This past week, the trial of Joseph Percoco and two others, in New York City continued with jury deliberations after almost seven weeks of testimony.
The trial revealed the all too common pay to play system that has come to embody Albany involving bribes and extortion that play an integral role in the awarding of lucrative contracts for economic development projects and public improvements.
It opened a window into the way contractors and developers obtain access to the public officials and their appointees who have the power to reward contributors to their political campaigns.
In this case, the two developers that are charged with Percoco, during the past decade, contributed over five hundred thousand dollars to the Governor, state legislators and local public officials that are influential and instrumental in awarding these contracts.
While the contributions were apparently legal and don’t constitute the bribes charged in the indictment, the way in which they were made should draw some scrutiny and reforms to eliminate the mechanism that allowed them to go unscrutinized.
At the heart of the case is a disgraced lobbyist named Todd Howe.
Howe pled guilty to eight felonies in connection with the charges in the indictment and agreed to cooperate with the government and testify about the acts charged in the indictment in exchange for leniency.
It hasn’t helped his credibility that he got arrested in the middle of his trial testimony, after it was revealed that he broke the terms of his plea agreement, which required him to commit no further crimes. He attempting to defraud his credit card company during a trip to New York City to meet with government prosecutors to prepare for trial.
Howe advised the developers to make their contributions through a Limited Liability Corporation (LLCs) that did not contain the company name so that no connection would be apparent between the developers’ contributions and the contracts awarded to them by virtue of their “preferred developer” status.
In the midst of all of this testimony, it was disclosed that Cuomo, who has always claimed to champion closing the LLC loophole, that allows contributors to skirt the limits on individual contributions, additionally accepted $ 2.2 million dollars from state appointees in violation of an executive order barring this practice.
The order was first promulgated by Eliot Spitzer at the beginning of his Administration and was renewed by Governor David Paterson and Cuomo, himself, at the start of his first term as Governor.
When this issue was raised with the Cuomo Administration, they tried to re-interpret the order by saying that it only prohibited donations from state employees that could be fired by the governor.
When that explanation didn’t “play in Peoria” as John Ehrlichman like to say, they offered a new interpretation, claiming that it only applied to employees who had to file disclosure forms with the Joint Commission on Public Ethics.
Observers and critics have pointed out that this requirement is not mentioned anywhere in the executive order.
Cuomo is sitting on a re-election campaign fund that exceeds $ 30 million dollars.
Cuomo’s determination to retain these contributions is tone deaf at best and arrogant at worst, since this disclosure comes during the first of two trials of a bribery and extortion scheme that reaches to the highest level of his Administration.
Joseph Percoco, the lead defendant in the current corruption trial is Cuomo’s closest confidant, whom he described as “Mario Cuomo’s third son.”
Testimony in the trial also revealed that Percoco retained and utilized his state office adjacent to Cuomo’s despite having left state service to run Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign.
Both of them apparently ignored a prohibition on utilizing state government resources for political purposes.
The New York Times, The Daily News and other newspapers have been highly critical of Cuomo’s shifting two-step as he tries to justify his questionable fundraising practices against the back drop of the first of the corruption trials.
When it was revealed that Howe had pled guilty to multiple felonies and was cooperating with the government, Cuomo tried to distance himself from him, claiming they weren’t friends and did not have a close relationship.
Like his tortured accounting of the executive order, history belied these claims too.
In e-mails introduced during the trial, Howe was included in the “brotherhood” of the Cuomo clan activated by Percoco as Cuomo began his 2010 campaign for Governor. He had worked for Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, when he was Governor, worked for Andrew Cuomo when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton Administration where he hired Percoco.
Despite his self-styled persona as a “reformer,” Cuomo surrounds himself with the Howes and Percocos of the world where everything is measured by what it does to advance Cuomo’s career, whether it is legal or not.
I don’t know how the trial will conclude.
It could end in a conviction, an acquittal or a mistrial.
If it ends in a mistrial, it is likely to be rescheduled late this year, after the bid rigging trial scheduled for June.
If that happens, it may overlap this year’s primary and general election campaign for Governor, putting the issue of this Administration’s corruption front and center before the voters as they go to the polls.
One can only hope.