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.

Comments

[akaGaGa]

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

FYI, I've moved my blog to:

http://akagaga.com/

[Brian]

Your opinion on a constitutional convention?

[Bob Conner]

Pro, albeit recognizing the validity of the counterargument that the political parties and other special interests would find ways of running their people to dominate it.

[Steve]

Hard to believe we would be looking back at Bruno's tenure as "the good old days".....I predict they will have absolutely nothing that will stick - he is the "Teflon Speaker", as it were, and well loved by people around here for the pork dollars he delivered...
Spitzer really should have known better....