Newsday from New York, New York • 27

Holtzman Runs To Her Own Beat HOLTZMAN from Page 21 has proposed an independent agency like the Congressional Budget Office to depoliticize the budget process. She has backed investing part of the city employees pension funds for economic development and housing. But mostly she has vowed to fight corruption, including beefing up the offices tiny fraud unit, which led Macchiarola to ask if she will be a surplus district attorney. In her announcement she vowed to use the comptrollers audit powers to repeal what she called the citys corruption tax, the fraud tax, the mismanagement tax and the waste tax the costs of bad government. Her opponents have been sniping at her incessantly, trying to drag her below the 40 percent level in the primary to force a runoff.

Todays New York Newsday poll showed her support level at 37 percent, down from 51 percent a month earlier, with 36 percent undecided. Hevesi and Nadler demanded that Holtzman resign to run for comptroller because of a 1985 state bar association opinion that district attorneys should avoid partisan politics except for their own re-elections. Holtzman suggested the demand is sexist because it was raised for the first time against a woman trying to move up. It wasnt raised when male prosecutors ran without resigning, including two who ran unsuccessfully after the 1985 opinion. The only difference is that Im going to win, she Baid.

Hevesi suggested she is trying to capitalize on last months racial killing in Bensonhurst. While she has appeared in the U.S. Supreme Court and state appellate courts and has monitored and attended a number of trial court proceedings, the Bensonhurst case marks the first time she has stood in the well of the court next to an assistant district attorney on a criminal case in her eight years in office. Holtzman, who has been endorsed by the black community paper the Amsterdam News, brought up the case three times after unrelated questions during a candidates debate last week. Holtz mans elective career began when she upset Celler in a 1972 Brooklyn primary that stunned the Brooklyn machine.

Despite the machines surprise, she was not unknown. She came out of Raddiffe College, Harvard Law School, the civil rights movement and the staff of former Mayor John Lindsay, which allows her to chide her opponents again by saying she is the only candidate with City Hall experience. She and her twin brother, Robert, grew up on Ocean Parkway with their father, a lawyer, and their mother, a professor who chaired the Russian Studies Department at Hunter College. Holtzman, who is single, lives in an apartment near her downtown Brooklyn office. In Congress, Holtzman was best known as a member of the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach President Richard Nixon.

She wrote laws targeting ex-Nazis living in the United States and spearheaded an investigation of a corrupt summer feeding program that Bent 17 people, including a congressman, to jail. She served on the House Budget Committee, where she led hearings showing that a default by New York City during the 1970s fiscal crisis would drive up borrowing costs to cities and states nationwide. In 1980 she ran for the U.S. Senate and suffered her only electoral loss. After upsetting Bess Myerson in the Democratic primary, she lost to Alfonse Amato when ailing Republican incumbent Jacob Javits stayed on the Liberal line, and Democrats fielded a losing presidential ticket headed by Jimmy Carter.

She quickly jumped into the race to succeed retiring Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold. She had a commanding lead in early polls, but lost most of it until she edged a machine-backed candidate Norman Rosen, with just over half the vote. As district attorney, she has won praise from police and others for innovations such as a remote television system that cuts down the hours Bpent by officers and victims waiting for routine pre-trial procedures. But police have also criticized her, marching on her office Beveral months ago in protest after a suspected kidnaper, released without bail, later killed a police -officer. Holtzman compounded the problems with the on-again, off-again suspension of the rookie assistant district attorney who handled the case, leading 130 members of her staff to sign a protest petition.

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