Edward Costikyan, a longtime and prodigious political adviser to a slew of Democrat and Republican New York governors and New York City mayors, was largely credited with eliminating the corruption of Tammany Hall during his time as the organization’s leader in the early sixties. He also lent his expertise on the city’s power structure to New York with a 1968 power list (“Who Runs New York?”), capturing a time when the Sanitationmen’s Union was the “best political machine left in town” and the New York Times’ chief editorial writer, John B. Oakes, was actually influential enough to make the cut. The following year he wrote “Who Runs the City Government?,” a take-down of New York’s entrenched bureaucracy and labor unions, accompanied by a three-page illustration of then-mayor John Lindsay being mangled and trussed up as he attempts to reform the system. Costikyan died on Friday at his South Carolina home.
