A lot of people have been calling on Guy Molinari since the news of Rep. Vito Fossella’s (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) scandal broke and the congressman announced he would not seek re-election. In the months since, local Republicans scrambled to find a candidate to fill the seat. That candidate, Frank Powers, died suddenly just weeks after they did. Molinari publicly lambasted the local GOP leadership for the 11th-hour decision to give the nomination to Robert Straniere, who was ousted from the Assembly by his own party in a 2004 primary. Molinari, a former congressman and borough president, has now sought to re-establish himself as the man with the reins of the Republican organization he brought to prominence decades ago.

In his law office on Staten Island, Molinari spoke about the need to install a new borough GOP chair, Conservative Party support of Council Member Michael McMahon’s (D) Congressional bid and why he is not joking about running a primary against Council Minority Leader James Oddo in an attempt to return to Borough Hall in 2009.
What follows is an edited transcript.

City Hall: Why did the Staten Island Republican Party allow itself to hinge on the success or failures of Rep. Vito Fossella (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn)?
Guy Molinari: Well, the fact of the matter is that Congressman Fossella was the person who controlled the party for at least a half-a-dozen years. So, the other elected officials paid deference to him. I was present a few times when the elected officials would meet—just have supper, some laughs, and I was invited—so you can see that he was the one calling the shots. His father and his uncle are big fundraisers, so all these years, the party was getting along pretty well, until Vito had his problems. When Vito had his problems, the elected officials seemed to go in different directions.

CH: You are trying to replace the borough GOP chair John Friscia next year. Why?
GM: It comes down to one word: recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. You don’t see recruiting anymore in the party. Recruiting is part of the county chairman’s job. I had a conversation with our party chairman a couple weeks back. I said, “John, what’s happening?” I guess we had about six days to go [to pick a Congressional candidate]. And he said, “Nothing. Everything’s pretty much the same.” And he was kind of lackadaisical about the response. And I said, “John, you’re the county chairman. It’s your responsibility to come up with a candidate.” And he said, “I don’t view it that way.” So, I said, “Well. Let me be blunt about it. You’re not doing the job expected. Our party’s in bad shape. You’re not doing the job that we expected of you. I’m going to tell you right now, that I’m going to seek to oust you next year. We’ll have a county committee fight across the island, and we’ll oust, as I’ve done it before. The county chairman will bring fresh faces in and will bring the party back to where it was before.” So he said, “Well, we should terminate the conversation right now.” I said, “Fine. Goodbye.” And I’m already underway organizing to do what I promised what I’d do next year.

CH:  Isn’t it detrimental to the party to run a primary for borough president against a popular Republican candidate, James Oddo?
GM: I’m the guy who brought the party to where it was, so I don’t think I have to apologize for thinking that I might run for borough president again. I was forced out by term limits, okay, or I probably would have stayed. If I ran for borough president, it wouldn’t be because I’m running against Jim Oddo. It would be because I wanted to be borough president again. It shouldn’t be misinterpreted.

CH:   Do you think, if Mike McMahon wins Fossella’s seat, it is possible for the GOP to win it back in a few cycles, or will he be too popular or entrenched?
GM: He’ll work hard for the job. He works hard. Our best shot at him would be the next election. That’s the time we’re going to have to take him out. So, we have to be prepared in advance for all seats, especially this. I’ll tell you why. There’s great concern in our party that Councilman McMahon, if he’s elected, and I’m sure he’s going to be elected, that he will then take the organization on the Democratic side, pull it together, and then go after Republicans that are holding seats. That’s what I did. And I had a conversation with him, and he told me, he said I set the model and he’s following the model I set forth.

CH:  In terms of building a farm team, was it wise for the borough’s Republican Party to tap a Conservative, rather than a Republican, to be borough president of Staten Island?
GM: The problem was [that] Jim Molinaro was my deputy borough president, and he expressed a desire to serve in that capacity. And he’s a man who had a lot of very close relations with Republicans. Probably did more for the Republican Party, directly and indirectly, than any other one person. I asked to change his party registration when he told me he wanted to be borough president, tried to get him to become a Republican. But he’s one of the founders of the Conservative party in New York State. Where they made the mistake is permitting the relationship with the borough president deteriorate to the point where it is today. The Conservative Party nomination still becomes very important to us. Since its inception, the Republican Party made a mistake in saying it would not accept an endorsement of a new Conservative Party. That haunts us even today. We were outnumberered 2.5-to-1, almost 3-to-1 back then, and we said, let’s have a boycott of taking their endorsement. The Democrats said, nah, we’re not going to do that. That put us way back. Most of the Conservatives, I dare say, prior to that were Republicans and conservative Democrats. So we lost something that was a natural partner of ours, and Jim Molinaro is somebody that we want to work with. He controls a lot of votes.

CH:  With Molinaro endorsing McMahon, what do you think this new alliance of the Democratic Party and the Conservative Party will do to Republicans?
GM:The relationship between the Republican Party and the Conservative party here has never been worse than it is today. Again, the Conservative Party controls a lot of votes on Staten Island. And smart politicians are going to want to seek to get those votes and that means working together with the borough president. That’s one of the reasons why he got the endorsement. Even now, I work with Conservative Party in this last go around. They had a very good candidate, Paul Atanasio, former Marine, like myself. He ran for Congress years ago. Two years before I did. And he ran a good race, but narrowly lost. He went to Wall Street, made a lot of money. So he had money, was an attractive candidate. The only rap on him was that he didn’t live on Staten Island, he lived in Brooklyn. But he said, “If I win this election, I’m going to move to Staten Island.” So, he was a good candidate. I like him a lot. I tried my best to see if we couldn’t get him to run when we faced this same problem: he’s not a Republican, he’s a Conservative. What we’ve done, through stupidity, is we alienated the Independence Party and the Conservative Party. And the Republican Party’s in shambles. So, we couldn’t have done a worse wrecking job if you were paid to do it.

CH:  Molinaro endorsed McMahon, and you have been a long-time critic of former Assemblyman Robert Straniere (R). Are you going to endorse or vote for McMahon?
GM: I wouldn’t rule that out. It takes a lot to get me to vote for a Democrat, although I have in the past. Sometimes nobody knew about it.