BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | In what Arthur Schwartz, the Village’s longtime Democratic district leader, called “a personal tragedy,” his son, Jacob Schwartz, 29, turned himself in for arrest last Thursday on child-pornography charges.
According to police, the younger Schwartz’s laptop computer contained “over 3,000 images and 89 videos depicting young nude females between the approximate ages of 6 months and 16 years old, engaging in sexual conduct…on an adult male.”
Jacob was arraigned on two charges on Thursday: promoting a sexual performance by a child and possessing a sexual performance by a child. He was freed on $7,500 bail and given a return court date of July 6.
Jacob was living in Murray Hill, and employed as a computer programmer analyst with the city’s Department of Design and Construction, where he worked for Build It Back, a Superstorm Sandy recovery and rebuilding-assistance program.
Following the news of his arrest — published last Friday in the Daily News and New York Post — he was promptly fired by the de Blasio administration.
Jacob Schwartz was also the president of the Manhattan Young Democrats and the Downstate region vice president of the New York State Young Democrats. However, according to the Post, his name and photo were scrubbed from both groups’ Web sites after the story broke.
According to the Post, a statement from the Manhattan Young Democrats said the organization was “shocked” by the allegations against Schwartz, and added that he was “no longer a member of the board, and an interim president is now in place.”
As for how law enforcement got wind of the younger Schwartz’s cache of child porn, his father said, “They said something was posted to a social-media site.”
According to a complaint filed with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, a detective from the Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit stated that on March 29, he went to Jacob Schwartz’s home, where Schwartz handed him the laptop and gave a written and signed consent to search it.
Arthur Schwartz said his son “deleted everything” before handing over his laptop to police, but “they can reconstruct what was on the computer.”
“He knew what he was doing was bad,” the district leader told The Villager.
“The judge released him without restrictions,” he added. “She didn’t say don’t be around kids or don’t go on the computer.” However, Arthur acknowledged, “If found guilty, he might go to jail. … That’s a horrible consequence.”
According to the criminal complaint, the type of sexual conduct the young girls — some of them mere babies — were engaging in in the images and videos included vaginal intercourse and performing oral sex on adult men.
In a lengthy telephone interview with The Villager Tuesday evening, Schwartz spoke about his sadness at the news, but also his son’s positive qualities, even his time playing Little League as a kid on Pier 40 at W. Houston St., and his hope that his son will recover and get his life together.
“It’s heartbreaking for me — I’ve been crying a lot,” Arthur said. “He’s my first son. He’s my only son. Kids are like a project… .”
Arthur Schwartz has been married twice and has four children — two from each marriage — including three daughters. Jacob is from his first marriage.
In the late 1990s, Arthur Schwartz, who is a top labor lawyer and a former Community Board 2 member, sued to force the state to create a ball field on Pier 40, at W. Houston St. That led to the community winning a ball field on the southeast corner of the roof of the 14-acre pier. A few years later that was followed by the massive artificial-turf field in the pier’s courtyard, which — though initially called “interim” — has become a sacred cow for local families whose kids play in the Greenwich Village Little League and Downtown United Soccer Club.
“My activism on Pier 40, a lot of it was motivated by Jacob,” Schwartz reflected. “He played Little League on Pier 40 for five years. Not only did I litigate on Pier 40, I managed and coached his Little League team there. I wanted him to enjoy it — definitely more than when I played Little League.”
Jacob is now living with his mother, a psychiatrist, in the East Village, Arthur said. Jacbob is in therapy — he started before his arrest — and is seeing someone who is a top specialist for this kind of psychiatric illness, his father said.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” Arthur said, when asked if his son was getting help. “I think he’s going three times a week. He’s going to suffer a lot, even if he doesn’t go to jail. He’s moved in with his mother — so he won’t be alone.”
Jacob attended Village Community School, followed by Packer-Collegiate in Brooklyn, and then Lehigh University.
“In high school, in his junior and senior years, he had the lead in all the musicals,” Arthur recalled. “He was in an a cappella group in college.”
Jacob spent 2012 singing a cappella on a cruise ship with his group, On Tap, after they won a talent contest.
“I’m looking at one of his YouTubes right now,” Arthur said, “ ‘I’m Yours.’ It’s got 173,000 hits. Not bad. They’re singing on a subway train.”
Arthur stopped living with Jacob when he was 14 after the attorney separated from his wife. Asked about his son’s personality, he said it was fine.
“He seemed extremely well adjusted,” Arthur said, “and when he got into politics, he was extremely popular, well liked and well respected.”
Schwartz said his son really was able to get along with everyone, from Bernie Sanders supporters to Hillary Clinton backers, moving deftly between competing political factions.
Now, with professional treatment, he hopes, his son will be able to overcome his serious personal problem.
“It’s an illness and it can go into remission — and that’s my hope,” Arthur said.
He said it all came as a shock to him, though his understanding now is that his son had been engaging in this activity for a while, apparently since his teens.
“He didn’t learn that from me,” Arthur stressed.
In 2017, with the world now thoroughly in the Internet age, his current wife has access and passwords to their two children’s e-mail accounts and social-media pages, and monitors them, he noted.
Republicans were quick to jump on the news story, hoping to make hay out of it and attack Mayor Bill de Blasio, in particular, and Democrats, in general.
“The Post called him ‘a de Blasio staffer,’ ” Schwartz scoffed.
By that stretch of a definition, tens of thousands of New York City municipal employees working in any position in any agency could also be called de Blasio staffers.
Adding to conservatives’ interest in the story, Arthur Schwartz was the lawyer for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in New York State and also the treasurer for Zephyr Teachout’s primary race against Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014.
Breitbart News, the alt-right Web site, quickly pounced on the story.
Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager and current counselor, tweeted out the Post article — but it reportedly only backfired right back at her.
“All she got were attacks — ‘How dare you?’ etc.,” Schwartz said with some satisfaction.
Yet, Conway’s mean-spirited tweet did have some effect, he admitted.
“Anyone that searches ‘Bernie’ will find that story the next couple of hours,” he noted. “Kellyanne Conway wanted to hurt Democrats. The Post wanted to sensationalize it and turn it into an attack on de Blasio.”
Asked if his son had been interested in following in his footsteps and running for office, Arthur said no, that Jacob preferred the “behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts” part of politics.
“He was basically running Build It Back,” Arthur said. “He’s an extremely organized, thorough person. I don’t think he made an enemy in the world. You wouldn’t find a person that had a bad word to say about him — other than this stuff that came out in the press.”
Arthur said no one is criticizing him personally or using his son’s misfortune as a political weapon against him.
“Nobody has said one thing to me,” he said. “And I got a lot of positive support — from all over the country. Nobody’s taken any work away from me.”
Some of the politicos who called him to share their sympathies also went a step further, offering suggestions on where to get treatment — because they had previously been down that road themselves, Schwartz added.
“I got tons of calls from people in the political world — and it would shock you,” he told The Villager. “People who had sexual issues and went into therapy — both in our district and out of our district.”
Schwartz did not divulge any names — except for one, which he firmly stressed was off the record and he did not want published.
Meanwhile, local politicos asked for comment by The Villager expressed sympathy for Schwartz and his family — yet also decried the scourge of child porn.
Tony Hoffmann is a former Village district leader and former president of the Village Independent Democrats.
“It’s a personal and family tragedy,” Hoffmann said. “I wish Arthur and his family the best during these harrowing times. As a father, I can relate to the pain Arthur is experiencing as he sees what his son is going through. As a father, I can also relate to the pain the exploited children of porn videos go through. Their lives are ruined and they will be scarred for life. Child porn must be stamped out. Society cannot tolerate it.”
Keen Berger, Schwartz’s co-district leader — each district has a male and a female leader — just called it sad.
“No comment from me,” she said. “It’s sad in so many ways, and nothing I say will make it better.”
Although they represent the same district, Assemblymember Deborah Glick and Schwartz are bitter political foes.
“It’s a terrible circumstance for the Schwartz family,” Glick said. “Although I reserve my compassion for the obvious victims, who are all these young girls who have been sold or trafficked and whose images have been proliferated around the Web. Those are the real victims and that is the really horrible part of this.”
