The end of the first week of 2002 was chilling for O. Aldon James, president of the National Arts Club, located at 15 Gramercy Park. The morning began when a flotilla of police and agents representing New York City's Department of Finance, acting in concert with the Manhattan District Attorney's office, staged an early morning, daylong raid of the club's offices, seizing 40 boxes of material and various computers. Most ominously, a grand jury has now been empanelled to review the records and to potentially weigh criminal charges.
The raid was perhaps the most dramatic event thus far in an ever-widening story involving accusations of financial impropriety at the august club, a story percolating in the press for over a year. It's even spawned a website (www.concernednac.com) that was created by an organization composed of dozens of dissident club members called Concerned Artists of the National Arts Club. It may well culminate in James, who has held his position for 14 years, facing any number of thorny legal problems.
Neither the National Arts Club nor the spokesman for the Department of Finance, James Moses, would discuss the raid and the ongoing investigation. Moses' only comments, in fact, were "the investigation is ongoing" and "the investigation may or may not lead anywhere," standard operating procedure for the tight-lipped feds.
The question is what are they investigating and what might James and his administration have or not have done? The one group eager to discuss the matter is, of course, Concerned Artists, or more specifically, Nilda Mesa, the wife of J. Robert Seyffert, a third-generation member of the club and one of several spokespeople advocating on behalf of the group's cause. The group, she says, includes "many, many club members," who have collaborated on developing an extensive dossier documenting not only the various and questionable activities of James, but of Stephen U. Leitner, a trustee of the club and, according to Mesa, James' "live-in lover." They, along with James' identical twin brother John, all currently reside at the club, which boasts 42 artist apartments and was once owned by New York governor and presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden.
The National Arts Club was founded by Charles de Kay, the art critic, in 1898. The club's mission, substantially trimmed in recent years from its original version, is to "stimulate, foster, and promote public interest in the arts and to educate the American people in the fine arts." Theatre lovers know the club largely through its many literary activities, from the bestowing of the Joseph Kesselring Prize for Best American New Play to the sold-out Food for Thought series featuring star-driven concert readings of one-act plays performed during the weekday lunch hour. Renowned as well for its devotion to the fine arts, music, and dance, its membership, estimated to be approximately 2,000, includes many esteemed patrons of the arts as well as such marquee names as Martin Scorcese and Tatiana von Furstenberg.
Accusations and Concerns
According to a long blurb on their website, Concerned Artists of the National Arts Club is "a rapidly growing group of NAC members composed, just like The NAC as a whole, of artists and lovers of the arts, that believe our club has lost its democratic structure and accountability during the years of the O. Aldon James' and his colleague Steven U. Leitner's administration."
The statement continues: "This belief is manifested by serious questions regarding the club's finances… its loss of millions of dollars in potential revenue from the dining room/catering operations within the clubhouse; the restructuring of the club constitution to make it virtually impossible to elect club officers not approved by the James/Leitner administration….and the years of extremely costly and questionable litigation promoted by Aldon James in the club's name against members trying to reform James/Leitner policies, against elderly members the ad-ministration wished to evict from Club-owned apartments, and against the Gra-mercy Park Trust—the most recent being two purported racial discrimination incidents involving large groups of schoolchildren Aldon James escorted or arranged to enter into the privately-owned park, without first consulting the Trust, and then having been turned away."
Such strong accusations require evidence, and Mesa says Concerned Artists has done its job of amassing that. In fact, she ties the recent raid directly to the overall media coverage the situation has been receiving. "At some point" she says, "I think the authorities had to look at the information appearing in the media, and they said 'something smells.' They're devoting a lot of time and staff power to this investigation, especially when you think they had 20 and 30 people there that Friday. You don't get a judge to sign a court order authorizing a search warrant unless there's probable cause that something is going on."
And what is going on? "I think it's the obvious stuff," Mesa says. "We already know that Aldon's under investigation for tax violations—they had two or three million dollars in gross revenue coming into the club from the restaurant and catering operations which was then not reported on the club's tax records, even though this is a nonprofit organization." Mesa says the club failed to report compensation to board members—and that board members deny even receiving compensation—and she further questions why James, his brother John, and Leitner "control 10 of the 42 apartments," between them. "It's kind of a mystery what they've got those apartments for," she says, but she's sure the overall investigation is "ramping up more than it's ramping down."
In a separate part of the investigation, there are accusations that the club has been used for activities that would be illegal, given their nonprofit status, such as dinners given in honor of judges and, in one case already reported elsewhere in the media, a supposed fundraiser for Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, a charge which James, also in the media, vociferously denied.
How the Concerned Got Concerned
Mesa says the group's activities began when "it came out in the news that the club had filed another lawsuit against the Gramercy Park Trust," one of several launched by the organization in recent years over a number of disputes. "A lot of us wondered just what this had to do with the fine arts and became concerned because a lawsuit can be such a drain on club finances, so some individuals wrote letters to the board. The responses they received were, at first, denials that the club was even involved, but since it's being reported in the news, so how could they deny it? The next response was pretty much not providing any information at all. Those individuals then began speaking to other individuals, especially after it became clear that the letters weren't having any effect. People starting thinking in terms of collective action."
One of the problems in starting the organization, Mesa says, is that the club's membership list is tightly controlled by James and Leitner. "Little by little," she says, "and very often through anonymous donations—someone says, 'add these 10 people'—we had a pretty good list. So then, when we would send out a letter questioning a policy or asking for information, many more people could sign it. Then, after Aldon sent out a letter to the members explaining why the club has engaged in yet another lawsuit, we read the letter and found it full of inaccuracies. So we took out an ad in a local newspaper, knowing it would reach a lot of members living near Gramercy Park. The publisher of that paper started looking into the situation, and we had evidence to back up everything we were saying about how the club was being run."
After all, she says, "it's highly unusual for a nonprofit to be so secretive about its finances…also, if you're nonprofit, you're granted a special status by the government, and there are certain obligations that go along with that, one of which is financial transparency."
Whether or not criminal charges are filed against James or anyone in his administration, the group's ultimate goal is for the club to once again "become a place for people to meet and pursue artistic endeavors, whether they be in the visual arts, music, dance, photography, or literary. I think that there is a real need for community, which is why many people joined in the first place."