June 23, 1991

Housing crusader approaches a crossroad

By Peter S. Canellos

When Bruce Marks talks about how banks and lending companies manipulated unsuspecting homeowners into deals that yielded huge profits, his seriousness is apparent in the beseeching tone in his voice, his flailing mannerisms, his red-eyed stare.

Marks, more than any other local activist or political figure, saw a connection between the abusive lending practices of some mortgage companies and the extensively documented lack of regular loans at conventional interest rates by mainstream banks to minority communities.

And, armed with damaging information about banks' financial ties to purportedly abusive lenders dug up by his staff at the Union Neighborhood Assistance Corporation, he pressured the banks to make concessions, gleefully employing the in-your-face protest tactics perfected by his mentor, hotel workers' union president Domenic Bozzotto.

But now, as Fleet/Norstar, the target of most of his wrath, prepares to cut a settlement deal with other activist groups, many observers believe that Marks' crusade is at a dangerous crossroads.

Fleet/Norstar officials, while publicly pledging to negotiate with all comers, are privately portraying Marks as a fringe character, an angry man with an unbendable antibank agenda who lacks the reasonableness and political finesse to obtain his objectives.

Their negotiations with rival groups carry an implicit challenge to Marks' contention that "my point of view represents that of the community."

Marks, 36, who entered advocacy after quitting a job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, seems to have been preparing his entire life for a spectacular clash with a perceived corporate villain.

But most observers question whether Marks will survive that clash - and whether his career as an activist will advance to the next level, where he will be recognized as a no less intense, but more formidable, battle-tested warrior.

Marks, for his part, claims to be comfortable with the pressure and scrutiny of a big media crusade.

"I clearly have not made friends from this," he says. "I've received threatening phone calls at home. But when I ride my bike, I've had people honk and give me a thumbs up."

Marks is very proud of his resume.

Not the one that says he grew up in upper-middle-class Scarsdale, N.Y.; taught tennis at country clubs for five years; earned a master's degree in business administration from New York University; and landed a plum position at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Rather, Marks is proud of the rich, anecdotal activist's resume described by those on his long list of friends, colleagues, ex-friends, estranged fellow activists and corporate enemies - the one that begins after he bolted the Fed, disgusted by what he saw as its lax, uncaring attitude toward bank regulation:

- How he plotted to disrupt the Boston Marathon, sponsored by John Hancock Co., owner of a hotel that was trying to thwart a union drive. (He forced concessions from John Hancock, and the disruption threat was dropped.)

- How he screamed himself red in the face trying to incite striking paper workers in Jay, Maine, to take over their plant.

- How, last week, he occupied the offices of the Boston Bank of Commerce, Boston's only black-owned bank and an institution revered in liberal circles, because the bank was hosting a meeting with Fleet/Norstar executives.

Marks learned these tactics at the knee of Bozzotto, whom he heard lecture in 1985, shortly after quitting the Fed and moving to Boston to work for a Hispanic community development corporation.

Bozzotto said he first met Marks when he breathlessly volunteered to work for the union and "I saw Bruce as a yuppie coming in to mingle with the workers."

The description seems only partly true.

Marks says he came from a supportive upper-middle-class family in a town full of upwardly mobile families, but he was from an early age at odds with his environment.

He had a bad stutter as a child - which has slowly improved into a much less noticeable impediment today - but he remembers often having something to say, an opinion to contribute, and being unable to get the words out. "It's a feeling of helplessness," he said. "You lose control. You can't get your point across."

His difficulty with speech, he says, sensitized him to both the special needs and the unappreciated talents of the disabled or unempowered: the sense that they really have something to say if allowed to transcend their handicaps.

"There are lots of people who grow up feeling entitled," he said. "I never felt entitled. I felt more for people who can't control their lives."

Growing up, he says, "I always sought out things that were different: different experiences, different philosophies."

As a junior at the University of Connecticut, Marks chose to spend a year abroad at the City University of London, a commuter school that catered to middle-class British students and a range of minorities, but almost no Americans.

One night a week before Christmas, he was attacked and badly beaten by two punks who cornered him in a laundromat and slashed his face, arms and legs.

Though badly shaken by the experience, he said, he was comforted by the support of friends in inner-city London. "I had one friend from Biafra and he went out looking for them - he was going to take them out," Marks said.

Business school, he said, began as an attempt "to know the enemy." He says he always resented students who, in his eyes, numbly followed a path through graduate school and into corporate America. "I really felt 80 percent of the people were there because they came from money, not because they were intelligent," he said. "They were on a path that had been laid out for them - to be decision-makers for corporations."

His Fed job, which he said he got after signing up for an interview as a lark, deepened his distrust of corporate America. He worked as an applications officer, evaluating banks that applied for charters or mergers. Community lending, he said, "got short shrift" in the Fed's analyses.

On several occasions, he said, he uncovered evidence of conflicts of interest, such as bank directors receiving below-market loans from their banks, but his bosses paid no attention to the cases. "It was a good experience, because I learned how much valuable information can be found on public documents," Marks said.

He happily played the role of inside agitator at the Fed, leading a series of crusades that he says established him as the office troublemaker.

He exposed high levels of asbestos in the Fed office. Later, he organized his own "substitute Santa" program to compete with the Fed's official Toys for Tots campaign. Under Marks' program, Fed workers brought toys directly to needy families, witnessing their poverty firsthand, rather than simply depositing presents at the office.

"They didn't like the fact that I was doing my own thing," he said with a satisfied smile.

At Local 26, the hotel workers' union where Marks volunteered for two years and then served on staff for two more before becoming chief of the related but independent Union Neighborhood Assistance Corporation, he was exposed to harsher protests.

"He got dirty with Local 26 as a volunteer and got dirty with us on staff," Bozzotto said, admiringly. Marks, he said, "has knocked on more doors, been in more membership homes, than most of the staff and leadership."

It was Marks who developed the vision of a trust fund to help hotel workers find housing. He pulled together a massive national coalition to change federal law to allow unions to bargain with employers for housing trust funds. The trust fund became the neighborhood assistance corporation, and Marks became director, supervising a staff of 12.

As a new, powerful force among housing advocates, Marks has won praise for his commitment and technical expertise. He has also won a reputation for arrogance, by lecturing other advocates on how to conduct their business and promoting his organization at the expense of others.

The neighborhood assistance corporation "has the air that they're the only ones who know how to do things right," said Lewis Finfer, director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance and one of the area's most respected housing advocates. "It's one thing to have pride in your own group, but to do it at the expense of saying no one else can do it as well . . ."

One city official says she and her colleagues were stunned and amused when Marks led off a meeting with an offer to help the city government by aggressively goading companies and banks to make more of a contribution to neighborhood development.

"He said: 'I'll be your junkyard dog. Let me be your junkyard dog,' " the official said. "The problem with a junkyard dog is you don't know when it will turn around and bite you."

Marks saves some of his best cuts for black advocates and officials, saying, "There is a void in effective black leadership in Boston," although he pointedly excepts such longtime Local 26 supporters as City Councilor Charles Yancey (Dorchester), Boston mayoral candidate Rev. Graylan Ellis-Hagler and former state Rep. Mel King.

He argues that the black community will never be able to assert its rights until it is organized, block by block, and residents vote in larger numbers and back up their demands with protests.

Marks' group, he says, has done in-the-trenches organizing in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan and worked with a team of emerging grass-roots black advocates to advance minority concerns. "I don't think it's a distraction to take on some of the self-appointed leaders" in the black community, he said. "It's an important issue. If you don't take them on, the real grass-roots leaders can't emerge."

The neighborhood assistance corporation is engaged in a long-running battle with the Greater Roxbury Neighborhood Authority, an advocacy group run by former Local 26 supporter Robert Terrell.

Marks says Terrell and many other "self-appointed leaders" are out of touch with their communities and cannot claim a fraction of the support that Marks' organization, which includes the largely minority Local 26 among its membership, can.

Terrell, in response, questions Marks' effectiveness and the wisdom of his showy tactics.

While Marks has hogged the spotlight by making conspiracy charges against banks, Terrell says, he and other black leaders have been laying the groundwork for an agreement that will help people in black communities keep their homes.

"They have contributed nothing of value to the discussions" about bank lending, Terrell said of the neighborhood assistance corporation. Referring to the group's sit-in at the Bank of Commerce, he said, "Their behavior on this issue has been unconscionable."

Banking leaders deride Marks' uncompromising stands as familiar rantings from the paranoid left.

One banking executive, declining to be quoted by name, describes Marks' strategy as "a script out of the '20s and '30s labor movement. You demonize your opponent, use a kind of rhetoric that objectively is absurd but frames the argument. Then you make claims on your opponent. The only way to atone for the demoniacal state is some huge concession."

Bankers maintain that Marks has conducted a deliberate strategy of media manipulation aimed at "extorting" money from the banks.

But Marks maintains that his campaign against the banks has a more fundamental objective: structural reform of leem is the checks and balances. If you let competition run wild, they'll take advantage of people. If we are well organized, we'll keep them in check."

This article is reprinted here for non-commercial, educational, fair use purposes only.