It is time for the evening news, Soviet style. The camera focuses on a man with a battered purple baseball cap as he chats with local factory workers. With a friendly, lopsided grin, he says in passable Russian, "Well, I'm just a simple worker." He switches to English and adds through a Soviet interpreter, "I'm ashamed to say it about my country, but in New York there are 60,000 people without a roof over their heads."
Moscow's new media celebrity is Joseph Mauri, 58, of New York City, who has become something of a regular on Vremya (Time) during his expense-paid tour of the Soviet Union. Muscovites first saw him last April as the star of The Man from Fifth Avenue, a 90-minute Soviet-made documentary about poverty in New York. The film shows close-ups of homeless men, then cuts to a specialty shop that sells chinchilla bedspreads, bottles of $1,500 perfume and designer pistols. Mauri, who acts as tour guide, is portrayed as a prime example of American capitalism's cruelty to the poor, a man who was ejected from his humble rented room by a rich and heartless landlady who wanted to turn it into a sewing room, a bent but not broken castout.
Well, not exactly. Mauri never spent a night on the street. Following his eviction, he was immediately moved into a subsidized apartment in Manhattan. Nor, perhaps, was that the only roof over his head. He appears to have had access to a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's Columbus Avenue, a thoroughfare that has become a yuppie mecca. Mauri has claimed that the apartment belongs to his estranged wife, but neighbors say he has also lived there for at least ten years.
Asked if he has a job, Mauri has been replying that he does "occasional work" but is currently unemployed. Again, not exactly. For some 25 years he has worked for the New York Times as a substitute mailer, a job that could earn him $35,000 annually if he filled five shifts a week; a shop steward at the Times says Mauri could easily do so. "If anything," says Charles Perkins, assistant commissioner for public affairs for New York City's housing department, "Mauri is a beneficiary of the system rather than a victim of the system."