PlanetAlbany

Typecasting at Bruno trial

At my third day dropping in on the Joe Bruno trial, I saw my first witness without a necktie. That would be Wolfgang Hammer, a beefy, gravelly voiced former business manager for the hotel and restaurant workers local in Saratoga Springs. With the jury gone during a break, Hammer was chatting with the presiding federal judge, Gary Sharpe, and causing his honor to erupt in gales of laughter. Next up was another union guy, a former Teamsters local president from New York City named Anthony Rumore who is not unfamiliar with court rooms. He was well dressed, slicker, walked with a stoop.

I also caught the end of the testimony of Senate Republican labor lawyer Ed Bartholomew (whom I've been covering off and on for 27 years, from when he was mayor of Glens Falls). He was not at all like last week's witness Francis "Tim" Collins, a former Senate lawyer who is now a state judge. Where Collins was halting, tentative, forgetful and forced to admit his own shoddy lawyering, Batholomew was crisp, clear and forceful.

As for what to make of it all, who knows? None of the witnesses I've seen has testified to any overt corruption, and to paraphrase the detective's sidekick at the end of the movie "Chinatown," "It's Albany, Jake." But prosecutors are hoping the federal jurors will not accept Albany's mix of private and public business as usual, where paper tigers like the Legislative Ethics Commission let politicians get away with anything.

 Bruno's investment-firm employers hired him to drum up business from, among others, union pension funds. But it's not at all clear that the union guys knew whom Bruno was working for, or whether it's good or bad for Bruno or the prosecution if they did or didn't know. If they knew, and got public benefits for hiring a Bruno employer (while he got a commission), there's your quid pro quo. But both today's union guys said their locals pulled out of Wright Investors' Service, Bruno's major employer, while he was still majority leader, because the firm wasn't producing high enough returns. Bruno didn't try to get them to reconsider. And Bruno was spreading so much money around Albany and the state that how can you prove the motivation for any particular piece of it? The feds, though, don't have to prove a quid pro quo, just that Bruno's services to the public were compromised in a corrupt system.

Setting the record straight on ethics

From today's Times Union story on the trial of Joe Bruno and his radio interview yesterday:

"On the air, Bruno said he proposed increasing the disclosure of personal business by public officials in ethics reform laws sought by ex- Gov. Eliot Spitzer. He said Spitzer told him that some professionals could not reveal their clients.
"Spitzer said Wednesday he could not recall his talks with Bruno. But 'I've always believed that full disclosure of outside income and the resulting transparency is beneficial and indeed necessary, and any proposal to increase that did have and would have had my full support,' Spitzer said."

What became the 2007 ethics reform law was introduced at a February news conference in the Blue Room of the Capitol by Spitzer, Bruno, Sheldon Silver et al. I asked Spitzer, once and in a follow-up question, about the absence of new financial disclosure requirements for legislators, and he twice inaccurately responded that legislators are now required to publicly disclose the approximate amounts of their private incomes. There is no such disclosure requirement to this day, although a bill passed by the Assembly this year would put one in place, while not identifying private clients. The Senate has not passed that bill, despite bipartisan support for it, while including it in a package with another bill, which also would not disclose private clients. A new Senate bill (see preceding post) is promised soon.

Spitzer was wrong then and is wrong now. On the other hand, Bruno could have voluntarily disclosed whatever he chose to about his private income and clients, and he never did. Nor has Silver to this day disclosed his private income or clients. Those are the facts.

No ethics bill

Diligent readers may recall how back in September the Senate declined to pass an Assembly ethics reform bill despite overwhelming bipartisan support, and that Senate leaders proposed an amendment which they couldn't pass. But they said we'll be back in session in a couple of weeks or so, when we'll have the votes to pass the bigger better package.

It took longer than a couple of weeks for Gov. Paterson to call the Legislature back into session, and ethics is not on the agenda. Austin Shafran, chief spokesman for the Senate Democrats, and Dan Weiller, his counterpart on the Assembly side, both said they were concentrating on the governor's agenda -- which means no new ethics bill. (The Assembly passed its bill earlier this year.) But Shafran said Sen. Eric Schneiderman, D-Manhattan, deputy majority leader for policy, is working on a new bill, which Schneiderman confirmed. Schneiderman said the bill should be unveiled in a day or two, and there have been discussions (not yet negotiations) about it at the staff level with the Assembly.

Blair Horner, legislative director of NYPIRG, was not impressed, saying he has not heard of any serious negotiations taking place, and blaming the Senate for inaction. "Our hopes are dashed," he said. "... It's a huge disappointment."

Deutsch waiting till next year on taxes

No deficit-reduction action at the Capitol so far today, so I had a word in the Senate lobby with Ron Deutsch, executive director of the union-connected New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness. His group is one of the proponents of a phony mid-year deficit reduction plan relying on one-shots such as tapping the rainy day fund. It also was a key player in building support for an income tax increase on the upper middle class and above that was included in this year's budget. The tax hike added two new brackets, with a top rate of 8.97 percent kicking in at annual income of $500,000 per year.

Earlier Assembly Democratic plans had called for higher taxes on incomes of $1 million and above, and there is a surprising amount of revenue to be derived from tapping that source, even with a new top bracket in the vicinity of 10 percent. So I asked Deutsch if he saw room for new income tax brackets kicking in at $750,000 and $1 million. Not this year, he said, but for the 2010-2011 budget year (which starts April 1) he does see scope for adding those two brackets, thus "tweaking the current system to be a little more progressive." Since there will be enormous pressure next year for budget cuts and property tax increases, there is a good case for that kind of income tax hike.

Parsing the health-care votes (updated)

On the preceding post, commenter Molly says: "So [NY Democratic Rep. Scott] Murphy votes against the Stupak amendment, and then votes against the entire bill as well? What's his reasoning? He would have voted for it had the Stupak amendment passed? Or he's trying to play it both ways? Vote against Stupak to shore up his liberal credentials, yet vote against the overall bill to try and appease conservative voters in NY-20? Either way it seems like a weaselly thing to do. "

Two other New York Democrats from relatively conservative districts, Eric Massa and Michael McMahon, had the same voting pattern. This is the political calculation: Voting against the Stupak amendment appeases pro-choice groups which are extremely powerful in NY Democratic Party politics, whereas voting for it would have enraged said groups. Voting against the entire bill does not do anything to annoy the pro-choice people, but is Blue Doggish enough that it might appeal to fiscally conservative voters. It is the opposite of the politically courageous decision made by Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao.

Update: It seems all New York Democrats voted against the Stupak amendment, while the state's two Republican congressmen voted in favor of it. Nationwide, 64 Democrats voted for the Stupak amendment along with 176 Republicans, while 194 Democrats voted against with one Republican voting present.

Murphy considering Stupak amendment (updated)

The House of Representatives is in session today (Saturday) and will apparently take up Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak's anti-abortion amendment to the health-care reform bill. I tried calling Rep. Paul Tonko's Washington office this morning at (202) 225-5076, but just got through to a machine which said I couldn't leave a message. I did leave a message on his cellphone. After a couple of tries I managed to get through to the office of another Democratic member, Rep. Scott Murphy, at (202) 225-5614, where someone told me the congressman was considering the matter. If these guys are moderates on this issue  --and Tonko in the Assembly did vote for a bill that didn't pass which would have banned partial-birth abortion -- they will vote for the Stupak amendment. The same applies to Bill Owens, the new congressman from the North Country, and other supposedly moderate Democrats.

Update: Murphy, Tonko and Owens all voted against the Stupak amendment. It passed anyway, however, greatly improving the bill and enhancing its prospects.

Bruno trial doldrums

This afternoon's entire testimony at the Joe Bruno trial in Albany came from one Len Fassler, a gnome-like 78-year-old who's been a friend of Bruno's for close to 40 years and started paying him several thousand dollars a month in the 1990s. He has also headed up a succession of companies with names like Sage, Interliant, Ameridata and Vytek, which may have been connected to other companies that benefited from state largess. Given all Bruno's secretive business contacts and governmental power, it was easy to take the prosecution's point that he can hardly have avoided conflicts of interest. But Fassler, while a prosecution witness, was friendly to the defense, saying Bruno earned his salary because he "helped me to become a better executive." And he said Bruno told him he'd gotten clearance from Senate ethics authorities for his private business consulting.

Under cross examination by defense lawyer Abbe Lowell, Fassler said not all the money went in one direction. The former Senate majority leader had twice invested $60,000 in Sage, and Lowell put up screen shots of the checks signed by Bruno. That did stop my eyes from glazing over, but I don't see it making jurors more sympathetic to the high-rolling defendant.

Examining Bruno's motives

Multiple connections to labor unions are coming up in testimony at the Joe Bruno trial. The prosecution is essentially contending that the longtime Senate majority leader helped the unions because he was getting paid off in his capacity as a private businessman -- or at least that he got much of his private income because the unions wanted the public benefit. And it's undeniable that Senate Republicans under Bruno's leadership became very helpful to organized labor.

But there's more to it than that. Bruno grew up poor, has a genuine connection to working people and seemed to believe in the legislation he advanced. Further, other Republicans including Gov. George Pataki were simultaneously heading in the same direction, having apparently calculated that the party needed to move leftward on labor issues. The defense's problem is that it may not want to put Bruno on the stand, so as not to subject him to cross-examination. How, then, will it present to jurors this alternative, non-corrupt narrative explaining Bruno's friendliness to labor unions?

What went wrong for GOP

Republicans nationally got pretty good news in Tuesday's election, and even in parts of New York. But the results in NY-23, coming on top of NY-20 earlier this year, were a disastrous one-two punch taken by the state GOP. New York Republicans are badly outnumbered by Democrats statewide, but they have a heavy registration advantage in both those districts. Yet they managed to lose both open seats, and now have a grand total of two members of Congress in the entire state.

One thing Jim Tedisco, the losing Republican candidate in NY-20, had in common with Doug Hoffman, the losing Conservative candidate in NY-23, is not living in the district he was running in. Further, neither capitalized on local issues. Hoffman's failure to demonstrate local knowledge was mocked by the Watertown Times, and he wasn't a particularly articulate spokesman for his positions. Some of that is not his fault. He was the outsider, nonpolitician running against an incumbent assemblywoman and a politically connected lawyer. Maybe he'll get better.

But not if he follows Tedisco's lead. Tedisco let his campaign be defined by the NRCC's incompetent negative ads, which drove voters away. He didn't show he was knowledgeable about specific issues of importance to local people, such as the collapse in dairy prices. Democrats from Sen. Chuck Schumer on down have made a point of paying attention to dairy issues and taking action to assist farmers, making inroads into what had been a Republican constituency.

NY-23 Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava's liberal views on social issues (which contrasted with pro-life former Rep. John McHugh's) helped spur the conservative revolt and torpedo her candidacy. It was a huge mistake for Republican leaders to pick her in the first place (and tin-eared Tedisco was one of the last to keep singing her praises). Tedisco and Hoffman did not have that problem, but neither were they articulate spokesmen for a socially conservative agenda. Tedisco, who on other issues came across as overly confrontational against the smooth technocrat Scott Murphy, didn't bring up abortion, which is fair enough. But when put on the spot at a newspaper editorial board, he seemed uncomfortable and just muttered something about his religion. Pro-life politicians need to be able to talk about that issue in a calm and reasonable way.

I confess I underestimated the impact of Scozzafava's endorsement of Democrat Bill Owens, thought Hoffman would win fairly easily and argued with Joe Bruno when he said the race would be tighter. But it also wasn't hard to see that the NRCC was blowing the Tedisco race, and that the GOP establishment had blundered again by anointing Scozzafava.

Albany on trial

At the federal court house in Albany today I asked Joe Bruno who he liked in the 23rd Congressional District, and he said he thought Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman would win by a couple of points, and would have voted for him. Do you think George Pataki (who backed Hoffman before the Republican candidate dropped out) will run for U.S. Senate next year?, Bruno asked. The former state Senate majority leader was in good form as he chatted with reporters during a break in the trial that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. The 80-year-old former boxing champ has cojones.

That's more than I'd say about Francis T. Collins, a Court of Claims judge who used to be Bruno's Senate counsel and was the day's star attraction in the witness stand. The soft-spoken Collins seemed on the verge of tears as he bleated indignantly about how he couldn't be expected to remember anything, or to have done any actual research or due diligence in his interactions with Bruno's private employers and the (notoriously toothless) Legislative Ethics Committee all those years ago. They flashed a letter from the committee up on video screens, and I noticed it was signed by co-chairman Tom DiNapoli, then an assemblyman and now the state comptroller, who succeeded Alan Hevesi, who was felled by one scandal and now seems to have been involved in a worse one. Which reminds me of Eliot Spitzer, felled by one scandal, enmeshed in another (Troopergate) and author of an ethics bill that amazingly succeeded in making Albany even worse. I see he's going to speak at an ethics foundation at Harvard.

DiNapoli was installed as comptroller by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver with Bruno's cooperation. Like Bruno, who got $3.2 million in private income while majority leader (a fact which only came out as a result of this case), Silver has a private employer, a Manhattan law firm. We don't know how much he makes from it, or who his clients are. John Sampson, one of the triumvirate doing Bruno's old job in the Senate, made sure to keep disclosure provisions regarding lawyer-legislators' private clients out of this year's reform bill, which of course has yet to pass the Senate. His colleague Majority Leader Pedro Espada has had well publicized legal and ethical problems. And Malcolm Smith, Senate president pro tempore, has utterly inadequate, illiterate and barely legible financial disclosure forms currently on file with the Legislative Ethics Commission (which was created to succeed the old committee by Spitzer's ethics law, and is just as toothless).

Bruno's defense is that he played by Albany rules, which apply not just at the top to the three men in the room, but also enrich high-paid staffers who become higher paid lobbyists (as do former legislators) or politically connected lawyers -- or who may just settle for becoming a judge. Maybe Collins' feckless testimony helped Bruno, by showing a culture where hardly anybody took concepts like conflict of interest seriously. (There are a few exceptions like David Grandeau, who was tossed out of office in 2007 by the Spitzer-Bruno-Silver ethics "reform" bill.) Bruno does have a defense, because if federal prosecutors took their "honest services" statute seriously and had an infusion of staff, they could indict half the players in Albany. So why pick on Joe? At least the old boy has elan.