Growing up in a violence-riddled Bronx housing project and losing a big brother to drugs, Carey Gabay vowed that he would make a difference in life — and came to personify what Gov. Cuomo on Monday called “the American Dream.”
“He grew up in public housing in The Bronx. He could have been at any law firm he wanted to be, making multiples of what we paid him,” a grieving Cuomo said at the West Indian-American Day Parade in Brooklyn, hours after Gabay was shot and critically wounded. “He worked for the state because he wanted to give back and he wanted to do the right thing.
“He is the American dream,’’ Cuomo added.
Gabay, 43, was on life support at Kings County Hospital Monday night.
“I saw a lot of things that made me really rethink life and rethink what I had,’’ the then-Harvard University junior told the school’s Harvard Crimson newspaper in 1993.
“Things in Cambridge just seem so idealistic and so perfect. It just doesn’t compare at all with the things I saw in The Bronx: rampant unemployment, poverty, drugs and violence.’’
His brother’s overdose death, Gabay said, made him more determined than ever to have a positive impact on the world.
Gabay, who is of Jamaican descent, said he planned to go into politics to help others.
“Back home, being a politician doesn’t mean that you’re doing it for yourself or to aggrandize power,” he said. “It means that you have an interest in the community. Politicians start as grass-roots activists.”
He went on to receive two bachelor’s and a law degree from the Ivy League university.
While attending The Bronx’s Truman HS, Gabay worked closely with the borough president as a member of the Bronx Corps program, which mentors kids.
In college, he was elected the first black president of the undergraduate student council, and devoted more time and energy to helping underprivileged kids.
He worked in the private sector at the law firms Jones Day and Schulte Roth & Zabel before joining the Cuomo administration.
He first worked in Albany as an assistant counsel to Cuomo before being appointed first deputy counsel to Empire State Development.
“He did great work,” Cuomo said. “He was the lawyer [who] worked on rent-reform laws that protect so many tenants.”
