Mike Bloomberg was filmed last year telling a business forum that a father and son who both died of a heroin overdose at the same Brooklyn party were ‘not a good family.’
The former New York City mayor and current Democratic presidential candidate spoke at the Bermuda Executive Forum in Manhattan last March.
During the event, Bloomberg commented on the October 2017 deaths of Joseph and Carlos Andrade.
‘Daily News had a picture on the front page of a father and a son — they both OD’d at the same party. I mean, it’s not a good family — craziness,’ Bloomberg says in the video unearthed by the New York Daily News.
Some in the audience were heard letting out a laugh.
COMMENTS BEGIN AT AROUND 19:10 MARK
Mike Bloomberg (seen above at a Manhattan business forum in March of last year) said that a father and son who died of a heroin overdose at the same Brooklyn party in 2017 were ‘not a good family’
Several people in the audience were heard laughing in response to Bloomberg’s comment
Joseph Andrade, 44, and his son Carlos, 22, died in Brooklyn in the early morning hours of October 29, 2017
Carlos was visiting Joseph in his Brooklyn apartment. The two then went out for a smoke, though in reality they snorted heroin mixed with fentanyl
Joseph Andrade, 44, and his son Carlos, 22, died in Brooklyn in the early morning hours of October 29, 2017.
Carlos was visiting his father from Maryland with his girlfriend and children for a family birthday party inside Joseph’s apartment.
The two then stepped outside for a cigarette.
Jasmin Santos, the 23-year-old mother of Carlos’ 11-month-old and 4-year-old sons, grew worried when the two men disappeared after going outside, and found Carlos just inside the building’s doorway with his face turning purple
At around 3am, they were seen struggling to breathe. Eventually, first responders were called to the scene, but attempts to resuscitate them failed.
Investigators say the pair snorted a mix of heroin and fentanyl.
First responders administered Narcan, which counteracts the effects of opioids, and the father and son were rushed to Lutheran Hospital, about two miles away.
Life saving measures were not effective and they were pronounced dead at around 4.10am.
Police were seen later Sunday morning investigating a red plastic baggie on the sidewalk near the scene of the incident.
Neighbors and family members told the New York Post that Carlos was a devoted father to his young sons, and wasn’t known to have a history with drugs.
Joseph, on the other hand, had a checkered past with respect to illicit substances, those sources said.
In his remarks to the forum, Bloomberg blamed the opioid epidemic on the push to legalize marijuana.
‘And then we are going hellbent for whether in this country to legalize marijuana, another addictive drug, where we’ve never done the research to what it does to people,” Bloomberg says.
‘Maybe, in the end, it’s going to turn out that it doesn’t hurt, but preliminary evidence shows it reduces a teenage user of marijuana’s IQ by 10 points and it doesn’t come back.’
Studies claiming that frequent marijuana use impacts IQ have been debunked, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
In the recent months since Bloomberg announced his entry into the Democratic race, controversial remarks have surfaced, shedding light on his attitude toward policing and other matters.
Last week, video of a 2011 interview given by the 78-year-old billionaire to PBS emerged.
In the clip, Bloomberg says that black and Latino men ‘don’t know how to behave in the workforce.’
In the 2011 interview – conducted while he was serving a third term as New York City Mayor – Bloomberg attempted to gain support for a new initiative to enhance employment opportunities for young men.
He told interviewer Jeffrey Brown: ‘There’s this enormous cohort of black and Latino males, age, let’s say, 16 to 25, that don’t have jobs, don’t have any prospects, don’t know how to find jobs, don’t know what their skill sets are, [and] don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively’.
Since entering the race for the Democratic nomination, several past controversial remarks made by the former New York mayor have surfaced. Bloomberg is seen left next to Senator Elizabeth Warren during last week’s debate in Las Vegas
Elsewhere, in the interview he asserted that ‘blacks and Latinos score terribly in school testing compared to whites and Asians’ and that minorities make up a majority of those incarcerated in the city’s jails.
He went on to add: ‘If you look at where crime takes place, it’s in minority neighborhoods. If you look at who the victims and the perpetrators are, it’s virtually all minorities. This is something that has gone on for a long time’.
The comment is similar to another Bloomberg made during a private speech in 2015 – which made front page news last week after leaked audio was shared on Twitter.
In that speech, given to the Aspen Institute, Bloomberg touted his controversial stop-and-frisk policy while stating that his strategy while Mayor was to ‘put all the cops in minority neighborhoods’ with the hope of tackling gun violence.
‘Ninety-five percent of murders – murderers and murder victims – fit one M.O.,’ he stated.
‘You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16-25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city.’
‘And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of people that are getting killed,’ he said.
‘So one of the unintended consequences is people say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods.’
‘Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them… And then they start… ‘Oh I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.’
Bloomberg apologized last Tuesday amid the uproar, in comments reported by Bloomberg News, which is part of the billionaire’s media empire.
Mike Bloomberg is again under fire for his problematic comments on race, with a resurfaced 2011 video showing him claim that many young black and Latino men ‘don’t know how to behave in the workforce’
‘I apologize. I own it. And there’s nothing – I’m going to live with it. My heart, I think, was in the right place of trying to do something of reducing murders but the police – I didn’t pay as much attention to them as I should have. And you know, I apologize,’ Bloomberg said.
He later tweeted: ‘This issue and my comments about it do not reflect my commitment to criminal justice reform and racial equity.
‘I believe we need to end mass incarceration and during my tenure we reduced incarceration by 40% and juvenile confinement by more than 60%.
‘We created the Young Men’s Initiative to help young men of color stay on track for success, which President Obama built on to create My Brother’s Keeper. And we overhauled a school system that had been neglecting and underfunding schools in Black and Latino communities for too long.’
The gaffes were seized upon by President Trump, who tweeted: ‘WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST’.
Bloomberg’s comments are likely going to make it harder for him to overtake the current Democratic front runner, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The former mayor is also struggling to recover from a disastrous performance in his first debate in Las Vegas, where Senator Elizabeth Warren hammered him over nondisclosure agreements that female employees of his company signed.