The Family That’s Pushing Cuomo to Apologize Personally for Covid Deaths

Thousands died in nursing homes at the outset of the pandemic. Will a campaign for accountability stall Andrew Cuomo’s progress in the mayor’s race?

“There’s only one thing standing between Andrew Cuomo and City Hall,” the man next to me whispered. “And that’s Peter Arbeeny.”

David Kramer, a longtime Brooklynite, known in his circles as a wry observer of New York’s political scene, was talking about Peter Arbeeny, the tenacious HVAC contractor of 38 years who was standing at a lectern mounted on a block of Brooklyn brownstones.

It was Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Arbeeny had drawn a small but passionate crowd for a rally held in commemoration of the 15,000 nursing home residents in New York State who had died of Covid in the earliest phase of the pandemic. Mr. Arbeeny’s 89-year-old father, Norman Arbeeny, a Korean War veteran, was among those casualties, for which many families have blamed the former governor’s mismanagement.

An empty casket borrowed from a Cobble Hill chapel around the corner was brought in as a set piece. This was a reprise. In October 2020, Mr. Arbeeny staged a similar demonstration nearby, what he described to me recently as “a mock funeral for Governor Cuomo’s leadership and integrity because I knew he was lying about the death toll.” Three months later, a report from the state attorney general’s office would find that the death toll in nursing homes had been significantly undercounted. Mr. Cuomo then released the relevant figures, arguing that he hadn’t distributed them before because he feared a politically tainted inquiry by the Trump administration.

A coffin featured distinctively in that first protest too. It was filled with 6,400 printouts of the cover of the governor’s ill-fated book “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic.” (The number of printouts signified the number of Covid nursing-home deaths known at that point.) “People came up to me and said, ‘Can I put a picture of my mother in your coffin?’” Mr. Arbeeny told me. “And I said, ‘This isn’t my coffin; this is all our coffins.’”

The Arbeenys have been in Brooklyn for generations, and they are lifelong Democrats. The family patriarch, Mr. Arbeeny’s grandfather, owned the Near East bakery on Atlantic Avenue in the 1970s. His grandmother had pictures of two politicians on the wall: John F. Kennedy and Mario Cuomo. When Donald Trump posted a picture of the mock funeral on Twitter, they got calls from reporters around the world.