New York News Blog

​It's hard to imagine a worse time for a governor to lapse into lazy lies. But with the state in its most troubled fiscal condition in decades, facing daunting deficits, David Paterson has become all spin all the time, putting his own concocted narrative ahead of the state's need for crisis credibility.

Paterson's
current TV ad and his Monday joint legislative session speech, like his Meet the Press appearance a few weeks back, are rooted in flimsy falsehood. "Some say I shouldn't be running for governor," a resolute Paterson says in this ongoing, multi-million-dollar, advertising campaign. "Legislators said that when I forced them to close $30 billion of deficits." Paterson wanted to exploit the same hyperventilating number in his speech at the emergency session this week, but telling the legislators sitting in front of him that he "forced" them to do their fiscal duty would be both rude and laughable, so he rephrased it: "In the last 18 months, we have been forced to close $30 billion of deficits."

In fact, as phony as this $30 billion self-serving pat of the back is, it was even more dishonest when he debuted it September 27 on Meet the Press.

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The key question coming out of this election is whether Mike Bloomberg got the message. Can he listen to voters he'll never face again? If Bloomberg L.P took a hit like he did Tuesday, wouldn't the company take stock and make real changes?

Bloomberg spent $80 million in 2005 and won by 19 percent of the vote. He spent more than a hundred million this year (the final number isn't in yet), and won by 4.6 percent of the vote. Diminishing returns on an investment like that might trigger a change at the top in the corporate world. Since that's not possible at City Hall, isn't it time for change in the inner circle? Is there, for example, a single significant initiative in the eight Bloomberg years that was actually sparked or executed by a black or Latino? Isn't it time to broaden the Patti Harris, Kevin Sheekey, Ed Skyler inner circle to include someone that wasn't part of the Bloomberg L.P. product line? When Bloomberg held his "senior staff meeting" at 9:15 this morning wasn't it mostly a gaggle of white men high-fiving each other with blackberries in their hands?

​On the eve of the mayoral election, Bill Thompson is suddenly facing a lawsuit that accuses him of engaging in a "blatant fraud" when he acquired his $2.1 million Harlem home in 2008.

Franklyn Castro, who fought unsuccessfully to block the court-compelled sale of his restored brownstone at 106 West 121st Street last year, is filing a 10-page complaint today in Manhattan Supreme Court detailing allegations that Thompson conspired with a politically-wired receiver in the case, Marc Landis, to deny him the right to match or top the Thompson bid.

The suit charges that Landis "represented that the sale was an 'an all cash deal,'" concealing the fact that Thompson obtained a $729,000 mortgage and $400,000 home equity loan from Amalgamated Bank, which did billions in business with Thompson at the comptroller's office, as the Voice revealed last week.

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A few hours after I posted yesterday's item about Bill Thompson's mysterious ties to the contractor implicated in the Deutsche Bank fire, I got an e-mail protesting the story from Ed Castell, the campaign manager for Thompson's mayoral run.

My story revealed that the $180 million museum/condo project of Elsie McCabe, Bill Thompson's wife, is being built by Bovis Lend Lease, the construction firm whose site safety manager is under indictment for criminally negligent homicide in the death of two firefighters (District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said he could have indicted the company as well, but didn't because it could bankrupt the firm and affect thousands of jobs). McCabe joined her condo partner in signing a contract with Bovis in October 2008, though it was widely reported at the time that Morgenthau was considering indicting the company on murder charges. The Uniformed Firefighters Association (UFA) was so outraged by the mishandling of the Deutsche Bank deconstruction that its president cited it repeatedly in a September 16 endorsement of Thompson.

One of the ancillary points I made was that Thompson has been virtually silent about the fire, commenting only once about it in all the campaign clips, and saying only a single sentence about it when pressed by reporters at the UFA endorsement press conference. Castell's e-mail to me was contesting this point, and he later sent me a memo that Castell said was "released to reporters" on September 17, the day after the press conference, detailing Thompson's position about the city's Deutsch Bank failures.

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Bovis Lend Lease, the contractor whose admitted failings contributed to the deaths of two firefighters at the Deutsche Bank fire in 2007, is building the $180 million museum and condo project on Fifth Avenue spearheaded by Elsie McCabe, the wife of mayoral candidate and Comptroller Bill Thompson.

When the Uniformed Firefighters Association (UFA) endorsed Thompson last month, its president, Steve Cassidy, repeatedly cited the "egregious" mishandling of the takedown of the Deutsche bank building as the prime rationale for the endorsement. As the construction manager of the job, Bovis, one of whose employees faces negligent homicide charges in the bank fire case, began doing preliminary work on McCabe's Museum for African Art project four months after the tragedy.

By then, Bovis' role in the unsafe management of the Deutsche Bank deconstruction had already been highlighted in news accounts. Park View Fifth Avenue Associates, a partnership of the museum and the developers building a companion 115-unit luxury condo project signed the construction contract with Bovis in October 2008, according to Rod O'Connor, an executive with Brickman Associates, the lead developer.

When the contract was signed, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau was actively considering indicting the city and the company in the death of firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino, a fact that was widely reported. In December, Morgenthau indicted Bovis' site safety manager but not the company itself, though his statement said the office had "determined that it could institute a criminal prosecution" against Bovis, but didn't because an indictment could bankrupt the construction giant, which employs thousands.

I have tried repeatedly to get a statement from Bill Thompson about the construction of his wife's musem to no avail. He's also been reluctant to talk about Bovis and Deutsche Bank fire. I can't say for certain that he's avoiding these issues because Bovis is building his wife's museum.

But the guys at the UFA, who do care about dead firefighters, can't be too pleased with the news.

Photo credit: Marla Maritzer.

(l to r): John Graham, Deputy Comptroller for Audits, Accountancy & Contracts and Bill Thompson.

In 2008, 3797 city employees called the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board and asked for a legal opinion about a transaction--or other action--they were thinking about doing that might be inconsistent with the city ethics rules. Another 624 wrote the board.

Apparently Bill Thompson, the comptroller who wants to be Mayor, wasn't one of them.

​City comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Bill Thompson and his wife Elsie McCabe received three loans totaling $1.4 million from Amalgamated Bank, which calls itself "the labor bank" and does a multi-billion dollar business with his office, the Voice has learned.

McCabe is also the president of an art museum that is building a new headquarters on 109th Street and 5th Avenue, and that Thompson has called public officials to support. At the same time that the couple got two of their Amalgamated mortgages in the summer of 2008, the developers building McCabe's museum and a companion luxury condo project obtained $161 million in construction financing from the United Labor Life Insurance Company (ULLICO), which is based in Washington, D.C. and describes itself as "the only multi-line financial services company owned by labor." Wachovia is participating in the ULLICO loan and providing approximately $19 million in permanent financing specifically for the museum once it is built. Wachovia has acted as a major underwriter of city bonds, selected by the comptroller and the city's budget director (Thompson has also joined other pension funds in a lawsuit against the bank).

​My favorite nugget from last night's mayoral debate was Mike Bloomberg's smug smile as he pronounced Joe Bruno a better majority leader of the state senate than Pedro Espada. Democrat Bill Thompson had already picked the-sometime Democrat Espada as the better of the two.

By 3:12 a.m., the Post called it Thompson's "worst moment," describing Bruno as "the steady Republican" without mentioning his current eight-count felony indictment. Espada was acquitted the only time he's been charged with a crime. He is no doubt the rankest form of small-time hustler; Bruno, on the other hand, helped criminalize Albany.

Apparently, the mayor didn't once feel so appalled by Pedro...

It was a sports weekend on the Barrett tube and my only companion, throughout the hours of playoff baseball, was Bill Thompson. Not his ad, of course, but the latest one Mayor Mike has on every channel endlessly about Thompson, railing about the comptroller's supposed flip-flop on a millionaire's tax. We could close the city budget gap simply by taxing a billionaire's television commercials about a millionaire's tax.

The ad is a shout-out for the hypocrite vote.

​The New York Post ran a rather long and mostly negative feature about Andrew Cuomo over the weekend and I was quoted twice, consulted no doubt because of my reputation. If I can't say a bad word about someone, I am congenitally speechless. I am never called for quotes when someone is writing a puff piece, which the Daily News did on Sunday, working from material served up by Cuomo aides that the Post rejected and ridiculed.

I had never met, read or spoken to the Post reporter, Maureen Callahan, but I found her meticulous and thoughtful. We must have gabbed for 45 minutes, long enough for her to get a word or two in herself. We have different recollections of both of my quotes, and I certainly wasn't taping (she probably was), so I'd like to say what I think I told her, with the caveat that this is at least what I meant to say. It's not that my words are so important. It's rather that the two issues I'm cited about are rather important, especially since they relate to the current Attorney General of New York and to the Not So Secret War that is going on between him and the governor-who-is-more-oblivious-than-blind.

One quote Callahan got utterly correct. I did say that Andrew is "great at dropping stinkbombs" and that "I wouldn't be surprised if this is how the Obama thing surfaced." I also said, it's my recollection, that this kind of rank speculation was off-the-record. She and I had this protracted bargaining session at the end of what was usable and not usable from me and either then, or when I actually made this reckless comment, I believe I said to her please don't quote me about that. Feel free to quote me about things I know -- some of which were critical of Cuomo in ways that echoed Callahan's thesis (I said, for example, that he was as sharp a political mind as I had ever covered, though unattracted to the intricacies of policy) -- but not the things I'm guessing at, like could he be one of the blind sources in the Paterson/Obama stories of the last week.