Undergraduate Council Chair Michael P. Beys '94 was in trouble yet again last spring amid charges that he had improperly funded the Rock for Shelter charity concert. It looked as if his charmed political career was in shambles.

But when then-Treasurer Carey W. Gabay '94 stood before the council and said he would resign if Beys was further attacked for doing his job, everybody listened. Gabay was the only member who had the standing to have a close political alliance with Beys and still maintain a squeaky clean image.

"I always thought I was a moderate--last year I was the one in the middle, the one who settled disputes," he says.

So Gabay resolved to run for president of the council. "When everyone just forgot about the business of the council and started getting mad at each other, I thought, 'Wow, the council's not doing too well and I think I can fix it,'" Gabay says.

Last month, Gabay won the council's presidential election. And two weeks after his first bout with scandal--charges that votes in the election of Vice President Melissa Garza '94, a leading Beys opponent, were improperly tallied--he says he has cut his political teeth and emerged from Beys' shadow.

"People keep saying that I'm Mike's puppet or that he and I are always in agreement," Gabay says. "That's not true."

He vehemently denies having a close relationship with Beys, whose term was tainted by numerous scandals. Gabay in fact opposed Beys in the recent election dispute in which Council Treasurer Rene Reyes '94 claimed that absentee ballots cast in his favor were unfairly discarded from the tally.

"Beys' cronies discovered that they couldn't push Carey around on that one," says council member Hillary K. Anger '93-94. "The way Carey works with people he disagrees with emphasizes his own integrity."

"Granted, he didn't act as decisively as some people would have liked, we have to understand that he hesitated because he was being thinking about the situation and we have to give him credit for that," she adds.

Garza credits Gabay with a thorough investigation of the voting procedure and council precedents. "No-one can deny that he looked into everyone's side," she says.

"Past leaders would have been much more likely just to react with a quick executive decision," Garza adds. "But not Carey. It's a nice change from how things used to be done."

Gabay says he wants to strive for a respresentative student body. "A big job of mine is to get the students on this campus active again, and if it inspires people to see their representatives practicing what they advise, then that just makes us more effective," he says.

Gabay attributes his desire to work with people to a childhood growing up in a tough neigborhood of the Bronx.

"Things in Cambridge just seem so idealistic and so perfect, even taking into consideration council scandals and dissent," Gabay reflects. "It just doesn't compare at all with the things I saw in the Bronx: rampant unemployment, poverty, drugs and violence."

Gabay attests that his perception of the world was altered when he lost an older brother to drugs.