There were concerns that she was after more than just WestView. A couple of years ago, she moved into Capsis’s own apartment, on the ground floor, although she kept her belongings, including closetfuls of designer clothes, upstairs. A person who has lived in the building told me, “She sort of exists in the brownstone, lady-of-the-manor style.” Berke started collecting rent from the other six units, and opening the building to itinerant friends. “Really cheesy people who clearly had, like, mental-health problems,” Schwartz said. (The tenant said, “There have been, like, five different random guests, friends of hers, that sleep in the parlor.”) Berke told one WestView contributor, “I’ll be the landlord one day.”
Staffers speak of Berke as coming out of nowhere, but she’d lived on the block before. After an unsettled childhood in California, she found work as an interior designer and married a wealthy party planner who had a house on Charles Street, a few doors down from Capsis’s. The brownstone, Berke told me, had a swimming pool, a batting cage, and split-level gardens. “Living in the Village was like living in the country,” she said.
Capsis didn’t know her, but she, of course, knew of Capsis. He’d lived his whole life in Manhattan. At P.S. 192, he was the Times’ student rep, selling newspapers to classmates for three cents. His father made a living setting up Greek immigrants with restaurants; he’d front the down payments. In the sixties, Capsis moved to the Village (a friend of a friend had loaned him his down payment), where he soon started the Charles Street Block Association, which planted trees and planned get-togethers. The group published a newsletter, which became a regular pamphlet; in 2004, Capsis turned it into WestView. When Berke and her husband divorced, a decade ago (they’d had a disagreement over his children using toothpaste that contained fluoride), Berke had to move out of the neighborhood. WestView was her connection.
Last fall, Berke was finally installed as WestView’s managing editor. The resulting issue, for November, 2022, was unusual. Some of its contents had little relevance to the Village. The above-the-fold front-page story was about “The Wall Street Conspiracy,” a documentary from 2012 on naked short selling. An article about 5G poles noted, “A few people who may be electromagnetically sensitive (EMS), say they notice a tingling and queasy feeling if they linger near them.”
According to Schwartz, the staff approached him in crisis. “They said, ‘Can you do something? Don’t you have some kind of agreement with George that you can take over if he’s incompetent?’ ” Long story. In 2013, during one of WestView’s liquidity crunches, Capsis had asked Schwartz for a lifeline. They signed a contract in which Schwartz agreed to provide thirty thousand dollars, paid back in advertisements for his law firm and political campaigns, in exchange for one per cent of the newspaper. The paper’s three-million-dollar valuation was, perhaps, secondary to another part of the deal: Schwartz would have the right to succeed Capsis in the event of his death or a loss of faculties.
Schwartz says he never sought to take over WestView. As he explained recently in a letter to Capsis’s lawyer, “I have a busy law practice, a marriage I spend time on, a daughter in college, a daughter about to go to college, play a major role in the Democratic Party (I am the District Leader in the Village and the Manhattan Democratic Party Law Chair, and represent numerous candidates running for office), help care for my 100 year old mother, play an important role in the complex lives of my 32 and 35 year-old children.” He went on, “I really had no desire to add Westview News into my life.” Still, he felt compelled. He and the staff began plotting in secret.
Schwartz allowed that he felt bad for Capsis. He’d heard that an ambulance had shown up not long after the defection. As for Sarah Jessica Parker, he said he’d had nothing to do with her apparent endorsement. “If I talked to Sarah Jessica Parker, it wouldn’t be about that,” he said. Yet Schwartz viewed the new paper as more homage than ripoff. “We took over the spirit of it,” he said. “And maybe for the first issue we took over the name of it.”
Capsis doesn’t see it that way. When I visited him, in his cramped ground-floor apartment, which has old copies of the paper stacked to the ceilings and a musty odor of neglect, he was enraged. “Suppose you, in your advanced age, had a newspaper that Sarah Jessica Parker praised as the best newspaper in the Village,” he said. “And Arthur Schwartz copies it. Copies it! It is the most despicable.” The scandal had captivated a subset of the neighborhood. The Village Sun, another local paper, had been running wall-to-wall coverage. Capsis told me that the ambulance rumors were true. (Berke had thought he was having a heart attack.) He fantasized about the paramedics returning, only not for him: “If Arthur Schwartz were to walk in here right now, I would slap him!”
Capsis and Schwartz agreed on one central point: the staff exodus was about Berke. “When they saw her name as the editor, they blew up!” Capsis said. But Schwartz, he believed, was using Berke as cover for a long-plotted takeover. Documents were produced.
The 2013 loan agreement had soured their friendship. Capsis thought Schwartz was trying to force him out. A few years ago, Schwartz began insinuating, in e-mails to the staff, that Capsis was mentally incompetent. “Dementia does funny things,” he wrote in 2018. At other times, Schwartz tried flattery. “Do you have some other plan for Westview when you pass?” he wrote. “Who else would be better equipped?” At one point, Capsis refused to publish Schwartz in the paper unless he voided the agreement. Schwartz relented and nullified the contract.
As Capsis and I talked, Berke, who has long brown hair and wears lots of gold jewelry, like a Malibu matron, would often cut him off or answer for him. Capsis would send her out of the room on various pretexts—to make him toast, to check on a cable guy. “Dusty likes this situation because it gives her control,” Capsis told me, while Berke was preoccupied. “She feeds on chaos. I have to be careful what I say. Dusty believes in the conspiracy theory.” I asked which one. He mouthed, “All.”
Berke overheard. “But what if it was a conspiracy theory that was hiding the real conspiracy?” she shouted. She went on a long rant, about vaccines, about a gonorrhea treatment called Argyrol that she’d used to treat Capsis when he got COVID, about the 2020 election (she said it was rigged), about September 11th. (“I never said that hologram planes hit the World Trade Center,” she clarified. “I only say Building Seven.”) She showed me a scale model of the Trade Center site that she keeps in the house.
Capsis, with growing irritation, interrupted. “Dusty, could you warm up my coffee?” he yelled. He turned to me and whispered, “You could see why a lot of people dislike her.”
She heard again and came rushing back.
“See!” Capsis said.
When she was finally out of earshot, Capsis seized my arm and leaned close, his face twisted in rage. “She won’t let me talk!” he whispered. “You’ll have to come and see me alone.” I asked when. “Getting rid of her is the problem,” he said.
Among those who have remained loyal to Capsis, there is a concern that the paper war with Schwartz, and whatever is going on with Berke, might be dangerous for a ninety-five-year-old’s health. There’s another faction that wonders whether the fuss is keeping him alive.
The conflict over WestView’s future was easily foreseeable. “A lot of people have been talking about succession for a long time,” a contributor told me. Capsis would dangle ownership rights, to Schwartz sometimes, to Berke at other times. Later, he’d act as if the conversations had never happened.
Other suitors materialized. Berke had a rich friend in Florida who was purportedly interested in buying the paper. A WestView hanger-on named Alan Silverstein, who describes himself as an entrepreneur (“I was involved with the bottled-water company that did Trump’s water bottles,” he told me), discussed a potential deal. Capsis occasionally floated the heir-apparent designation to others: to Lincoln Anderson, the publisher of the Village Sun; to Karen Rempel, the author of a fashion column called “Karen’s Quirky Style.” “He said he didn’t want Dusty to have it, he didn’t want Arthur to have it,” Rempel told me. “I decided that it would just be too much hassle.” To another regular columnist, Capsis confided that his intention was for the paper to die with him.
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