April 1, 2026 • 29 mins
Who is the strange guest who came with James Davis to City Hall, only to shoot him repeatedly at close range. And why did he do it? Niel Askew’s close friends tell the story of a quiet closeted kid from a religious family, who came to New York, came out, and climbed the heights of the gay club scene of ‘90s NYC.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Letitia James is the Attorney General of the State of
New York, a big deal in New York politics. But
back in two thousand and three, Tish, as she's known,
was working as the chief of staff for Brooklyn Assemblyman.
By the way, his interview was over the phone and
the audio is not great.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I got the call from the police and they said,
did I know who James Davis? And I immediately have
them applied the gentleman who got such a a be
patriot James.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Days the day before the shooting at City Hall, Tishet
met with a man at her house. He told her
he was a candidate in the upcoming primary for city council.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
The gentleman came and sat on my.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Fuke for about two hours and.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
We had a long conversation about whether or not I
were going to run against the incumbent, and if I
was not, what I support is candidacy.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
The incumbent was James E. Davis. The man was Neil.
Ask you And when the police asked her if she
knew who might have shot James, her mind immediately went
to Neil because he hadn't just come to her house
to ask for her support. He needed her.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Help he wanted to know what advice I could provide him,
and she was the victim of blackmail.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
The silver forty caliber handgun was recovering in the city hall.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
Will somebody tell me that Jeffery who wasn't a coincidence?
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Jeffer who did it? There were times when I thought
that he was unstable, and there were times when I
thought maybe he shouldn't carry a gun.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
He alleged was a victim of flodmail.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
This was not just killing somebody because she wanted his seat.
I'm Jamal Jordan, and this this Russhack.
Speaker 6 (02:01):
I've had some very tough days in my life, and
some tough days in city Hall, but I don't think
I've ever had as tough a day as today.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
It's by twenty pm, a little more than three hours
since the shooting. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is addressing reporters in
a briefing room on the brest floor of City Hall.
Speaker 6 (02:19):
Somebody who was an elected official of the City of
New York has been killed, and they've been killed right
here in City Hall, and another person is also dead.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
What we know so far is the following.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
James Davis came into City Hall along with a mist
to ask you, who had filed papers to run against
James Davis. They came in together. They went through the
security booths, but did not go through the magnetometer. Apparently
(02:57):
the city council members and the mayor have not been
going through a magnetometer the same ways that pilots and
stewardesses don't go through magnetometeras at airports.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Mayor Bloomberg admits that many public officials, including him, are
disregarding security at the city Hall. It's not even two
years since nine to eleven. New York City is still
very much on edge.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
A few minutes later, in the falcony of City Hall,
it would appear that mister Ascu shot James Davis, our
city council member, and that mister Ascue was in turn
shot by a New York City police officer. It is
(03:46):
still preliminary. We don't know anybody's motives. It does not
appear that there is anything else to the story other
than a dispute between these two men.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
The dispute between these two men, Neill ask you and
James Davis, and now both of them are lying dead
in the same hospital a few blocks away. The hero
of the hour opposite. Richard Bert has been taken to
(04:24):
Saint Vincent's Hospital to be treated for trauma.
Speaker 7 (04:27):
I got a visit from the Police Commissioner Ray Kelly,
and from him I find out that the person A shot,
you know, was killed.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Ritchie didn't know the name of the man he had shot,
but he knew that now his first time using his
weapon outside of the firing range, he had killed someone.
Counselman Larry Seber had met James's guest at city Hall
(05:02):
that day.
Speaker 8 (05:03):
It's kind of agitated. I didn't get a good vibe
from this cat. Larry is sitting in Beakman Hospital. He
had brought fellow council member Maria by us there after
the shooting because she was hyperventilating and she's being treated now.
I'm sitting there waiting for her and the detectors come
(05:24):
over to me and say, if you can do an
identification for us, it would be helpful.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
So I said, Okay, what do you want me to do?
He said, come with.
Speaker 8 (05:37):
Us, and they had the guide ling up there. When
they pulled down his sheet, saw the guy's face, so
I said, oh, that's the guy that was with James.
Speaker 9 (05:47):
And then they pull it and you could see the
bullet hit him right here. The hole was in his chest,
and I'm right, WHOA, that was the guy.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I never go down to City Hall ever. Henny Hiroshami
is in real estate.
Speaker 10 (06:17):
But I had to go to the Woolworth Building to
receive a deposit for a house that I rented in Miami.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
The Woolworth Building was built in nineteen thirteen. It was
once the tallest building in the world. It's right next
to City Hall.
Speaker 10 (06:32):
Park, so I was literally maybe one hundred feet away
from Neil when the shooting took place.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
They didn't say Neil, ask you. I didn't connect the
dots al or he was.
Speaker 10 (06:42):
There was a shooting that happened in City Hall, and
it wasn't until I started heading back that reporters were
already flocking to our office because that's where he registered
his campaign office.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Henny and a partner had opened a co working space
good rent Offices by the hour. Neil was a friend
and they let him use it. But when he first
told them about his campaign for city council, Kinney was surprised. Politics.
We never really talked about it.
Speaker 10 (07:13):
To be honest with you, I was very surprised here
he was running for a political career.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Neil had also confided to Hinty that he had a problem.
Speaker 10 (07:23):
He did say his political adversary was trying to blackmail
him regarding his sexuality, and that was something that upset
him greatly because he never came out to his parents.
Speaker 11 (07:39):
He was an innocent kid from Long Island that was
closeted and was lost in a way.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Cliff Nasked was Neil Asku's friend and roommate in the
nineteen nineties when Neil had first moved to New York
City from a working class town on Long Island. His
family was conservative and religious, and Cliff understood that this
was a real problem for Neil.
Speaker 11 (08:01):
He was a Jehovah witness, and he said his parents
would disown him if they found out he was gay.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Cliff first met Neil at Long Island University in nineteen
ninety two. To Cliff, he seemed like someone who was
in the process of rewriting their own story.
Speaker 11 (08:18):
I remember the first day meeting him. I asked him
what his ethnicity was and he said, to me an American, Indian,
Irish and a little black. But by his skin tone
and his features, he looks African American. He wasn't happy
(08:38):
being a black male. He wore contacts and he relaxed
his hair. He claimed to have went to a high school,
which is more of a upper middle income type on
Long Island, and he always tried to blend in with
the upper middle income Jewish type of crowd.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Cliff coun sense that Neil was struggling to figure out
who he was and that he had some demons.
Speaker 11 (09:06):
I was dating a brownskin Latin guy and Neil comes
in and sees me on the sofa in my apartment
with this brownskin Latin guy, and he said, what are
you doing with this end guy in my apartment?
Speaker 12 (09:25):
That's the word he used to describe the guy.
Speaker 11 (09:27):
So a lot of deep seated issues that he had
with people's color of their skin. I think there's a
lot of hatred inside, which caused him a lot of
anxiety and problems in his life.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Cliff was big into the gay nightlife scene in New
York and he opened that world up for his new.
Speaker 12 (09:48):
Friend during school.
Speaker 11 (09:50):
We had a lot of fun coming to the city,
going to Fire Island. I introduced him.
Speaker 12 (09:56):
To a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
They would go to clubs that are now can disidered legendary,
like the Roxy, the Lime Light, the found Factory in
the Paradise Garage.
Speaker 11 (10:07):
I remember going to a Roxy on Saturday night and
I invited Neil to come, and I don't even think
I had a T shirt on.
Speaker 12 (10:16):
Neil was so new to this.
Speaker 11 (10:18):
He went in a button down shirt and tie, and
then by the end of the night his shirt was off.
And then the next weekend he was at the Sound
Factory dressed in shorts.
Speaker 12 (10:33):
Just George.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Neil was transforming from a closet at Jehovah's Witness into
a party kid.
Speaker 11 (10:40):
Being in your twenties and being attractive game en, you
can experience a lot. We like nicer things in life.
We like the fast life. We like having fun in
New York City, and we met a lot of very
very well connected people and had fun at the same time.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
After college, Cliff Nast moved into an apartment in Midtown, Manhattan,
and then Neil moved into an apartment nearby. Cliff got
a job in pharmaceutical sales, pitching doctors on new medications,
a good job for handsome charmers.
Speaker 11 (11:19):
Neil did that as well, just to follow in my footsteps.
Speaker 12 (11:24):
Very interesting. Neil liked to do a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
I did a lot.
Speaker 11 (11:30):
I did find it kind of weird, and maybe he
did have some desire to.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Be like me, whatever reservations he might have had, Cliff
invited Neil to move into his place at Riverbank, a
luxury apartment building on West forty third Street. When they
first met, it was Cliff who knew was way around
the scene, but at this point Neil was the one
getting invites to parties with fancy people. Cliff remembers going
(11:56):
with Neil to a lavish apartment that overlooks Central Park.
Speaker 11 (12:01):
I remember going up in the elevator and they said, oh,
just get out, you have the whole floor. They said,
oh Sting lives upstairs and mel Gibson lives downstairs, but
they only have a quarter of the size. I don't
know how the hell mey Neil met these people out
of the blue.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Cliff says that the two of them hung out with
fashion designer Jean Paul Gaudier at clubs in Manhattan and
met Calvin Klein on Fire Island. That designer Marc Jacobs
took one look at Neil and asked him to be
one of his models.
Speaker 11 (12:34):
Neil was definitely a social climate, and he used his assets,
his brain and his body to move far in this world.
People offering him money, offering him to do modeling gigs.
He had his hands in many different places, trying to
figure out life.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
I would go to Splash Bar just because it was
a social thing and have a couple of beers and
mingle with people and talk. The guys would come out
on the stage and they would shower and dance and
so forth.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Victor Carneccio is a fine art photographer and Splash Bar
was a gay bar in West seventeenth Street in Lower
Manhattan and also the first gay bar I ever went
to with my fake ID at age eighteen. Victor met
Neil ask you there in the summer of nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
I found him very attractive, and I thought I'd like
to photograph him. We went down to the studio and
did the pictures that night. He was very young, and
he really loved showing his body. We didn't do total nudes.
I think we might have done some of his underwear.
I could tell he would really liked be in front
of the camera. He was just playing, experimenting and discovering himself,
(13:53):
you know. He was happy.
Speaker 11 (13:57):
Neil was always out for a good time, and I
actually kind of enjoyed the excitement of being friends with
them because there was always something good, funny, or even
dangerous going to happen.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
But it could also go too far. Like one night
back when they were still in college on Long Island.
Speaker 12 (14:17):
We were coming home from the club.
Speaker 11 (14:19):
We're driving through the Midtown Tunnel and I'm like, Neil,
I told you we have classes in the morning. I
can't be out till four in the morning. I can't
do with this. You're crazy, You're crazy. And I said,
I don't know if I'm going to be speaking with
you again. And he pushed his foot on the accelerator
and kept going faster. He said, if you're not going
(14:39):
to talk to me, I'm going to kill you and
me before we get in this tunnel.
Speaker 12 (14:48):
And I literally jumped out of the car at the booth.
Speaker 10 (15:00):
Neil and I met while we were working on Long
Island for a company called Premier Catering.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Henny orsholemy again.
Speaker 10 (15:06):
I was a manager and Neil is the other manager
of that catering team.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
They got to be friends. Neil was fun and spontaneous,
if maybe a little intense.
Speaker 10 (15:18):
I had dinner with my girlfriend and he brought his
friend Mario, who seemed like a very nice guy, and
we had dinner together and I told him I was
going to Jamaica tomorrow with a bunch of other friends,
and he excused himself. He comes back ten minutes later
and says, I just booked a flight.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I'm coming with you. But certain aspects of his friend
remained closed off until Neil was finally ready to be
open about his life.
Speaker 10 (15:46):
Neil and I hung out one night and he said, well,
what I think about his friend Mario, And you know,
my response was, you know, Mario seems like a very
nice guy. So he said, do you think Mary is
a good looking guy? He'll call me a little bit
off guard to be honest with Steve, and I was like, well,
I guess so he's a pretty good looking guy. And
it goes honey, Mary was my lover. I know this
(16:10):
guy now for a couple of years, and I had
never suspected he was gay, but his ability to keep
that from me was kind of surprising. I absolutely saw
Neil living two separate lives.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I'm sure a lot of.
Speaker 10 (16:23):
It had to do with him being in a closet,
with his family being Jehovah witnesses, I'm sure it was
a bit complex.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And so when Neil told Hinney that his political rival
was blackmailing him, threatening to out him as gay, it
wasn't totally out of the blue. Neil might be out
to his closest friends, but as someone trying to break
into politics, maybe he felt that he had to keep
some things to himself.
Speaker 11 (17:08):
Although you reached the office of councilmanic candidate Osanil Boez
ask you for the thirty fifth District of New York City.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
I was covering Brooklyn politics pretty closely in those days,
and I always looked at the campaign Finance Board filings.
Speaker 12 (17:29):
I would go through the list and see who's looking
to run this year.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Journalist Eric anglists.
Speaker 12 (17:36):
Most of the names on these lists.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
I would know because I had been covering Brooklyn on
and off since nineteen ninety one. I saw this name Othniel,
ask you, and I thought, Wow, who is this guy?
Speaker 12 (17:50):
People run for office generally.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
Have some standing in the community, but ask you, I'd
never heard of him.
Speaker 12 (17:58):
This wasn't totally unusual.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
There's always a few candidates who come out of nowhere
and as a rule, they never win. But nonetheless I
sent an email just to ask, like, who are you,
what's going on? And lo and behold he responded, and yes,
he said he was running in this council race.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Neil's tone and his emails struck Eric as a bit odd.
He said him along Bio a kind of humble beginnings
type thing.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
You have to be a little bit strange to run
for office, especially if you have absolutely no standing in
the community.
Speaker 12 (18:37):
You know, one's ever heard of you, you know.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
So I figured he was a little bit different, and
that was fine and nothing wrong with that. But I
called up James Davis and I said, a counselman, have
you ever heard of Neil?
Speaker 12 (18:53):
Ask you?
Speaker 4 (18:54):
And Davis said to me, I've never heard of him or.
Speaker 12 (19:00):
Her, and then he left. I mean he was a
trash talker.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
James Davis often found a way to take small jabs
at his opponents like this, undermined them in little ways.
To him, it was all part of the game. He
was also quoted as laughing and saying, ask you come
out wherever you are.
Speaker 12 (19:23):
Who in central Brooklyn those days was not a trash talker.
To some extent. There were no kid gloves.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
Davis had run against the machine, so he viewed himself
as someone who sort of made his own career rather
than making a deal to get into office. So rivals,
he didn't take them lightly, but he didn't necessarily treat
them that well either.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Eric more or less forgot about this. Neil, ask you
until the next important moment in the process, when candidates
have to hand in the signatures they've collected in order
to get on the ballot. The deadline was July tenth,
thirteen days before the shooting.
Speaker 12 (20:04):
To get on the ballot was not easy to do.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
Ask you that five weeks to collect nine hundred signatures,
and this is painstaking work. I mean you're standing on
the street corner, stopping New Yorkers as they go by
and saying, can you either take a minute sign This
not easy to do. Once you collect them, you take
them to your election lawyer and you put them together
(20:27):
with a cover sheet, and everything has to be done
by the book. All the i's dotted, the tea's crossed,
everything's got to be perfect. And then you have to
bring those bound petitions to the Board of Elections office
and you have to file them by a deadline.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Neil spent weeks collecting thousands more signatures than he needed
because a lot of signatures get tossed out for technical reasons,
and yet he didn't get those bound petitions in by
the deadline.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
There's no question that the petitions were never properly delivered
to the Board of Elections. But I do know that
ask You showed up at his attorney's office at nine
pm and the bound signatures were ready.
Speaker 12 (21:13):
All he had to do was bring them.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
To the Board of Elections by midnight, and that didn't happen.
And I also know that a few minutes after midnight
someone slid found petitions under the door of the Board
of Elections after the deadline. That doesn't count. They were
(21:36):
never recorded.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Why wouldn't You'll ask You do all that work only
to miss the deadline and forfeit his chance to run
for city council.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
To this day, I believe he was thinking whether or
not to file them, and he had some kind of conflict,
and at the end of the day he decided I'm
going to file, but it was too late. And I
believe that if ask You had gotten on the ballot,
this murder never would have happened.
Speaker 12 (22:06):
And who knows. I mean James Davis could literally be mayor.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
At this point, Eric emailed Neil to ask what had happened.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
I sent a message like why are you not on
the ballot? And he wrote back that because of quote
human incompetency, the petitions did not get filed.
Speaker 12 (22:27):
There was a very cryptic message.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
He didn't explain who's incompetency, who was at fault?
Speaker 12 (22:35):
What had happened?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
After the shooting, Eric inquist dug deeper his reporting shed
a little more light on the who and the why.
Speaker 4 (22:45):
Before the July tenth deadline to file petitions for the
Democratic primary, Ask You showed up at the home of
a politically active person in the district and near tears,
revealed that he couldn't run because James Davis had some
personal information on him that would destroy his life.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
David R. Miller has been in the Brooklyn political world
for decades. On the evening of July twenty second, the
night before the shooting, he ran into Neil Ask you
at a political event at a bar on Atlantic Avenue
in Brooklyn. After the shooting, Miller began referring to Neil
only as the killer.
Speaker 13 (23:34):
The killer was paying James Davis to be his technician.
Oh what a technician is? So you have the submit petitions,
all right?
Speaker 14 (23:45):
Your technician goes line by line to make sure it
conforms to the arcane, very strict laws in New York State.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Often a candidate has an organization behind them to handle
this kind of thing. But if they don't, they outside
help a technician. He old told David Miller that he
had paid James Davis to provide this kind of help.
He also told them that it had ruined him.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
He was broke. He ran through his savings and everything
in his life. I know he spent the last ten
thousand dollars on a campaign. I know that for a fact,
his last money he's paying James.
Speaker 14 (24:23):
And then he had knocked off the ballot. Then if
the petition wore a file on time. That's one of
the oldest tricks in the book. Man, Okay, that is
the oldest trick in a book for insurgents. Van Derdida
is famous for that.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Vander Lbedi was a controversial state assemblyman from Brooklyn. On
August thirtieth, nineteen ninety, he was shot to death in
his story front campaign office. David Miller was supposed to
have lunch with him that day. Van's will say, okay, man,
give me a hundred.
Speaker 12 (24:53):
Cheek up.
Speaker 14 (24:54):
They cared you one hundred seats. That's fifteen hundred signatures.
You only need five hundred ballot things to make them,
so you're in the bank. But he gives you a hundreds,
you don't.
Speaker 12 (25:03):
Make the ballot. You'll and you put it all that
money for it.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Is it possible that James Davis took the last of
Neil's savings to help him foul his petitions and secure
a place in the ballot, only to sabotage his efforts
and eliminate the competition.
Speaker 4 (25:19):
I don't trust anything that ask You said, because a
lot of what he said was verifiably untrue.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Eric Anquist again to him, the idea that James Davis
would want to knock Neil off the ballot makes no sense.
James already had someone else running against him besides Neil.
Ask you, it would be better for James if Neil
was in the race.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Davis was the incumbent. There's an anti incumbent vote in
any election, and if you can split that vote, it
basically eliminates any chance that either insurgent candidate has to win.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
On the morning of the shooting, just a few hours
after seeing David Miller at the bar on Atlantic Avenue,
Neil made a phone call to the FBI. The day
after the shooting, NPR reportage on Neil's call.
Speaker 15 (26:14):
Investigators tell the Associated Press that the gunman Othnil asked you,
called the FBI the morning of the killing, and, in
a rambling conversation, told the bureau that his victim, Consulman
James Davis, was blackmailing him, threatening to expose him as
gay unless he dropped a political challenge.
Speaker 12 (26:32):
That actually I think was true.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Journalist Errol Lewis knew James Davis and lived in the
thirty fifth district.
Speaker 16 (26:40):
Listen, if it's two thousand and three and you're running
and your opponent is gay in Crown Heights, where there's
a bunch of conservative Black Baptists and a whole lot
of conservative hasidum, you would be negligent not to at
least bring it up, you know, And whether you're a
quote outing that or just pointing it out, it would
(27:02):
not make sense to ignore that.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But the thirty fifth district wasn't just Crown Heights, it
was also Fort Green a neighborhood that, because of his
black gay community, was nicknamed Chocolate Chelsea. For Eric Anquist,
it doesn't add up.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
This theory never made sense for a number of reasons.
Number one, ask you was already out of the closet.
He frequented gay establishments, so it was not a mystery
that he was gay. Number two, being gay was not
a negative in two thousand and three in Central Brooklyn
to run for office. If anything, it might have even
(27:41):
helped him pick up a few votes. Number Three, James
Davis had a very good relationship with the gay community.
He saw them as important to his own career. And
the idea that he would out someone that would have
outraged the gay community, and there's there's no way he
would have even threatened to do that.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Neil may have deliberated and then files his petations too late,
as Eric Inquist speculates, and he told more than one
person that James Davis was blackmailing him. But did James
really have some secret information on Neil? And if it
wasn't about being gay, then what was it about. That's
(28:29):
next time on Rorshak Murder at City Hall. Rorshak Murder
at City Hall is a production of iHeart Podcasts in
partnership with Best Case Studios. It's based on Death in
the Chamber by Brent Katz. It's written and executive produced
by Brent Katz and Adam Pinkis produced by Charlotte Morley
(28:53):
and co produced by me Jamal Jordan, Edited and mixed
by Max Michael Miller. Original music was by tunday Ada
Pempe and Walder Zobie. Our chival producer Isabelle d'Orval, consulting
producer Amir Loomis. Development production assistance from David Michael. Archival
content provided by Spectrum News New York One additional material
(29:14):
by NPR. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry, Carl Catel,
and Anna Stumph. Following rate Rorschak Wherever you get your
podcasts
Letitia James is the Attorney General of the State of
New York, a big deal in New York politics. But
back in two thousand and three, Tish, as she's known,
was working as the chief of staff for Brooklyn Assemblyman.
By the way, his interview was over the phone and
the audio is not great.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I got the call from the police and they said,
did I know who James Davis? And I immediately have
them applied the gentleman who got such a a be
patriot James.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Days the day before the shooting at City Hall, Tishet
met with a man at her house. He told her
he was a candidate in the upcoming primary for city council.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
The gentleman came and sat on my.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Fuke for about two hours and.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
We had a long conversation about whether or not I
were going to run against the incumbent, and if I
was not, what I support is candidacy.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
The incumbent was James E. Davis. The man was Neil.
Ask you And when the police asked her if she
knew who might have shot James, her mind immediately went
to Neil because he hadn't just come to her house
to ask for her support. He needed her.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Help he wanted to know what advice I could provide him,
and she was the victim of blackmail.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
The silver forty caliber handgun was recovering in the city hall.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
Will somebody tell me that Jeffery who wasn't a coincidence?
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Jeffer who did it? There were times when I thought
that he was unstable, and there were times when I
thought maybe he shouldn't carry a gun.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
He alleged was a victim of flodmail.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
This was not just killing somebody because she wanted his seat.
I'm Jamal Jordan, and this this Russhack.
Speaker 6 (02:01):
I've had some very tough days in my life, and
some tough days in city Hall, but I don't think
I've ever had as tough a day as today.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
It's by twenty pm, a little more than three hours
since the shooting. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is addressing reporters in
a briefing room on the brest floor of City Hall.
Speaker 6 (02:19):
Somebody who was an elected official of the City of
New York has been killed, and they've been killed right
here in City Hall, and another person is also dead.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
What we know so far is the following.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
James Davis came into City Hall along with a mist
to ask you, who had filed papers to run against
James Davis. They came in together. They went through the
security booths, but did not go through the magnetometer. Apparently
(02:57):
the city council members and the mayor have not been
going through a magnetometer the same ways that pilots and
stewardesses don't go through magnetometeras at airports.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Mayor Bloomberg admits that many public officials, including him, are
disregarding security at the city Hall. It's not even two
years since nine to eleven. New York City is still
very much on edge.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
A few minutes later, in the falcony of City Hall,
it would appear that mister Ascu shot James Davis, our
city council member, and that mister Ascue was in turn
shot by a New York City police officer. It is
(03:46):
still preliminary. We don't know anybody's motives. It does not
appear that there is anything else to the story other
than a dispute between these two men.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
The dispute between these two men, Neill ask you and
James Davis, and now both of them are lying dead
in the same hospital a few blocks away. The hero
of the hour opposite. Richard Bert has been taken to
(04:24):
Saint Vincent's Hospital to be treated for trauma.
Speaker 7 (04:27):
I got a visit from the Police Commissioner Ray Kelly,
and from him I find out that the person A shot,
you know, was killed.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Ritchie didn't know the name of the man he had shot,
but he knew that now his first time using his
weapon outside of the firing range, he had killed someone.
Counselman Larry Seber had met James's guest at city Hall
(05:02):
that day.
Speaker 8 (05:03):
It's kind of agitated. I didn't get a good vibe
from this cat. Larry is sitting in Beakman Hospital. He
had brought fellow council member Maria by us there after
the shooting because she was hyperventilating and she's being treated now.
I'm sitting there waiting for her and the detectors come
(05:24):
over to me and say, if you can do an
identification for us, it would be helpful.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
So I said, Okay, what do you want me to do?
He said, come with.
Speaker 8 (05:37):
Us, and they had the guide ling up there. When
they pulled down his sheet, saw the guy's face, so
I said, oh, that's the guy that was with James.
Speaker 9 (05:47):
And then they pull it and you could see the
bullet hit him right here. The hole was in his chest,
and I'm right, WHOA, that was the guy.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I never go down to City Hall ever. Henny Hiroshami
is in real estate.
Speaker 10 (06:17):
But I had to go to the Woolworth Building to
receive a deposit for a house that I rented in Miami.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
The Woolworth Building was built in nineteen thirteen. It was
once the tallest building in the world. It's right next
to City Hall.
Speaker 10 (06:32):
Park, so I was literally maybe one hundred feet away
from Neil when the shooting took place.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
They didn't say Neil, ask you. I didn't connect the
dots al or he was.
Speaker 10 (06:42):
There was a shooting that happened in City Hall, and
it wasn't until I started heading back that reporters were
already flocking to our office because that's where he registered
his campaign office.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Henny and a partner had opened a co working space
good rent Offices by the hour. Neil was a friend
and they let him use it. But when he first
told them about his campaign for city council, Kinney was surprised. Politics.
We never really talked about it.
Speaker 10 (07:13):
To be honest with you, I was very surprised here
he was running for a political career.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Neil had also confided to Hinty that he had a problem.
Speaker 10 (07:23):
He did say his political adversary was trying to blackmail
him regarding his sexuality, and that was something that upset
him greatly because he never came out to his parents.
Speaker 11 (07:39):
He was an innocent kid from Long Island that was
closeted and was lost in a way.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Cliff Nasked was Neil Asku's friend and roommate in the
nineteen nineties when Neil had first moved to New York
City from a working class town on Long Island. His
family was conservative and religious, and Cliff understood that this
was a real problem for Neil.
Speaker 11 (08:01):
He was a Jehovah witness, and he said his parents
would disown him if they found out he was gay.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Cliff first met Neil at Long Island University in nineteen
ninety two. To Cliff, he seemed like someone who was
in the process of rewriting their own story.
Speaker 11 (08:18):
I remember the first day meeting him. I asked him
what his ethnicity was and he said, to me an American, Indian,
Irish and a little black. But by his skin tone
and his features, he looks African American. He wasn't happy
(08:38):
being a black male. He wore contacts and he relaxed
his hair. He claimed to have went to a high school,
which is more of a upper middle income type on
Long Island, and he always tried to blend in with
the upper middle income Jewish type of crowd.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Cliff coun sense that Neil was struggling to figure out
who he was and that he had some demons.
Speaker 11 (09:06):
I was dating a brownskin Latin guy and Neil comes
in and sees me on the sofa in my apartment
with this brownskin Latin guy, and he said, what are
you doing with this end guy in my apartment?
Speaker 12 (09:25):
That's the word he used to describe the guy.
Speaker 11 (09:27):
So a lot of deep seated issues that he had
with people's color of their skin. I think there's a
lot of hatred inside, which caused him a lot of
anxiety and problems in his life.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Cliff was big into the gay nightlife scene in New
York and he opened that world up for his new.
Speaker 12 (09:48):
Friend during school.
Speaker 11 (09:50):
We had a lot of fun coming to the city,
going to Fire Island. I introduced him.
Speaker 12 (09:56):
To a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
They would go to clubs that are now can disidered legendary,
like the Roxy, the Lime Light, the found Factory in
the Paradise Garage.
Speaker 11 (10:07):
I remember going to a Roxy on Saturday night and
I invited Neil to come, and I don't even think
I had a T shirt on.
Speaker 12 (10:16):
Neil was so new to this.
Speaker 11 (10:18):
He went in a button down shirt and tie, and
then by the end of the night his shirt was off.
And then the next weekend he was at the Sound
Factory dressed in shorts.
Speaker 12 (10:33):
Just George.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Neil was transforming from a closet at Jehovah's Witness into
a party kid.
Speaker 11 (10:40):
Being in your twenties and being attractive game en, you
can experience a lot. We like nicer things in life.
We like the fast life. We like having fun in
New York City, and we met a lot of very
very well connected people and had fun at the same time.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
After college, Cliff Nast moved into an apartment in Midtown, Manhattan,
and then Neil moved into an apartment nearby. Cliff got
a job in pharmaceutical sales, pitching doctors on new medications,
a good job for handsome charmers.
Speaker 11 (11:19):
Neil did that as well, just to follow in my footsteps.
Speaker 12 (11:24):
Very interesting. Neil liked to do a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
I did a lot.
Speaker 11 (11:30):
I did find it kind of weird, and maybe he
did have some desire to.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Be like me, whatever reservations he might have had, Cliff
invited Neil to move into his place at Riverbank, a
luxury apartment building on West forty third Street. When they
first met, it was Cliff who knew was way around
the scene, but at this point Neil was the one
getting invites to parties with fancy people. Cliff remembers going
(11:56):
with Neil to a lavish apartment that overlooks Central Park.
Speaker 11 (12:01):
I remember going up in the elevator and they said, oh,
just get out, you have the whole floor. They said,
oh Sting lives upstairs and mel Gibson lives downstairs, but
they only have a quarter of the size. I don't
know how the hell mey Neil met these people out
of the blue.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Cliff says that the two of them hung out with
fashion designer Jean Paul Gaudier at clubs in Manhattan and
met Calvin Klein on Fire Island. That designer Marc Jacobs
took one look at Neil and asked him to be
one of his models.
Speaker 11 (12:34):
Neil was definitely a social climate, and he used his assets,
his brain and his body to move far in this world.
People offering him money, offering him to do modeling gigs.
He had his hands in many different places, trying to
figure out life.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
I would go to Splash Bar just because it was
a social thing and have a couple of beers and
mingle with people and talk. The guys would come out
on the stage and they would shower and dance and
so forth.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Victor Carneccio is a fine art photographer and Splash Bar
was a gay bar in West seventeenth Street in Lower
Manhattan and also the first gay bar I ever went
to with my fake ID at age eighteen. Victor met
Neil ask you there in the summer of nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
I found him very attractive, and I thought I'd like
to photograph him. We went down to the studio and
did the pictures that night. He was very young, and
he really loved showing his body. We didn't do total nudes.
I think we might have done some of his underwear.
I could tell he would really liked be in front
of the camera. He was just playing, experimenting and discovering himself,
(13:53):
you know. He was happy.
Speaker 11 (13:57):
Neil was always out for a good time, and I
actually kind of enjoyed the excitement of being friends with
them because there was always something good, funny, or even
dangerous going to happen.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
But it could also go too far. Like one night
back when they were still in college on Long Island.
Speaker 12 (14:17):
We were coming home from the club.
Speaker 11 (14:19):
We're driving through the Midtown Tunnel and I'm like, Neil,
I told you we have classes in the morning. I
can't be out till four in the morning. I can't
do with this. You're crazy, You're crazy. And I said,
I don't know if I'm going to be speaking with
you again. And he pushed his foot on the accelerator
and kept going faster. He said, if you're not going
(14:39):
to talk to me, I'm going to kill you and
me before we get in this tunnel.
Speaker 12 (14:48):
And I literally jumped out of the car at the booth.
Speaker 10 (15:00):
Neil and I met while we were working on Long
Island for a company called Premier Catering.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Henny orsholemy again.
Speaker 10 (15:06):
I was a manager and Neil is the other manager
of that catering team.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
They got to be friends. Neil was fun and spontaneous,
if maybe a little intense.
Speaker 10 (15:18):
I had dinner with my girlfriend and he brought his
friend Mario, who seemed like a very nice guy, and
we had dinner together and I told him I was
going to Jamaica tomorrow with a bunch of other friends,
and he excused himself. He comes back ten minutes later
and says, I just booked a flight.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I'm coming with you. But certain aspects of his friend
remained closed off until Neil was finally ready to be
open about his life.
Speaker 10 (15:46):
Neil and I hung out one night and he said, well,
what I think about his friend Mario, And you know,
my response was, you know, Mario seems like a very
nice guy. So he said, do you think Mary is
a good looking guy? He'll call me a little bit
off guard to be honest with Steve, and I was like, well,
I guess so he's a pretty good looking guy. And
it goes honey, Mary was my lover. I know this
(16:10):
guy now for a couple of years, and I had
never suspected he was gay, but his ability to keep
that from me was kind of surprising. I absolutely saw
Neil living two separate lives.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I'm sure a lot of.
Speaker 10 (16:23):
It had to do with him being in a closet,
with his family being Jehovah witnesses, I'm sure it was
a bit complex.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And so when Neil told Hinney that his political rival
was blackmailing him, threatening to out him as gay, it
wasn't totally out of the blue. Neil might be out
to his closest friends, but as someone trying to break
into politics, maybe he felt that he had to keep
some things to himself.
Speaker 11 (17:08):
Although you reached the office of councilmanic candidate Osanil Boez
ask you for the thirty fifth District of New York City.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
I was covering Brooklyn politics pretty closely in those days,
and I always looked at the campaign Finance Board filings.
Speaker 12 (17:29):
I would go through the list and see who's looking
to run this year.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Journalist Eric anglists.
Speaker 12 (17:36):
Most of the names on these lists.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
I would know because I had been covering Brooklyn on
and off since nineteen ninety one. I saw this name Othniel,
ask you, and I thought, Wow, who is this guy?
Speaker 12 (17:50):
People run for office generally.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
Have some standing in the community, but ask you, I'd
never heard of him.
Speaker 12 (17:58):
This wasn't totally unusual.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
There's always a few candidates who come out of nowhere
and as a rule, they never win. But nonetheless I
sent an email just to ask, like, who are you,
what's going on? And lo and behold he responded, and yes,
he said he was running in this council race.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Neil's tone and his emails struck Eric as a bit odd.
He said him along Bio a kind of humble beginnings
type thing.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
You have to be a little bit strange to run
for office, especially if you have absolutely no standing in
the community.
Speaker 12 (18:37):
You know, one's ever heard of you, you know.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
So I figured he was a little bit different, and
that was fine and nothing wrong with that. But I
called up James Davis and I said, a counselman, have
you ever heard of Neil?
Speaker 12 (18:53):
Ask you?
Speaker 4 (18:54):
And Davis said to me, I've never heard of him or.
Speaker 12 (19:00):
Her, and then he left. I mean he was a
trash talker.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
James Davis often found a way to take small jabs
at his opponents like this, undermined them in little ways.
To him, it was all part of the game. He
was also quoted as laughing and saying, ask you come
out wherever you are.
Speaker 12 (19:23):
Who in central Brooklyn those days was not a trash talker.
To some extent. There were no kid gloves.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
Davis had run against the machine, so he viewed himself
as someone who sort of made his own career rather
than making a deal to get into office. So rivals,
he didn't take them lightly, but he didn't necessarily treat
them that well either.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Eric more or less forgot about this. Neil, ask you
until the next important moment in the process, when candidates
have to hand in the signatures they've collected in order
to get on the ballot. The deadline was July tenth,
thirteen days before the shooting.
Speaker 12 (20:04):
To get on the ballot was not easy to do.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
Ask you that five weeks to collect nine hundred signatures,
and this is painstaking work. I mean you're standing on
the street corner, stopping New Yorkers as they go by
and saying, can you either take a minute sign This
not easy to do. Once you collect them, you take
them to your election lawyer and you put them together
(20:27):
with a cover sheet, and everything has to be done
by the book. All the i's dotted, the tea's crossed,
everything's got to be perfect. And then you have to
bring those bound petitions to the Board of Elections office
and you have to file them by a deadline.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Neil spent weeks collecting thousands more signatures than he needed
because a lot of signatures get tossed out for technical reasons,
and yet he didn't get those bound petitions in by
the deadline.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
There's no question that the petitions were never properly delivered
to the Board of Elections. But I do know that
ask You showed up at his attorney's office at nine
pm and the bound signatures were ready.
Speaker 12 (21:13):
All he had to do was bring them.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
To the Board of Elections by midnight, and that didn't happen.
And I also know that a few minutes after midnight
someone slid found petitions under the door of the Board
of Elections after the deadline. That doesn't count. They were
(21:36):
never recorded.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Why wouldn't You'll ask You do all that work only
to miss the deadline and forfeit his chance to run
for city council.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
To this day, I believe he was thinking whether or
not to file them, and he had some kind of conflict,
and at the end of the day he decided I'm
going to file, but it was too late. And I
believe that if ask You had gotten on the ballot,
this murder never would have happened.
Speaker 12 (22:06):
And who knows. I mean James Davis could literally be mayor.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
At this point, Eric emailed Neil to ask what had happened.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
I sent a message like why are you not on
the ballot? And he wrote back that because of quote
human incompetency, the petitions did not get filed.
Speaker 12 (22:27):
There was a very cryptic message.
Speaker 4 (22:30):
He didn't explain who's incompetency, who was at fault?
Speaker 12 (22:35):
What had happened?
Speaker 1 (22:37):
After the shooting, Eric inquist dug deeper his reporting shed
a little more light on the who and the why.
Speaker 4 (22:45):
Before the July tenth deadline to file petitions for the
Democratic primary, Ask You showed up at the home of
a politically active person in the district and near tears,
revealed that he couldn't run because James Davis had some
personal information on him that would destroy his life.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
David R. Miller has been in the Brooklyn political world
for decades. On the evening of July twenty second, the
night before the shooting, he ran into Neil Ask you
at a political event at a bar on Atlantic Avenue
in Brooklyn. After the shooting, Miller began referring to Neil
only as the killer.
Speaker 13 (23:34):
The killer was paying James Davis to be his technician.
Oh what a technician is? So you have the submit petitions,
all right?
Speaker 14 (23:45):
Your technician goes line by line to make sure it
conforms to the arcane, very strict laws in New York State.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Often a candidate has an organization behind them to handle
this kind of thing. But if they don't, they outside
help a technician. He old told David Miller that he
had paid James Davis to provide this kind of help.
He also told them that it had ruined him.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
He was broke. He ran through his savings and everything
in his life. I know he spent the last ten
thousand dollars on a campaign. I know that for a fact,
his last money he's paying James.
Speaker 14 (24:23):
And then he had knocked off the ballot. Then if
the petition wore a file on time. That's one of
the oldest tricks in the book. Man, Okay, that is
the oldest trick in a book for insurgents. Van Derdida
is famous for that.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Vander Lbedi was a controversial state assemblyman from Brooklyn. On
August thirtieth, nineteen ninety, he was shot to death in
his story front campaign office. David Miller was supposed to
have lunch with him that day. Van's will say, okay, man,
give me a hundred.
Speaker 12 (24:53):
Cheek up.
Speaker 14 (24:54):
They cared you one hundred seats. That's fifteen hundred signatures.
You only need five hundred ballot things to make them,
so you're in the bank. But he gives you a hundreds,
you don't.
Speaker 12 (25:03):
Make the ballot. You'll and you put it all that
money for it.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Is it possible that James Davis took the last of
Neil's savings to help him foul his petitions and secure
a place in the ballot, only to sabotage his efforts
and eliminate the competition.
Speaker 4 (25:19):
I don't trust anything that ask You said, because a
lot of what he said was verifiably untrue.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Eric Anquist again to him, the idea that James Davis
would want to knock Neil off the ballot makes no sense.
James already had someone else running against him besides Neil.
Ask you, it would be better for James if Neil
was in the race.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Davis was the incumbent. There's an anti incumbent vote in
any election, and if you can split that vote, it
basically eliminates any chance that either insurgent candidate has to win.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
On the morning of the shooting, just a few hours
after seeing David Miller at the bar on Atlantic Avenue,
Neil made a phone call to the FBI. The day
after the shooting, NPR reportage on Neil's call.
Speaker 15 (26:14):
Investigators tell the Associated Press that the gunman Othnil asked you,
called the FBI the morning of the killing, and, in
a rambling conversation, told the bureau that his victim, Consulman
James Davis, was blackmailing him, threatening to expose him as
gay unless he dropped a political challenge.
Speaker 12 (26:32):
That actually I think was true.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Journalist Errol Lewis knew James Davis and lived in the
thirty fifth district.
Speaker 16 (26:40):
Listen, if it's two thousand and three and you're running
and your opponent is gay in Crown Heights, where there's
a bunch of conservative Black Baptists and a whole lot
of conservative hasidum, you would be negligent not to at
least bring it up, you know, And whether you're a
quote outing that or just pointing it out, it would
(27:02):
not make sense to ignore that.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But the thirty fifth district wasn't just Crown Heights, it
was also Fort Green a neighborhood that, because of his
black gay community, was nicknamed Chocolate Chelsea. For Eric Anquist,
it doesn't add up.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
This theory never made sense for a number of reasons.
Number one, ask you was already out of the closet.
He frequented gay establishments, so it was not a mystery
that he was gay. Number two, being gay was not
a negative in two thousand and three in Central Brooklyn
to run for office. If anything, it might have even
(27:41):
helped him pick up a few votes. Number Three, James
Davis had a very good relationship with the gay community.
He saw them as important to his own career. And
the idea that he would out someone that would have
outraged the gay community, and there's there's no way he
would have even threatened to do that.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Neil may have deliberated and then files his petations too late,
as Eric Inquist speculates, and he told more than one
person that James Davis was blackmailing him. But did James
really have some secret information on Neil? And if it
wasn't about being gay, then what was it about. That's
(28:29):
next time on Rorshak Murder at City Hall. Rorshak Murder
at City Hall is a production of iHeart Podcasts in
partnership with Best Case Studios. It's based on Death in
the Chamber by Brent Katz. It's written and executive produced
by Brent Katz and Adam Pinkis produced by Charlotte Morley
(28:53):
and co produced by me Jamal Jordan, Edited and mixed
by Max Michael Miller. Original music was by tunday Ada
Pempe and Walder Zobie. Our chival producer Isabelle d'Orval, consulting
producer Amir Loomis. Development production assistance from David Michael. Archival
content provided by Spectrum News New York One additional material
(29:14):
by NPR. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry, Carl Catel,
and Anna Stumph. Following rate Rorschak Wherever you get your
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