FOR THE RECORD

There are those private citizens who perform good works but have a knack for getting themselves into trouble whenever they open their mouths in a public setting. David Mack is one of them, and he lost his Metropolitan Transportation Authority board post and an appointment to a similar seat at the Port Authority last week because of that tendency.

During Governor Pataki's first year in office in 1995, Mr. Mack was rewarded for his sizable campaign donations a year earlier with an appointment to the unsalaried position of Deputy Superintendent of Facilities Management for the State Police. Mr. Mack had no law-enforcement experience, but this didn't matter to State Police Colonel Thomas Wiese, who did what he could to ingratiate himself with the new Governor.

Last week's report by State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo about possible political improprieties involving the State Police noted that the appointment had a negative effect on Trooper morale because of Mr. Mack's lack of qualifications for the job and his habit, nonetheless, of showing up for work in full dress uniform.

When Mr. Mack was interviewed by the Attorney General's Office last year as part of the probe, he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to questions. And so when the report was released, Governor Paterson announced that he was removing the realestate developer from his MTA board post and withdrawing his PA appointment.

Mr. Mack immediately protested, saying he had cooperated with the probe and merely utilized his constitutional rights against self-incrimination.

Mr. Cuomo bristled at the claim of cooperation, telling the New York Post that when Mr. Mack was interviewed, "he gave only his name and refused to answer any questions."

And while the Fifth Amendment is a safeguard against setting yourself up for criminal prosecution, it is not the best defense for explaining why, once you have used it, you should be entitled to serve in a responsible public position.

Curiously enough, Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, who had previously re-appointed Mr. Mack to the MTA board, has allowed him to continue as an Assistant Police Commissioner for the county's force despite his refusal to answer questions about a possible cover-up in the upper echelons of the State Police. Well, maybe not so curious: as Newsday's Dan Janison reported Sept. 11, Mr. Mack's mother last year contributed $17,500 to Mr. Suozzi's campaign fund.

Mr. Mack last had a moment of public notoriety 15 months ago, when the Daily News cited him as among the 58 past and present MTA board members using free EZ-pass tags at MTA facilities and free transit passes. Pressured to give it up, he initially refused, telling a reporter he would not pay to ride the Long Island Rail Road. As he put it so artfully then, "Why should I ride and inconvenience myself when I can ride in a car?"

The Success Charter Network, a group of charter schools run by former City Councilwoman and longtime United Federation of Teachers foe Eva Moskowitz, launched another broadside against the union Sept. 9, saying it had coordinated a protest against its newest charter school, blocking the entrance for arriving children.

The Harlem Success Academy 2 is located within P.S. 123 in Harlem, and has become a flashpoint for protesters against the proliferation of charter schools in the neighborhood.

While the protesters outside were mostly Teachers from other schools who had apparently organized their protests beforehand at State Sen. Bill Perkins's office, there was no evidence that the UFT, which declined to comment, was involved.

A release from the charter network said that "Teacher union protesters" who "bizarrely evoked the language of Brown vs. Board of Education" had disrupted the 5-year-olds arriving at school.

Flyers distributed by the protesters quoted Mr. Perkins as calling public charter schools "segregation, pure and simple."

"Today's Harlem students have access to world class public schools in a way they have never had," Ms. Moskowitz said in a statement. "The answer is to expand that access, not shut it down."

She said in a phone interview that it "[seemed] pretty clear that this was a UFT operation," noting, "there were no parents there, with one exception, and she wasn't even part of the protest."

She alleged that the protests was simply the latest action taken by the union as part of its long vendetta against her.