New York News Blog

For a guy who was supposed to have been the most widely admired man in the Capitol Region, Joe Bruno so far hasn't gotten a lot of help from his friends.

Yesterday's unhelpful testimony at the former state senate leader's fraud trial in federal court in Albany came from one of his former top aides. Veteran top Republican senate finance aide David Natoli spelled out exactly how his old boss divvied up the loot when it came to member item allocations, i.e. taxpayer-funded pork doled out by senators to favored groups and causes.

Natoli provided one of those rare honest descriptions of how things really work in the legislature, according to Albany Times-Union ace James Odato. "Senator Bruno decided the allocation," he testified. Average shares for Republican members during those GOP-majority years, the finance big stated, were $2 million a head, with "adjustments for seniority," and a bump for "politically marginal members" who needed to shore up support by spreading the bread around the district.

Any dough left over -$4 million to $7 million a year -- was tossed into Bruno's own pot. (This helps explain how the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium -- a.k.a. "The Joe" -- came to be in next-door Troy, along with the bust of Senator Joe that adorns the observation deck at the Albany airport).

Here's today's lesson from the nonstop tutorial in indictment avoidance now being offered in an Albany federal courtroom where ex-state senate boss Joe Bruno is on trial for stealing his own honest services from his trusting constituents. The lesson is this: Don't send those e-mails.

Executives from a pair of communications firms that retained Bruno as a paid consultant took the witness stand yesterday as prosecutors asked them about a series of e-mails they'd sent regarding Bruno's payments.

As detailed in an excellent follow-the-dots piece by the Times' Nicholas Confessore, there was this July, 2005 gem from one top exec at the Motient Corporation, which was doling out tens of thousands of dollars in monthly fees to Bruno, to another when confronted with a bill for the senator's services: "I am drawing a complete blank."

A follow up e-mail from a Motient VP read: "Do you know anything that Sen. Bruno does?"

He also had not a clue. So he forwarded it to Bruno's horse-breeding partner and pal Jared Abbruzzese who had authorized the payments. Motient chief financial officer Chris Downie topped it with his own cyber-speak plea: "Need some help here pls."

At some point, the clueless execs consulted with their Washington lobbyist on the theory that Bruno must be helping with issues with federal regulators. This too drew a blank.

"I have no idea," responded the lobbyist. "Never ran across him."

The e-mail lesson comes after a top senate attorney testified earlier this week about a memo in which he had instructed all members of the senate's Republican caucus to be sure to walk their sworn statements of financial disclosure over to the Legislative Ethics Office rather than trust them to the mailman. The obvious reason? "There were, quite frankly, concerns with federal mail fraud statutes," as the lawyer testified.

Hope everyone's paying attention. There will be a test following the trial. Image via Joshing Politics.

​There was another of those rare moments of truth at yesterday's session of the Trials of Joe Bruno.

From the witness stand, former top state senate legal counsel Kenneth Riddett, was asked about an April 21, 2001 memo he prepared for the senate's then Republican majority members. Assistant U.S. attorney William Pericak pointed to a bold and underlined sentence in the memo directing senators that their annual financial disclosure statements detailing their sources of income and holdings "should be hand delivered not mailed." Why was that?

Riddett's answer was simple and direct: "There were, quite frankly, concerns with federal mail fraud statutes, to be honest with you."

In other words, while local prosecutors are likely never to bother to sort through the sworn statements for potential crimes, the feds are always a wild card. I.E., skip the mailman and take a short walk to the Legislative Ethics Office.

So there you have it: Your tax dollars at work. And one more reason why Bruno's now 11-day old trial has become the best Albany show since Legs Diamond held court at Jack's Oyster House (where Bruno also held down a table).

N.B. For those wanting more of this fare than the NYC dailies are currently delivering, the Albany Times-Union is providing the most complete trial coverage by any newspaper since the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, complete with trial exhibits (the paper fought and won to get access) and even transcripts. Image via Joshing Politics.

​Fear not New York Times. You are not alone!

Actually, as we type, raiders from the office of the Manhattan District Attorney's office are busy hauling records from the distribution offices at all of the city's major dailies, not just the old gray lady.

Investigators this morning hit the Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, and El Diario.

The source of law enforcement's concern is that evergreen of labor racketeering schemes, the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union, whose offices were also being searched by investigators.

The probe, sources say, centers on allegations that the union screwed its own members by jumping seniority lists at all the city's papers on behalf of a favored few.

Such scheming was also part of a massive probe back in 1990 by DA Morgenthau's office that exposed a wonderful nest of mobsters and their cronies who were sipping espresso at the delivery offices of all the papers.

The story was somehow undertold by the dailies themselves (except for Newsday which doesn't have the NMDU as its union). The Voice gave the story fuller coverage a few years later.

​That fabulous image of former state senate leader Joe Bruno as the silver-maned, horse-riding, man's man, the ex-boxer who always looked like he could (and would) drop Shelly Silver with a half-punch - even at the age of 80 - took another beating yesterday in Albany.

This time it wasn't just the steady jabs from the witness stand by business execs and union officials who have already told the jury in federal court how Bruno leaned on them to do business with firms that were paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultant fees.

This one, coming in Round 10 of the trial, was much worse: His longtime executive secretary testified that even after she took care of everything from balancing his checkbook to buying his family Christmas presents, he still treated her lousy.

"He was demeaning. Very degrading," was how Patricia Stackrow put it.

As a result, Stackrow, 66, did what any self-respecting and much-abused executive assistant might do: she dipped into his checking account a little for herself.

Prosecutors didn't detail how much Stackrow - who testified under immunity - swiped. And she clammed up on the witness stand about why she did it. She had to hear her own words to the grand jury read back to her to be reminded that she had said she was looking for a little payback for her boss's disrespect.

When she was serving as Bruno's $100,000 a year executive assistant on the state salary, Stackrow was known as the "gatekeeper" to one of Albany's three top powerbrokers. Bruno didn't sweat the small stuff: He had Stackrow handle all his private business as well, everything from his horse-breeding partnership with a couple of pals eager for state favors to preparing his taxes.

"I did a lot of his personal business," she said on the stand.

Prosecutors have another dozen witnesses to go. The champ is looking winded.

Senator Fireplug

​Just when you thought you could never feel sorry for David Paterson again, along comes kooky Carl Kruger, the comic book hero of the Democratic state senate.

The fire-plug shaped Brooklyn legislator has launched himself as a one-man band fighting Paterson's proposed budget cuts. This morning he is vowing to hand-deliver a letter to Paterson demanding that he start collecting taxes on Indian cigarette sales. Kruger has the clout to make this noise because he's the chairman of the senate finance committee, a post he won thanks to the shenanigans he pulled as part of the notorious "Three Amigos" shakedown earlier this year.

Paterson top aide Larry Schwartz yesterday called Kruger "a liar" and insisted he owes the governor an apology.

Good luck getting through. Proof that Kruger operates on a different planet from the rest of us came in March when the Voice tried to ridicule him as the would-be Hugo Chavez of south Brooklyn. The article described hordes of cheering constituents shouting, "All the way with Chairman K!"

This effort at mockery failed miserably. Kruger had an aide call up and ask for permission to reprint the article, "Vanguard of the Senate Revolution."

We weren't sure we heard him right. "He wants to reprint it?" we asked.

"Yes, he's very proud of it," the aide insisted.

This proved conclusively that satire is always dangerous when dealing with the deranged. "Go ahead," we told him. "Knock yourself out."

Good luck Dave.

A private film maker stood up in a near-deserted federal courtroom in Manhattan this morning to plead guilty to stealing tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue that should have gone to the city.

Vincent Taylor, 50, pled to a single count of wire fraud before federal District Judge Harold Baer. Taylor said that he had been enlisted in the scheme in March, 2007, by Trevor Scotland, former chief operating officer of NYC-TV, the city's wholly owned television production studios.

Taylor told Baer that he had been trying to persuade Scotland to use public service ads he had made about diabetes and childhood obesity when Scotland asked him in March,2007, to submit bogus invoices for ad work that he hadn't done.

"I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I was afraid that the chief operating officer [Scotland] would blacklist me," Taylor said.

​Here's to Art D'Lugoff, the great Village music impresario, the round and bearded political and artistic enthusiast, whose eclectic tastes educated more than one generation, and who died yesterday at 85. Much too young.

A friend, Thomas Vitullo-Martin, said D'Lugoff had been in good health, but under stress from dealing with ailments of his wife, the photographer Avital Achai. "He was just very stressed about that, but he was active right up until the end."

Few people were more active than Arthur Joshua D'Lugoff. In 1958, he opened a jazz and cocktail spot at the corner of Bleecker and Thompson streets. There had once been a gate where the door was, so he called it "The Village Gate," which is exactly what it quickly became. It was the place where jazz musicians came to be noticed, from Thelonius Monk, to Nina Simone, to Bill Evans, to John Coltrane, to Herbie Mann, all of whom proudly recorded albums there. "Live at the Village Gate" on an LP record jacket became a hallmark of musical distinction.

In 1957, the year before he opened his night club, he brought Billie Holiday, who wasn't allowed to perform in local clubs because of her past record, to New York to sing at the old Loew's Sheridan on 7th Avenue and 12th Street on a bill with Dave Brubeck. He later launched a battle to end the requirement that musicians had to have cabaret cards allowing them to perform, a fight he later won after convincing a friend, Mayor John Lindsay, that they got in the way of great music.

​Midway in the World Series last night, Fox's TV cameras lingered on top Yankee fan Rudolph Giuliani, seated in his customary box adjacent to the dugout (The cost? No man knows.) The ex-mayor's team was up by three runs, but his jaw was set in grimace, his teeth bared as though ready to bite some faux Philly fanatic. Had Judy said something peevish? Had Jeter brushed off one of his fawning jokes?

The likely answer only came after the game at a flick of the news wires: The Times was reporting that top Giuliani protege, Bernard Kerik, was accepting a three-year prison term in lieu of federal trials.

For Kerik, 54, it is a sensible career move. His own worst enemy, he is already in jail for having flouted a judge's orders. He faced the possibility of 20 years more, and legal fees likely to bury him in debt.

For Giuliani, it is the last stop on the campaign train, for governor or anything else. Worse -- and this is the most probable cause for his scowl - it badly devalues the Giuliani brand. It is one thing to explain that you were viciously deceived by a man you thought to be a prince only to learn he was a simple thief. These things happen. It's another to try and air-brush the former police commissioner out of all those 9/11 photos.

It could even -- perish the thought -- make the Yankees rethink the benefit of having the ex-mayor and his third wife occupy that precious photo-op site in their newly coronated stadium.

The way it was supposed to work was that David Paterson would ride out his last days in office with something resembling statesmanlike respectability. At some point early next year, he'd take that sweet post at Columbia University, or maybe an ambassadorship in a sunny clime. The baton would pass to top deputy and acting-governor-in waiting Richard Ravitch. Everyone would then get things ready for the coming of Cuomo II. And that would be that.

But leave it to Paterson to screw up even his own one-car funeral. Thanks to the most ham-fisted World Series maneuver since a ground ball trickled through Bill Buckner's legs - demanding freebie tickets from the Yankees, and then lying about it - Paterson will now be the subject of another agonizing ethics probe, one that's sure to dog him right out the door in shame and (even more) ridicule.