Minisode: Pappas v Giuliani

about them, just for a few minutes. We'll see if I managed to follow through on that, but for now today, here's a little treat I recently found myself for normal work related reasons, combing through the campaign finance reports for David Duke's nineteen ninety six campaign for US Senate. There

are obviously some names in there that I recognize. A donation from longtime clan lawyer Sam Dixon, salary payments made to a longtime Duke associate who happens to be the son in law of a guy who died in a shootout with US Marshalls, things like that. Some of the names on those forms or stories I'll tell you eventually, But as I was flipping idly through lists of small dollar donors. One line caught my eye, not because it was a name that I recognized, but because of his profession.

Almost all of the people willingly putting their name on the record as a David Duke donor by nineteen ninety six were retired. Line after line after line donors list their occupation as retired, and for those who did work, they were almost all self employed. But on August twenty seventh, nineteen ninety six, David Duke's campaign received a five hundred

dollars contribution from a New York City Police officer. Nineteen ninety six was a pretty long time ago at this point, so I was pretty sure there was no chance this man was still employed by the NYPD, But I was curious if his fondness for David Duke ever caused any issues for him in his professional life. That seems like a pretty safe bet, right, But honestly, it might not make him that much more racist than any given NYPD

officer chosen at random. But it turns out that Officer Thomas Poppus did something else in the mid nineties that almost ended up in front of the Supreme Court. See In the nineties every year, the Miniola Auxiliary Police Department sent out mailings requesting donations to their McGruff, the crime Dog anti drug program. Most people throw that kind of thing away. Some people will write a check and put it back in the pre addressed return envelope to make

a donation. But every year one envelope came back to that barvolunteer organization stuffed with anti Semitic cartoons, pamphlets with racist conspiracy theories, and materials published by a group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People. And by nineteen ninety seven, the volunteer organization receiving these mailings went to the police. After years of getting these hateful mailings,

they'd hired a company to encode the reply envelopes. If someone mailed back one of these smaller donation envelopes, they'd be able to tell exactly where the original mailing had

been sent. So when the racist flyers showed up that year, they used the tracking code to connect that envelope to a particular PO box, and when they went to the police, they were able to determine that PO box was registered to a New York City police officer, and so to test their theory, the Nassau County Police sent a fake letter to that po box soliciting donations for a charitable cause, and he took the bait, the stuffed reply envelope with

racist flyers, and mailed it back. Nasau County then turned the investigation over to the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, and they too tested the theory. They mailed Thomas Papus a letter asking for donations to a charitable organization, and he returned the envelope full of anti Semitic cartoons. And when he was confronted with this evidence, he did eventually admit that he'd done it. He tried to be casual about it.

At first he said it was just a hobby, and then it didn't mean anything, and then later in the same interview, he said it was a form of protest because he was quote tired of being shaken down by charitable organizations. And it turned out that while had just been the one organization who finally figured out where the mailings were coming from and went to the police, he'd done this hundreds of times over the years to countless organizations.

After he admitted to the mailings in nineteen ninety eight, New York Times reported that he was probably going to be allowed to retire with his pension. After a full investigation and disciplinary hearing and a lot of public outcry, he was found guilty of prohibited conduct and fired, so he sued. He filed a lawsuit in federal court, naming New York City, the police commissioner and the mayor as defendants, which in two thousand makes the case citation Pappas v. Giuliani.

Papas claimed he'd been unfairly terminated in retaliation for engaging in protected First Amendment conduct. The Southern District of New York disagreed. Pappas was absolutely within his right to mail

people racist pamphlets, but that's not the issue here. He wasn't criminally charged for it, and there is significant case law that allows government employers to take disciplinary action when it comes to speech by public employees when there is a legitimate government interest in promoting the efficiency of the

public services it performs through its employees. Papas may have had a better case here if he'd been engaged in speech that looked more like pro if he'd made any attempt to engage in public discourse, or if he'd mailed the flyers to parties who were engaged in public activity on the issues he claimed he was protesting, but he was just mailing garbage to any random organization unlucky enough

to have sent him a pre addressed envelope. Quoting from the opinion, mister Poppus suggests that somehow, by anonymously sending his white supremacist literature to any charity with the misfortune of soliciting a donation from him, he was commenting on perennial matters of public concern, such as taxation, political history, race,

and religion. This claim defies reason and the record. Although the First Amendments protection does not turn on the effectiveness of a speaker's media strategy, mister Poppas's purported strategy for addressing the matter of public concern is so plainly unreasonable it belies his claim that addressing matters of public concern was ever his intention. So his speed, which was, as

the Court wrote, of relatively low First Amendment value. And then on the other side of the scale, there's the very real concern of the government employer that his activity could disrupt government business. His activities had become a matter of real public concern. People were very worried that this cop hated Jews and black people. So they can't fire him for being racist, for having racist ideas. They can't

fire him for what's in his heart. But they fired him for being racist in public, out loud, and in a way that was damaging to the department's reputation and mission. And look, just for the sake of this legal argument, try not to laugh at the idea of the NYPD having a reputation that could be tarnished like this. Okay, So, after he lost this lawsuit, he appealed the decision up to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in two thousand and two, and they affirmed the lower court's decision, with

one judge on that three judge panel dissenting. And the descent makes a number of arguments. You know, he wasn't a supervisor. He did this on his own time. He didn't do it at work. He did it privately, He

did it anonymously, and most alarmingly. The dissent argues that if the department had never disciplined him in the first place, the public trust wouldn't have been damaged because no one ever would have known that it was a cop doing this, that the department itself is responsible for the damage to its own reputation, because I guess the proper course of action here would have been to cover up this policy violation.

The case was back in the news a few years later when that dissenting Judge Sonya Soto Mayor was nominated to the Supreme Court. I found several op eds citing this dissent as proof that she was a fair minded defender of free speech, and these were largely attempts to counter right wing attacks on her nomination. But if you look back at the majority opinion in this case, for College Leaguess called her descent a misunderstanding of the law

and seriously misguided. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said in eighteen ninety two, a policeman may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman. So it turns out police departments really can fire a cop for being extremely racist in his private life. They just usually don't want to. We're Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me Wiley Coner. Our executive producers

are Sophy Leuctriman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Roy Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Did. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. You can exchange conspiracy theoris about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys supper at it. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys