PRISONERS
OF PROFIT
In 1986, two young men scuffling
in a hallway in the Brooklyn Arms
fell down a broken elevator shaft
and plunged 15 stories to their
deaths. A few weeks later, four
children who had been left alone at
the hotel for hours died in a fire.
By 1989, Mayor Ed Koch’s administration had succeeded in
closing many of the city’s crime-
HUFFINGTON
11.03.13
Slattery and Horn called the
new company Esmor, Inc. They
laid out ambitious expansion goals
that included running a variety of
facilities that would house federal
prisoners, undocumented immigrants and juvenile delinquents.
“We saw a significant demand,”
Slattery told Forbes magazine in
1995, “and limited supply.”
“It’s everything that’s wrong with politics rolled up in a
package. You’re talking about society failing children. It’s
politically motivated, and it’s money-motivated.”
ridden welfare hotels, including
the Brooklyn Arms. Slattery’s
management group soon set its
sights on a new pot of government
money: prison halfway houses.
Slattery and Horn proposed
leasing out floors of their hotels
as re-entry housing for newly
released federal inmates, taking advantage of a surge in prison populations nationwide. In
1989, one of their hotels, a midtown Manhattan property called
LeMarquis, opened some of its
rooms to federal inmates.
As federal prison officials
awarded Esmor an emergency
contract to operate a halfway
house in Brooklyn, local community leaders challenged the decision, questioning why the same
people who had managed problem-plagued welfare hotels should
be given fresh responsibility.
“We do not want that group
doing anything up here because
they are not trustworthy and do
not deserve our support,” Democratic New York state Sen. Velmanette Montgomery said at a
community meeting in 1989, according to Newsday.
Less than three years after Es-