Working Families Party Staten Island Lawsuit Settled: Sources

A settlement will be announced in court tomorrow, sources say, and the case that was supposed to have blown the lid off of a statewide political scheme to under-bill political candidates comes down to this: The Rose campaign will agree to pay an additional $8,500 to the Working Families Party for services rendered.

For its part, the WFP agrees to change the way it works on campaigns, presumably either pulling the plug on its for-profit campaign arm -- Data and Field Services -- and replacing it with an internal political committee, or spinning it off as a totally separate organization.

To roll back the tape a little, Mastro filed the lawsuit last October gaining headlines with his claim that the WFP had engaged in "an audacious to scheme to violate the law."

Mastro's clients were a five members of Staten Island Republican warhorse Guy Molinari's political club and the complaint suggested a massive fraud. The WFP, the suit claimed, "was using corporate subterfuge to hijack our local election process." The allegation was that the WFP hid major expenses and low-balled the bills that its DFS arm sent to campaigns. But after several days of testimony and almost a month of additional discovery, the issue seems to have mainly come down to the cost of a list of voters that DFS supplied to the Rose campaign.

This afternoon Mastro hung up the phone when asked about the settlement. "I'm not going to have any comment at all. Come to court," he said.

Working Families Party director Dan Cantor was similarly close-mouthed, if more polite. "No comment," he said.