My guest is Bob Trupin, All-Ivy Basketball star, coach, camp director, teacher, and commentator. Our subject is sports development, parental involvement, the NCAA, professional careers, and the chances of success versus failure. My guest panelist will be Alan Rosenberg, CPA, sports enthusiast, and a fellow basketball player.

                                                                             
                 
                                                                                   BOB TRUPIN  and ALAN ROSENBERG

Bob Trupin has had a long career as camp director, he has taught at places as varied as the NYC school system, Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, the Guilford Arts Center, the Shoreline Foundation, and college summer programs. His sport’s column, “Handle on Sports” appeared in the Shoreline Times newspapers for many years, He has been a camp and an athletic director for thirty years at Camp Trupin in Colchester, CT, Friends Seminary, in NYC, and Kutscher’s Sports Academy in Monticello, NY.

He has directed Robert Trupin’s Sporthink in Madison, CT for the past 12 years, which focuses on counseling, coaching and consulting at all levels for athletes, coaches, parental involvement, and teams.  Bob, who originally grew up and was educated in Mount Vernon, NY, was a Westchester High School All-County Basketball player, played basketball at Yale University, where he was selected All-Ivy and was drafted by the NY Knicks. He worked for the Knicks in the publicity department in the late 1960’s. He also has an MBA from NYU’s Graduate School of Business and a MS from Fordham University.

Also, we have Alan D. Rosenberg, who will serve as our guest panelist. Alan, who is a native Mount Vernon, graduated from AB Davis/MVHS and New York University. He is a long-time CPA, who has offices in both New York City and Scarsdale and is an avid sports fan and memorabilia collector.  Alan also played basketball for NYU, and has been heavily active in NYU alumni affairs. Over the years, Mr. Rosenberg has appeared three times on The Advocates; twice as a guest panelist with former NYU basketball great Cal Ramsey, and Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca, who also was a Davis HS and NYU graduate and athletic great.

Download | Duration: 00:52:13

My guest is the distinguished Boston College Professor, Ray Madoff. The subject is the power of generation skipping trusts and the rising influence of the American dead through statute and estates. Professor Madoff will talk about the following:

• Who owns one’s body, and why?
• Inheritance taxes, their affect and rationale
• Generation-skipping trusts: are they bad public policy?
• The rising power of the dead through trusts
• The enduring economic value of one’s image

                        


Ray Madoff is a Professor at Boston College Law School where she teaches trusts and estates, estate and gift tax, estate planning, and a seminar on immortality and the law. She is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead (Yale 2010), which looks at how American law treats the interests of the dead and what this tells us about our values for the living, and has done a number of radio interviews on the subject: "Legally Dead," (The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC Radio), "Changes to U.S. Taxing After Death," (Marketplace), and "The Rising Power of the American Dead," (AARP Radio: Prime Time Focus), among others. For a full list, click here.

She is also the lead author of Practical Guide to Estate Planning (CCH), and has written in a wide variety of areas involving property and death. Professor Madoff is an experienced mediator and leading authority on the use of mediation to resolve will and trust disputes. Prior to teaching, she was a practicing attorney for 10 years in New York and Boston. Professor Madoff is a member of the American Law Institute, an Academic Fellow of the American College of Trusts and Estates Counsel and the Chair of the Donative Transfers Section of the American Association of Law Schools. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the ACTEC Foundation.
She is the chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Donative Transfers, Fiduciaries, and Estate Planning. Elected to the Board of the ACTEC Foundation.

Some of her recent contributions have been Op-Eds on the following: "America Builds an Aristocracy." New York Times, July 12, 2010, "Protect the Farm, Tax the Manor." New York Times  November 21, 2009, on the Leona Helmsley Charitable Trust for dogs in New York Times. July 9, 2008. One can hear her Podcast with New York Times editor David Shipley on the Helmsley Trust. Subscribe/Listen (iTunes) She recently appeared on KCRW radio discussing the new "super-rich" in America. She is serving on committee to consider whether Massachusetts should adopt the Uniform Trust Code. Recipient of grant from ACTEC foundation to study the use of mediation in resolving will and trust disputes. She was awarded the Law Student’s Association Teaching Award for “Inspirational dedication to the Boston College Law School Community,” 2000. Professor Madoff is a graduate of Brown University (A and NYU School of Law (J.D.,LL.M).

Download | Duration: 00:52:13

My guest is the distinguished author Andrew Roberts. His book is "Masters and Commanders," and the subject is WWII strategy, starring FDR, Winston Churchill, General George C, Marshall and Field Marshall Alan Brooke.

 * The Cricality of Leadership
 * The Competing Long-Range Objectives of the Western Allies
 * The 2nd Front and its Necessity
 * Whose Strategy Prevailed?
 * Normandy, Calais, or North Africa and Italy?
 * Why Not Berlin for the Westerb Allies?
 *The Reality of Victory

     

                        Andrew Roberts at the FDR Library


Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honors degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he is an honorary senior scholar. His biography of Neville Chamberlain's and Winston Churchill's foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, entitled The Holy Fox was published in 1991, to be followed by the controversial, but no less well-received Eminent Churchillians in 1994. As well as appearing regularly on British television and radio, Roberts writes for The Sunday Telegraph and reviews history books and biography for that newspaper as well as The Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday and Daily Telegraph.
In 1999 he published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, the authorized biography of the Victorian prime minister the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, which won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. In September 2001 Napoleon and Wellington, an investigation into the relationship between the two great generals, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and January 2003 saw the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, which coincided with Roberts's four-part BBC2 history series.

Roberts holds an honorary doctorate from Westminster College, Missouri. He has two children, Henry, who was born in 1997 and Cassia, who was born in 1999, who live in Edinburgh. He lives in Belgravia in London with his wife, Susan Gilchrist, the senior partner of the corporate communications firm Brunswick Group and a Governor of the Southbank Centre.In 2005 Roberts published 'Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble', which was published in America as 'Waterloo: The Battle for Modern Europe'. The publication of 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900' brought him an invitation to the White House in February 2007, where he delivered the prestigious White House Lecture. Masters and Commanders, which was published in 2008, won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and was shortlisted for The Duke of Westminster’s Gold Medal for Military History and The British Army Military Book Award, both of Britain’s two top military history prizes. The Storm of War was published in August 2009 which reached No.2 on The Sunday Times bestseller list and has also been shortlisted for the British Army Military Book Award for 2010.

Roberts is interested in public policy and sits on the boards or advisory councils of a number of think-tanks and pressure groups. He is a Director of the Harry Guggenheim Foundation in New York, a founder member of Jose Maria Aznar’s Friends of Israel Committee, and in 2010 chaired the Hessell-Tiltman Award for Non-Fiction.

Roberts is a judge on the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography Prize, chaired the Conservative Party's Advisory Panel on the Teaching of History in Schools in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has also been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and an Honorary Member of the International Churchill Society (UK). He is a Trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and of the Roberts Foundation. More information about him can be found in Who's Who. Andrew Robert's and The Advocates on You tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFp6E5Uiki0&feature=related

Download | Duration: 00:51:04

My guests are Tony Russo, Michael McKeon and Michael Correra, and the subject is, “Wine and Spirits, Who Should Sell it and Why!”
We'll explore the following questions:

1) Small local business vs. national chains
2) Local diversity vs. potential monopoly
3) Safety: traffic, underage drinking
4) Service for the consumer
5) Level playing field for business competition
6) Selection of product, who can provide more choice for the consumer

    

Host: Richard J. Garfunkel


   Tony Russo of Aries Wine and Spirits

Tony Russo has been a wine retailer for over twenty-five years in White Plains and the Bronx.  He has long been active in his White Plains community, supporting numerous philanthropic and not-for-profit organizations throughout Westchester County.  As a former educator in the Yonkers school system, and as an adjunct professor at Westchester Community College, he is always aware of the role the wine and liquor industry plays in protecting our underage children from the unsafe sale of alcoholic beverages.  Mr. Russo has close contacts with the law enforcement community in his area, and has served on the White Plains Public Safety Advisory Board and the Westchester County Italian American Advisory Board.  Mr. Russo has also served on the Executive Board of the Metropolitan Package Store Association, an industry group of over four hundred wine and liquor stores throughout the New York metropolitan area.  In 2006, he was selected by Brown Forman Distillers as the “Retailer of the Year”.

Michael Correra is the owner of Michael Towne Wine Liquors in Brooklyn Heights for the past 15 years. He has an M.B.A. in Business from Wagner College. For the last two years, Michael has been the executive director of the Metropolitan Package Association, a 400 store trade conglomerate for NY wine and liquor retail that has existed since repeal and remains the largest throughout the state. You can access additional information at the Metro Package Store Association website.
 
Michael McKeon is a Partner of Mercury Communication LLC, His experience in government, politics and journalism gives him a unique understanding of how the news media frames current events and opinions. This understanding reflects more than 10 years working as a reporter for three New York newspapers and winning several awards for local and political reporting. Recently, Mike served as a member of the distinguished panel of judges for the International World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition which selected the memorial for Ground Zero. Mike also served as chief spokesman and a top strategist for Governor Pataki's successful 2002 re-election campaign. Prior to joining Mercury, Mike served as New York Governor George Pataki's Director of Communications. In that role, he advised Governor Pataki on major policy and strategic decisions. Prior to that, Mike served as Press Secretary to the Governor, overseeing the daily communication operations of the Governor's office and all state agencies and authorities. He directed more than 100 communications professionals throughout State government to ensure a consistent presentation of the Governor's agenda. Mike is a graduate of Utica College of Syracuse University, he has three children and lives in Kinderhook, NY.       

           

Download | Duration: 00:51:54

My guest is defense lawyer, legal commentator, and former prosecutor, Michael Shapiro, of Carter, Ledyard, & Milburn. Our topic is the Supreme Court, its recent decisions, its philosophical shift, the challenge to Federalism and the impact of its decisions.

    • A greater role for religion in American life
    • More participation from unions and corporations in elections
    • Broader 2nd Amendment rights- unrestricted gun ownership
    • Abortion rights curtailed
    • Limitations on affirmative action
    • Limiting the protection of rights of the accused

                                                     

Mr. Michael Shapiro is a long-time Scarsdale resident and noted criminal defense lawyer. Mr. Shapiro, who was raised in the Bronx, was educated at the City College of New York, where he received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude, and later earned his JD from New York University. Michael started his legal career as a prosecutor, serving as a special assistant attorney general in the then newly established NY State Office of the Special Prosecutor for Nursing Homes, Health and Social Services.  He is currently a faculty member of the Cardozo Law School’s Intensive Advocacy Program and has been a frequent guest panelist at the Harvard Law School. He is now a partner with the prestigious Wall Street, New York law firm, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, which was established in 1854.

Download | Duration: 00:52:09

My guest is writer and lawyer Amy Bach, who has written, Ordinary Injustice, How America Holds Court, “…the exposure and systematic shoddiness at the core of the American criminal justice system…” from Publishers Weekly. Guy Fairstein, now of Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, will join me as a guest panelist.

                                                                        

                             Guy Fairstein                           Amy Bach                          

Amy Bach, a member of the New York bar, has written on law for The Nation, The American Lawyer, and New York magazine, among other publications. For her work in progress on Ordinary Injustice, Bach received a Soros Media Fellowship, a special J. Anthony Lukas citation, and a Radcliffe Fellowship. She was a Knight Foundation Journalism Fellow at Yale Law School. Ms Bach is a graduate of Brown University and the Stanford Law School. After law school she clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett, judge of the 11th Circuit of Appeals in Miami, Fla.

She was raised in NYC and currently lives in Rochester, New York, where she has taught legal studies at the University of Rochester. She is currently a Soros Justice Media Fellow at The Open Society Institute. Recently, she held the Hayward Burns Memorial Fellowship at The Nation Institute, where she wrote a series of articles about injustice for The Nation magazine.
Guy R. Fairstein is a graduate of Williams College (B.A., 1966) and the University of Virginia School of Law (LL.B., 1969). During almost 40 years in the practice of law, Guy has concentrated his practice in the field of civil litigation, mostly cases involving commercial transactions and business entities, and some cases in the field of trusts and estates.  He has represented individuals, privately owned businesses, and some large corporations, in all phases of civil litigation.  Clients for which he has tried cases include Allied Stores Corporation (age discrimination action), KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (injunctive action under the Railway Labor Act), and Simon & Schuster (breach of contract action).  

For almost 20 years Guy has given his time to service as a volunteer mediator in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  Since July 2008 he has provided pro bono representation to indigent clients as a volunteer attorney working in association with Legal Services of the Hudson Valley.  Guy’s niche pro bono practice area concerns default judgments, wage garnishments and frozen bank accounts.

Download | Duration: 00:51:52

My guest is Julie M. Fenster, biographer and historian. Our subject is Louis McHenry Howe, and how he influenced the course of American history with his dedication and friendship with the Roosevelt’s.

         

Julie Fenster at the FDR Library,  and the Summer Bookfest at Hyde Park, NY

Julie M. Fenster is an author and historian who began her career at Automobile Quarterly, where her book Packard: The Pride won the Best Book award from the National Automotive Journalism Conference. The author of six additional books on a wide range of historical topics, she has written for American Heritage, the New York Times, and American History.
Her previous book, Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It, received the Anesthesia Foundation Award for best book of 2001. Fenster graduated from Colgate University and lives in upstate New York, where she drives her sports car on roads that trace the route of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race.She has starred in a TV commercial for Cheapbooks which was aired in early 2008. She is shown at a book signing for her work "Race of the Century." In 2003 she won The Anesthesia Foundation’s 2003 Book/Multimedia Education Award for Ether Day. In January 2006, she and co-author Douglas Brinkley released Parish Priest, a biography of Father Michael J. McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus..
She is also a regular contributor to American Heritage, Fenster has also written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She has appeared on NPR and C-Span, among others. Below is a list of her books

 • Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It (2001)
 • Mavericks, Miracles, and Medicine: The Pioneers Who Risked Their Lives to Bring Medicine into the Modern Age (2003)
 • Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race (2006)
 • The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President (2007)
 • FDR's Shadow: Louis Howe, the Force That Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (2009)

Download | Duration: 00:51:50

Today my guest  is financial advisor and consultant to cities, states, and national governments, John Berenyi, who will discuss public policy issues that include: military spending, pension reform, mining the sea, education reform, mass transit, government re-organization, and the pension time bomb!

        

Mr. John Berenyi, has undergraduate and graduate degrees in, engineering, management sciences and applied economics from Columbia University. He has been an investment banker, who has specialized in alternative energy and environmental finance for the past 25 years. In the early part of his career, as a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University, he developed the composite set of environmental indicators to measure the quality of life in cities across the United States. Cities, counties, states, and academic institutions have adopted this work, across America, as a tool for public of public policy and evaluation. Today, after a long career serving companies like Citicorp, HSBC Capital and IF Rothschild, he is the managing director of Ecocite, a Canadian-based company that works as an energy investment trust for eco-property development. He is also the Senior Advisor on Energy to the AJ Congress to implement the US-Israeli Energy Independence. Act. He is directing the Infrastructure & Energy Solutions Group (IESG), which is working on solutions regarding sustainable infrastructure and renewable energy for municipalities. John Berenyi has been an important contributor to The Advocates over the past three years, with his annual year-end predictions, his important and critical contributions on energy independence, financial market analysis and American sustainability.

Download | Duration: 00:52:31

My guest is Neil M. Maher, author of a book about the Civilian Conservation Corp, and its impact on the nation's environmental movement.

 

                Neil Maher at the Roosevelt Summer Bookfest
                     signing his book "Nature's New Deal"

Neil M. Maher is an associate professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark, where he teaches environmental history and political history.  He has published articles in academic journals including the Western Historical Quarterly, Environmental History, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and edited a collection of essays by historians, scientists, and policy analysts titled New Jersey’s Environments: Past, Present, and Future (Rutgers University Press, 2006). He has recently published "Nature’s New Deal:" The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008), which won the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for the best monograph in conservation history.  He is currently researching and writing a book on the environmental history of the space race during the long 1960s.

Download | Duration: 00:53:21

My guest is diplomat, scholar, businessman and former Ambassador William vanden Heuval. Our subject is the Four Freedoms Foundation, FDR and the new memorial dedicated to him that will be erected on Roosevelt Island. Information can found at  www.fdrfourfreedomspark.org.

Throughout his distinguished career as a lawyer, diplomat, businessman, and scholar, Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel has worked tirelessly to realize Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s ideals of social justice, human rights, and collaboration among nations. Born in Rochester, New York, in 1930 of immigrant parents, William vanden Heuvel attended public schools and worked his way through university, graduating Deep Springs College, Cornell University and Cornell Law School where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Law Review. He began his career in public service as Executive Assistant to William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan during General Donovan’s ambassadorship to Thailand, and subsequently served as Counsel to New York State Governor Averell Harriman.

                

In 1964, as Assistant to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Mr. vanden Heuvel led the efforts to defeat local resistance to school desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia. A Supreme Court landmark secured the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education and restored free public education to thousands of black children who had been without it since 1959 when the County closed its schools rather than desegregate them. The establishment of the Prince Edward County Free Schools System in 1963, for which Ambassador vanden Heuvel was singularly responsible, is considered a landmark in the civil rights struggle.

As Chairman of the New York City Board of Corrections in the early 1970s, he led a campaign to investigate and ameliorate conditions in the city’s overcrowded prison system and has had a lifelong involvement in the reform of the criminal justice system.

During the Carter Administration, Mr. vanden Heuvel was U.S. Permanent Representative to the European Office of the United Nations in Geneva and U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. Ambassador vanden Heuvel has eloquently defended the UN’s mission and importance with leadership roles in the United Nations Association/USA and the World Federation of United Nations Associations. As Co-Chair of the Council of American Ambassadors, he has written reports on Israel and Cuba, and reported on the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

Ambassador vanden Heuvel has served since 1955 as a director of the International Rescue Committee, a non-profit agency assisting refugees from political persecution and violent conflict.  In 1956, he traveled to Hungary and Austria to aid refugees of the Hungarian Revolution.  As President of IRC, he later organized efforts on behalf of Cuban, Chinese, Angolan, and Eastern European refugees. He serves on the Advisory Board of the International League for Human Rights, and has pressed for the U.S. to play a greater role in the developing world. “If we are unable to identify our own well-being in strengthening the economic foundations of the developing world,” he wrote in 1981, “then we are doomed to pay a price that dollars alone will not begin to measure.”
Ambassador vanden Heuvel was a Senior Partner at the law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, where he practiced international and corporate law.  He is currently Senior Counsel to the firm. He has held directorships in a number of public companies, among them the U.S. Banknote Corporation, Time Warner, Inc., and the North Aegean Petroleum company, and is currently Director of several prominent energy corporations. Since 1984 he has been a Senior Advisor to the investment banking firm Allen & Company.

As President of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute since 1984, and Chairman of the Board since 2000, Ambassador vanden Heuvel has presided over a range of academic conferences and initiatives relating to the Roosevelt Era, and helped to establish the Institute’s Roosevelt Study Centers in the Netherlands, Russia, and South Korea. With Ms. Anne Roosevelt, Ambassador Vanden Heuvel annually presents the prestigious FDR Four Freedoms Medals to outstanding individuals and organizations whose work embodies a commitment to the ideals that President Roosevelt expounded in his historic “Four Freedoms” address of 1941.

Ambassador vanden Heuvel has coauthored a biography of Robert F. Kennedy, and has written frequently on international affairs and the FDR legacy. In 2000 he edited a widely acclaimed book of essays examining current prospects for Russian political and democratic reforms, and he is Co-Editor, with historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Douglas Brinkley, of the St. Martin’s Press Series on American Diplomatic History.

Download | Duration: 00:52:03