two decades, Stein has been careful to curate Kavanagh’s understanding of the lifeguard program. One veteran pool supervisor says that, several times a year, Marty Kravitz, the Manhattan borough coordinator, calls to warn him that Kavanagh is making rounds in the area. “Call me as soon as he leaves,” Kravitz would say and later demand a detailed report on what they discussed. Stein need not worry, the supervisor adds. Every year, he complains about the same broken shower, every year Kavanagh jots down notes, and every year it goes unfixed. “Nothing ever changes,” he says.

In 2013, after Hurricane Sandy, Stein moved Fash to Beach 32nd Street, the same distant post to which Joe McManus had been isolated. The shack was her Elba, she joked.

Stein’s patronage machine kept his lieutenants well fed. Between 2008 and 2019, Kravitz, the Manhattan borough coordinator, saw his salary jump 60 percent to $168,362 a year. Allyson Jerrahian, a secretary at the lifeguard school, saw an increase of 61 percent to $141,261. For those without high-school diplomas, a year-round pool job was a ticket to the middle class. “You give someone with no degree a $65,000 job,” says Edwin Agramonte, a 47-year-old veteran lifeguard. “That’s real power.”

Stein’s own lifeguard compensation hit $175,463 in 2019, plus tens of thousands more in union pay from DC 37. He lived well: He drove a late-model Mercedes-Benz, had a vintage Jaguar XJS, and vacationed in Mexico. (By comparison, the lifeguard chief in San Diego, a highly demanding, yearround post, earned $152,924 in 2019.)

The parties and the impunity continued. In 2009, Post reporters caught on-duty lifeguards wearing headphones and “canoodling” with women and crates of Bud Lime stacked outside the Orchard Beach shack. “All that’s missing are the Greek letters,” the Post wrote. A few days later, lifeguard Luis Peralta, 25, was arrested for nearly drowning a teenager who had disobeyed his warning to stay out of a pool during cleaning. Peralta was rehired the next summer.

On the evening of July 4, 2013, Francisco Lorenzo, a 39-year-old chief lifeguard, organized a party in the Bronx. He charged admission and admitted minors. Security footage captured dancing, drinking, and drugs. The Parks Department demoted two supervisors and transferred four others. Lorenzo, meanwhile, lied to Parks investigators and showed no remorse for throwing the party, according to legal documents. An arbitrator let Lorenzo keep his job, and the lifeguard union later fended off a city lawsuit that again sought to terminate him. In 2017, after police arrested Lorenzo for molesting a male subordinate at a pool on East 23rd Street, he finally hung up his whistle.

Between 2011 and 2013, 11 people drowned at pools and beaches with lifeguards on duty. In July 2011, Jonathan Proce and Bohdan Vitenko, both 21, were practicing breath-holding techniques at Lyons Pool on Staten Island in preparation for military basic training. They blacked out underwater. Three fewer lifeguards were working than required by the city’s Health Code, and a supervisor wasn’t on duty. When lifeguards finally pulled them out, they couldn’t find the pool’s defibrillator. Vitenko died that

morning, and Proce died in the hospital four days later. Their families sued and were eventually awarded $2.1 million.

Lifeguards who complained about lax safety standards were targeted. On Labor Day 2015, Barbara Torres, a supervisor at Thomas Jefferson Pool in East Harlem, ordered lifeguards not to drink on duty. After lunch, red Solo cups began appearing. Torres called her boss, and he sent home lifeguard Felix Velez. Her crew was furious. As Torres left the pool, Felix’s sister, Natasha Velez, came sprinting up the block and hit her across the temple with a cell phone. Lifeguards recorded the attack on their phones. Torres tore a foot ligament fighting her off. The state later charged Natasha with assault, but the next year, it was Torres who was punished for making waves: She failed the swim test twice, was stripped of her title, and was moved to an indoor pool. Felix Velez continues to work as a lifeguard.

In 2016, a member of Stein’s inner circle, Freddie Bomhoff, died. He had taken bribes to pass lifeguards on the swim test, but, unlike the rest of top management, he was beloved as a Dionysian charmer of the beach. At a memorial on the Rockaway boardwalk, dozens of aging lifeguards showed up, some whose tenures dated to the 1950s. Stein and Sher were among them. So was Fash. After a few speeches, Fash’s husband paddled beyond the waves on a surfboard with a wreath of orange and green flowers, the colors of city lifeguard uniforms. As the crowd broke up, Fash approached Stein. She wanted to talk about getting more lifeguards for her section.

“Now is not the time,” Stein said, holding up his hand.

“When is the fucking time?” she asked. The next day, Stein came to Fash’s shack. For nearly two hours, he spoke about the early days of the union, his strategic decisions over the years, and how many of his closest lieutenants were stupid. Fash just sat and listened. She realized Stein was a lonely man. His lieutenants remained, but they were aging. Sher, the oldest of the bunch, was closing in on 80. Bomhoff was gone, and now the tide was coming in for Stein.

Another group of veterans remained as well—men in their 50s and 60s whom Stein deemed insufficiently loyal to be rewarded with his most plum jobs. Such a group of malcontents is always dangerous, whether in a banana republic’s army or a city’s lifeguard corps.

Ulises Peña, a longtime lieutenant lifeguard at Orchard Beach, had been a reliable foot soldier for more than three decades; he had reelected Stein in sham votes and handed out flyers for union-backed candidates on Election Day. But in 2018, Peña complained about not getting a promotion, and the next summer Stein moved him from his beloved Bronx beach to an indoor pool. It was Peña who put together the anonymous flyer that showed up at Connolly’s last summer. The cut-and-paste job, all strange angles and different fonts, read like a kidnapper’s ransom note. what does your union do for you after they take your dues ?????? , it screamed, along with other grievances about unfair promotions and retaliation.

Miguel Castro, now 62, still worked at Coney Island, but he had mellowed, thanks in part to a new wife. He had met Peña at the lifeguard school in 1985, and they maintained a loose friendship. With Castro’s encouragement, Peña drove down to Coney Island and gave a handful of flyers to Castro’s friend Omer Ozcan, who had grown frustrated after Stein promoted younger lifeguards with better connections—a friendship with a supervisor or a dad in the NYPD—over him. Ozcan pinned them to shack bulletin boards in Coney Island.

Lifeguards took photos and texted them around. It popped up on NYC Lifeguards, a Facebook group with more than 1,100 members. Castro also connected Peña with Fash. Domingo Pineda, 53, was tired of bending the knee for his preferred pool assignments. He joined too. They created a WhatsApp group, named it “Justice League” after the DC Comics superhero team, and began to plot. Members of the group filed foil requests for their bosses’ salary histories and the lifeguard seniority list. Peña and Ozcan covertly recorded meetings and phone calls with David Catala, director of DC 37’s Blue Collar Division, and Bubba Paige, president of Local 461.

During their amateur investigation, they uncovered that, in 2019, Paige had been improperly paid $102,000 as a supervisor while representing the rank-and-file lifeguard union. He had also failed to hold a union meeting in years. Fash argued that they take aim at Paige, score a quick bull’seye, and then focus on Stein. She didn’t want to shoot too high and miss. On January 10, the rebellious lifeguards met at a barbecue joint in Rockaway. Fash brought the papers, and they all toasted as Ozcan and Rafael Sequeira, who worked with Peña at Orchard Beach, signed formal union charges.

When he reviewed the charges, Rich Abelson, chairman of afscme’s judicial panel in Washington, D.C., agreed they were worth investigating. He set a trial for March 31. A conviction might force an election— even terminations. If they won, the Justice League would gun for Stein next.

Then, a few weeks before the trial, covid-19 swept across New York. Abelson delayed the hearing. On April 16, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he would close outdoor pools for the summer and postpone lifeguard training. He set no date for beaches to open. Adrian Benepe, the former Parks commissioner, took to Twitter and the Times op-ed page, imploring de Blasio to put lifeguards on beaches and prevent inevitable carnage. Sure enough, on May 22, the Friday before Memorial Day, a 24-year-old drowned near Beach 91st Street in Rockaway.

Even in pre-covid times, lifeguards would not have been on duty until that Saturday, but the death highlighted the looming crisis. A few days later, lifeguards resumed training. In a June 11 radio appearance, de Blasio promised that lifeguards would be ready to be deployed as soon as beaches were safe to open for swimming. Once again, the city needed Stein to work his magic: prepare an army of lifeguards in the midst of a pandemic and, later, political protests and curfews. The virus had thrown him an unexpected lifeline—or at least, given him new leverage. A crisis was no time for regime change.

At the Chelsea Recreation Center, supervisors met applicants wearing face masks and gloves. When Fash went for her test, Javier Rodriguez, one of Stein’s deputies, put her in a heat with faster, younger swimmers; kids 40 years her junior lapped her. Still, she slipped in under the cutoff. When Castro arrived to test, Rodriguez, a man he had known for 42 years, refused to speak to him. Both he and Fash worry about retaliation when the beaches reopen—unfavorable beach assignments or perhaps no job at all.

Meanwhile, the afscme trial of Bubba Paige remains postponed. Fash is despondent. Stein knows his way around the national union, and she fears he is outmaneuvering them. With beaches closed, she spends her days gardening and jogging. Full-time lifeguards are still getting paid, but part-timers aren’t. Domingo Pineda, whose reduced hours were the reason he’d joined the Justice League, worries he won’t be able to support his two teenage children.

The prospect of no summer wages is an opportunity for Stein to remind them, once again, that he is their patron. In a four-page letter co-signed with Paige in early May, he boasts about securing paid time off for cancer screenings and promises some pay for seasonal lifeguards if beaches don’t open. It closes with a plea in large font: “PLEASE REMEMBER THERE IS STRENGTH IN UNITY.” ■