Original story, https://a12iggymom.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/albany-ny-albany-rocked-by-bribery-scandal-no-surprise-here/
WATCHDOG: A CLOSER LOOK
Culture change needed in N.Y. politics, indeed
Someone in the newsroom wondered Tuesday how anyone would think they could get away with the kind of bribery allegedly perpetrated by former state Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith and five others. I’m guessing a lot of other people had a similar reaction.
Then Thursday it was announced that there was a new, separate federal corruption case involving Assemblyman Eric Stevenson, D-Bronx, and four other defendants.
Let’s acknowledge this first: Smith, Stevenson and the others are innocent unless proven guilty. Like anybody else, they are due their day in court.
But the ease with which the alleged bribes happened, according to Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, shows that something is very wrong with the state’s political system.
The prosecutor highlighted a quote by one of those charged, New York City Councilman Daniel Halloran, as reported by Gannett Albany bureau reporter Jon Campbell: “That’s politics. It’s all about how much,” Halloran said, according to the criminal complaint. “And that’s our politicians in New York. They’re all like that, all like that, and they get like that because of the drive that the money does for everything else. You can’t do anything without the (expletive) money.”
Halloran may be facing a criminal charge, but he’s got a point.
Consider the following news items, all from the past few months:
» According to a Gannett Albany bureau report on March 13, the state’s industrial development agencies doled out $5.6 billion in tax breaks to local projects between 2008 and 2011, a state study found. Monroe County ranked eighth on a list formulated by the state Authorities Budget Office, totaling $114 million in tax exemptions through its IDA, known as COMIDA.
» On March 6, the Albany bureau reported that debt at the state’s public authorities has reached $243 billion and was racked up with little public input, according to a study by Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office.
» The Buffalo Bills recently reached a new 10-year, $271 million lease agreement for Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, Erie County, that calls for $130 million in stadium renovations, $60 million of which is expected to be kicked in by the state.
» In February, COMIDA approved a package that gives College Town Rochester LLC a $345,000 exemption from the mortgage tax and $1.6 million in sales tax exemptions on materials used to build the University of Rochester’s College Town.
» Last month, COMIDA approved a mortgage tax break valued at $40,000 to facilitate a $4.7 million deal that would have End2End buy the outstanding bonds and correct longstanding humidity problems at the Sports Centre ice rink on the Brighton campus of Monroe Community College.
I could go on. There are plenty of other examples, including the I-Square project that just broke ground this week in Irondequoit.
I’m not suggesting for a minute that there is anything legally wrong with these projects or situations.
What I am suggesting is that it’s not as far an ethical leap as some make it out to be from using financial incentives to entice the Buffalo Bills to stay in western New York to using financial incentives to entice a few politicians to let you on a particular ballot line. (I’m a Bills season ticket holder; I have a stake in keeping the team here. But the ethics of the lease deal trouble me, as do all such deals with sports teams nationwide. The public shouldn’t be forced into paying stadium costs, especially by a league that makes as much money as the National Football League.) The communities of Batavia and Genesee County bent over backward to draw the Alpina and PepsiCo-Muller yogurt plants, providing shovel-ready sites and expedited building permits, among other incentives.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s regional economic development councils have millions of dollars on offer for assistance to selected projects.
These are all seemingly worthwhile initiatives, and we need to do something to break out of the economic malaise of the past six years. But there’s a lot of money involved, and oversight and accountability are needed. Oversight can’t happen without information.
Providing financial incentives seems to have become a very political game, one that everybody is playing, not just New Yorkers. Realistically, we have to do it to survive, to compete. And yes, there are distinct differences between legitimate economic development efforts and outright criminal bribery.
Yet is it any wonder that our elected officials sometimes lose sight of the ethical line between offering legally acceptable incentives and the criminal type of bribery? Especially with all this money floating around?
The best way to ensure that the line isn’t crossed is to make every action of every public authority and economic development effort across the state open to the public, to bring it out from behind closed doors as much as possible. Corruption can’t live in the bright light of public exposure. The citizenry won’t stand for it. We need to know more about what state and local officials, especially those in charge of the purse strings, are doing in our name. Yes, you can’t do anything without the money. But there are limits to what you can, and should, be able to do with the money. New Yorkers deserve to be a bigger part of that conversation.
The watchdog column appears in print on Fridays and online all the time in the watchdog blog at Democratand-Chronicle.com. Dick Moss can be reached at (585) 258-2626.
He led feds to 2nd Legislature bribery scandal this week
Joseph Spector – Albany bureau chief
ALBANY — A state assemblyman revealed Thursday that he had been an informant since 2009 and helped prosecutors in public-corruption cases.
The assemblyman, Nelson Castro, a Bronx Democrat, announced his role after a state lawmaker was arrested Thursday by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara for bribery — the second bribery scandal in a week to hit the Capitol.
That Castro was working with state and federal authorities and wore a wiretap sent shock waves through Albany and led to speculation that more lawmakers could be taken down in what appears to be a widening probe.
“I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better because of the aggressive pursuit by the U.S. attorney and the sheer sloppiness of the elected officials,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a good-government group. Thursday’s case added fuel to the long-held criticism that state government in New York is dysfunctional. Twenty-nine state lawmakers have had ethical or legal troubles since 2000.
In the past six years, nine senators have been defeated in a general election; 12 have been arrested, according to the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Castro said in a statement that he was indicted on perjury charges in 2009 related to a civil case from the previous year. After he was charged, he cooperated with authorities and helped out with “various investigations.”
He was first elected in 2008 and took office in 2009, and he was re-elected twice while still working with prosecutors. He resigned Thursday as part of his agreement with Bharara’s office.
“I continue to cooperate with state and federal authorities in this prosecution and in other investigations,” Castro said in a statement.
Castro’s cooperation led to the arrest Thursday of Assemblyman Eric Stevenson, D-Bronx. Stevenson was charged along with four other defendants for allegedly accepting $22,000 in bribes to push legislation for an adult-care center in his district.
“The allegations illustrate the corruption of an elected representative’s core function — a legislator selling legislation,” Bharara said. “And based on these allegations, it becomes more and more difficult to avoid the sad conclusion that political corruption in New York is indeed rampant and that a show-me-the- money culture in Albany is alive and well.”
A woman who answered the phone at Stevenson’s office said there was no comment and hung up.
Stevenson’s arrest came two days after Sen. Malcolm Smith, DQueens, was charged in a separate bribery scandal Tuesday.
Smith, the former majority leader of the Senate, and five other political leaders, including the mayor of Spring Valley, Rockland County, were charged in a scheme to help Smith win the GOP nomination for New York City mayor. Stevenson was charged with conspiracy to deprive New York state of honest services, and federal bribery. The charges, should he be found guilty, come with a maximum potential sentence of 35 years in prison.
In both cases, the Democratic lawmakers boasted to their cohorts that they had more influence in Albany than they probably did.
Smith vowed to get $500,000 in state aid for a Spring Valley community center, but the money was never secured, and Smith did not get the Republican nomination for mayor.
Stevenson said he could get approved a bill in the Assembly to put a three-year moratorium on new adult day care centers in the city, which ostensibly would have helped Stevenson’s alleged co-conspirators.
The bill didn’t have a Senate sponsor and went nowhere in the Assembly, yet Stevenson told an informant, “I’m telling you, it’s done. It’s no problem.”
Former Assemblyman Joel Miller, R-Poughkeepsie, said the cases illustrate that lawmakers have an inflated opinion of their influence at the Capitol and often boast of things they had no role in. “If you can take credit for things you didn’t do, why not promise to do things you can’t do?” Miller said.
Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, said it’s disheartening that some lawmakers are tarnishing the work of most legislators.
“It’s hard to imagine in this day and age, that people are still so arrogant that they think they can get away with this,” Morelle said.
“You’re almost after a while at a loss for words to describe how disappointed you can be in colleagues.”
He called it “disconcerting” that Castro appeared to be wiretapping private conversations, but doubted that anything incriminating would be found.
Bharara pointed out that Stevenson knew about the risks associated with his alleged plot. He talked on wiretaps about the prison time that other lawmakers faced for Albany misdeeds, including former Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who served nearly 20 months in prison in a pay-to-play pension scandal.
“Bottom line … if half of the people up here in Albany was ever caught for what they do … they … would probably be in the same place” as Hevesi, Stevenson said, according to the complaint. Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to clean up the troubles in Albany when he took office in 2011 and sought to stabilize state government after Eliot Spitzer resigned in 2008 in a prostitution scandal. But a new ethics panel that Cuomo installed has been widely knocked as being ineffective, and now Cuomo is facing added pressure to tighten ethics and campaign finance laws. Cuomo said Wednesday that no law can stop all malfeasance. “People do stupid things, frankly,” Cuomo, the former attorney general, told reporters in Oswego.
“People do illegal things. People in power abuse power. And that’s part of the human condition. We do everything we can do to try to stop it.”
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, called on Stevenson to resign.
“I believe that given the evidence that has been presented, he should seriously consider whether he can continue to maintain the public trust. I am encouraging him to resign,” Silver said in a statement. At a news conference Thursday, Bharara criticized state lawmakers for not doing more to police themselves. He said they must see what is going on and turn the other way. “Where do we go from here?” Bharara said. “The people of New York should be more than disappointed. They should be angry. When so many of their leaders can be bought for a few thousand dollars, they should be angry. “
JSPECTOR Twitter.com/gannettalbany
Preet Bharara
Eric Stevenson
Eric Stevenson
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