About ten years ago, I used to visit a prison in upstate New York as part of a program that brought law students and prisoners together for conversation and education. One of the inmates who attended our group was an older gentleman known as Mr. Smalls. He always wore his signature gold-framed glasses, and was wise and thoughtful in our discussions. He was respected by everyone inside, nicknamed the “elder statesman.” He was renowned for his legal knowledge and his willingness to help others. It was always strange and disturbing that someone his age, clearly rehabilitated, should still be behind bars. 

I eventually left school, and the program, and never heard whether he got out. But in May of 2020, I came upon his obituary. Benjamin Smalls, aged 72, had died of coronavirus after the COVID-19 pandemic had swept through the state’s prisons. 

As I read further details, I became enraged. 

It turned out that back in 2018, Mr. Smalls had applied to Governor Andrew Cuomo for executive clemency, based on his heart issues and glaucoma. The application was not acted on. When the pandemic hit, posing its greatest threat to the elderly and sick, Mr. Smalls made another emergency clemency application to Gov. Cuomo. Again, nothing happened. The Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) campaign then joined the effort to get Cuomo to release the vulnerable, completely rehabilitated Mr. Smalls. RAPP “repeatedly wrote to the Governor’s office” pleading for his release, as well as campaigning for Cuomo to order a mass clemency for elderly prisoners. Despite three emergency requests, Cuomo did not release Mr. Smalls, and within months he had caught the illness and died. 

The story of Mr. Smalls’ tragic life and preventable, unnecessary death is one I think about often. And it’s one I want every New York City resident to know when, next month, they are asked if they want to elect the man who killed Mr. Smalls as their mayor. 

Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace from New York’s governorship in 2021, after the state attorney general released a report concluding that he had sexually harrassed nearly a dozen women, and even “unlawfully retaliated against at least one of the women for making her complaints public.” The AG’s 165-page report makes for disturbing reading. It should have ended Cuomo’s political career for good. Why would someone who has abused their power to this degree ever be entrusted with public office again? Why would even one voter cast a ballot for such a person? 

Yet, strangely, four years later, Cuomo is not only back, but he is leading in the polls for next month’s Democratic mayoral primary. Cuomo currently has a 20-point lead over the next closest candidate, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. (Mamdani’s internal polling shows the gap has recently been closing.) Astonishingly, many leading Democrats who rightly condemned Cuomo for his disgusting abuses of power while in office are now staying silent about him. 

Not being from New York myself, I don’t really know how to understand Cuomo’s comeback. I suppose he has name recognition, and a lot of money, and perhaps people think that being an asshole makes him a “getting shit done” kind of guy. He’s also avoiding situations where he might be confronted about his record, like mayoral forums and other public events. Politico says that Cuomo “has led every poll by wide margins” and “many Democrats in the five boroughs seem willing to forgive and forget.” Personally, I find it hard to forgive and forget when I hold him responsible for the death of a man I knew. But I suppose it’s their choice to make.

Before they make that choice, though, I’d like to remind them of just what it is that they’re “forgiving and forgetting.” If they’re going to decide that Andrew Cuomo should be restored to high office, New Yorkers should at least take a moment to recall why he was ousted in the first place. Let us briefly review the record. 

Andrew Cuomo abused the office of governor to touch women inappropriately. This is confirmed by numerous testimonies from his victims, by the attorney general’s report, and by the federal Department of Justice. (I will not be using uncertain terms like “allegedly” and “accuser” because state investigators “said they corroborated the claims of 11 women… through interviews with 179 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents.”)

Former aide Lindsey Boylan, for instance, has explained in detail all of the numerous ways in which Cuomo abused his power. He “would go out of his way to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs,” she says, and would open conversations with crude comments like “Let’s play strip poker.” Boylan became afraid to be alone with him, a fear confirmed when he escalated beyond creepy comments and gestures and kissed her on the lips. Boylan concluded that Cuomo had “created a culture within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected.” When she went public, his office mounted a smear campaign against her. His top aides “actively sought to discredit Boylan and her allegations, disseminating personnel files to reporters that cast Boylan as an under-performing employee” and “Cuomo and members of his staff formulated an op-ed attacking Boylan, though the item was ultimately not published.” “He used intimidation to silence his critics,” Boylan says. “And if you dared to speak up, you would face consequences.” 

Cuomo even “on multiple occasions, sexually harassed an unnamed female state trooper who he had requested join his protective detail.” Another staffer, Charlotte Bennett, said Cuomo “inquired about her sex life, questioning whether she had monogamous relationships and if she liked older men.” He also “explained that he was fine with anyone over 22,” when Bennett was 25 at the time. (The State of New York ended up having to pay $450,000 to settle a lawsuit by Bennett over Cuomo’s conduct.) The behavior was constant, and the attorney general’s report found that “each complainant found his conduct to be some combination of humiliating, uncomfortable, offensive, or inappropriate.” Anna Ruch recalls that Cuomo came up to her at a wedding, put his hands on her, and asked to kiss her. Sometimes he did not ask. Former Syracuse mayor Stephanie Miner said that not only did Cuomo kiss her in order to exert power, but that this was just one of many control tactics he deployed. Cuomo grabbed butts and breasts, he kissed and made suggestive remarks. The attorney general’s report is a detailed, evidence-filled portrait of a man who delighted in getting to push boundaries with women, knowing there was little they could do about it given his immense power. 

Cuomo responded to these women with denial. “I never touched anyone inappropriately,” he falsely asserted, in the face of photographic evidence to the contrary. (See below.) The attorney general’s report concluded that Cuomo was lying. (“We found his denials to lack credibility and to be inconsistent with the weight of the evidence obtained during our investigation… The Governor’s blanket denials and lack of recollection as to specific incidents stood in stark contrast to the strength, specificity, and corroboration of the complainants’ recollections, as well as the reports of many other individuals who offered observations and experiences of the Governor’s conduct.”) Cuomo implied that the women had misinterpreted his natural warmth and exuberance. He gave ludicrous excuses, for instance insisting that he asked Charlotte Bennett “about her love life in a misunderstood bid to help her cope with trauma from a past sexual assault.” He also claimed the unwanted kissing was because he was Italian-American, an excuse that didn’t sit well with an Italian woman he kissed while touring her flood-damaged home. (“Family members kiss. Strangers do not kiss,” she said.) 

This is how Cuomo treated women that he “liked.” But there was another dimension to Cuomo’s abusiveness: his treatment of those he didn’t “like.” Boylan says she and other women experienced Cuomo’s “‘if he-liked-you’ toxicity” but most other people “saw the ‘if-he-hated you’ toxicity.” “If you got yelled at in front of everyone, it wasn’t any special day,” says Bennett. The whole environment was “extremely toxic, extremely abusive,” and one reason she kept quiet about her discomfort was because “I did not want him to get mad.” She thinks Cuomo knew “that he could get away with it because of the fear that he knew we had.” As executive assistant Alyssa McGrath described it:

[W]hat makes it so hard to describe every single inappropriate incident is the culture of the place. On the one hand, he makes all this inappropriate and creepy behavior normal and like you should not complain. On the other hand, you see people get punished and screamed at if you do anything where you disagree with him or his top aides.

The attorney general’s report is worth reading through carefully. Instead of showing true contrition, Cuomo took the Trumpian route of denial. He called it “a ‘sham report’ and asked the state Supreme Court to investigate [attorney general] James, claiming she manipulated the investigation to pursue a run for governor.” Anyone who reads the report itself can see this is nonsense. Everything is carefully documented, with dozens of witnesses who were under oath, and based on an extensive documentary record. This is a man who consistently took advantage of women and then lied shamelessly about it. 

Cuomo making women uncomfortable by touchingand kissingthem without their permission.

The sexual harassment scandal is what finally ended Cuomo’s governorship. But he did not just create a toxic workplace. He also governed incompetently during the most serious crisis of his administration. That incompetence had deadly consequences for New Yorkers, many of whom lost loved ones because of Cuomo’s poor governance, which Cuomo has lied about and tried to cover up. 

While Cuomo was hailed for his leadership during the pandemic, and was even touted as a sex symbol in parts of the media, he in fact made catastrophic missteps in responding during the pandemic’s early days that seriously worsened the death toll in New York. Cuomo initially said the “seasonal flu was a graver worry” and his spokesperson “refused to say if the governor had ever read the state’s pandemic plan.” As the pandemic raged, the state was dealing with $400 million in Medicaid cuts that Cuomo had supported, and had lost 20,000 of its 73,000 hospital beds due to “budget cuts and insurance overhauls.” Current mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams recalls:

I remember begging the governor’s office to send life-saving vaccines to my community[…] And for weeks and months, our request was denied no matter what we said. Because the site where the vaccines were supposed to go was run by then-Mayor de Blasio, the former governor’s political enemy.

Indeed, Politico reports that Cuomo “personally blocked vaccine distribution to Citi Field, where [de Blasio] planned to open a mass vaccination site, and his administration withheld daily data from the city.” 

Nursing homes were particularly hard hit, with 15,000 people ultimately dying in long-term care facilities in the state. Under Cuomo the state undercounted deaths, with the full total only coming out after he left office. New York had one of the highest per-capita death rates in the country. Cuomo made every effort to conceal his pandemic incompetence, and “top aides to Mr. Cuomo pushed to hide the number Excess Deaths From COVID-19 and Other Causes in the US, March 1, 2020, to January 2, 2021 - PMC of deaths in state nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic,” a coverup that was later admitted by Cuomo’s secretary. When a health department report “put the death toll roughly 50 percent higher than the figure then being cited publicly by the Cuomo administration,” the governor’s office staged an “extraordinary intervention” to get the facts excised. Cuomo himself personally edited the report and then lied about it. He is now under criminal investigation by the Justice Department, which unsurprisingly he insists is politically motivated.

Cuomo put pressure on those who brought up the scandal. Assemblymember Ron Kim said “the governor threatened to ‘destroy’ him over Kim’s criticism of the nursing home debacle.” Cuomo called him and “goes off about how I hadn’t seen his wrath and anger, that he would destroy me.” This is characteristic behavior. New York Magazine reports that “when he’s criticized, [Cuomo’s] first reaction—often deployed through surrogates or staffers—is to belittle or intimidate.” Incredibly, after receiving a “flood” of campaign donations from nursing home executives, Cuomo signed legislation that shielded those executives from lawsuits stemming from the mishandling of coronavirus. 

The nursing home scandal got more attention than what happened in prisons. Throughout the worst months of the pandemic, elderly prisoners and their advocates were pleading with Cuomo to grant emergency clemencies so that they could be safe from the virus. These are prisoners with minuscule recidivism rates (“almost zero percent for those older than 65,” according to one estimate), so releasing them posed little risk to the public. But for months, Cuomo did not respond to these pleas. He did, however, put prisoners to work making hand sanitizer for pennies an hour. (Although according to VICE, prisoners were not exactly “making” hand sanitizer, but rather “doing nothing more than taking existing hand sanitizer and rebottling it into packaging labeled ‘NYS Clean.’”) In a September 2020 report to the state Senate, filled with heart-rending testimony from prisoners, RAPP said that despite a huge coalition of advocates pleading for Cuomo to act, he did nothing: 

[We] worked with advocates across the country, elected officials at all levels of government, philanthropists, district attorneys, and even celebrities to call on Governor Cuomo to grant emergency clemencies to people currently incarcerated in New York State prisons, especially those who are particularly vulnerable to the virus. We sent the Governor’s office and DOCCS hundreds of individual requests for clemency and medical parole releases on behalf of some of the state’s oldest and sickest people. We received and forwarded to the governor 21 separate appeals from groups of public health experts, US Congressional representatives, community, medical, and legal organizations, criminal justice professionals, law enforcement, and faith community leaders urging him to release vulnerable incarcerated people[…] [Yet] Governor Cuomo has only granted three clemencies amidst the COVID-19 pandemic[…]

Eventually, Cuomo announced a plan to take elderly prisoners from around the state and concentrate them in a special nursing home prison in a remote part of the state, a plan condemned by over 80 social justice organizations, who said the idea “runs directly counter to public health, racial justice, and criminal justice evidence, and instead promotes mass incarceration, family separation, racism, and the needless punishment of incarcerated older people.” They pointed out that it also “threaten[ed] to replicate the public health crisis experienced in nursing homes across the state,” a central lesson of which should have been that it was very dangerous to keep vulnerable older adults in close proximity. 

But those close to Cuomo were given somewhat different treatment during the pandemic. The Times Union reported in 2021 that high-level members of the Department of Health were instructed to “conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor's relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration.” Members of Cuomo’s family “including his brother, his mother and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials — some several times,” with state officials dispatched to their private residences to conduct the testing. (Their samples were referred to as “critical samples” and pushed to the front of the testing line.)

​To help push the narrative of himself as a pandemic hero, Cuomo secured a $5.1 million book deal with Crown to write a self-aggrandizing memoir called, with stunning arrogance and irony, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic. You’d think for that sum of money he would have at least written the book himself, but no. Cuomo directed state employees to help him with the drafting and editing of the memoir—on time paid for by taxpayers! Essentially, New Yorkers paid their own money to make Cuomo rich from his own dishonest spin. (The book flopped, but Cuomo had already made his millions. It’s not dissimilar to what happened with his previous memoir, which also came with a big advance and sold so few copies that Cuomo ended up making $245 per copy.)

The pandemic made Andrew Cuomo rich, even as he caused the deaths of innocent people through his cruel negligence. 

Sexual misconduct and causing deaths may be Cuomo’s most egregious offenses, but they are not the sum total of them. There is plenty of other evidence that he is not fit to hold public office. Perhaps the most comical of Cuomo’s scandals is the story of the corruption commission. In 2013, Cuomo announced the formation of the “Moreland Commission,” with a mandate of investigating public corruption. A noble mission by a public servant committed to transparency! Except: the commission soon got too close to implicating Cuomo. Two months after its formation, its “investigators, hunting for violations of campaign-finance laws, issued a subpoena to a media-buying firm that had placed millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements for the New York State Democratic Party.” But that firm did advertising work for the governor, and his office called the commission and demanded the commission withdraw the subpoena, which they did. The governor “deeply compromised the panel’s work, objecting whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.” Eventually, the Times Unionsays, Cuomo “abruptly disbanded the panel after it began probing the governor's allies.”

It is no surprise that Cuomo didn’t want the corruption committee to take its task too seriously, given that his administration was a sewer of corruption. For instance, a company called Crystal Run Healthcare donated $400,000 to Cuomo’s campaign, and soon after received $25 million in grants from the state. Much of this grant money went towards building facilities that the company was already working on, meaning that taxpayer money was essentially just being funneled to a private company for no reason. "Why this apparently successful company should be granted such extraordinary support from taxpayers has never been adequately explained,” said Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy, told the Times Union. The paper reported that the company “tried to spend the funds on eyebrow-raising items including expensive artwork, two $59,000 ‘mood music’ systems, and an ‘artificial flower arrangement’ to adorn a lobby.” When the Times Union filed a FOIA request about the grant, Cuomo’s administration “redacted almost all financial details from the applications of two projects awarded the money.” 

Cuomo operated a brazen patronage system. The New York Times reports that the state economic development agency created a position and hired a new college graduate (with a classics degree) to fill it. The young man’s father happened to be a lawyer who had donated $26,000 to Cuomo’s campaigns. The month after, the agency hired a 23-year old with a degree in Assyriology—the study of Mesopotamia, Sumer, and other ancient societies—for a job with a $75,000 salary. Shortly before the young Assyriologist started work, his real estate developer father had given $25,000 to Cuomo’s reelection campaign. Of nearly 50 people hired by the economic development agency during the first 20 months of Cuomo’s tenure, “nearly a third were the governor’s political associates, donors and friends, or their relatives.” 

Cuomo’s own “right hand man,” Joseph Percoco, was ultimately convicted of soliciting and accepting over $300,000 in bribes from companies doing business of the state, some of which occurred while Percoco was managing Cuomo’s reelection campaign. (In emails with companies bribing him, Percoco referred to money as “ziti,” a Sopranos reference.) Cuomo was close to Percoco, having once called him “my father’s third son.” But he claimed to know nothing about the corruption, and was not charged himself. Nevertheless, the fact that open bribery could flourish so close to Cuomo reveals lax standards of ethical oversight. 

I have thus far concentrated on matters that should be objectionable to anyone, regardless of their political views. Lying, harassment, intimidation, and incompetence are not “left vs. right” issues. But there is plenty that is objectionable about Cuomo’s actual politics, too. 

When Cuomo was first elected he “pursued a decidedly un-progressive agenda[…] passing austerity budgets, targeting public-employee unions, cutting taxes on the wealthy, going to bat for charter schools,” according toCity Limits. No surprise, then, that Cuomo “rake[d] in money from corporate, hedge fund, and real estate interests.” As Politico reported, Cuomo dismissed the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy and introducing a state-level single payer program. The Alliance For Quality Education was scathing about Cuomo’s record, writing in 2021 that he “has been on a mission to underfund high need public schools ever since his first year as Governor, when he cut over $1 billion from schools, while giving a tax break to millionaires.” Meanwhile Cuomo offered Amazon $3 billion in incentives—plus a special helipad for Jeff Bezos!—to locate a headquarters in New York. Cuomo joked that he would change his name to “Amazon Cuomo” in order to please the company. 

When Cuomo did support progressive policies, it was largely because outside pressure, especially from labor unions, made him see those policies as being in his political interest. After rejecting a $13 minimum wage as a “non-starter,” Cuomo quickly flipped and supported a $15 minimum wage when it looked like a political winner. Bill Lipton, executive director of the Working Families Party, said that “The truth is Cuomo has no policy or values base at all. What he cares about is keeping taxes low on his donors.” Cuomo would take credit for others’ initiatives. His chief of staff threatened to end the career of an openly gay state legislator if he did not allow the governor’s staff to handle the passage of the legislator’s gay marriage bill. “You’ll never work again[…] I’ll make it my mission in life to destroy you,” the legislator recalled him saying. (Said one Democratic strategist: “Andrew is vindictive[…] He wants to punish people. And he gets joy out of that.”) 

Cuomo is also staunchly pro-Israel, and in 2016 he signed an executive order banning the state from doing business with any company that refuses to do business with Israel. “If you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you,” he said. The New York Civil Liberties Union called the measure a “blacklist” and an unconstitutional affront to free speech. That same year—long before the October 7 attacks and the current war on Gaza—Cuomo said that because Israel’s enemy is “obsessed,” no amount of force it uses could be considered disproportionate: “How can you have a disproportionate response when you are dealing with an enemy who is obsessed and single-minded? By definition you can’t be disproportionate.” It is unsurprising, then, that Cuomo joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team to defend the right-wing Israeli leader against war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court. Today, his mayoral campaign is being “boosted by donors who support Israel.” 

For years, Cuomo even helped ensure that his own party was kept out of power in the state Senate, and “encouraged [an arrangement] that allowed the Republicans to remain in leadership even after the election of a Democratic majority.” He wanted to guarantee “that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn’t be handing over power to New York City Democrats.” Cuomo also tried to hobble progressive political power in other ways. After the Working Families Party worked out a deal with Cuomo, getting progressive concessions in exchange for not running a challenger to him on its ballot line, he “reneged on those commitments and set out to destroy the party.” Journalist Ross Barkan says that “an organized progressive wing of the party was terrifying to him.”

Even on policy, though, I don’t think you need to be a leftist or progressive to be critical of Cuomo’s record. I spoke several years ago to Barkan, one of New York’s top investigative reporters and the author of the indispensable book on Cuomo, The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York. Barkan told me that many people hold an image of Cuomo as a ruthless Machiavellian who nevertheless manages to accomplish a great deal, a kind of Robert Moses figure. But, Barkan said, this is mythology. Cuomo was “not nearly as competent as the reputation would suggest.” The idea was that “if he broke a few eggs, he at least made the omelet,” but those like Barkan who examined the actual record found that “the omelets he made were never very good, and he wasn't even good at breaking the eggs, in terms of implementing efficient government.” Indeed, Bill Samuels, founder of Effective NY, which advocates for reform in Albany, called Cuomo “an old school political boss, who exploits and worsens the most dysfunctional components of NY state politics to make it worse.”

For example, Barkan says, “the New York City subway system deteriorated on his watch.” The state government is responsible for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) that runs the subway, but “Cuomo had no interest in it” and didn’t care that “it wasted tons of money, that the signal system wasn't functioning, that trains were becoming badly delayed.” It went beyond the subway. During Cuomo’s tenure in office, New York’s governance, Barkan says, was “horrible,” a national laughingstock. The state continued to have “worse voter laws than most Southern states,” including restrictions on absentee and early voting, “a deeply incompetent election and administration infrastructure,” and a board of elections “riddled with patronage, totally a failed body.” Barkan says these failings “should be laid at the governor's feet.” But Cuomo was “very good at dodging blame when there [is] some election snafu or some train delay or something… very good at pretending it was someone else's problem.” 

I could go on and on with examples of Cuomo administration failures and shadiness. There was the policy of deleting state employees’ emails after 90 days, which conveniently made sure that if there was evidence of misconduct it would probably disappear before it was found. (After heavy criticism, the policy was reversed.) There was the PFOA water pollution crisis in Hoosick Falls, in which residents were not told that there were cancer-causing chemicals in their water supply. There “Cuomo administration officials were assuring residents their water was safe [when] the municipal water supply had already tested at 600 parts per trillion,” even though safe consumption levels had been “lowered to 100 parts per trillion and then to 70 parts per trillion.” According to a local doctor, residents “were advised incorrectly to consume water that was unsafe for at least for 12 months.” The list of scandals from Cuomo’s time as governor goes well beyond harassment and COVID-19. 

Listen to “American Machiavellian,” the full Current Affairs podcast episode with Barkan on the rise of Andrew Cuomo. 

Powerful New York Democrats want to sweep all of these facts under the rug. The New York Times reports that “the state’s powerful Democratic establishment now appears more interested in getting back in [Cuomo’s] good graces than in stopping him.” Kirsten Gillibrand, known in the senate as an ally of the #MeToo movement, said of Cuomo that “this is a country that believes in second chances,” ignoring the pleas of Cuomo’s victims to stop an abuser from returning to office. Rep. Ritchie Torres said that Cuomo had made New York “ungovernable,” but now hails his “resurrection.” 

Lindsey Boylan is disgusted with these Democrats, saying that “most of our leaders are more interested in staying comfortable and staying in their jobs than actually protecting us and defending us.” “It’s disturbing beyond belief. It’s incredibly bleak to me that he’s back at all,” she says. Other accusers say “they’re deeply disappointed by Cuomo’s return to politics and feel betrayed by the Democrats who once publicly supported them.” Some powerful Democratic groups and individuals have endorsed Cuomo, although most have simply maintained a harmful silence. Even Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite their “fighting oligarchy” tour, have yet to endorse Zohran Mamdani or make any effort to help beat Cuomo.

What makes this especially unconscionable is that Cuomo’s election risks doing active harm to people. It’s not just that he is unlikely to do anything about inequality in the city, and heaps scorn on proposals like Mamdani’s plans to reduce the costs of transportation and housing, calling them simply “not possible.” It’s worse than that. Because Cuomo is a sexual harasser, electing him means exposing every woman in the mayor’s office to risk. The attorney general’s report said that the pattern of harassment was “enabled and facilitated by a culture within the Executive Chamber of secrecy, loyalty to the Governor, and fear, as well as the normalization of inappropriate comments and interactions by the Governor.” We can expect that toxic culture to come to City Hall if Cuomo is made mayor of New York. 

Furthermore, because Cuomo has shown that he is corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent, we can expect the mayor’s office to be corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent on his watch. Like I said, I’m not a New Yorker, but I personally cannot understand why anyone would vote for this if there was any other option available. 

I will not forget Mr. Smalls. I will not forgive the man who caused his death, who has never expressed an ounce of contrition and who has repeatedly lied to cover his misconduct. 

And to every New York voter: I hope you don’t forget, either. 

Benjamin Smalls (1947-2020)