The Savior of Newark?

Cory Booker lives in a penthouse apartment with a picture-postcard view of the Manhattan skyline. It's just what you would expect from a 31-year-old Stanford graduate, Rhodes scholar and Yale-trained lawyer who wears tweed pants. Except that when Booker goes home, he waits at least 10 minutes for the elevator. And when it comes, he crowds on with ex-cons, tiny children and old ladies, all of whom know his name. A uniformed guard pushes the buttons.

Booker lives in Brick Towers, one of the largest low-income housing complexes in Newark, N.J. When he graduated from law school in 1997, instead of taking a job with a six-digit salary, Booker successfully ran for city councilman in a place that has perhaps the gloomiest reputation on the East Coast. Newark for years has ranked among the worst cities in the country for violent crime and poverty. And yet, Booker says with a straight face, "this city is the land of milk and honey"--only minutes from the wealth and culture of New York City. "The tragedy of Newark is that it's fallen so far short of its potential."

So far, Booker has proved an exception to almost every rule of Newark politics. Although he grew up in a cushy, mostly white suburb 20 miles away, he beat a 16-year incumbent in Newark. Through a series of grandiose gestures, he earned the contempt of almost every other Newark politico. But he won attention, and loyalty, from many locals who had given up on the city's notoriously corrupt political machine. "He is the most exciting elected official in Newark in the past generation," says Clement Price, a Rutgers University history professor. "He's fearless, if not reckless."

Last week Booker kicked off his latest show of bravado. He moved into his new summer digs: a 1987 motor home with mauve interior, which he will use to live in the most drug-afflicted corners of his ward. "If you roll up your sleeves and go into the neighborhoods people tell you not to go into," Booker says with his trademark self-seriousness, "you can make a difference."

Last summer Booker erected a tent outside one of the most violent housing projects in Newark and fasted for 10 days to get more police protection for the place. It worked; Mayor Sharpe James and the police brass were shamed into paying attention. Conrad Lindsey, 25, still lives at the complex and says Booker "changed a lot of moods in this community."

Booker's first stop this summer is a battered street corner near Newark's Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Last Thursday the councilman went door to door, listening to people's concerns: one woman shows him her broken, housing-authority refrigerator; another takes him to a stripped-bare playground where the dirt reeks of urine.

On this block--which features a view of New York's World Trade Center, as well as an open-air drug market--the motor home looks like a carnival curiosity. Women walking with their children look quizzically at the vehicle and ask if there's a book giveaway. They have trouble believing that Booker is a city councilman. "Does he know what neighborhood he's in?" asks Maryann DiCostonzi, 39, who grew up here.

The disbelief runs all the way up to city hall, where Booker is widely suspected of having his eye on the mayor's office. When Booker got elected, Mayor James told the local paper he worried about people "who try to create an empire and run for higher office." The day Booker moved into the motor home, a four-page anonymous screed was sent to hundreds of city leaders, stating that "Booker himself hates Newark...He is a mere publicity-stunt hound dog who is against everything and for nothing." Over the past three years, Booker's opponents have anonymously accused him of being white, gay, a tool of the Ku Klux Klan and a lover of Jews who lives in a mansion.

It's easy to see why some people would find Booker's record hard to believe: he played tight end for Stanford's football team. At Oxford, he was elected president of the Jewish L'Chaim society--even though he's a Baptist. He's a vegetarian, and says he has never drunk alcohol. And did we mention he once talked a suicidal fellow student out of jumping?

Here's the really annoying thing: Booker is thoroughly unaffected. In fact, he has a little-boy earnestness and optimism that are hard to resist. When he talks about cleaning up Newark, he can barely get the words out fast enough. At one point, when he realizes he's almost forgotten Mother's Day, he actually exclaims, "Jiminy Cricket!" The first night in the motor home, the generator and the engine die, leaving no water, no air conditioning and no way to drive out should there be any trouble. Booker collapses into bed--and gets up at 6:30 a.m. to go running.