20 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
Broadway and 140th Street. The neigh-
borhood, which had been poverty-
stricken, filled with abandoned build-
ings, and therefore affordable when the
Fortune Society salvaged the place, in
the late nineteen-nineties, is now, as Co-
lumbia University pushes north and west,
an ever more desirable area, dotted with
restaurants and the inevitable espresso
joints. The former convent school would
be unaffordable now.
“There’s an architecture of the room
that I rely on—E. being firm in the
corner, Easy kibbitzing from the side,”
Rivera went on. What had seemed an
accidental weekly arrangement was pur-
poseful. “You can’t emphasize enough
things that may seem superficial. The
look of a room, the kind of food we
serve, which doesn’t look or taste like
institutional food. Remember, a lot of
our residents are people who went from
eating institutional food in school to
eating institutional food in prison and
that’s all they know. No one’s ever spo-
ken to them empathetically. No one’s
ever asked them how they feel.”
Rivera grew up on the Lower East
Side. “My mother had me when she
was fifteen,” he said. “But we were al-
ways working poor. My parents always
had jobs.” He speaks with the ancient,
“r”-less, broad-vowel speech of a New
York working class. In prison, Rivera
recalled, he helped care for sick inmates
during the height of the AIDS crisis,
and he has done the same sort of work
ever since. Rivera first visited Fortune
as a client, in 1991, and then began a
career in various post-prison and advo-
cacy groups, including a long stint at
Exponents, a leading drug-rehab orga-
nization in New York. Since then, he
has been back and forth between For-
tune and another nonprofit. “I’m a four-
time recidivist here,” he has joked. He
lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, and has
two teen-age sons and a daughter in
her twenties.
“That you’ve got to hit the rock-bot-
tom moment?” he said, reflectively. “It’s
something I’ve been thinking about
for a long time. I’ve looked at programs
that were created around recovery pro-
tocols, and the theory was: If there was
ten per cent left of your rock bottom,
they would intentionally bring you down
to that zero, and then build you back
up. My view is just the opposite. If you
still have ten per cent after being through
prison and abuse of many kinds, then
we can start.
“So, I tell the story. I was with my
boys, watching a show where they’re im-
ploding a casino, and I’m kind of into it.
It’s all dramatic, and they hit the thing—
old school!—you know, the box with the
plunger? And at about the third floor it
caved in and the guy said, ‘Wow! With
all the dynamite we used to destroy this
building, the foundation was so strong
that it wouldn’t go down.’ And I’m, like,
‘That’s it!’ If we can find your founda-
tion, you won’t fall. You’ll lean! You’ll trip,
but you won’t fall. So that’s my work, find-
ing the foundation that remains. Let’s
not make it about the dynamite. Let’s
work on your foundation—what will keep
you standing, even if you start to use drugs
again, even if you went back to prison.
So that’s the only bottom I want to hit.
That foundation that’s still there.”D
avid Rothenberg founded the For-
tune Society almost by accident. In
the late nineteen-sixties, at the peak of
his career as an extremely successful
Broadway publicist, working with the
likes of Richard Burton and Elizabeth
Taylor, he produced a Canadian play
about rape in prison called “Fortune and
Men’s Eyes,” and realized that the men
who were most stirred by the play were
ex-cons, as they were called then. Al-
most as an afterthought, he began a help
line for such people—“Really, only an
extra desk in the office”—and watched
it blossom into a lifetime’s work. Yet
he remains spiritually on both sides of
the doorway. This makes his conversa-
tion a singular braid of show-biz anec-
dotes and social-activist exhortations.
Holding out his right arm, he might say,
“This is the arm that Liz Taylor cried
on at the opening night of Dick Bur-
ton’s ‘Hamlet’ in 1964,” and then avow,
“The mistake you make is thinking that
they’re ever honest about crime num-
bers. The city will bring them up and
down as they want, according to the pol-
itics of the moment.”
The turning point, for him, took place
on “The David Susskind Show,” in 1968.
“Everyone watched Susskind on Sun-
day nights,” Rothenberg recalled. “They
always had six of a kind—six ex-alco-
holics or six prostitutes or whatever was
coming in sixes that year. I called theproducer and said, ‘Have you ever had
six former prisoners?’ She said, ‘I want
’em but I can’t get ’em.’ I said, ‘I can.’ So
we went on, and the next morning, after
the show, I got call after call after call.
It was overwhelming! There was an
endless line of men snaking up the stairs
of this theatrical building. And I began
to transition from full-time press agent
and part-time prison activist to full-
time prison activist and part-time press
agent. Well, no-time press agent.”
Rothenberg takes a late lunch or an
early dinner most days at Trufa. “Thurs-
day meetings are always essential—we
realized that if we had rooms and no
services we were just a hotel,” he said.
“What Sam does at the meeting is he
gets people talking who are comfort-
able talking, but sometimes he’ll say,
‘Hey, Joe—what’s happening with you?’
And Joe starts talking and doesn’t shut
up. He had never been given permis-
sion. Joe’s never been asked how he is
in his life!” Rothenberg chuckled.
“You know ‘The Green Pastures,’ the
movie?” The 1936 film relates Bible sto-
ries as Black American folklore. “Yeah,
there’s a line, I think it’s from there, that
I always repeat. The Lord, who’s repre-
sented as African-American, says to an
angel, ‘We have to take care of that
planet, but don’t forget the wing of the
sparrow over there.’ Sam is one of the
people taking care of his portion of the
planet by taking care of the wings of
the sparrow.”H
ousing programs for an offender’s
reëntry into the community usu-
ally involve a bewildering array of bu-
reaucracies, and often result in former
inmates being placed in halfway houses
and homeless shelters that replicate the
conditions of prison. Almost three-quar-
ters of the released population are ar-
rested again within three years.
“The Castle began when we kept
seeing that there was an urgent need
for housing for people released who be-
came homeless,” JoAnne Page, the pres-
ident and C.E.O. of the Fortune Soci-
ety, explained from her office at the
society’s administrative headquarters, in
Long Island City. “More than half the
people coming out of state prison to
New York City right now are being
dumped in shelters. HUD defines peo-
ple who are coming out of incarcera-