Nearly a year ago, crusading federal prosecutor Preet Bharara mocked Albany’s culture of corruption, heaping extra scorn on the deals hatched in secrecy by three men in a room. Now two of them are on their way to prison and the third, Gov. Cuomo, reportedly remains a potential target of a separate probe.
The convictions of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos mark a historic development in Bharara’s years-long campaign to drain the swamp. Silver, a Democrat, was the boss of the Assembly, while Skelos, a Republican, ruled the Senate.
The verdicts were slam-dunks. The two men were charged with a combined 15 felonies, and juries declared them guilty on all 15 counts. So much for defense claims that they were only practicing politics as usual.
Yet their fall is not producing celebrations or any sense that Albany has been cleansed. Part of the reason is human nature — power corrupts, and the pols who replaced Silver and Skelos are not known to be born-again reformers.
But most important to the feeling of unfinished business is the cloud that hangs over the third man in the room.
Cuomo, to put it kindly, has been erratic on fighting corruption. As attorney general, he campaigned in 2010 on a vow to end the sleaze, saying Albany was so crooked, it “would make Boss Tweed blush.” He warned that unless the Legislature made real changes in ethics laws, he would use the subpoena powers of the Moreland Act to expose the dirt.
Less than a year later, he was singing a different tune. After he got an on-time budget with changes he wanted, Cuomo declared that New York has “the best legislative body in the nation.” Another time, he insisted that “99.9 percent of the legislators are great people.”
So it went, time and again. He alternately threatened to invoke Moreland, then switched to praise when he, Silver and Skelos emerged from their hidey-holes to declare agreements. He embraced the unflattering description that they were “the three amigos.”
As he geared up for re-election, Cuomo put his crime-fighter hat back on and finally convened a Moreland panel in 2013. He recruited an impressive array of law-enforcement officials, gave them a wide berth and promised they would be independent.
“It’s going to be a real follow-the-money investigation,” Cuomo told me then. “We want to see who gives you money, the legislation you introduce.”
When I expressed skepticism about his commitment, given his repeated retreats, he insisted this time was different, saying he was as “serious as a heart attack.”
But he wasn’t. As soon as the Legislature gave him modest ethics changes, he pulled the plug on Moreland.
That could be his undoing. The gumshoes he appointed with such flair had taken their assignment seriously and were aggressive, apparently too much so for the governor’s taste. Numerous accounts surfaced that his office intervened when probers focused on his donors and allies.
In response, Cuomo offered a series of defenses that grew increasingly bizarre. He started with denials and ended up insisting that the panel was never independent.
“It’s my commission. I can’t ‘interfere’ with it, because it is mine. It is controlled by me,” he told Crain’s magazine.
Fortunately, Bharara had a decidedly different view. He called the decision to prematurely disband the panel “difficult to understand” and told Moreland members in writing that it looked as if “investigations potentially significant to the public interest have been bargained away” in a deal among Cuomo, Silver and Skelos.
He seized Moreland’s investigative files in what amounted to a raid on its offices. When reports suggested that Cuomo aides solicited statements from panel leaders defending the governor, Bharara warned that such solicitations might “constitute obstruction of justice or tampering with witnesses.”
That, publicly at least, is where the investigation stands. Cuomo is using campaign funds to pay a criminal defense lawyer representing his office, and several of his aides hired their own counsel.
It is possible, of course, that the Silver and Skelos verdicts will be the end of Bharara’s campaign. It is also possible that they were the warm-up and the final act is about to unfold.