"'Ridicule and shame' - Grand jury report faults Schenectady Police Department for inadequate oversight of officers"

By LAUREN STANFORTH, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Tuesday, November 20, 2007

SCHENECTADY -- City police have brought shame to themselves by allowing vice squad members to work almost completely unfettered, allowing cases and evidence to go missing, and criminal behavior that has seen the arrests of seven officers in the last five years, according to a damning grand jury report released Monday.

The 31-page report was a follow-up to the September sentencing of former Schenectady vice squad officer Jeffrey Curtis, who was found to have stolen and used crack cocaine evidence to feed his addiction.

While the report reveals incendiary details about how Curtis obtained the drugs and eluded discovery, it also focuses on the Schenectady Police Department's culture of shrugging off supervision has encouraged internal corruption for years.

"Lack of supervision and oversight over generations of police leadership has fostered an environment where a disproportionate number of police officers have engaged in criminal behaviors, seemingly without regard to consequences," the report states.

"This has repeatedly subjected the Police Department to ridicule and shame and resulted in the erosion of public confidence in the organization, which undermines the morale of hard-working officers who care about their jobs and their community," the report adds.

Schenectady County District Attorney Robert M. Carney convened the grand jury in mid-September to look specifically at how the internal workings of the department allowed Curtis -- recently sentenced to four years in prison -- to steal crack cocaine from crime scenes, confidential informants and internal police department evidence storage.

A large portion of the grand jury's investigation used information gleaned from a State Police investigation report, which was never released to the public.

The grand jury report paints a picture of some vice squad officers who didn't document cases because the leads went dead; whose hours on the job were never tracked; and who allowed piled-up drug evidence to spill out of storage boxes -- often in violation of department policies.

As part of the State Police investigation, an audit team reviewed vice and intelligence unit cases from September 2004 to January 2007.

It was in January that 85 pieces of crack cocaine went missing, resulting in the dismissal of an indictment against alleged drug dealer Anthony Best.

The development also led to the internal Police Department investigation that nabbed Curtis.

While the grand jury report looked in depth at that particular time period, it also stressed that flouting of procedure and lack of supervision is a tradition in the Schenectady Police Department.

Schenectady Public Safety Commissioner Wayne Bennett, who was hired in May to oversee the department in the wake of the scandal, said the city gave up managerial control of police operations over the years as a concession during union contract negotiations.

"When you're not capable of providing financial incentive to your employees, you give away management rights, I think part of it was that," said Bennett at Monday's news conference on the grand jury report.

The report cites numerous instances in which oversight was almost nonexistent.

For example, there was little supervision over vice squad detectives' individual cases, and if leads were unproductive, documents weren't always filed in the case.

The State Police audit team determined that about 80 case files were missing.

Also, police officers only had to acknowledge they worked a full day by putting an 'X' on their time sheets.

Officials said this system allowed Curtis to abuse it.

A State Police tail of him for two weeks revealed Curtis worked only between 4 and 6 p.m. most days, while putting the 'X' on his time card that he worked a full day, according to the grand jury report.

The mismanagement of crime evidence also made drugs easy for the taking.

A drop box for evidence was often overflowing, forcing department officials to leave unsecured drugs on a nearby table.

Curtis also said he could just reach into the door of the box and take whatever drugs were sitting on top.

Evidence audits were required, but never done.

Bennett, Carney and Mayor Brian U. Stratton's said the Police Benevolent Association has gotten too powerful in its role over the department.

But PBA President Lt. Robert Hamilton said if the grand jury's report faults supervision, then blame for the problems should fall on the mayor, who oversees management appointments such as sergeants and lieutenants.

"We recognize all the problems, but the mayor and chief of police chose to ignore it," Hamilton said, noting that the issue also goes back to prior administrations before Stratton.

Bennett said 65 percent of changes recommended in the report have been put into effect, such as requiring a new formal system of tracking work hours.

All crime evidence has been moved to a more secure location.

Bennett will deliver a report to the mayor in about two months that addresses all of the grand jury's recommendations, which also include details about how drug tests should be conducted and the documentation of how confidential informants are used.

Meanwhile, the city is looking for a new chief, as former Schenectady Police Chief Michael Geraci left last week to take a position with the federal government.

Stanforth can be reached at 454-5697 or by e-mail at lstanforth@timesunion.com.

A double life

The grand jury report shed some new light on how former Schenectady police officer Jeffrey Curtis obtained drugs and hid his habit.

Curtis had informants buy him drugs, making them believe they were buying it as part of an undercover police operation.

He skimmed some drugs found at crime scenes and returned the rest for evidence.

He would also immediately request leave time after he was informed he had to report for a drug test the following day.

The grand jury report also contains the following revelations about the Schenectady Police Department:

Generally, no photographs were taken of evidence at scenes to prove their contents or existence.

Drug evidence was routinely stored in the vice squad area, as opposed to a separately locked property room in the basement.

Audits of evidence were rarely conducted.

THE NEW YORK POST

"$75M SUIT VS. SPITZER HAS 'TEETH'"

By ALEX GINSBERG

November 19, 2007 -- A Park Slope dentist has filed a $75 million lawsuit, claiming Eliot Spitzer used the Attorney General's Office to trump up politically convenient charges of Medicaid fraud against him in 2006.

The lawsuit, filed last week in Brooklyn federal court, charges that Spitzer, who in 2006 was the attorney general and the Democratic front-runner in the primary battle for governor, was getting slammed as being soft on Medicaid fraud - and found a convenient fall guy.

"I had it all, and overnight I lost it all for no good reason, other than for the governor to have a nice headline," said the dentist, Leonard Morse.

"If that's what they'll do to a professional, imagine what they could do to the everyday citizen."

Morse, 60, said he'd never been sued by a patient or cited by state authorities in the 30 years he practiced in Brooklyn.

In 2002, when the Attorney General's Office demanded records, he expected another routine audit.

He'd already had four such audits, with no findings of wrongdoing.

More than four years later, authorities told him he'd be charged with allegedly ripping off $1 million from the program.

It happened in April 2006, just as the New York Times was running a major series of stories on Medicaid fraud and Spitzer's primary opponent, Tom Suozzi, was slinging accusations that Spitzer was soft on the issue.

"We're alleging that he was falsely accused of committing a crime that he absolutely didn't commit and that these charges were filed for political reasons," said lawyer Jon Norinsberg.

The charges collapsed at trial after reams of records were ruled inadmissible.

In the end, prosecutors asked Justice John Walsh to consider charges that Morse stole just $3,000.

The judge found the dentist not guilty on that charge.

But today, Morse's patients are long gone - scared off, he says, by the barrage of press releases calling their dentist a thief.

Copies of those press releases, in a variety of languages, are still posted on the Web site of the current attorney general, Andrew Cuomo.

Both Spitzer and Cuomo declined comment.

"I think I want beyond money," said Morse.

"I want justice."

"I want my good name back."

"I want all those thousands of patients back who I treated for 30 years."

"I want all my friends and neighbors and relatives to see that I didn't do anything."

"I became a political pawn."

alex.ginsberg@nypost.com

http://www.nypost.com/seven/11192007/news/...eeth_492441.htm

"Ed Dague's court hearing adjourned"

By DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

Last updated: 4:55 p.m., Tuesday, November 20, 2007

BALLSTON SPA - A court hearing for retired TV news anchor Ed Dague was adjourned today and will not take place until 2008.

Dague, charged with making a threatening phone call to a Saratoga County 911 dispatcher after his wife was given a traffic ticket, was due to be arraigned for second-degree aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor, at 6 p.m. tonight in Milton Town Court.

The case, however, was adjourned until January to give the longtime local media presence and his lawyer and son, Harris Dague, time to discuss their options, Saratoga County District Attorney James A. Murphy III said.

"We're in the process of turning over to the defense some of the proof we have," Murphy said.

"I suspect we will be able to come to some resolution in the new year."

Harris Dague said neither he nor his father had a comment.

Saratoga County Sheriff's Department officials say Ed Dague's arrest stems from an Oct. 28 incident in which his wife Donna was ticketed for allegedly driving on Route 9P in Saratoga while talking on her cell phone.

Police said that upon finding out about the ticket, the former WNYT Ch. 13 anchor allegedly called the Saratoga County 911 Center in a rage and threatened a dispatcher that he would "go to the scene with a firearm."

The Dagues live in Stillwater.

Ed Dague was arrested on Nov. 1.

He was released on an appearance ticket and faces up to a year in jail, a $1,000 fine or both.

Shortly after his arrest, Dague, who authors a blog on timesunion.com, told a reporter that he doesn't own a gun.

He also said to WNYT that he was suffering from chronic pain at the time the call was made.

Dague retired because of health problems in 2003.

THE ITHACA JOURNAL

"If Spitzer thought the first year was hard"

Jay Gallagher / Commentary

Most of the advantages Gov. Eliot Spitzer had when he took office in January — overwhelming popularity, a bulging campaign war chest, a booming Downstate economy, good relations with many legislators — have vanished.

But at least now he has some experience.

He's going to need it.

In January, he said everything was going to change on Day 1 of his administration.

Some things did change in short order, including a deal to overhaul workers' compensation, tougher ethics restrictions, a more open budget process, more school aid for the neediest districts and curbing of the growth of health care expenses.

But a lot didn't.

Most important decisions were still made behind closed doors, politics still dictated where much of state money was spent, campaign-finance laws remained stacked in favor of incumbents, and an archaic public-construction law that costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year remains on the books.

It turned out that the Legislature proved far less pliable than Spitzer had assumed.

So then Spitzer bragged in June, after the Senate left town without acting on much that he thought lawmakers needed to do, that he could do much governing without the Legislature — using state agencies and executive orders to work his will.

But, as he finally acknowledged this week when he retreated from his edict that illegal immigrants should be granted driver's licenses, having the technical power to do something doesn't always translate into the actual ability to do something if the politics doesn't work.

And he's come to realize that even when they're not in session, lawmakers have more than enough political power to sink what they see as an ill-considered initiative.

So it's been a rough first year, and in retrospect, 2007 appears to be a blown opportunity.

Not only did Spitzer have a huge mandate to try to shake up Albany (he won with 69 percent of the vote last year), but he came into office at a time when the state was flush with cash and when the Legislature was so dispirited by its often high-handed treatment by the Pataki administration that they were susceptible to a charm offensive.

That policy, which included private, informal chats with Democratic and Republican lawmakers and a series of small-group breakfasts in the Executive Mansion, was well received by lawmakers, especially those from the minority parties who are used to being ignored.

But the goodwill was largely dissipated in February when he went to war with the Assembly over who should succeed Alan Hevesi as state comptroller.

His declaration to Republican Assembly Leader James Tedisco that he would “(expletive) steamroller” him if he got in his way became a symbol of the governor's perceived arrogance.

Still, he used more of his political capital (as well as money from his campaign account and even some of his private fortune) to match the TV ads sponsored by the state's most politically potent union, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union that represents health care workers and opposed many of the health care changes Spitzer proposed.

Spitzer eventually got most of what he wanted on that issue.

Most of the points of contention in the budget were greased by a bulging state treasury.

For example, when Long Island legislators tried to block more school aid than normal going to city districts, Spitzer agreed to throw in an extra $100 million, most of which went to suburban schools.

But this year, Wall Street is slowing down and the housing market has turned soft, slowing the flow of tax receipts to the Capitol.

Spitzer's own campaign war chest that he used to fight for his budget last year is a relatively paltry $1.5 million, and his reservoir of good will with lawmakers is mostly exhausted.

And maybe most significantly, questions about the “Troopergate” scandal, where Spitzer aides used the State Police to try to gather damaging information on the governor's chief political rival, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, remain unanswered.

Investigations are continuing, with questions about what the governor knew and when he knew it still hanging.

Spitzer's experience has been hard won.

His enemies say he is temperamentally unsuited to be governor and so will continue to make the same mistakes.

His allies point out how smart he is, how hard he works and how much he wants to succeed.

We'll see who's right.

Write Gallagher at Jgallagh@gannett.com.

Originally published November 20, 2007

http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs....05/1014/OPINION

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

And speaking of Ed Dague …

It appears from the TU article “Ed Dague’s court hearing adjourned” by DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer, Last updated 4:55 p.m., Tuesday, November 20, 2007, that there is some kind of deal getting set to go down with respect to Ed Dague’s November 1, 2007 arrest for second-degree aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor, for allegedly calling the Saratoga County 911 Center in a rage and threatening a dispatcher that he would “go to the scene with a firearm” in an October 28, 2007 incident in which his wife Donna was ticketed for allegedly driving on Route 9P in Saratoga while talking on her cell phone.

According to the article:

A court hearing for retired TV news anchor Ed Dague was adjourned today and will not take place until 2008.

Dague, charged with making a threatening phone call to a Saratoga County 911 dispatcher after his wife was given a traffic ticket, was due to be arraigned for second-degree aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor, at 6 p.m. tonight in Milton Town Court.

The case, however, was adjourned until January to give the longtime local media presence and his lawyer and son, Harris Dague, time to discuss their options, Saratoga County District Attorney James A. Murphy III said.

end quotes

According to an earlier TU story entitled “Media spotlight falls on Dague after arrest - News personality becomes the news after police say he threatened to use gun in 911 call” by MARC PARRY, Staff writer, first published Saturday, November 3, 2007:

During his anchoring days, reporters knew they had to be prepared when they did a live report from the field, because if they left out a salient fact Dague would ask about it.

They called that “getting Dagued.”

end quotes

I remember, however, one occasion in the spring of 1989 where a TV 13 news reporter over in Troy at the TRIAL OF THE CENTURY being held in the Rensselaer County Office Building, that being the SHOW TRIAL being conducted by Rensselaer County to justify firing Paul R. Plante, the county Associate Public Health Engineer, put it right back at Ed Dague and Chris Kapostacey about the SPLICE JOB concocted by Kapostacey on October 11, 1988 to set Plante up so that REPUBLICAN Rensselaer County Executive John L. Buono would then have a viable excuse to lock Plante out of the Rensselaer County Office Building, which act ocurred on the following day, October 12, 1988 …

During the subsequent SHOW TRIAL in early-1988, Rensselaer County was actually using a videotape of the Kapostacey SPLICE JOB from the October 11, 1988 TV 13 news broadcast as evidence against Plante to justify his firing …

Plante, who was defending himself in that SHOW TRAIL, thoroughly debunked the Kapostacey splice job at the trial while the Channel 13 news camera rolled in the presence of the reporter who was assigned by TV 13 to cover that SHOW TRIAL …

Then, on the 6 O’Clock News, that reporter then confronted Dague and Kapostacey on the air about fabricating a news story …

And all Dague could do, as I recall, was mumble, and nothing ever more was said about it after that …

The reporter left Channel 13 sometime after that …

I try to recall his name …

A tall man he was …

His name might have been Chris …

And so …

Posted by John Galt on November 20, 2007 7:18 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...d-ends-134.html

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Spitzer aide Peter Pope hires criminal defense attorney in Troopergate probe"

By JOE MAHONEY, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, November 21st 2007, 4:00 AM

ALBANY - Peter Pope, Gov. Spitzer's $165,000-a-year policy director, has hired a Manhattan criminal defense lawyer to represent him in Albany District Attorney David Soares' reopened Troopergate probe, the Daily News learned Tuesday.

The lawyer, Susan Necheles, confirmed that Pope retained her to represent him.

She insisted he is suspected of no wrongdoing.

"He is nothing more than a witness," said Necheles, whose past clients have included Wall Street brokers suspected of improperly trading mutual funds.

Sources familiar with the Soares' probe said Albany prosecutors are looking into discrepancies between statements former Spitzer communications director Darren Dopp and Pope gave to the state Public Integrity Commission.

That panel is seeking to determine if Dopp or any other Spitzer administration member was involved in any unethical conduct when they tried to discredit Senate GOP Leader Joe Bruno with state police records channeled to an Albany newspaper.

Asked why Pope would need a criminal defense lawyer if he is not a potential target, Necheles said:

"When people are told they are witnesses in criminal cases, if they can afford an attorney, they usually get one."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/11/21...iminal_d-1.html

"Sides remain far apart in WNYT labor talks - Union says pay, seniority issues are 'deal breakers'"

By CHRIS CHURCHILL, Business writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Wednesday, November 21, 2007

MENANDS -- The labor dispute at WNYT Ch. 13 continues, despite a five-hour negotiation session on Monday.

Workers at the local NBC affiliate, who are represented by the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, have been without a contract since the end of September, when the prior pact expired.

The majority of station employees, including on-air reporters and anchors, are represented by the union.

Monday's session, held at the Century House in Latham, was the first meeting between station management and the union since mid-September.

A federal mediator participated in the session.

"I thought we had a good dialogue, and it certainly was a helpful day," said Stephen Baboulis, the station's general manager.

"We still have a long way to go, however."

Union president Bill Lambdin, a longtime reporter at the station, agreed the sides remained far apart.

He said management continues to push several points that the union considers "deal breakers," including the right to cut pay and lay off union members without regard to seniority.

Baboulis has declined to discuss details of the negotiations publicly, a position he repeated Tuesday.

No new negotiation sessions have been scheduled.

Baboulis and Lambdin both predicted that because of the December holidays, it will be difficult to hold another session until January.

WNYT is owned by Hubbard Broadcasting Inc., a Minnesota company that operates 12 television stations nationwide.

Workers have authorized the union to strike, but it has not done so.

Likewise, management at the NBC affiliate has not moved to lock out the workers.

"All options remain on the table," Lambdin said.

The union on Sunday held a rally outside the station in Menands, part of its ongoing campaign to draw attention to the union dispute and put pressure on management.

"NY's Spitzer goes from gangbuster to bust as freshman"

By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press

Last updated: 1:02 p.m., Saturday, November 24, 2007

ALBANY -- He was once untouchable.

"Eliot Ness" declared the tabloids.

Time magazine called Eliot Spitzer "Crusader of the Year," while People called him one of the sexiest politicians alive.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert called him "the golden boy" and the world's most powerful capitalists called him right back.

Before he was elected governor, Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and liberals loved the two-term attorney general: This new, tough-on-crime, fiscally conservative Democrat who for eight years policed the world's financial markets to protect the little guy.

His father, millionaire real estate developer Bernard Spitzer, boldly told a magazine his son would be the first Jewish president.

No one laughed.

As far back as 2005, Fortune said he could be a presidential contender, and a gaggle of reporters and photographers tracked him at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

But since he swept to the governor's mansion less than a year ago with a record vote, he's been hit with scandal and derided as a rich brat who doesn't play well with others.

"Eliot's Mess," mocked the tabloids.

The low point came two weeks ago when, battered in the polls and amid concerns that he was threatening to unhinge Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid, he grudgingly surrendered on his plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

He is now the guy who set the standard for rapid political collapse.

The white-hot national attention -- from the Clintons, the networks and The Washington Post -- has gone cold as the party focuses on its more immediate stars, those with less baggage.

In New York, pollsters are starting to pit Spitzer against Democratic Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for a possible primary in 2010.

"It is very, very unusual for someone to dive this far, that quickly," said Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who worked on President Clinton's successful re-election campaign in 1996 and handled Spitzer's ads in his first two campaigns.

Edward Koch, the former New York City mayor who has seen political rise and fall firsthand, said Spitzer lost an enormous amount of political capital.

"He has not yet redeemed himself, but is on the path, hopefully," Koch said.

"I say that because of his recognition that what he was proposing -- giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens -- was unacceptable to something like 75 percent of the public."

"And his apology was far from fulsome."

"What he has to do is show a little humility," said Koch, a quintessential, brash New Yorker himself.

"But I believe he ultimately will prevail and once again have the support of the New York citizenry."

On Wall Street, where corporate titans vilified Spitzer as an arrogant bully years before politicians and polls did, Spitzer's problems are better sport than an early squash game.

But they say gloating, at least publicly, is bad form.

"He's done," said Roger Stone, a Washington political consultant who worked on President Nixon's re-election and worked for presidents Bush and Reagan.

"I don't think he'll be re-nominated."

Stone worked for the New York Senate's Republican majority to capitalize on and compound Spitzer's rookie mistakes, but eventually resigned after he was accused of making a threatening phone call to Spitzer's father, a call he denies making.

It's not the first freshman flop by a political firebrand turned governor.

In 1980, Bill Clinton was just the second Arkansas governor in the century to fail to win a second term after unpopular measures angered lumber companies and taxpayers.

(He later won another term.)

In football-crazy Texas, Democratic Gov. Mark White served a single term in the 1980s after instituting a "no-pass/no-play provision" that barred failing students from sports.

At Spitzer's inauguration, he vowed to usher in a new era of vitality, reform, openness and government working for the people.

He spoke of working with all, and all seemed to know that if that didn't work, he had the smarts, the political support and the popularity to smash the status quo.

And it worked, for a while.

He led and scared lawmakers to unprecedented reforms of the budget process, ethics, and a bloated worker's compensation system that for decades cost employers too much while paying injured workers too little.

Then the status quo fought back.

Spitzer was beset by scandal involving two top aides who were tracking the travels of the governor's chief political nemesis, the Republican leader of the state Senate.

Pointed arguments and angry accusations of skullduggery whirled around the walls of the Capitol.

As one longtime Republican operative put it, "He's shown he's 'vincible.'"

In the process, he's made his opposition stronger.

A week ago, a Siena College poll found 64 percent of New Yorkers had a negative rating of his job performance.

In January, 75 percent of New Yorkers viewed him favorably.

A year after he was elected with a historic 69 percent of the vote, New Yorkers by a 2:1 margin said they wouldn't re-elect him in 2010.

What happened?

"He just doesn't seem to realize he isn't attorney general," said political science Professor Jeffrey M. Stonecash of the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

"There's a big difference between book smarts and political smarts."

Stonecash said Spitzer's mistakes date to his campaign, when he insulted the Legislature as the nation's most dysfunctional while he himself didn't understand Albany's politics.

"I thought he made a very foolish statement in the campaign, that `Day One, everything changes,'" Stonecash said.

Political science Professor Christopher W. Larimer of the University of Northern Iowa, a researcher of leadership traits and flaws, said politicians walk a fine line.

"If you become a powerful leader, you can then step over the line and become power hungry," he said.

"I think generally once they cross it, it's pretty hard to come back."

But Spitzer has come back once before.

In 1994, Spitzer finished last in a four-way primary for the Democratic nomination for attorney general.

While others wrote his political obituary, Spitzer jumped in the family minivan and put on 70,000 miles building support and contacts among New Yorkers he admitted he misunderstood.

It propelled him to unparalleled electoral popularity.

He's been doing the same this fall, trading the van for a state airplane, pushing his agenda and declaring great success.

Last week he blocked a fare increase for New York city subways and buses, the kind of bread-and-butter issue political strategist Sheinkopf said Spitzer needs to concentrate on now.

"Three years is an eternity in politics," Sheinkopf said.

------

Michael Gormley is the Albany, N.Y., capitol editor for The Associated Press. He can be reached by e-mail at mgormley(at)ap.org.

"Work force could be cut - Spitzer says it's possible some state vacancies won't be filled as he cites uneasiness about economy, budget deficit"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, November 22, 2007

ALBANY -- Gov. Eliot Spitzer on Wednesday would not rule out cutting the state work force as he prepares a more than $120 billion budget plan for next year.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, Spitzer said he's uneasy about the and a potentially bigger budget gap than the $4.3 billion deficit he has been estimating in recent weeks.

"The concern is it could be higher," Spitzer said in an interview.

"I don't want to speculate."

"We'll know pretty soon."

As a result, he would not flatly rule out Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith's proposals for trimming $2 billion from the budget gap.

The plan, offered by Smith on Tuesday, includes not filling about 4,000 of the roughly 12,000 expected vacancies -- those deemed nonessential -- in the state work force in the coming year.

That would result in recurring savings of $600 million a year.

The Queens Democrat's proposal, embraced by organizations such as the Citizens Budget Commission and Manhattan Institute's Empire Center, was criticized by Senate Republicans and public employee unions.

"It makes some sense," Spitzer said.

"We are considering all the various budgetary possibilities, and certainly levels of staffing necessarily are considered in the budgetary process."

The governor added that "when you think of saving money … everything is on the table."

"I'm not ruling anything out."

Smith's plan for shrinking the state work force, said E.J. McMahan, director of the Empire Center, is long overdue.

"He deserves a lot of credit for being the first one out there to state the obvious," he said.

The state work force is at 199,400 and is on pace to grow to 201,168 next year, according to the Division of the Budget.

Spitzer, in the interview, also said he has yet to resolve the state racing franchise issue, although he said he is determined to work out an agreement with the Legislature before New York Racing Association's franchise to operate the Saratoga, Aqueduct and Belmont Park tracks expires Dec. 31.

"It is one of the issues I look forward to working with my colleagues on in the next few weeks."

"There is a Dec. 31 deadline that is real."

He would not speculate on what will happen on New Year's Day if the franchise question is unresolved.

NYRA, favored by Spitzer to continue operating the tracks, is in bankruptcy court but is competing for the franchise.

It has maintained that it owns the tracks and that it could shut down racing if it doesn't get the franchise.

The governor also said that although he was able to help work out a deal to avoid subway and bus fare hikes for passengers using the MTA in New York City, he is less able to influence decisions of the New York Thruway Authority, which is planning toll increases.

"We're going to look at it," the governor said.

"But understand that is an authority whose board members are not individuals I have appointed."

"They are holdovers … from the prior administration."

He said the Thruway officials are not necessarily influenced by his positions but that he supports investments in roadways and bridges to improve safety.

"We are going to do what we can do to minimize the toll increase," he said.

Sen. Dale Volker, R-Depew, said Wednesday the governor should make the same type of financial commitment for Thruway users that he is for MTA passengers.

Spitzer committed to $600 million in 2010 to help the MTA deal with future deficits.

Half the money would come from New York City government's treasury.

Elizabeth Lynam, an analyst with Citizens Budget Commission, said the governor is postponing inevitable fare hikes by subsidizing the money-losing MTA.

She said the Thruway and MTA need to be self-supporting and the state can't afford bail-outs.

"I don't think the money's there," she said.

"It's going to be a real challenge without raising taxes."

James M. Odato can be reached at 454-5083 or by e-mail at jodato@timesunion.com.

"Ruling narrows confinement law - Federal judge says state cannot keep sexual predators jailed while determining future risk level"

By RICK KARLIN, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, November 22, 2007

ALBANY -- A federal judge struck down parts of state's new civil confinement law for sexual predators, sparking questions about the way it was crafted and raising the possibility that lawmakers may have to revisit the issue when they return next month.

In a key part of the ruling, U.S. Southern District Court Judge Gerard Lynch said the state can't keep sex offenders jailed while awaiting a trial to determine whether they need to be supervised more closely.

Lynch also ruled on the standards of proof needed to keep people confined if they were originally sent to psychiatric hospitals without a criminal trial due to their mental illnesses.

It wasn't immediately clear if the rulings, signed last week by Lynch, would hamper enforcement of the law, under which convicted sexual predators can be locked up in psychiatric hospitals after they complete their prison terms.

If authorities deem parolees to be a danger, they can call for a trial to see if they should be confined or subject to ongoing intensive supervision.

The case centered on Shawn Short, 33, who served time in prison for rape and sodomy.

He had been out on parole in the Binghamton area for more than two years when authorities had him locked up in a local jail.

State parole officials wanted to determine if he should continue to be supervised under the new civil confinement law.

Lawyers for Mental Hygiene Legal Services, which represented Short, contended that was wrong and Gerard agreed, writing that it was "potentially catastrophic" to lock up a person pending a trial on whether they need further supervision.

"There is no convincing reason that an individual should be detained for a substantial period of time pending a trial to determine whether a person does or does not need outpatient treatment," concluded Gerard.

"I don't know if the Legislature envisioned this."

"He was in the community," said Sheila Shea, director of Mental Hygiene Legal Services, a state funded agency that represents those in psychiatric hospitals and developmental centers.

Short remained in jail on Wednesday, and Shea said her organization would meet with the judge within the next few days to see about getting him released.

While she declined to specify where he lives or where he was being detained, she noted that he has been working at a dairy farm and at a factory and was a Level I offender, considered the least dangerous.

Gerard also found that authorities would have to find "beyond a reasonable doubt" that a person held in a psychiatric hospital without trial required supervision or further commitment.

The law required meeting a lesser standard of "clear and convincing" evidence in such cases.

Assembly Republican Minority Leader James Tedisco of Schenectady said he fears Gerard's decision could damage the civil confinement law, which Republicans had long pushed for and was gotten passed under Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer earlier this year.

"Achieving civil confinement in New York took 13 years of hard work," Tedisco said.

"If this decision waters down New York's civil confinement law, it has the potential to be an incredibly harmful ruling."

Shea, however, said her group wasn't trying to overturn civil confinement, which has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, but was only challenging a narrow part of the statute.

Tedisco's chief counsel, Mike Cuevas, explained that Assembly Republicans wanted to use language that would specify "sexually violent predators" as those who could be locked up pending a civil confinement trial.

But that wasn't included in the final law.

As to those who had been committed without trial, which is a potentially smaller class of people, Cuevas said the Assembly GOP initially proposed using the "reasonable doubt" standard, but lawyers in the governor's office apparently concluded that since these were "civil" rather than criminal confinements, the lower standard of "clear and convincing evidence" was warranted.

"It slipped through," said Cuevas.

Spitzer's office referred calls to the office of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who defended the case before Gerard.

Cuomo spokesman John Milgrim said they were reviewing the decision and possible options to deal with it.

Rick Karlin can be reached at 454-5758 or by e-mail at rkarlin@timesunion.com.

"NYRA status muddies future - Franchise negotiations between state leaders drag on, jeopardizing the winter horse racing meet"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Tuesday, November 20, 2007

ALBANY -- Seventeen days beyond his self-imposed deadline to resolve the future of the state racing franchise, Gov. Eliot Spitzer can't say what will happen with Saratoga, Aqueduct and Belmont tracks.

Private negotiations with the Senate in recent weeks have failed to resolve differences.

With just six weeks left in the New York Racing Association's franchise and the bankrupt NYRA warning that it will shut down winter racing if it loses its hold on track operations, horse owners and trainers are beginning to consider transferring horses to out-of-state tracks.

Rick Violette, president of the New York Horsemen's Association, called an emergency board meeting today to discuss options because of the uncertainty.

"Staffs of the governor's office and Sen. Bruno are talking, and that's great news," he said.

"It needs to be fast-tracked."

On Sept. 4, Spitzer announced he had privately worked out a deal to give NYRA a 30-year extension on the franchise it has held since 1955.

He said he would announce a separate franchise holder for running a video lottery terminal casino at Aqueduct within 60 days.

Today is day 77.

Spitzer spokesman Errol A. Cockfield Jr. said the governor has examined the bids and is nearly done, "but will not reach a decision about which group to recommend until there is more clarity about the outcome of ongoing discussions with the Legislature about the future of the NYRA franchise."

Spitzer's plan, declared unacceptable by Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, calls for giving NYRA $75 million to help it pay creditors owed more than $310 million, according to the bankruptcy filing.

In return, NYRA would give up its claim to ownership of the tracks.

NYRA President Charles Hayward said Monday the bankruptcy judge would likely want to control those assets should NYRA lose the franchise, raising the possibility that no one would get to run the tracks while he deliberated.

His prediction has raised concerns that winter racing at Aqueduct would be closed Jan. 1 if NYRA doesn't have the franchise.

He said NYRA is as eager as horse owners are to know what will happen on New Year's Day.

"I'm most concerned about our employees," Hayward said.

Bruno and Spitzer aides, in talks for the past few weeks, have discussed compromises that include allowing NYRA to continue running the tracks, according to people briefed about the discussions.

The parties also have discussed more legislative appointees on the NYRA board, greater oversight and stricter performance reviews.

The two sides also favor allowing a major VLT parlor at Belmont, but Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has publicly opposed VLTs there.

Silver has not been in the negotiations.

Bruno is pushing for a new public authority to oversee racing and gambling, including off-track betting, and wants to split up the tracks for competitors to operate.

"Discussions are ongoing, but we continue to believe that our approach is the right one," Scott Reif, a Bruno spokesman, said about talks with Spitzer.

Meanwhile on Monday, Capital Play LLC, a NYRA competitor, criticized NYRA's reorganization plan and continued losses, which totaled $4.7 million for October.

And new filings in NYRA's bankruptcy case showed that creditors and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. are concerned about NYRA's ability to pay debts.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. estimated NYRA has underfunded pension accounts by $95 million.

NYRA submitted an amended plan for reorganization on Monday based on its franchise being extended through Dec. 31. 2037.

It calls for paying unsecured creditors fully for all claims approved by the court and the right to terminate pension plans.

James M. Odato can be reached at 454-5083 or by e-mail at jodato@timesunion.com.

"Spitzer taps big, powerful for funds"

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Monday, November 19, 2007

Gov. Eliot Spitzer is gathering campaign cash at $1,000 a head, and he's getting it with help from major developers, lobbyists and lawmakers.

A Dec. 3 fundraiser at Manhattan's Metropolitan Pavilion for the governor's campaign committee is being billed as a "winter gala celebrating New York's history of groundbreaking innovation."

The first major historical event listed as worthy of celebrating: the creation of the New York Stock Exchange in 1792.

Last year, Spitzer dipped into his campaign account to battle an estimated $10 million lobbying effort by health care powerhouses fighting his proposed Medicaid cuts.

The cash raised at next month's reception and dinner may give him a cushion for a second round of trouble with the same health care advocates as he puts his second budget together and warns of more cuts.

Indeed, concerns about declining Wall Street revenue hurting the state's bottom line could lead Spitzer to propose a budget that is far more conservative than his first.

Those helping him raise cash include several developers, including mall builder and Pyramid Cos. owner Robert Congel and lobbyist Patricia Lynch and her associate, former Assembly Majority Leader Paul Tokasz.

Others lobbying in Albany on the long list of people raising funds for the gala include Steve Sanders, David Weinraub and Steve Weingarten.

Lawmakers pitching in include Assembly members RoAnn Destito, Joseph Morelle, Sam Hoyt and former Assemblyman Ryan Karben.

If you insist ...

Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith was in no rush last week to explain how he got to Washington, D.C., when Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced the end of his plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Asked how he and his boss got to the Spitzer event, Smith's press officer, Curtis Taylor, was reluctant to provide information, and quickly ended a call from a reporter about the matter.

But later he said Smith purchased a commercial ticket with his campaign funds.

Taylor said he flew on a commercial flight and paid his own way.

The purpose of Smith's appearance in Washington was to attend a national legislator's association meeting.

Since he was in town, he also sat down with the New York congressional delegation to listen to Spitzer's presentation, Taylor said.

Spitzer took a state airplane to make his announcement on the national stage.

The plane was pretty full: Michael Balboni, Christine Anderson, Danny Kanner and Marty Mack were among those aboard.

Errol Cockfield Jr. traveled separately on a commercial aircraft.

The trip was official business and required no reimbursement to taxpayers, said Anderson, Spitzer's director of communications.

Capitol Confidential was reported and compiled by Capitol Bureau reporter James M. Odato, jodato@timesunion.com; 518-454-5083.

"Their dream deal was a house of cards - Home buyers' pursuit of subprime mortgage provides a cautionary tale"

By CATHY WOODRUFF, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, November 25, 2007

BRUNSWICK -- George and Rebecca Weiss were thrilled to be buying their dream home.

What seemed impossible to the young couple a few months earlier now looked, through a series of unexpected lucky twists and their own determination, within reach.

"This house offered everything -- and then some," Rebecca recalled as she described the spacious white four-bedroom Colonial.

Ultimately, it wasn't to be.

With the contents of their Clifton Park apartment packed up and their three children anticipating their first night in their new house, the deal fell apart at the closing table when mortgage terms they originally agreed to appeared far different.

Now, as the scope of the national subprime mortgage debacle grows and home foreclosures in the Capital Region climb, the Weisses realize they narrowly escaped financial disaster.

Experts say their story illustrates how easy it is for home buyers to wind up over their heads in debt.

The Weisses say they hope their experience will serve as a cautionary tale for others.

The documents they confronted when they arrived for the closing on Jan. 3 surprised them.

Their mortgage loan would have an adjustable rate instead of fixed.

The initial interest rate was about 3 points higher than they had expected, and the listed fees were higher than they had understood they would be.

The 30-year mortgage included monthly payments on principal and interest of $1,767.37 the first two years, climbing to $2,377.48 for another half year, before rising to $2,387.81.

The final monthly payment, however, would be a doozy: $229,955.67, nearly as much as the $246,081.29 they were to be financing.

In all, the Weisses would have paid $1,072,226.92 over 30 years for their Colonial, not including property and school taxes.

Still, the Weisses say, they might have signed on if last-minute problems with the bank involved hadn't scuttled their purchase.

Refinancing within a few months to decrease their payments seemed a likely option to decrease their payments -- or at least keep them stable.

The prospect of losing the house at that point -- when it seemed so close to being theirs -- seemed almost unbearable.

"Going to the closing and having the keys in your hand and losing the house, it was very tough on both of us," said George.

The Weisses and others involved in the transaction disagree about who bears the main responsibility for how things unfolded, but the details they shared about their experience point out how easy it can be for home buyers to get tangled in unwise financial commitments before they realize it.

"Closing documents can be difficult to understand, even for professionals," said Stephanie Lane, a housing counselor with the Troy Rehabilitation & Improvement Program.

"For home buyers who have no pre-purchase counseling, they can be puzzling."

There's no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a "predatory" loan, Lane says.

Legally speaking, there's little that's clearly prohibited, and there's little financial incentive to discourage a buyer from going whole-hog, experts say.

Lenders and brokers make their money from fees or service charges levied at the closing, Lane says, and even if the original lender retains responsibility for servicing the mortgage, the loan itself -- along with the risk in case of a default -- is typically sold to another bank or financial concern.

The Weisses' house hunt was just getting under way in the spring of 2006, when Rebecca first saw her dream house on the Internet.

"Of course, I fell in love with it," she said, but with an asking price of $299,000, "we put it out of our minds."

A few months later, the Weisses were surprised when the four-bedroom house came to their attention again at a $249,000 asking price.

Around the same time, they learned from their mortgage broker and real estate agent that they might be able to qualify for a larger mortgage loan than previously approved for an annual income of about $65,000.

Their credit rating was not strong, they acknowledged, but they both had state jobs they believed were secure.

They were receptive to the good news.

"Now, we were interested," recalled Rebecca.

"All of a sudden, the house was in play," said George.

George vividly recalls the moment when he realized their hearts were set.

It came when Rebecca looked up at the staircase and told him she envisioned their daughter descending in her wedding dress.

On Oct. 30, 2006, they received a letter from the manager of the Mortgage Zone in Clifton Park saying they were preapproved for a $229,000 purchase.

A handwritten notation on the letter, which is not clearly legible, includes a figure of "242,240" (with no dollar sign).

They made an offer for $242,740, including a $500 deposit, which was to "net" the seller $229,900 after fees and seller "concessions" were taken into account.

Within days, the Weisses accepted a counteroffer, and the contract was amended to reflect a $253,340 purchase price, with the seller to net $239,000.

The Weisses expected to finance much or all of their down payment and closing costs, they said.

Most of their early loan applications filled out in early November listed an amount of $254,294.

They figured their budget would be tight for a while, but they would refinance within a couple of years and could make it work.

"When all was said and done, we work for the state, we get a raise every year," Rebecca said, describing their thinking at the time.

"The mortgage is going to come down, slowly, but it will come down, and this was a house we planned on spending the rest of our lives in."

"So, to us, we might be stretching our budgets, maybe for the first five years, but it was still feasible."

The coming weeks brought an avalanche of paperwork and a series of anticipated closing dates that came and went without action.

Finally, in late December, just as it appeared they might never close on the house, their loan officer sent word of a grant program that seemed like the answer to their prayers.

An organization called Partners in Charity was willing to provide a gift of $28,254.80 to cover a down payment, closing costs and any other prepaid items.

"I thought it was some sort of miracle," George said.

When they finally sat down to do the closing, their high hopes crashed.

The Weisses contend they were misled at many points in the process.

Their real estate agent, Kathleen Schneibel, and officials at The Mortgage Zone insist they were only doing their best to help the Weisses buy the house they were determined to have with a payment the couple said they could manage.

"They wanted this house and they did not want to hear 'no' as an answer," said Schneibel.

"So many people bent over backwards and did everything they possibly could to try to get this house for Rebecca."

Kevin Tollisen, the lawyer who represented the Weisses at the closing and was hired to be the bank's agent at the table, said he ultimately pulled the plug on the transaction because of a last-minute request regarding the Partners in Charity grant that came from a representative of the bank, who was participating via a speaker phone.

The group was reviewing a federal statement that details the terms of the sale in compliance with rules of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The subprime lender, First Franklin Financial Corp., suddenly balked at using the Partners in Charity grant to cover all of the down payment and closing costs, Tollisen said, and finally "they told us to just take it off" the HUD document.

"When you sign a HUD One statement, you are signing a statement that says it is true and accurate," he said.

"They were asking us to do stuff that I was not comfortable with, obviously, and something that I would not allow my client (the Weisses) to do."

"... There was no way, no how that it was closing with my office."

Even if the statement including the grant had passed muster with the lender, Tollisen still was not sure whether the sale would have been completed because so many questions were outstanding about the terms of the mortgage.

"All their loan terms were different than what they expected, so it certainly was an issue," he said.

A First Franklin spokesman in California said it was no longer possible to determine with certainty who participated in the closing meeting because the loan never was made, but he confirmed it would be against the bank's policy to encourage filing a false statement.

The Mortgage Zone loan officer who lined up the Partners in Charity grant is no longer with the brokerage, said branch manager Marc Salvadore, and Salvadore isn't sure where his employee found the organization.

"He probably Googled 'down payment assistance programs,' " Salvadore guessed.

The increase in the purchase price in conjunction with the grant raised eyebrows for Lane at TRIP, who said it could have made it difficult for the Weisses to hold onto the house if the purchase had been completed.

According to the terms of grant documents signed by both the Weisses and the sellers, the total house price was to increase to $282,548.

The $28,254 donation paid by the seller was matched by an equivalent "distribution" to the seller, and other seller fees and concessions were listed.

Richard Ellis, who owned the house with his wife, said he had not realized the role of the grant until the snags started cropping up at the closing.

"As far as I knew, I was selling the house for $239,000," he said in a recent interview.

Just over a year after their offer on the house in Brunswick was accepted, the Weisses have moved on.

They purchased a spacious five-bedroom house in Lansingburgh, using a mortgage through M&T Bank under a special program for buyers with poor credit, George said.

Real estate records show a sale price of $139,200.

They say they're very happy with their new place and have begun to view the loss of the Brunswick house with relief.

"I think that having the experience of now actually making a mortgage payment has made us realize that had we closed that day, we likely would have been in trouble from the first month."

"Especially if one of us had an emergency or a job loss," George said.

Cathy Woodruff can be reached at 454-5093 or by e-mail at cwoodruff@timesunion.com.

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

Say!

Dr. Cannon, dude …

Before I forget …

Down in News of the Day, I posted for you what I would call a SEMINAL ARTICLE entitled “Rensselaer County housing deals probed” by Tim O’Brien from the March 18, 1989 Albany Times Union newspaper …

SEMINAL: containing or contributing the seeds of later development …

- Webster’s new Collegiate Dictionary

What I neglected to tell you down there was that I retrieved this particular TU article from United States Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation File No. 194B-251 …

Which file available through Freedom of Information is entitled “ALLEGATIONS OF CORRUPTION IN RENSSELAER COUNTY GOVERNMENT RELATING TO LAND DEVELOPMENT; RENSSELAER COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; PAUL R. PLANTE - DIRECTOR, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH DIVISION, RENSSELAER COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; CORRUPTION OF STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC OFFICIALS - LOCAL LEVEL …

While my purpose in posting that SEMINAL ARTICLE was in large part to provide a historical background to this SUBPRIME MESS which is sweeping across the economies of the nations of the world like a brush fire stirred up by Santa Ana winds in Malibu Canyon …

The article also serves as a basis for a sidebar that Mike and I have been having in here concerning why Joe Bruno is an UNTOUCHABLE in Albany as far as being prosecuted by the federal government for anything …

And as such, Dr. Cannon, that same SEMINAL ARTICLE also goes directly to statements made by yourself in here and on the CAPCON BLOG that Joe Bruno should be indicted for something …

Which brings us right to the heart of the matter of the relevance of that TU article from March 18, 1989 to this present-day discussion that we are having in here, right now, today …

Because while that March 18, 1989 article is in fact about many things relevant to right now today, it is also THE GENESIS OF THE STORY of what happens to those here in the Albany area who would serve as a witness against Joe Bruno in any kind of criminal proceeding …

The KEY SENTENCES in that regard are as follows, Dr. Cannon:

The state probe was requested by County Executive John L. Buono after allegations of improprieties were made by Environmental Health Director Paul R. Plante.

The county is in the midst of a disciplinary hearing on Plante, who is accused of insubordination and other charges.

end quotes

In 1988, Dr. Cannon, the engineer Paul Plante brought Joe Bruno up on misdemeanor charges of violation of the New York State Public Health Law …

In 1988, enforcement of the New York State Public Health Law in Rensselaer County was in fact the sole duty and responsibility of the engineer Paul R. Plante …

And when Joe Bruno allegedly wilfully violated the NYS Public Health Law in Rensselaer County in 1988 and Plante lawfully called him on it, to our collective amazement, Plante was charged with INSUBORDINATION and was fired by Rensselaer County, DESPITE the fact that Plante was in the process of filing and litigating a successful Worker’s Compensation case against Rensselaer County for PSYCHOLOGICAL HARASSMENT and injuries suffered to his neck and head in a back-hoe assault in the summer of 1988 …

WITHOUT WITNESSES, Dr. Cannon, THERE WILL BE NO INDICTMENTS ….

And thanks to the FBI and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York in Albany, you can rest assured that NO WITNESSSES AGAINST JOE BRUNO are going to come forth in Rensselaer County …

And so ….

Just setting the record straight in here for you, Dr. Cannon ….

And for Mike, too, of course …

And Roger Murdock …

And yes, Mr. Ravi Batra, as well ….

And so …

Posted by John Galt on November 25, 2007 4:02 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...#comment-306894

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

The POINT that always seems to get lost in these BLOGS, Dr. Cannon, is that in the State of New York, at least outside of NYC, there is in fact a REALITY that is supposed, on paper, at least, to be grounded in LAW, rather than in POWER POLITICS ….

And that is what makes this MATTER OF PAUL R. PLANTE so interesting and significant today, in the light of this ON-GOING SUBPRIME MESS that is going to have a big potential for adverse impact to the economy of NYS itself …

AND ITS RESIDENTS, of course ….

Some of whom were a part of this LAND SCAM that underlies the SUBPRIME MESS …

And many who were not …

But will likely get hit with the BILL for the mess, nonetheless, which is how it always seems to go in these SCAMS ….

Witness the Savings and Loan BAIL-OUT …

And so …

Posted by John Galt on November 25, 2007 4:34 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...#comment-306911

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

We countryfolks learned a lot about how “government” really does function back then, Dr. Cannon …

Back in 1989, when the United United States Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation was “swarming” in Rensselaer County, showing up at the homes of various people here and there, intimidating the be-jaysus out of them as they went along …

One of them was at my house …

Several times, actually …

He took some evidence from me and it subsequently disappeared …

What we learned from that REAL-LIFE EXPERIENCE, Dr. Cannon, among other things, was exactly how easy it is for the Office of the U.S. Attorney and the FBI to waltz in to some JURISDICTION not their own and to then HI-JACK an on-going investigation by responsible authority in that jurisdiction, in this case an investigation by Plante in the Rensselaer County Health District, for the purpose of DERAILING that investigation to protect those who are themselves under investigation for alleged violation of state, NOT FEDERAL, laws …

And so ….

Posted by John Galt on November 25, 2007 4:44 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...#comment-306920

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

What we learned, Dr. Cannon …

From our own OJT course in NEW YORK STATE REALPOLITIK in 1989 …

Was exactly how puny and flimsy and worthless the LAW really is here in NYS ….

Where despite being a HEALTH OFFICER performing a legal duty in Rensselaer County in 1988 ….

The engineer Plante was STRIPPED of the protection of New York State Public Health Law section 12-c, as if the LAW in NYS did not really exist ….

But instead ….

Was nothing but a CHIMERA in the face of RAW POLITICAL POWER such as “BIG JOE” Bruno wields in Rensselaer County …

Thanks in large part to the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York and the FBI ….

And so …

NEW YORK STATE PUBLIC HEALTH LAW ARTICLE I, TITLE 2:

S 12-c. Obstructing health officer in performance of his duty.

A person who wilfully opposes or obstructs a health officer or physician charged with enforcement of the health laws, in performing any legal duty, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Posted by John Galt on November 25, 2007 5:02 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...#comment-306920

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

When the law becomes useless to the common citizens of a state, Dr. Cannon …

Because of a concerted effort by the “state” to not enforce the law as it is written by the state legislative body on behalf of the PEOPLE of that state …

And when the Constitution of a state becomes absolutely worthless to the PEOPLE of a state …

Because the “state” has chosen to ignore it …

Then what good is the “state” to the PEOPLE, Dr. Cannon?

That is what confronted the people of New York back in 1776, Dr. Cannon, when they had their representatives sign the Declaration of Independence …

And here we all are, in our own lifetimes …

CONFRONTED by the exact same questions here in New York State …

And so …

Posted by John Galt on November 25, 2007 5:41 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...#comment-306920

"Have we seen worse of mortgage crisis?"

By JOE BEL BRUNO, Associated Press
Last updated: 1:42 a.m., Saturday, November 24, 2007

NEW YORK -- When Domenico Colombo saw that his monthly mortgage payment was about to balloon by 30 percent, he had a clear picture of how bad it could get.

His payment was scheduled to surge by an extra $1,500 in December.

With his daughter headed to college next fall and tuition to be paid, he feared ending up like so many neighbors in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who defaulted on their mortgages and whose homes are now in foreclosure and sporting "For Sale" signs.

Colombo did manage to renegotiate a new fixed interest rate loan with his bank, and now believes he'll be OK -- but the future is less certain for the rest of us.

In the months ahead, millions of other adjustable-rate mortgages like Colombo's will reset, giving them a higher interest rate as required by the loan agreements and leaving many homeowners unable to make their payments.

Soaring mortgage default rates this year already have shaken major financial institutions and the fallout from more of them, some experts say, could spread from those already battered banks into the general economy.

The worst-case scenario is anyone's guess, but some believe it could become very bad.

"We haven't faced a downturn like this since the Depression," said Bill Gross, chief investment officer of PIMCO, the world's biggest bond fund.

He's not suggesting anything like those terrible times -- but, as an expert on the global credit crisis, he speaks with authority.

"Its effect on consumption, its effect on future lending attitudes, could bring us close to the zero line in terms of economic growth," he said.

"It does keep me up at night."

Some 2 million homeowners hold $600 billion of subprime adjustable-rate mortgage loans, known as ARMs, that are due to reset at higher amounts during the next eight months.

Subprime loans are those made to people with poor credit.

Not all these mortgages are in trouble, but homeowners who default or fall behind on payments could cause an economic shock of a type never seen before.

Some of the nation's leading economic minds lay out a scenario that is frightening.

Not only would the next wave of the mortgage crisis force people out of their homes, it might also spiral throughout the economy.

The already severe housing slump would be exacerbated by even more empty homes on the market, causing prices to plunge by up to 40 percent in once-hot real estate spots such as California, Nevada and Florida.

Builders like Chicago's Neumann Homes, which filed for bankruptcy protection this month, could go under.

The top 10 global banks, which repackage loans into exotic securities such as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, could suffer far greater write-offs than the $75 billion already taken this year.

Massive job losses would curtail consumer spending that makes up two-thirds of the economy.

The Labor Department estimates almost 100,000 financial services jobs related to credit and lending in the U.S. have already been lost, from local bank loan officers to traders dealing in mortgage-backed securities.

Thousands of Americans who work in the housing industry could find themselves on the dole.

And there's no telling how that would affect car dealers, retailers and others dependent on consumer paychecks.

Based on historical models, zero growth in the U.S. gross domestic product would take the current unemployment rate to 6.4 percent.

That would wipe out about 3 million jobs from the economy, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.

By comparison, in the last big downturn between 2001-03 some 2 million jobs were lost, according to the Labor Department.

The dot-com bust early this decade decimated the technology sector, while the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks hurt the transportation and allied industries.

Economists said the country was officially in recession from March to November of 2001, but the aftermath stretched to 2003.

There is increasing evidence that another downturn has begun.

Borrowers who took out loans in the first six months of this year are already falling behind on their payments faster than those who took out loans in 2006, according to a report from Arlington, Va.-based investment bank Friedman, Billings Ramsey.

That's making it even harder for would-be buyers to get new mortgages -- a frightening prospect for home builders with projects going begging on the market, and for homeowners desperate to unload property to avoid defaulting on their loans.

Meanwhile, the number of U.S. homes in foreclosure is expected to keep soaring after more than doubling during the third quarter from a year earlier, to 446,726 homes nationwide, according to Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc.

That's one foreclosure filing for every 196 households in the nation, a 34 percent jump from just three months earlier.

Such data suggests more Americans could lose their homes than ever before, and those in peril are people who never thought they'd welsh on a mortgage payment.

They come from a broad swath -- teachers, pharmacists, and civil servants who were lured by enticing mortgage terms.

Some homebuyers gambled on interest-only loans.

The mortgages, which allowed buyers to pay just interest at a low rate for two years, were too good to pass up.

But with that initial term now expiring, many homeowners find they can't make the payments.

The hopes that went along with those mortgages -- that they'd be able to refinance because the equity in their homes would appreciate -- have been dashed as home prices skidded across the country.

"It's been said a lot of people have been using their homes as ATM machines," said Thomas Lawler, a former official at mortgage lender Fannie Mae who is now a private housing and finance consultant.

"The risk has a lot of tentacles."

This example illustrates the distress many homeowners are in or will find themselves in: A subprime adjustable-rate mortgage on a $400,000 home could have payments of about $2,200 a month, with borrowers paying 6.5 percent, interest only.

When the teaser period expires, that payment becomes $4,000, with the homeowner paying 12 percent and now having to come up with principal as well as interest.

Minneapolis resident Chad Raskovich found himself in a such a situation.

He hoped -- it turned out, in vain -- to gain more equity in his home and that a strong record of payments would enable him to secure a better loan later on.

"It's not just me, it's a lot of people I know."

"The housing market in the Twin Cities has dramatically changed for the worse in the years since I purchased my home."

"Now we're just looking for a solution," he said.

Colombo, who lives in the planned community of Weston just outside Ft. Lauderdale, said the reset on his home would have "destroyed' his financial situation.

He went to Mortgage Repair Center, one of hundreds of debt counselors trying to bail out desperate homeowners, to work with his lender.

"But many people in my neighborhood didn't get help, and some have literally just walked away from their homes," said Colombo.

"There are over 133,000 homes on the market in Broward-Miami-Dade counties, and some of them were actually abandoned."

"People in this situation don't like to talk about it, and end up getting hurt because they don't."

Many Americans are unaware that a borrower defaulting on a loan can have an impact on everyone else's well-being and that of the nation.

After all, the amount of mortgages due to reset is just a fraction of the United States' $14 trillion economy.

But the series of plunges that Wall Street has suffered in past months prove that no one is immune when mortgages turn sour.

Today's financial system is interconnected: Mortgages are sold to investment firms, which then slice them up and package them as securities based on risk.

Then hedge and pension funds buy up such investments.

When home prices kept rising, these were lucrative assets to own.

But the ongoing collapse in housing prices has set off a chain reaction: Lenders are tightening their standards, borrowers are having a harder time refinancing loans and the securities that underpin them are in jeopardy.

This has resulted in more than $500 billion of potentially worthless paper on the balance sheets of the biggest global banks -- losses that could spill into the huge pension and mutual funds that also invest in these securities and that the average worker or investor expects to depend on.

There's more pain left for Wall Street:

"We're nowhere close to the end of the collapse," said Mark Patterson, chairman and co-founder of MatlinPatterson Global Advisors, a hedge fund that specializes in distressed funds.

"I just assumed banks could stomach these kind of losses," said Wendy Talbot, an advertising executive when asked about the subprime crisis outside of a Charles Schwab branch in New York.

"I guess you don't really pay attention to things until your forced to."

"... You put out of your mind the worst things that can happen."

The subprime wreckage could dwarf the nation's last big banking crisis -- the failure of more than 1,000 savings and loans in the 1980s.

The biggest difference is that problems with S&Ls were largely contained, and the government was able to rescue them through a $125 billion bailout.

But this situation is far more widespread, which some experts say makes it more difficult to rein in.

"What really makes this a doomsday scenario is where would you even start with a bailout?" housing consultant Lawler asked.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a key member of Senate finance and banking committees, said borrowers are the ones who need relief.

The playbook to bail out the economy would not be applied to the banks and mortgage originators, but money could be funneled through non-profit organizations to homeowners that need help, he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"There is a worst-case scenario because housing is the linchpin of our economy, and more foreclosures make prices go down, that creates more foreclosures, and creates a vicious cycle," Schumer said.

"You add that to the other weakness in the economy -- on one end is the home sector and the other is the financial sector -- and it could create a real problem."

He also believes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should do more to help the economy.

Bernanke said in recent comments he has no direct plans to bail out the mortgage industry, but to instead offer relief through cheap interest rates and further liquidity injections into the banking system.

There's also been talk of letting government-backed lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages of as much as $1 million from lenders, pay the government a fee for guaranteeing them and then turn them into securities to be sold to investors.

This would extend the government's support, and its exposure, to the mortgage market to help alleviate stress.

Either way, the impact of a fresh round of subprime losses remains of paramount concern to economists -- especially since there's little certainty about how it would ripple through the U.S. economy.

"We all know that more hits from these subprime loans are coming, but are having a devil of a time figuring out how it will happen or how to stop it," said Lawler, who was once chief economist for Fannie Mae.

"We've never been in this situation before."

THE NEW YORK POST

"FBI TWIST IN SPITZ PROBE"

November 26, 2007 -- Gov. Spitzer is being blamed for siccing the FBI on Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno - after earlier accusations that he unleashed the State Police, and tried to unleash the Internal Revenue Service, on him as well.

Sources close to Bruno told The Post that Senate investigators probing the Dirty Tricks Scandal have turned up what one called "strong indications" that Spitzer tapped his powerful law-enforcement connections last year while still attorney general to push the FBI into investigating the Rensselaer County-based Bruno's private consulting business.

"Sure, we think Spitzer was behind it."

"He's been behind every other attempt to destroy Joe, and it's all tied in," said a source familiar with Bruno's thinking.

Bruno, the state's most powerful Republican, hastily called a press conference last December to announce the FBI probe after learning The Post was about to reveal that several Albany-area officials and business leaders had received federal subpoenas.

Bruno denied any wrongdoing and has insisted that consulting fees he received from Albany-area businessman Jared Abbruzzese were unrelated to state funds he steered to one of Abbruzzese's businesses.

The Post revealed in July that the Spitzer administration had used the State Police in a plot to gather damaging evidence about Bruno's use of a state aircraft.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, in a July 23 report, confirmed The Post's findings and concluded Bruno had done nothing wrong.

While Spitzer apologized for the anti-Bruno effort and claimed his staff acted without authorization, The Post then disclosed a second plot by the governor to get the IRS to investigate Bruno.

Spitzer spokeswoman Christine Anderson said any claim that the governor was linked to the FBI probe of Bruno "is untrue, and couldn't be more ridiculous."

Meanwhile, the Senate GOP is refusing to schedule meetings with lobbyists from Patricia Lynch and Associates (PLA), the firm that hired former Spitzer Communications Director Darren Dopp, a key figure in the Dirty Tricks Scandal, last October, legislative sources say.

The Senate GOP had made clear their unhappiness with Lynch, a former top aide to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), just days after Dopp's hiring was announced.

But it was not until now that the blacklisting of lobbyists from the firm became known.

"The senate will meet with PLA clients but won't meet with the lobbyists."

"The firm has been 'iced,' " one source said.

fredric.dicker@nypost.com

http://www.nypost.com/seven/11262007/news/...robe_809445.htm

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

I just read the November 26, 2007 NY POST story “FBI TWIST IN SPITZ PROBE” by Fred Dicker …

And personally, I think the whole thing is nothing but a BUNCH OF HOO-HAH, right on across the board …

First off, no one in Rensselaer County that I know really believes that Joe Bruno is being seriously investigated by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York …

And the FOUNDATION for that belief stems directly from a 3/30/89 MEMORANDUM to the FBI SAC, Albany, United States Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation File No. 194B-251 …

Which file available through Freedom of Information is entitled “ALLEGATIONS OF CORRUPTION IN RENSSELAER COUNTY GOVERNMENT RELATING TO LAND DEVELOPMENT; RENSSELAER COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; PAUL R. PLANTE - DIRECTOR, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH DIVISION, RENSSELAER COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; CORRUPTION OF STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC OFFICIALS - LOCAL LEVEL …

The particular paragraph in that 3/30/89 MEMORANDUM which serves to cause this present-day DISBELIEF in Rensselaer County concerning Joe Bruno and the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York reads as follows:

[REDACTED] has been actively following the PAUL PLANTE disciplinary hearing [REDACTED] is of the opinion that there is a lot of “smoke” regarding the Rensselaer County Health Department and Rensselaer County developers; however, she has no evidence that developers are making any kind of cash payments to Health Department or other county officials in return for favorable treatment of their developments.

On the contrary [REDACTED] is of the opinion that the Rensselaer County Health Department is very lax in their enforcement of state and county health regulations as those regulations apply to realty subdivisions because the Rensselaer County Health Department is unprofessional, and they seem to have a very relaxed “live and let live” attitude towards development and developers.

end quotes

With those words, “she” (believed to be Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Cottrell) closed down an investigation in Rensselaer County by the F.B.I. that had gathered evidence that Joe Bruno was in alleged wilfull violation of the NYS Public Health Law, a misdemeanor in the State of New York, in connection with Joe Bruno’s Windfield Subdivision in his hometown of Brunswick, N.Y. …

I myself saw the FBI Special Agent who was ordered out of Rensselaer County by the US Attorney back then, after the investigation had been closed, down in front of the Federal Building on Broadway in Albany, and he told me to my face that we had “POWERFUL ENEMIES” in Rensselaer County who could get the FBI ordered off a case like that …

And so …

That FBI FILE is and has been a public record here in Rensselaer County for years, now, and I don’t know of anyone around here who doesn’t know about it, or have a copy, since it is widely disseminated out here in the countryside now …

Certainly, Eliot Spitzer knows of and had a copy of this same file, as did Joe Bruno, himself …

And Joe’s lawyers, of course …

And it is clear from reading that file, and knowing the facts and the outcome, that in 1989, the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York gave Joe Bruno a “DO NOT HAVE TO TROUBLE YOURSELF ABOUT EVER GOING TO A FEDERAL PRISON IN THE FIRST PLACE” CARD …

And everybody knows that …

Everybody knows that the FBI was here …

Everybody knows that the FBI was run off …

Soooooo ……

What’s changed since then?

Nothing so far as we know ….

And so …

Posted by John Galt on November 26, 2007 6:02 PM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...#comment-307127

"Former cop's arsenal seized - Weapons, ammo taken from former Albany assistant police chief's home after his death in 2004, but agencies involved failed to document removal"

By BRENDAN J. LYONS, Senior writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, November 25, 2007

WATERVLIET -- An arsenal of weapons, including assault rifles and artillery shells, was secretly seized three years ago from the home of a deceased former Albany police official who had helped dozens of officers illegally purchase machine guns in the mid-1990s.

The Albany Police Department, State Police and the Albany County Sheriff's Department may have played a role in the undocumented removal of weapons from the home of William M. Murray, 64, a beloved assistant chief and avid gun collector who died January 2004, six years after his retirement.

None of the police agencies kept records showing they were at the home or took part in removing weapons.

Police in Watervliet, where Murray lived for decades, said they have no records of the incident.

The department was not notified, and precautions such as evacuating the neighborhood were not taken when a sheriff's inspector was sent to Murray's home by Albany police in July 2004 to remove three military-style artillery shells, including one that was live.

The activities at Murray's home are surfacing now as Albany police and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recently interviewed Murray's neighbors as part of an effort to learn more about the machine guns purchased by Albany officers and others.

Chief James W. Tuffey confirmed recently that at least nine of the machine guns are missing, and he's now leading an investigation to recover them as a result of a Times Union inquiry.

It is a felony under state and federal laws for an individual to possess such a gun, which are still registered to the department.

They cannot be sold or removed from the department without authorization from the Justice Department.

One of the machine guns was seized from Murray's residence by a police official before Murray's death.

But Murray, who had arranged for the purchase of dozens of military assault rifles for police officers, also had other weapons that are restricted under federal laws.

Tuffey and two ATF agents recovered two such guns a few weeks ago from neighbors of Murray's who said they contacted authorities after reading a Times Union report about the machine guns.

The couple said several years ago they found two short-barreled shotguns in Murray's cluttered basement after being enlisted by the family to clean out the debris following his death.

The guns had "Albany Police Department" etched on the trigger guards, the couple said.

The guns have short barrels and pistol-type stocks and must be registered with the ATF's National Firearms Act branch.

Otherwise they cannot legally be possessed by an individual, including a retired police officer.

Other shotguns tied to the department have been recovered in the fallout from the machine gun investigation.

In early 2003, ATF agents used a search warrant to seize two short-barreled shotguns, both registered to the force, from a Colonie gun store that at the time was under criminal investigation for several violations, records show.

The gun store where the shotguns were recovered -- B&J Guns -- was where ATF agents found one of the Albany machine guns illegally listed for sale a month earlier in December 2002.

That discovery triggered an intensive but secret effort by Albany police to track down their missing machine guns.

During the process, two law enforcement sources said, the department learned there were other weapons missing from their armory.

Top city officials, including members of the Common Council's Public Safety Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Police Department, said they learned about the scandal in an August Times Union story.

U.S. Attorney Glenn T. Suddaby said his office never received a formal referral for prosecution from the ATF related to the police officers' purchase of the machine guns and no one has ever been prosecuted in the case.

One of the guns also was purchased by an Albany County assistant district attorney, who has since returned the gun.

Officials for Albany police, the sheriff's department and State Police have downplayed their roles and given conflicting accounts about what went on at Murray's home.

One of the only public accounts of the removal of the weapons is a cryptic entry in a Surrogate's Court document filed as part of a claim brought by Murray's sister, Dolores Burke, who contends her brother's home was practically looted after his death.

"Upon his death, an unknown quantity of the firearms came under the care and control of proper law enforcement personnel," the document states, without elaborating.

Most of the other weapons, including dozens of handguns and more than 180 rifles, were taken from the home by two local gun dealers, including Brian Olesen III, who ran the shop where the Albany machine gun was found listed for sale.

The gun dealers have since paid Murray's estate more than $30,000 to settle claims brought by Burke, records show.

"I was robbed," Burke said.

"Things were done without my knowledge and they all knew what they were doing and I didn't."

"... I don't feel that anything should have been taken from this house unless it was written down."

Burke does not fault Olesen or police but said she's uncertain what weapons law enforcement and another gun dealer, John Nelson Jr., removed from the residence.

She recalled that prior to her brother's death he was visited by an Albany assistant police chief, Anthony Bruno, who removed an assault rifle that day.

Tuffey confirmed last week Bruno had retrieved one of the missing machine guns from Murray's house.

More than 50 of the machine guns were purchased from a Vermont gun dealer, but Tuffey said the department's records don't specify who obtained them.

They were able to purchase the restricted guns by registering them to the department and falsely claiming they were for official use only.

An Albany judge also was rumored to have purchased one of the machine guns but has denied receiving one.

Tuffey said there are no records indicating the department was involved in the removal of other weapons from Murray's residence.

"I don't have anything that says we had anything to do with that," Tuffey said.

"We would have them in our custody with a property report which would then show that we had had them."

However, there are indications certain records related to the purchase of the machine guns -- and the effort to recover them -- were destroyed or discarded by the department.

For instance, Tuffey has recently said he asked the ATF to provide copies of its records about the department's purchase of the machine guns.

But those same records were turned over to the department in late 2002, according to a city police source.

Last month, the Times Union was shown a copy of a letter written four years ago to the ATF by former Albany police Chief Robert Wolfgang stating the department had lost 12 machine guns.

The letter was once in the department's files but Tuffey said he'd never seen it.

It's also clear the Albany force was involved in more than removing a single machine gun from Murray's house.

John Curry, a part-time sheriff's department inspector, said he went to Murray's home in July 2004 -- six months after Murray's death -- at the request of Wolfgang.

Curry said he was asked to remove three large artillery shells, including a live one, from the basement.

Curry said he went alone and never documented the incident or notified Watervliet police.

Curry said that's not unusual because he doesn't believe it was necessary to evacuate surrounding homes in the densely populated neighborhood or to have firefighters on hand in case of a mishap.

"He asked me to remove something and I removed it," Curry said of Wolfgang.

Sources familiar with the incident claim Curry had assistance that day from the State Police bomb squad, which Curry denies.

In early September, two State Police officials said they had no records showing they were ever at Murray's residence.

Last Tuesday, a State Police spokesman at the agency's Albany headquarters cited "tracking records" as he said a captain confirmed a member of the bomb squad had responded to Murray's residence at least once in 2004 to assist in the removal of weapons.

On Wednesday, after speaking with members of the bomb squad, where Curry worked before joining the sheriff's department, the spokesman recanted and said they can't confirm they were ever there.

"The one record we would have to show if we were there is no longer accessible," Sgt. Kern Swoboda said.

Meanwhile, a court fight has erupted over the hundreds of weapons and thousands of bullets contained in Murray's collection, which included some guns that may have been worth thousands of dollars each.

Burke, who now lives in the home her brother left her, said she believes she was victimized by Nelson, whom Murray listed in his will as someone who could "assist" the family in selling his arsenal after his death.

Nelson could not be reached for comment.

He did not respond to a request for comment left with his father, who said he would relay the message to his son.

Burke, two neighbors and a police source said Nelson allegedly went into the home during the week of Murray's funeral and carted away dozens of guns.

The home was ransacked in the process as a safe was broken open, mattresses were turned upside-down and some of the gun racks were destroyed, said the neighbors, who asked not to be identified.

Murray wrote in his will that his guns and ammunition should be sold and the proceeds used to care for his sister, Dolores, and their brother, John.

"I was really so devastated over my brother's death that I should have been paying more attention."

"But I couldn't when I didn't really know anything about guns or prices and he did," Burke said.

"I think that I trusted all these people because I knew they were friends."

"... Anything that Billy had he bought and paid for with his own money."

"That was his life."

"I just wish people would remember the good things he's done in his career as a policeman."

Brendan J. Lyons can be reached at 454-5547 or by e-mail at blyons@timesunion.com.

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS DAILY POLITICS BLOG:

Posted by c p retiree: I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the Bruno FBI investigation spill out soon.

In fact, senior FBI personnel have been relocated upstate for this express purpose.

I think "Uncle Joe" is as dirty as the day is long.

JOHN GALT RESPONDS: An interesting post, c p retiree ...

Especially the part about senior FBI personnel allegedly being relocated to upstate NY ....

Nobody in Rensselaer County believes that anything is going to happen, however ...

Because we have prior experience with the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York, which controls the FBI ....

And we have experience with the FBI in the Northern District of NY ...

And we have considerable experience with Joe Bruno ....

And in 1988, we had hard evidence that Joe Bruno was involved in violations of law here in NYS that constituted misdemeanors ...

At a time when felonies were being also committed involving the Rensselaer County Department of Health and hinky or totally bogus approvals of land in Rensselaer County and NYS for residential purposes when the land did not meet the appropriate codes ...

And the Office of the US Attorney for the Northern District of NY helped Joe Bruno to get that all covered back over again ...

Undaunted, we began all over again after the bulk of our evidence was destroyed by Rensselaer County in 1989 ...

And by 2001, we once again had evidence to proceed on, starting with a graphic videotape of an assault on our expert witness by a young POLITICALLY-CONNECTED GOON here in Rensselaer County who can be heard bragging on the videotape after the assault of how he was a protected person here in Rensselaer County ....

And this time, in August of 2001, the Office of the US Attorney assisted Joe Bruno and Eliot Spitzer, who was one of Joe Bruno's CHIEF PROTECTORS back then, in having our expert witness destroyed after the assault by CONCOCTING a bogus story based upon fraudulent papers filed with the VA Police in Albany and the Office of the US Attorney for the Northern District of NY in Albany that our expert witness was an alleged dangerous mental patient ...

AND THE GOON WHO ASSAULTED HIM WENT FREE ...

Soooo ....

Hhhhhhmmmmm ...

I guess from Clifton Park, this situation appears to you quite a bit different than it does to us down here in Rensselaer County ...

And we think that it is we who are the realists here ....

Which would make you the dreamer, c p retiree ...

Or the hopeful one, anyway ...

And so ....

Posted by John Galt on November 27, 2007 7:09 AM

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypoli...d-ends-136.html

"Deja vu: Home sales down, median price steady"

November 27, 2007 at 10:33 am by Chris Churchill, Albany, New York Times Union

The pace of new and existing home sales in the Capital Region continues to be down, even as the median sale price has not slipped.

Numbers released today by the Greater Capital Association of Realtors Inc. say closed home sales among its members in October were down 10 percent, compared to the same month last year.

The median sale price, though, held: climbing from $187,750 to $190,825 when compared year to year.

Those numbers are for the broad, 11-county region covered by the Colonie-based association.

More locally, closed sales in October in Albany County were down 5 percent, while the median sale price dropped 1 percent to $195,000.

In Rensselaer County, closed sales were down 13 percent, while the median sale price, at $180,500, was almost exactly the same.

Closed sales were down 9 percent in Saratoga County, where the median sale price held steady at $260,000.

And in Schenectady County, the pace of sales was down 20 percent, but the median price reported increased 11 percent to $179,483.

Alluding to the poor housing market in much of the nation, James Ader, GCAR chief executive, said in a written statement that the region “has weathered the adjustment to a market favoring buyers much better than many parts of the country.”

“And as the Capital Region becomes more and more a Tech Valley,” he added, “we should begin to see a return to a more active and exciting housing market.”

For the first 10 months of the year, closed sales among members of the association were down 8 percent, compared to 2006.

The median sale price increased 2 percent, to $192,000.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

"After a Rough Start, Spitzer Rethinks His Ways"

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Published: November 27, 2007

On a Tuesday morning early this month, Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his closest aides gathered at his country estate in Columbia County, N.Y., to review the administration’s first year.

Hours passed before someone asked the question on everyone’s mind: Should Mr. Spitzer drop his plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants?

On the outside, the answer was clear: the public overwhelmingly disliked the idea, Republicans were rallying against it and legal challenges were on the way.

But around the dining table, looking out over the rolling farmland, few wanted to back off.

They had come to Albany to fight for their ideas, several said.

Mr. Spitzer, especially, did not want to budge.

The governor, who swept into office quoting Theodore Roosevelt and promising bold action, believed he could convince people that he was right.

“At that moment I thought, ‘This is a matter where we are right on the substance, and I don’t want to sacrifice that,’” the governor said in an interview last week.

But in the end, Mr. Spitzer’s determined push sent his poll numbers to their nadir, angered his allies, and even became a point of contention in the Democratic presidential campaign.

Coming after a summer of scandal and other stumbles, the long and ultimately futile battle over driver’s licenses has left many people pondering the same simple question: Does Eliot Spitzer have the judgment to succeed as governor?

“I’m not naturally suited to this job, perhaps,” Mr. Spitzer said in the interview.

“But maybe, at this point in time, we need someone who is not naturally suited to it to get done the transformative things that the public wants done.”

Reflecting on his first year, the governor said — not for the first time — that he knew he needed to temper his zeal with diplomacy.

He even consulted recently with former President Bill Clinton, whose own first year in office was plagued by problems.

Mr. Spitzer also said the driver’s license debate had overshadowed his real accomplishments, victories that he predicted would fundamentally change Albany in the years to come.

He led the Legislature in overhauling the state’s much-criticized workers’ compensation program; he negotiated a new formula for school aid; he persuaded lawmakers to revamp the budget process to make it more transparent and efficient.

“At the policy level, despite all the Sturm und Drang, things are happening in Albany,” said Robert B. Ward, deputy director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a nonpartisan research group in Albany.

But others said the most striking change was how Mr. Spitzer — so popular a year ago that he rolled up the biggest victory margin of any New York candidate for governor, and so ascendant that some considered him a potential first Jewish president — came to face rumblings about whether he would last longer than one term.

“He’s had the toughest first year since I’ve been following governors,” said William Cunningham, a former aide to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who also worked for Governors Mario M. Cuomo and Hugh L. Carey.

In interviews with a dozen top aides and advisers to the governor, and with more than two dozen lawmakers, former elected officials, labor leaders and political experts, many seemed almost bewildered by how swiftly his fortunes have declined.

Nearly all of the advisers now concede that they deeply misjudged how the driver’s license proposal would fare, though few believed that it would permanently hobble Mr. Spitzer and fewer still blamed the governor himself.

Those outside the executive chamber, however, mostly echoed Mr. Cunningham.

Some of Mr. Spitzer’s toughest critics questioned whether he could rehabilitate himself.

More troubling than his blunders, they said, is a suspicion that he does not learn from them.

“With Spitzer, it seems like he’s walked into buzz saws of his own devising,” said Richard Norton Smith, a biographer of former Gov. Thomas E. Dewey who is now at work on a book about Nelson Rockefeller.

“He spent capital, but it’s hard to say how it leads to some payoff, unless he’s been humbled and educated by his first year.”

Lessons Learned

Mr. Spitzer said he had, in fact, been hitting the books.

While he has previously delved into biographies of governors like Roosevelt, Charles Hughes and Al Smith, all of whom battled the Legislature to bring about change, he said he was now pondering the lessons of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who matched brute will to a subtle mastery of the legislative process.

“There’s an art there that I would like to be more successful at,” Mr. Spitzer said.

“Life is a learning process, and a little more Lyndon Johnson would not hurt.”

Mr. Spitzer has reached out in recent weeks to politicians better known than he is for their bedside manner.

Several aides said he had begun relying more on his lieutenant governor, David A. Paterson, a well-liked former state senator, and he hired as an adviser the lobbyist Bruce N. Gyory, an easygoing Albany hand who is friendly with both Republicans and Democrats.

Still, for all of Mr. Spitzer’s growing pains, many of his advisers remained convinced that his stubbornness was what people outside of Albany like most about him.

Some aides likened him to Ronald Reagan and Rudolph W. Giuliani: no-nonsense politicians who spoke bluntly and overturned entrenched political orders.

“I think people really did, and do, respect that he fights for what he believes in, that he’s tough,” said Richard Baum, Mr. Spitzer’s top aide since his days as attorney general.

“I still think that works for him.”

More than most politicians, Mr. Spitzer is a believer in the power of argument to clarify political debates and to move public opinion.

He often reminds people that when he was attorney general, business executives and financial pundits complained that his swagger and threats would rattle the markets and hurt investors.

But eventually, his advisers said, those fears went unrealized, and public acclaim followed.

It was a formative experience that has shaped Mr. Spitzer’s strategy as governor.

And by the time he won election last year, conventional wisdom held that his passion and drive were just what Albany needed.

But some now question whether the attorney general’s office was an adequate proving ground for the Executive Mansion, and whether Mr. Spitzer’s political skills developed fully.

Mr. Spitzer, they point out, never faced a significant election fight after he first won office in 1998.

“Attorney generals generally don’t get dislodged,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“You become almost untouchable."

"It skews the way you view things.”

Early Impressions

Some people who met with him in his earliest days as governor said that Mr. Spitzer was still carrying himself then like the sheriff of Wall Street.

One official involved in the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan recalled a meeting in late January to break an impasse over the demolition of the Deutsche Bank building at ground zero.

Insurance and construction executives were gathered at Gracie Mansion when the mayor and the governor walked in.

Mr. Spitzer thanked the executives for coming and then delivered a trademark ultimatum.

“I just want to say you’re here to work it out,” the official recalled the governor as saying.

“Not working it out is not acceptable to anyone."

"It’s not acceptable to me."

"It’s not acceptable to the mayor."

"So work it out.”

As the official put it, “It was like, ‘Or I’m going to bring down the full weight and power of the state government upon you.’”

When he arrived in Albany, Mr. Spitzer faced not bureaucrats or anxious chief executives, but other politicians, with their own agendas and constituencies.

Some veteran lawmakers found him and his staff to be arrogant.

He issued significant policy decisions without consulting allies, and he often seemed impatient with the ceremonial aspects of politics that can have huge meaning for lawmakers.

In May, for example, the governor signed Jonathan’s Law, a bill tightening parental notification requirements for state agencies and institutions after the death of Jonathan Carey, an autistic teenager, while in state care.

But his staff apparently did not invite the assemblyman who represented the boy’s family, an omission that rankled Democrats.

More significantly, Mr. Spitzer was also slow to recognize that the Legislature was far less vulnerable than his past adversaries.

Almost immediately after winning election, Mr. Spitzer picked a fight that he and his aides believed would demonstrate his seriousness about changing Albany.

When Assembly Democrats chose one of their own for the state comptroller’s post — breaking an agreement with Mr. Spitzer to select from among candidates recommended by a screening panel — the governor traveled to the districts of two relatively unknown Democratic lawmakers to single them out for their votes.

Legislative Confrontations

The governor’s aides saw the confrontation as fortifying, but Democratic lawmakers were incredulous.

It poisoned the waters, they said, between the governor and his natural allies.

“The wounds have not healed from that,” said Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, a Harlem Democrat.

Mr. Spitzer said he had tried to adapt to dealing with the Legislature.

Still, he said: “If you’re trying to change a culture, there’s going to be opposition."

"The balance becomes, how do you work with the people you have to work with to get the change.”

Yet Mr. Spitzer has sought not only a cultural change in Albany, but also a change in the political balance of power, which created other complications.

Even as he sought legislative common ground with Senate Republicans, he talked of his desire to put Democrats in control of the chamber.

Breaking the nonaggression pact that had ruled Albany for decades, under which governors of both parties accepted Republican control of the Senate and Democratic control of the Assembly, Mr. Spitzer lured a Senate Republican into his cabinet, then campaigned successfully for a Democrat to replace him in a special election.

That victory cheered Mr. Spitzer’s party and seemed a demonstration of his strength.

But it also put Republicans on notice that their majority was in peril, leaving them little incentive to work with him.

Dozens of his nominees to state posts were bottled up.

Deals that seemed tantalizingly within reach, such as campaign finance reform, evaporated in acrimony.

Republicans who were nervous about Mr. Spitzer’s threat were also eager to throw him on the defensive, and blunders by the governor and his aides made that task easier than it might have been.

Some blame those mistakes on what they call a win-at-all-costs mentality that Mr. Spitzer has inculcated in his staff.

Last spring, two senior Spitzer aides asked the State Police to assemble travel records that would show that Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, had used state aircraft to attend political fund-raisers.

The move was redolent of his hardball tactics as attorney general, though Mr. Spitzer has denied direct involvement in the effort.

When it was discovered, Senate Republicans demanded an investigation by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, who concluded that the governor’s aides had acted improperly.

Mr. Cuomo’s report led to additional investigations by prosecutors and ethics authorities.

And Democrats sat on their hands.

“If it were a different governor, he might have had the troops rallying around him because he had the relationships,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a prominent Brooklyn Democrat.

Only then, it seemed, did Mr. Spitzer take pause.

In August, he traveled to the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

In a lofty speech sprinkled with references to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Mr. Spitzer promised a new humility and acknowledged that his administration had “allowed our passion to get the best of us.”

New Battles

It was, apparently, a hard habit to break.

Within weeks, his staff was secretly working with Senate Democrats to draft a letter to the Internal Revenue Service urging an investigation of whether Mr. Bruno owed income taxes on some of the state aircraft flights.

In October, a copy of the letter leaked, a major embarrassment that cemented the administration’s reputation for political clumsiness.

But by then, Mr. Spitzer had already begun his next battle: Giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

No fight would better capture Mr. Spitzer’s stubborn belief in his powers of argument, nor better illustrate their limits.

From the start, Mr. Spitzer and his aides viewed the license proposal as a serious but relatively minor one.

People would respond to the benefits, they believed, of allowing illegal immigrants to obtain car insurance, which would bring down rates for other drivers.

Yet when public and political sentiment turned against the idea, Mr. Spitzer reverted to type, digging in his heels and attacking even potential allies.

When Mr. Bloomberg gently criticized the idea, Mr. Spitzer erupted, telling reporters that the mayor was “factually wrong, legally wrong, morally wrong, ethically wrong.”

In meetings with his staff, Mr. Spitzer rebuffed suggestions that he soft-pedal the issue or deploy surrogates to make his case.

“He knew the lay of the land on it; he just wasn’t willing to bend — it’s just not him,” Mr. Baum said.

“He believed it was the right thing to do and that people would respect him for it.”

The best response was an argument on the merits, Mr. Spitzer told his staff, and he was the best person to make the argument.

A few days later, in a speech at Fordham University, Mr. Spitzer stood alone on a podium and lit into critics with a righteous anger.

“The politics of fear and selfishness,” he said, “has replaced the politics of mutual responsibility.”

Instead of bringing Mr. Spitzer new respect, the speech produced fresh anger, not only from his usual critics, but also from a broad swath of the public, who resented Mr. Spitzer’s implication that his opponents were motivated largely by bigotry.

The administration had acted once again on the assumption that fighting harder would swing the political currents, and it was wrong.

“It’s like boxing, when they teach you to jab-jab-jab,” Mr. Paterson said.

“And then someone hits them really hard, and they go right back to brawling."

"It’s a natural reaction.”

Within a few days of the Columbia County retreat, even lawmakers who had supported the original driver’s license plan concluded it was dead.

In a conference call the following Saturday, most of Mr. Spitzer’s advisers expressed the same opinion.

The furor over the licenses, they said, threatened to cripple his agenda.

Mr. Spitzer found himself almost alone in wanting to fight on — against his advice of his staff, most of the state’s elected officials, and public sentiment.

Even now, Mr. Spitzer says, he believes that his idea was a good one.

The governor had run into an argument he could not win.

By all accounts, it was a shattering experience for Mr. Spitzer.

The question is whether it will be, as the governor himself might say, a transformative one.

“Straight talk is perhaps something that comes too naturally to me,” Mr. Spitzer said.

“There are times that it’s a good, and there are times when I wish I hadn’t said some of the things that I’ve said."

"The reality is you need to talk straight — and the public respects that — without making it impossible to get deals done.”

Reporting was contributed by Steven Greenhouse, Danny Hakim, Raymond Hernandez, William Neuman and Sam Roberts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/nyregion...mp;ref=nyregion

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Eliot, try reading your own lips"

Tuesday, November 27th 2007, 4:00 AM

As he girds for battle over next year's state budget, Gov. Spitzer should dig out his old campaign commercials for inspiration.

Especially relevant is the spot where he laid out his "day one" to-do list, vowing to boost everything from the middle-class standard of living to high school graduation rates.

It ended with the boldest, most important promise of all:

"There's one thing we're not going to raise - your taxes," Spitzer said.

"You can take that to the bank."

Keeping his word will not be easy in the months ahead.

Closing a projected $4.3 billion gap in the next fiscal year without hiking taxes means Spitzer will have to slash spending in ways that are sure to push his sagging poll numbers even lower.

He will also have to cross swords with the wealthy interest groups that have the run of the Capitol - not to mention face down 212 members of the Legislature counting on a spending binge to grease their path to reelection next fall.

Unfortunately, there are already signs that the scandal-damaged Democrat is ready to wave the white flag.

For one thing, his budget office is already talking about letting spending soar at almost twice the rate of inflation.

Mind you, this is before a single day of hard bargaining with the Assembly or Senate.

Instead of the Consumer Price Index - which is the standard Albany has used (and violated) for generations - Spitzer is using personal income growth as his budgeting benchmark.

By that logic, the governor could get away with spending hikes of up to 5.3%, when inflation is about 3%, and still call himself fiscally responsible.

Even if that were true, it's a mistake to show his hand this early.

Albany budget negotiations are always a dickering process.

The governor starts low, the Legislature starts high and they eventually meet in the middle.

"If you propose a spending increase of 5%, what you'll wind up with is a spending increase of 7%, if not 8%," warns E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for New York State Policy.

Also troubling is the continuing talk of "closing loopholes" in the tax code.

One example of that thinking popped out of Spitzer's tax department last month, when it quietly ordered Amazon.com and other out-of-state Internet retailers to start collecting sales taxes.

Spitzer thankfully scratched the idea, declaring that the holiday shopping season "is not the right time to be increasing sales taxes on New Yorkers."

But you can bet Spitzer's budget team is scouring the tax code for other stealth hikes it can impose without inviting political blowback.

The defenders of this approach will call it "reform."

But real reform would be revenue-neutral.

Closing a loophole without simultaneously cutting the overall rate is a tax increase by another name - and a violation of the spirit of Spitzer's campaign promise.

Spitzer isn't the only one in Albany shaking the trees for more Benjamins.

On a capital radio show yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno rejected out of hand the idea of modestly trimming the state workforce - through attrition, not layoffs - as a way of balancing the budget books.

"I don't think that's the way to go," said Bruno, whose members are angling for endorsements from public employee unions.

"We have to look at revenue."

He said he will bring a list of $5billion in "available resources" to the budget table - mostly one-time sources of cash, but also various taxes that the state is theoretically owed but now go uncollected.

That spend-every-last-dollar-you-can-find approach practically guarantees tax hikes - if not this year, then down the road when the bill comes due.

The buck stops with the governor.

Failing to control spending and prevent tax hikes would destroy what's left of his credibility and push New York's teetering economy toward a job-killing downturn.

That would set Spitzer up to be the first one-term governor since the 1950s.

You can take that to the bank.

whammond@nydailynews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/1...ips.html?page=0

THE NEW YORK SUN

"Questions Surround Probe of Ex-Spitzer Aide"

By JACOB GERSHMAN, Staff Reporter of the Sun

November 27, 2007

The decision by state ethics officials to ask the district attorney of Albany County, David Soares, to investigate perjury allegations against a former top aide to Governor Spitzer is coming under increasing scrutiny in Albany political circles.

Under speculation is whether the perjury referral made by the Commission on Public Integrity was influenced by a motive to protect Mr. Spitzer.

The commission is conducting a probe into allegations that the governor's office may have committed ethical violations by involving the state police in an alleged attempt to discredit the Republican Senate leader, Joseph Bruno.

Some Republicans and legal experts are wondering if the commission's request that Mr. Soares examine alleged inconsistencies in sworn statements by the governor's former communications director, Darren Dopp, was an attempt to bury potentially damaging information contained in the aide's testimony to the ethics body.

If the commission finds fault with the Spitzer administration, it is obligated to make public a notice of reasonable cause.

It has a fair amount of flexibility in determining whether to release testimony it collects in the course of an investigation that turns up wrongdoing.

When it completes its probe, the commission will likely face pressure from Senate Republicans to make public the testimony of Mr. Dopp and other administration officials.

For Republicans, a critical issue is whether the testimony contradicts Mr. Spitzer's public assertions that he had no knowledge of the special measures taken by the police to gather Mr. Bruno's travel records.

While witnesses who receive subpoenas from prosecutors are not under the same secrecy obligations imposed on the grand jury processes, the commission could cite the confidentiality of grand jury proceedings as a justification for concealing Mr. Dopp's testimony.

A similar tactic is frequently employed by defense attorneys who try to protect their clients by encouraging prosecutors to subpoena damaging documents as a way to shield them from the public eye.

At times, "people who hand things over to the district attorney's office in response to a grand jury subpoena will cite the secrecy of the grand jury processes that don't necessarily bind them," a former state prosecutor in Manhattan, Thomas Curran, who is now with Ganfer & Shore LLP, said.

A spokesman for the commission denied that political motive was involved in the referral.

The district attorney's office has opened an inquiry into allegations that Mr. Dopp's sworn testimony before the commission didn't match the content of a sworn statement he made earlier to the attorney general's office, which conducted its own probe of the administration and found no illegal wrongdoing.

Sources say Mr. Soares, who may have empanelled a grand jury in the matter, is, in part, focusing on a portion of a two-paragraph July 22 statement by Mr. Dopp in which he said:

"I now recognize that any request for State Police records relating to those travels should have been handled through other channels, and I regret any appearance of impropriety that was created by the manner in which this information was sought and obtained."

Mr. Dopp is alleged to have contradicted that statement by later telling ethics officials that he didn't see anything improper with the way in which he gathered the records and released them to the press, sources said.

Mr. Dopp resigned as the governor's communications director following a July report by the attorney general's office that suggested Mr. Dopp misled reporters about his alleged attempt to gather records from the state police concerning Mr. Bruno's use of police escorts during fund-raising trips to New York City.

He now works at a lobbying firm in Albany.

The district attorney's office of Albany subsequently conducted a criminal probe and concluded that the administration had not violated any laws.

Administration officials declined to say if Mr. Spitzer has testified before the commission.

http://www.nysun.com/article/67017?page_no=1

THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Spitzer, Hat in Hand, Asks Fellow Democrats in the Assembly for a Second Chance"

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Published: November 28, 2007

At first, Gov. Eliot Spitzer told a packed room of Assembly Democrats yesterday, his wife didn’t like him much either.

After meeting his bride-to-be, the Southern-bred Silda Wall, at Harvard Law School in the 1980s, he asked her out, and she said no.

But he was persistent, Mr. Spitzer said, and she finally agreed.

Now, they are happily married.

All he wants from the Assembly members, whose affections for him have largely evaporated in the last 11 months, is a similar sort of second chance, Mr. Spitzer told the group.

“That set the tone for the whole meeting,” said Assemblyman Rory Lancman, a Queens Democrat, who attended the closed-door meeting with the governor at the Marriott Hotel in Downtown Brooklyn.

“People didn’t feel the need to stand up and harangue him for being a bad partner.”

It was an atypically self-deprecating appearance for Mr. Spitzer, who faces a difficult legislative season in the months ahead and is doing his best to woo lawmakers in advance.

Although he has in the past seemed to treat the Legislature as a kind of political doormat, Mr. Spitzer stuck a figurative flower in his lapel yesterday and laid on the charm, even granting his fellow Democrats equal billing on some of the signal accomplishments of his first term, including the new state school aid.

“What I said was that it’s like a family, where we have a common worldview, deep affection for one another, and sometimes we squabble,” Mr. Spitzer told reporters after the meeting.

“It’s not just a metaphor that I’m using because it’s cheap and easy,” he quickly added.

The Assembly Democrats were gathered for their annual retreat, and at times the conversations seemed better suited to the back-and-forth on “Dr. Phil” than the rough-and-tumble of New York politics.

As with any relationship talk, there appeared to be much discussion about communicating better.

“He’s been in closer touch the last few weeks and months,” said Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker.

“I think he’s turned that corner.”

But many Assembly members, the speaker conceded, still worried that Mr. Spitzer had commitment issues.

“Actions,” Mr. Silver said, “obviously speak louder than words.”

Yesterday’s meeting was not, some noted, Mr. Spitzer’s first effort at rebuilding bridges he had burned in Albany, nor the first time he had promised to be more humble and to do a better job of a reaching out.

But some of those who have turned on Mr. Spitzer in recent weeks said that the meeting might thaw the chill that has reigned, on and off, between the governor and his fellow Democrats for the last few months.

“He acknowledged that he could do better,” said Keith L. T. Wright, a Harlem Democrat.

“And I think the first step toward success is acknowledging some of the mistakes that you’ve made.”

Mr. Spitzer “has the potential to be a very creative man,” said Aileen M. Gunther, an Assemblywoman from Sullivan County.

“If he works with all the creative people in the Legislature, I think there’s a lot of great possibilities for a turnaround.”

For 45 surprisingly peaceable minutes, lawmakers said, they peppered Mr. Spitzer with questions about how he planned to balance the state budget, what he would do about New York City’s shortage of subsidized housing, and whether he might think about raising taxes to bring in more revenue.

Mr. Spitzer sidestepped the question about taxes, according to people in the room.

But he was more vocal about spending — specifically, his willingness to help raise lawmakers’ pay, which bottoms out at $79,500 a year.

Mr. Spitzer, they said, reiterated his belief that legislators, state judges and department commissioners all deserved raises.

(He was coy, though, about what concessions he, like past governors, might expect in return.)

“He treated us with the respect the Legislature deserves,” said Assemblyman Mark Weprin, a Queens Democrat.

“I think dialogue always improves relationships.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/nyregion...amp;oref=slogin

"Bear Stearns cuts 4 percent of staff"

By JOE BEL BRUNO, Associated Press

Last updated: 4:43 p.m., Wednesday, November 28, 2007

NEW YORK -- Battered by the subprime mortgage crisis, Bear Stearns Cos. on Wednesday cut 4 percent of its staff in a move that could prelude a final push by investment banks to cull their ranks before bonuses are handed out.

The nation's fifth-biggest investment bank will cut 650 jobs in all departments from its staff of about 15,500.

This marks the third wave of layoffs to sweep through Bear Stearns, which as of last month eliminated about 900 positions.

Bear Stearns has been among the hardest hit on Wall Street as investment banks reel from deterioration in the subprime mortgage and leveraged loan markets.

U.S. banks and financial service companies are cutting tens of thousands of jobs in an attempt to lower costs and trim underperforming businesses.

The investment bank's decision to cut jobs with the end of the year just weeks away also spreads worry on Wall Street that other firms will do the same.

Year-end bonuses represent a large part of compensation for everyone from support staff to investment banks, and eliminating those payments could free up a significant amount of money.

"They are cutting overhead and shoring up positions for next year," said Christopher W. Hunt, whose Stamford-based firm Hunt-Scanlon conducts market research for the executive search industry.

"Many people have bonuses guaranteed, but many firms would indeed save on all the other bonuses."

He said Wall Street firms that are trying trim expenses, and slim down before beginning a new year, often use this tactic.

Typically, though, only back-office staff such as assistants and secretaries, who aren't guaranteed the kind of blockbuster bonuses reaped by investment bankers and traders, get laid off at this time of year.

The round of earnings warnings and layoffs at Wall Street investment banks likely means bonuses will decline this year, or will be paid out using stock instead of cash to retain key employees.

The New York State Comptroller's office said in a report earlier this month that bonuses are likely to shrink 10 percent from the record levels reached a year ago, when they hit $23.9 billion, or more than $136,000 per employee at major U.S. financial institutions.

Bear Stearns in a memorandum distributed to employees that was obtained by The Associated Press said that the latest cuts are part of an ongoing review "to best position Bear Stearns for 2008 and beyond."

Employees affected would get severance, benefits and outplacement services, the memorandum said.

Russell Sherman, a spokesman for Bear Stearns, said the jobs cuts would come from across the firm and were not restricted to one particular business.

In October, Bear Stearns cut 300 jobs from areas including its equity trading business.

The company, which is the nation's second-biggest underwriter of mortgage bonds, also slashed about 600 positions from its mortgage-origination unit.

Further pain might also lay ahead for Bear Stearns, which earlier this month said it would writedown another $1.2 billion linked to its mortgage-backed securities business.

The biggest global investment houses and major banks collectively wrote down some $80 billion worth of assets because of the market crisis this summer.

This puts even more pressure on Chief Executive James Cayne, whose leadership has been under scrutiny since Bear Stearns announced the collapse of two hedge funds in July.

Rival Merrill Lynch & Co. ousted CEO Stan O'Neal earlier this month, and Citigroup Inc. did the same to CEO Chuck Prince a week later.

Cayne, who owns about 4 percent of Bear Stearns, has refused to relinquish control of the struggling firm.

Instead, he pushed out former president Warren Spector in August.

Spector did not receive a severance, but was allowed to keep stock and option awards worth about $23 million, according to a regulatory filing.

Shares of Bear Stearns rose $4.07, or 4.3 percent, to close at $99.50 on a day when share prices in general rose sharply after a Federal Reserve official hinted that the central bank may lower interest rates again.

"Feds say they've broken up two big alien smuggling rings"

By WILSON RING, Associated Press

Last updated: 5:33 p.m., Wednesday, November 28, 2007

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Federal prosecutors said Wednesday they have broken up two of the largest human smuggling rings ever discovered in the northeastern United States.

The rings allegedly smuggled hundreds of illegal aliens into the U.S. from Korea, Pakistan, India and countries in Central America beginning in 2004 by having them walk across the U.S.-Canada border and then be picked up and taken to cities along the East Coast.

U.S. Attorney Thomas Anderson said there was no indication either groups smuggled anyone in who would be considered a terrorist, but that the smugglers would move anyone who paid up to $10,000 per person to get into the U.S.

"When an organization has established a pipeline to aliens from various countries, including countries with terrorists, into the United States, they don't care who's passing through that pipeline as long as they are paying," Anderson said.

"They don't care if its a family looking for a better life or a terrorist looking to harm America."

Officials said some of the aliens brought into the United States had previous criminal records in this country, but others were vulnerable to being preyed upon by the smugglers.

"Often times, these people who are smuggled into the United States are indebted to these people for a very long time," said Bruce Foucart, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent.

The two indictments charge 11 people.

Eight of them have been arrested, including one in Korea; three others were still being sought -- one in the U.S., two in Canada.

The arrests appear to have disrupted organized human smuggling efforts along the Border Patrol's Swanton Sector, which runs from Ogdensburg, N.Y., east through Vermont and on to the New Hampshire-Maine border.

"Roughly since August, the aliens we have apprehended coming across the Swanton sector have really dwindled to a trickle," Anderson said.

The individuals being smuggled were driven to areas near the border and directed across the border, into both Vermont and New York.

"Sometimes, they'll go a stretch of two or three miles on foot," said U.S. Border Patrol Assistant Sector Chief Paul Moran.

"Sometimes, they could be in close proximity to a port of entry, other times they're out there in the thickets."

Anderson said that in the past people smuggling cases were treated individually.

The people who were caught were prosecuted, but little effort was made to find the larger organizations.

That changed several years ago, when investigators on both sides of the border began going after organizations, Anderson said.

"We had information that there were organizations that were involved in these smuggling operations in Montreal, in Toronto, and we said 'Look, we should be focusing on dismantling those organizations, not just nipping at the edges,'" Anderson said.

"We refocused our energies to go after the organizations."

According to the indictments:

-- The Toronto-based smuggling run was run by Chol Min Jang, 49, and Dal San Jang, 44, who were arrested recently in Ontario by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

-- The second group was led by Jose Manuel Galdamez-Serrano, 54, a native of El Salvador operating in the Montreal area.

Galdamez-Serrano was also arrested recently by the RCMP.

Anderson said efforts were under way to extradite the suspects to the U.S.

If convicted, they could get up to 15 years in prison on each smuggling charge.

The Border Patrol's Swanton sector is a prime area for human smuggling because of its proximity to Montreal and Toronto and three interstate highways -- Interstate 87 in New York, Interstate 89 in Vermont and Interstate 91 in Vermont -- that make it easy to move people once they're in the country, Anderson said.

Anderson said that none of the smuggled people intended to remain in the area where the crossed the border.

But the cases show how important these areas are to protecting the northern border.

"A small state like Vermont can play a critical role in helping to secure our nation by doing all it can to shut down these pipelines," Anderson said.

"Errors contributed to officer's shooting - Lax oversight, missteps by police partly caused accidental wounding"

By BRENDAN J. LYONS Senior writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, November 29, 2007

ALBANY -- Poor supervision and a series of missteps by a sheriff's narcotics unit contributed to circumstances that led to a veteran Albany detective being shot in the hand two months ago during a friendly fire incident deep in the woods of Berne.

Numerous people familiar with an internal investigation into the shooting of Detective Jeffrey Connery said the incident could have been prevented.

Those people, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about the case, said three investigators who went into the woods to cut down marijuana plants lacked an action plan, were not all carrying handguns or handcuffs, as required, and did not account for the fact they were in an isolated area where police radios and cellphones often don't work.

Sheriff James L. Campbell said no one should face discipline and that the shooting was accidental.

The assignment that day went awry when a parolee from Greene County, 38-year-old Kevin P. O'Reilly, surprised the members of the drug task force while he was hiding in a small shack near where more than 100 marijuana plants were growing.

The police officers, who were wearing camouflage clothing, had not expected to find anyone there.

They coaxed O'Reilly from the shack but had to use his shoelaces to bind his wrists because no one had handcuffs.

O'Reilly, who told investigators he was uncertain the plainclothes officers were really police, broke free and ran.

His dog attacked Connery when the detective tackled the suspect, according to police officials.

Sheriff's Investigator Carmen Frangella, who was carrying a machete but not a gun, grabbed a third investigator's handgun and shot the dog twice, wounding Connery in the process.

Connery had been temporarily assigned to the sheriff's unit as part of a drug task force.

Police officials said Frangella took appropriate action when he grabbed a partner's gun and killed the dog.

But police sources who don't want their names revealed say the situation could have been avoided and that an internal investigation found breakdowns in policy and procedures.

Police officials and fellow officers say Connery is a dedicated and talented narcotics detective.

He has had SWAT training and he formerly worked in the Albany Police Department forensics unit.

He suffered a debilitating injury when his right thumb was nearly blown off by the .40-caliber bullet during the raid.

His return to duty is uncertain and he's undergoing a series of complex surgeries and physical therapy, Department of Public Safety spokesman James Miller said.

After Connery was shot, the investigators weren't able to call for help with their radios or cellphones and walked Connery, who was bleeding profusely, and the suspect out of the woods.

Police and paramedics had a hard time finding them in the isolated area off Beaver Road because no one was certain of their exact location, officials said.

Campbell said despite issues raised in an internal investigation, he has ruled the shooting "accidental" and no disciplinary measures will be taken.

Internal affairs investigators did not interview Inspector John Burke, who heads the drug unit.

Campbell said he personally handled that interview.

"I've talked to Inspector Burke that in the future make sure that they take all of their gear with them," Campbell said.

"As far as any policies or anything we've tightened up our procedures on members of the drug unit advising our communications of their location during field investigations."

Campbell also confirmed he recently signed a letter given to Frangella's attorney, Paul Clyne, that effectively exonerates the investigator for his actions that day.

"I was retained in connection with any possible administrative disciplinary type of proceeding," Clyne said.

"My understanding is that there will not be any at this point."

Clyne, a former Albany County district attorney, said he would not be surprised if Connery files a lawsuit.

"He suffered an injury related to his job and I think he's probably going to explore his legal options," Clyne said.

The sheriff said he gave Frangella the letter even though the investigation is not concluded.

That's because Connery has never been interviewed by the sheriff's officials conducting the internal investigation, police officials said.

That interview is scheduled to take place today, the sheriff said.

But an Albany police source said the interview was not likely to take place now because Connery, who has retained a private attorney, was being advised not to take part in the interview.

That may be because the sheriff's office already has ruled the shooting was accidental and that no disciplinary measures would be taken, the person said.

Sheriff's and city police officials began making arrangements for Connery to be interviewed earlier this week after receiving a list of written questions from the Times Union about the internal investigation, the person said.

Meanwhile, District Attorney David Soares said his office recommended early in the investigation that an outside agency, such as the State Police, should be brought in to handle the case so there would be no conflict of interest.

The district attorney's office is prosecuting O'Reilly, who remains jailed on multiple felony charges related to the marijuana plants in the woods.

Prosecutors have not received any reports or detailed information related to the internal shooting investigation.

"It's the opinion of the office that in situations like this that you ought to have independent third parties come in to conduct investigations," Soares said.

"Our office is going to be reviewing the sheriff's and the APD's findings to be making determinations."

"Those are legal determinations and not to be made by the chief of the police and the sheriff of the county."

Brendan J. Lyons can be reached at 454-5547 or by e-mail at blyons@timesunion.com.

"DiNapoli to propose budget reform - In speech at Rockefeller Institute, comptroller will call for restricting debt, reducing authorities' powers"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, November 29, 2007

ALBANY -- Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli today will call for restricting debt, reducing the financial powers of public authorities and making state budgets easier to read.

In a speech this morning at the Rockefeller Institute, the Democrat, appointed this year as the state's top auditor, intends to call for staggered board terms of four years on all public authorities while curtailing authority borrowing.

The speech, "Every Dollar Counts: A Budget Reform Proposal for New York," arrives as budget planners expect next year's financial plan will come with a $4.3 billion budget gap.

DiNapoli offers a recipe for changing the way public authorities use funds that might help.

He will call for authority spending not related to core missions to be turned over to state agencies and returned to the state budget so the spending is subject to oversight.

His message, coming less than two months before the 2008-2009 budget presentation by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, will focus on producing a budget document that average people can read and comprehend.

"Right now the budget is written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats," DiNapoli states in highlights released by his office.

He promises, starting this spring, to publish a first-ever expenditure report for people to use to follow how much the state spent on travel, fuel for state vehicles, heating state buildings and more.

He also plans to identify all new state contracts on his office's Web site.

His debt reform pitch calls for a "hard" cap on new borrowing and for any additional debt to be part of a comprehensive plan to address infrastructure needs.

"Right now we have an artificial debt cap," the comptroller's notes state.

"There is $52 billion that doesn't even count under this cap."

"We need a hard cap that is linked to the state's ability to pay."

DiNapoli has noted several risks to the state's financial plan, particularly a heavy reliance on borrowing and nonrecurring revenues to pay for recurring expenses.

"NYRA gets breaks in bankruptcy case - IRS cuts tax bill for group on same day reorganization plan is accepted; Aqueduct land sale OK'd"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, November 29, 2007

ALBANY -- The Internal Revenue Service backed off a $1.6 billion tax bill for the New York Racing Association on Wednesday, while state lawyers did not object to NYRA's plan for paying back more than $310 million in debt.

In the hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, NYRA's Chapter 11 case advanced with the bankruptcy judge setting a Dec. 27 date for confirming NYRA's plan for emerging from the court's protection from creditors.

NYRA's reorganization plan, which calls for fully repaying debts, got a boost when the IRS notified the court it had reduced its claim of $1.6 billion to no more than $25 million.

The judge agreed the plan is complete and can be voted on by affected parties, including the state, which said it supports the plan, according to lawyers for creditors and NYRA.

"They stood up today and stated their support for the plan," said Brian Rosen, NYRA's bankruptcy attorney.

However, the entire plan is contingent on legislative approval and confirmation of financial agreements by the state.

Lawmakers would have to go along with a deal worked out privately between NYRA and Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

It calls for state funding of $75 million and a 30-year racing franchise extension for NYRA.

In return, NYRA would give up its claim to ownership of Saratoga, Aqueduct and Belmont tracks.

The reorganization plan also would allow NYRA to sell 17.5 acres of non-track property at Aqueduct to help with operating expenses.

State officials had previously rejected such a sale, but Spitzer's office said the governor supports the sale of 70 parcels that aren't needed by the track to raise $15 million.

Jeffrey Rich, a lawyer for the creditors, said legislative approval of the Spitzer/NYRA agreement may be necessary by Dec. 27 for the judge to approve the reorganization.

NYRA's franchise expires Dec. 31 and it is warning the tracks could go dark if a deal isn't worked out before Jan. 1.

Talks between Spitzer and lawmakers to resolve the future of the racing franchise have not concluded and Senate Republicans have publicly rejected the proposed agreement Spitzer worked out.

James M. Odato can be reached at 454-5083 or by e-mail at jodato@timesunion.com.

"Nassau crowd protests DEC mine permit"

By BOB GARDINIER, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

Last updated: 3:42 p.m., Friday, November 30, 2007

ALBANY - Assemblyman Tim Gordon, backed by about 100 Nassau residents, handed a petition to a Department of Environmental Conservation official at the agency's headquarters today, opposing a permit that would allow rock mining in the town.

"This is an important issue that has made this small town vulnerable to outside special interests," Gordon said to DEC official Chris Ballentine, who emerged from the secure building to accept the petition signed by more than 100 people.

"We are asking DEC to take another look at the permit."

In May the DEC granted the West Sand Lake-based Troy Sand & Gravel a permit to mine graywacke, a hard rock valued for highway paving.

"Thank you folks for all your comments and your energetic exercising of civic responsibility," Ballentine told the crowd, adding that he could not comment further before returning inside.

Even though the company has the state permit, no mining has started at the hilltop site off Route 66 near Pikes Pond because the company doesn't yet have a town permit.

Mining opponents, including a majority of current town officials and the group Residents Against Mining, have fought the mining proposal and filed several lawsuits.

The town has also passed a law banning commercial mining and the matter is tied up in legal arguments over local autonomy and the state's overriding authority under current mining laws play out.

There is also a legal 'grandfather clause' issue yet to be determined involving the timing of the town law, which was passed after TS&G had filed its state and town permits in Dec. 2003.

Andrew Gilchrist, mining company lawyer, has said the company has already begun action in state Supreme Court in Rensselaer County challenging the legality of the town law and whether it applies to the permit.

The company notes the application was filed two years before the local ban was passed, and argues it should be grandfathered in under the law and any state mandates.

Before the face off between Gordon, who has taken the residents' side in the issue, and the DEC official, marchers carried signs and chanted for almost a hour in front of the building.

Signs read: "Protect Our Water," "Don't Blast Our Mountains" and "Zoned Rural Residential Not Industrial," to name a few.

"We've been fighting this for four years and the town has had laws restricting commercial mining on the books for more than 20 years," said resident Karli Dwyer, who was dressed in a mask with feathers like a Calico Indian.

During the anti-Rent Wars against the rich Patroons in the late 1830s and early 1840s, farmers in Nassau and other local towns banded together donning paint and called themselves the Calico Indians.

The first-term Assemblyman was able to usher a bill through his house that would block the state from approving mining operations in communities like Nassau over local objections.

That bill has been referred to a Senate committee.

"State faces fiscal bind - Ruling could save aid but cost municipalities like Albany millions in crucial support"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Saturday, December 1, 2007

ALBANY -- Despite an estimated $4.3 billion budget deficit, the state is resisting a chance to save $200 million a year and will fight a court order to stop making "unconstitutional" payments to municipalities, including the city of Albany.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office on Friday said it intends to appeal a judgment made with little fanfare this month.

It involves a small town in Western New York whose former supervisor tried unsuccessfully to get $22,000 annual payments in lieu of taxes for his rural municipality and school district.

The judgment calls for the state to either stop making tax and in lieu of tax payments for state property within communities, or to treat all municipalities with state land the same way.

Albany stands to lose $398.5 million out of a $507 million, 30-year payment deal Mayor Jerry Jennings worked out with Gov. George Pataki.

"It would be a financial disaster for the city," Jennings said.

The judgment would either require the state to choose between wounding, if not bankrupting, some municipalities getting the payments or creating a uniform and equitable policy that might be extremely expensive for the state.

The decision by a state Supreme Court Nov. 14 came from a lawsuit by John "Jack" Dillenburg III of the Chautauqua County town of Arkwright, population 1,126.

The Democrat served as supervisor for 12 years, until stepping down five years ago.

Dillenburg said he got fed up with trying to get the Legislature and governor to pass a bill authorizing payments in lieu of taxes for 2,265 acres of the Canadaway Creek Game Management area, owned by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

He said he worked for 12 years trying to get a bill passed in the Legislature to authorize the payments.

Some years a governor would support the idea.

Other years one chamber would pass it and the other would refuse.

One year it passed, but was vetoed by Pataki.

"These bills adopt a piecemeal approach to the issue" of disbursing such revenues, Pataki wrote in his veto.

"By choosing certain properties in certain counties or areas for preferential tax treatment, these (proposed) bills simply add to the jumble."

Dillenburg said such declarations made him mad.

He said influential areas, such as Albany, get favored treatment compared to rural communities.

"The only way to get this is to take it to court," he said.

He lodged his suit in 2003 and endured a yearlong fight to win the right to sue, defeating a state lawyer's attempts to throw out the case on a technicality.

His lawyer, Michael Bobseine of Fredonia, said Dillenburg won a David-and-Goliath battle because the order came after an argument on the merits.

Dillenburg beat back the claims of the attorney general's office and got the judgment from Acting Supreme Court Justice Timothy J. Walker.

Walker wrote that the defendants -- Pataki, state Sen. Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Comptroller Alan Hevesi -- "have caused, are now causing and are about to cause an unconstitutional disbursement of state funds by paying taxes and/or payments in lieu of taxes on state-owned lands to counties, municipalities, school districts or special districts ... while not making such payments on state-owned lands situated elsewhere in New York."

He ruled the state must "permanently" cease the practice.

But he also held off on enforcement of the judgment, pending the appeals process.

The state pays nearly $200 million annually to municipalities in taxes and payments in lieu of taxes.

Much of that goes to communities in the Adirondack and Catskill preserves.

The state also tries to help upstate communities with protected water supplies for downstate populations and where state facilities result in service costs to a jurisdiction.

Jennings was able to get payments because of all the taxable properties taken in south Albany for the creation of the Empire State Plaza.

Assemblyman John McEneny, D-Albany, said the judgment could set an "enormous precedent."

If it results in a uniform policy, he said, Albany might be able to add to its payment schedule and receive aid for other state lands such as the state university and Harriman Office Campus.

"The way it is rendered it could hurt us," he said.

"The way it is remedied could help us."

James M. Odato can be reached at 454-5083 or by e-mail at jodato@timesunion.com.

"Despite gloomy forecasts, NY's budget poised for busting - again"

By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press

Last updated: 10:32 a.m., Saturday, December 1, 2007

ALBANY -- Wall Street is wobbling.

Tax revenue growth has slowed.

Economic forecasts call for a chance of recession.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli -- who have agreed on almost nothing in months -- agree on this:

The economic outlook is more bleak than in years, and likely to get worse.

So, of course, New York's state government is poised to spend like a drunken yachtsman.

Never mind the projected $4.3 billion deficit for the 2008-09 budget.

Billions of dollars in new spending have already been committed, promised or threatened by one faction or the other.

Oh, and one more thing: Next year is an election year for the Legislature.

"So far, the more talk we hear about the budget, the less things add up," said E.J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, part of the conservative Manhattan Institute.

"A lot of this is beginning to sound like the late '80s and early '90s, when the most disciplined player in the house was Mario Cuomo."

Yikes.

Most New Yorkers -- those who aren't among the thousands who already fled to jobs in other states -- remember those days as the heyday of the rising cost of being a New Yorker.

That's back when the state, in a flagging economy, resorted to gimmicks like trying to sell prisons to itself to feed its spending addiction.

Although New Yorkers won't pay attention to the state budget process until its often elusive deadline of April 1, if at all, the bulk of the budget work quietly hits a sprint this week.

Spitzer is preparing his budget proposal for Jan. 22 with a goal of holding spending to a 5.3 percent increase.

That's about $4.2 billion and well above the inflation rate.

Tough times indeed.

"There are warning signs out there that things could get worse," Paul Francis, Spitzer's budget director, told The Associated Press.

"There will be significant cuts in spending really across almost every sector of the budget."

Except not really.

In Albany, a "cut" means less of an increase.

And even that's rare.

And Spitzer's 5.3 percent target for increased spending is before the Legislature gets to it.

By the time most fiscal years start, the Legislature usually adds another $1 billion or so.

The result in the current budget was a $120 billion plan, including $80 billion in just state spending.

Those figures are more than double the 1990-91 budget.

The current budget, Spitzer's first after campaigning to rein in state spending, grew by about 8 percent.

The governor was quick to note that was still lower than any of the three previous years.

He didn't note that those previous three budgets grew by Rockefeller-era proportions of around 10 percent.

For the coming fiscal year, Francis said times are so tough he will have to resort to one-shot revenues, like the anticipated conversion of some nonprofit health care companies to for-profit, and taking for the general fund whatever money's left over from state authorities that run the Thruway, New York City mass transit and other services.

In addition, expect some "user fees" to increase.

These are charges for various state services or programs such as for hunting or state beaches.

Francis said the specific user fees to be raised haven't yet been targeted.

Also, expect a few more "loophole closers" that cost some businesses millions this year in what the Senate GOP insisted were new taxes.

Other ideas swirling around the Legislature include a greater tax on the richest New Yorkers, although Spitzer and Bruno promise no tax increases.

As governors have done in the past, the Legislature will be advised in January that it has to balance any of its own increases with spending with cuts.

And as Legislatures have done in the past, the advice will be quickly and thoroughly ignored.

The Senate's Republican majority, feuding with the Democratic governor since spring, is already worked up.

"Expecting us to comment on a target for spending in November is absurd," said John McArdle, spokesman for the GOP majority.

"If he proposes a budget with his priorities out of line as much as he did last year, we're going to fix it."

The Assembly's Democratic majority has, uncharacteristically, an even more dire revenue forecast than the governor, but Speaker Sheldon Silver has made it clear that he's not ready to back down on his priorities:

"We face difficult challenges ahead, but we must meet the education, health care and job growth and economic development needs of New Yorkers."

Even Spitzer's target of holding spending to a 5.3 percent increase won't be easy, given the developments of recent weeks:

--The State University of New York Board of Trustees on Tuesday asked for $287 million more and a 5-percent increase in tuition that the Assembly's Democratic majority usually tries to avoid by tossing more state funds at the system.

--The state Board of Regents called for $1.94 billion more in school aid, much of which the state is already obligated pay under a court order.

But Republican senators on Long Island, fighting to keep the GOP majority, are already screaming their districts are getting shortchanged.

--A week ago, Spitzer avoided a planned increase in the $2 base subway and bus fare in New York City, but key downstate Assembly members promise to try to tap the state budget to prevent other fare increases.

--That got upstate Republican senators promising to use state funds to stop or reduce planned increases in Thruway tolls.

--In October, the Spitzer administration started settling contracts with state worker unions that will provide 13 percent higher wages over the next three years.

In addition, Francis said the state's debt will go up $3 billion in 2008-09, to $53 billion, mostly for road and bridge work and construction at public colleges.

That debt, along with $52 billion in public authorities' debt, makes New York not only one of the most heavily taxed states but among the most deeply in debt.

All of this matters to families, employers, retirees, and more young educated New Yorkers wondering whether to give this much-anticipated new New York under Spitzer another shot before heading out of state.

"Unfortunately," said McMahon of the conservative think tank, "the message to business from everything that's been said in Albany, is, 'You better count the silverware.'"

------

Michael Gormley is the Albany, N.Y., capitol editor for The Associated Press. He can be reached by e-mail at mgormley(at)ap.org.

"Union link to Bruno questioned - Labor groups invest heavily in a firm that employs the Senate majority leader"

By DANNY HAKIM, New York Times

First published: Sunday, December 2, 2007

ALBANY -- An investment firm that employs New York's Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, is managing tens of millions of dollars from New York labor unions, according to state ethics records and tax documents.

The unions have voluminous interests before the state Legislature, including several measures that Bruno has backed.

Bruno, the state's top Republican, has collected salaries from both the state and the Winthrop Corp., parent company of Wright Investors' Service, based in Milford, Conn., since the mid-1990s.

He became majority leader in 1995.

While Bruno's annual ethics reports have previously disclosed that he is an employee of Wright, the reports do not reveal what he does for the company or who the company's clients are.

After receiving information from individuals within organized labor, The New York Times examined tax records filed by the unions that detailed the investments.

Eugene Helm, president of Wright Investors, said his company's relationship with unions predated Bruno's employment.

Helm described Bruno's role at the company as "business development," but declined to provide details.

Bruno's office also would not discuss the senator's duties.

Bruno's outside business interests have been the subject of a federal criminal investigation for at least a year.

Helm declined to say whether his company had been subpoenaed or approached by investigators.

"We have never run afoul of the law or had a suit against us," Helm said, adding, "Did we employ and do we employ Joe Bruno?"

"Yes."

"But that by itself doesn't make us guilty of anything."

"I don't know where this investigation is going, but I think by the end of it, our position will be borne out."

Officials from several of the unions that have given money to Wright to manage said they did not know Bruno was employed at the firm.

Al Catalano, the former president of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 2, based in Albany, said he believed the union began investing with the firm in the mid-1990s, but said he was unaware of its affiliation with Bruno.

"I've only had one meeting with Bruno."

"It was in his chambers, about workers' comp," Catalano said, referring to a meeting several years ago.

"There was never any pressure."

Mike Brady, an administrator of Local 157 of the Laborers' International Union of North America, based in Schenectady, which has pension funds managed by Wright, said, "I can definitely tell you that Senator Bruno didn't have anything to do with it."

John McArdle, a spokesman for Bruno, declined to say what work the senator did for the company or whether he had encouraged the unions to invest with the firm.

"It's an outside business that he's entitled to do as a part-time legislator," McArdle said.

"The fact that you found out who some of the clients are and they said they had no idea Bruno was involved, that should tell you everything you need to know."

The state ethics law allows officials to have outside employment, though they cannot engage in activities that create or appear to create a conflict with their public duties, and they are barred from securing unwarranted privileges for themselves or others.

The unions that have invested pension or health funds with Wright Investors in recent years include local and regional chapters representing carpenters, bricklayers, electrical workers, plumbers, steamfitters and service employees.

Several are based in or near the senator's Capital Region district; others are in New York City.

As recently as 2005, the New York-based Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, the huge local chapter that represents building service workers like janitors and security guards, had tens of millions of dollars under Wright's management.

A spokesman said the union stopped investing with Wright last year.

Wright also manages a pension fund maintained by Local 370 of the carpenters union, based in Albany, which is being investigated by the Department of Labor, a person with knowledge of the investigation said.

That inquiry does not appear to involve Bruno.

William Weir, the president of the local, said he was not aware of any such inquiry or that Bruno was affiliated with Wright.

As majority leader, Bruno has cultivated ties to labor unions that are unusually close for a Republican, and has become personally involved in advocating for their positions.

Bruno has been the most important ally in the state for 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, the powerful health care workers union that is a sister branch of 32BJ and a frequent obstacle in efforts by Gov. Eliot Spitzer to reduce the state budget.

According to the records examined by The Times, 1199 United Healthcare Workers East has not invested with Wright since at least 2000.

While the health workers union typically supports Democratic candidates nationally, in New York it is the single largest campaign contributor to Senate Republicans, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Among other things, Spitzer has accused Bruno of blocking his efforts to overhaul the Wick's Law, which requires multiple contractors on public works projects.

The law has driven up costs for municipalities, but it is fiercely protected by unions because it creates work for their members.

The carpenters union has lobbied on the issue this year.

Bruno agreed to pass modest changes to the law in June, but the deal unraveled.

Bruno and the governor are barely on speaking terms; their relationship imploded this summer after it was revealed that the governor's staff had asked the State Police to provide details of flights and car rides they had provided to Bruno.

Government watchdogs said Friday that Bruno's work for Wright highlighted the weakness of ethics and disclosure laws in New York.

Lawmakers may have outside work but are required to disclose almost nothing beyond where they work.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver practices law but does not disclose clients.

"How do these guys do this?" said Barbara Bartoletti, the legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York.

Regarding Bruno, she said, "The appearance is that they have him in a salaried position to drive business to that corporation."

"Would they still want him as a salaried employee if he wasn't majority leader?" she added.

With the governor and lawmakers negotiating a legislative pay raise, Bartoletti said that it might be a good idea to bar outside employment.

"Maybe it's time to just sever outside interests," she said.

Russ Haven, legislative counsel for the New York Public Interest Research Group, said:

"New York operates under a worst-of-all-worlds kind of system."

"You have a part-time Legislature where many of the members have outside business and professional interests, and yet there's no independent oversight."

Yet Assembly Majority Leader Ronald Canestrari, D-Cohoes, said Saturday that forcing legislators to forgo outside work would be a "radical change" that might limit the pool of willing candidates.

"We have people in the legislature who are also dentists and farmers, and I would hate to see the legislature go in the direction where only the wealthy could serve," Canestrari said.

"And the fact is, we are up for re-election every two years, and we don't know how long this will last."

Barring outside affiliations also "indicates an assumption that the outside affiliations are inherently illegal," which he said is unfair.

Of Bruno's situation, Canestrari said:

"Joe certainly doesn't need this with the other things that are going on at this point in time."

"It may appear worse than it really is, but it sounds like something that won't go away too quickly."

"... I'm sure the senator could explain the arrangement, and we shouldn't be too quick to draw conclusions."

Union staff writer Jordan Carleo-Evangelist contributed to this report.

"Fight for Lake George - Water quality becomes issue with development"

By BRIAN NEARING, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, December 2, 2007

Lake George - A building boom echoes through Lake George's forested hills, beyond reach of a state board meant to protect a lake whose legendary gin-clear water is getting murkier.

This decade, nearly 2,400 acres -- equivalent to two dozen Empire State Plazas -- have sprouted 687 new single-family homes, according to a Times Union computer-assisted analysis of assessment records.

About 80 percent of the surge is at the lake's southwestern edge in Warren County, where local governments in Bolton, Lake George town and village, and Queensbury -- not the state-created Lake George Park Commission -- hold sway over development.

Every time it rains, each road, home and lawn can sweep a brew of silt, fertilizers or road salt into brooks, down steep hills and into the water.

Environmentalists claim the Queen of American Lakes is being nibbled to death.

Researchers at a center run by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute agree increasing pollution is making water murkier, saltier and less hospitable to aquatic life.

One sign is more algae blooms, which cloud water and rob it of oxygen.

Septic leaks and phosphorus-rich fertilizers that keep lawns green well into late fall also feed algae.

Most of the building surge is beyond reach of the park commission, created in 1961 to protect the lake.

Executive Director Michael White said the commission does not track building in the four burgeoning municipalities because each has commission-approved stormwater rules.

Commission Chairman Bruce Young said the four municipalities do a good job, with White adding: "We are a partner, not an overlord."

The town of Lake George took over rule enforcement from the commission in 1992.

Bolton and Queensbury assumed responsibility in 1998, followed a year later by Lake George village.

The commission controls the other five towns around the lake, where there is more state-owned land and less development.

However, the commission is eyeing its first-ever rules to limit building around streams and reduce cutting of trees, which help anchor natural ground filters that absorb contaminants.

Watching developers clear-cut land next to his Assembly Point home in Queensbury has been "a lesson in futility," said Stuart Rosenberg, an Albany doctor who has owned his Knox Road A-frame since 1985.

After a small camp was bulldozed and more than two dozen trees -- some more than 100 years old -- were cut, a 6,000-square-foot, five-bathroom mansion took its place.

Rosenberg said he complained to the town but got little satisfaction.

"They replanted a handful of trees along the property line, and along the road, but only did that because they were told they had to," he said.

The commission's lack of oversight in the fastest-growing areas is a problem, said David Wick, manager of the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District.

"The lack of a building history for the lake is a huge point of contention," he said.

"It is a political hotbed."

"Who is going to say they need to stop development?"

The lake's mountainous surroundings make it vulnerable.

Each acre of lake is fed by drainage from five acres.

For many lakes, that ratio is higher.

Lake Champlain has about 1,000 acres of drainage for each acre of lake.

Disagreements have sparked two recent lawsuits against residential projects, filed by the Lake George Waterkeeper, a not-for-profit group affiliated with the Waterkeeper Alliance headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The commission's hands-off attitude toward local control surfaced during public hearings on stormwater rules in 2004.

Residents urged the commission to review disputed local plans if opponents submitted petitions.

That was rejected, with the commission saying it would cost developers more money and discourage local officials who might feel second-guessed.

Such caution makes Chris Navitsky scoff.

Navitsky is the Lake George waterkeeper, hired in 2002 by the Kennedy environmental group to head its Lake George operations.

A civil engineer, Navitsky once worked for developers putting up big-box stores in New Jersey.

He has a name for local officials who review building plans of local developers:

"The good ol' boy network."

Since May 2006, Navitsky, the Fund for Lake George and several homeowners have sued the park commission, Bolton, the town of Lake George, Adirondack Park Agency and prominent Bolton developer Rolf Ronning, owner of Bell Point Realty.

Targeted are two of Ronning's subdivisions -- Saddlebrook in Bolton and Forest Ridge in Lake George, which call for 60 homes on 370 acres.

Navitsky claims the towns let Ronning off easy on rules, to the point that some Saddlebrook plans called for stormwater to flow uphill.

"My goal is to not sacrifice Lake George so a few people can go to the bank," Navitsky said.

Ronning, a lifelong resident of Bolton Landing, has his own word for Navitsky: "Waterboy."

He said Navitsky's challenges cost a million dollars in engineering and legal fees.

Ronning admits lake water isn't as clear as it was when he was a kid, but he sees the problem as the state's irresponsible use of road salt and "sporadic and uneven enforcement" of rules.

While the park commission is responsible for water quality, that duty ends at the lake's edge.

Control over building is "the job of the towns, not the commission,"' Ronning said.

"Stormwater issues can be quite expensive."

"I think that our planning board does an extremely good job," said Alexander "Sandy" Gabriels, Bolton town supervisor.

The town, where a two-acre hillside building lot goes for up to $350,000, is in a building boom.

Of the town's 2,164 housing units identified in the 2000 Census, more than half were summer homes.

"The next rage of development is up the hillsides."

"People are going to build on higher and steeper slopes, because that is what's left," Gabriels said.

And there is plenty left.

In 2003, a plan found room for as many as 2,600 additional residences.

However, the report by Saratoga Associates, a Saratoga Springs-based consulting firm, warned such a surge could increase pollution.

Of the nine major creeks that drain into the lake, Bolton is home to three -- Huddle, Indian and Finkle brooks.

Ronning is currently pursuing a 15-lot luxury housing development on about 1,000 acres that he owns near Indian Brook.

Gabriels, like Ronning, takes a dim view of Navitsky.

"Sometimes he takes a position that no development should occur," Gabriels said.

But some residents side with Navitsky.

During a heated public hearing on Saddlebrook, several blasted the town.

"Town boards and planning boards take a very short view of their communities' fabrics and let short-term profit motives of developers drive their thinking," said Graham Cox.

"We are not paying planning board members and staff to allow this landscape to be piecemealed to death."

The issue of development around the lake is not new.

Recognizing a growing threat, the state in 1987 created the Lake George Watershed Conference, composed of 25 representatives from state, county and municipal governments, as well as lake associations, to come up with a plan.

A 2001 update, headed by state Secretary of State Christopher Jacobs, found problems with development and water quality remained.

In 2004, another update contained recommendations such as an annual limit on algae-feeding nutrients and mapping to identify tainted stormwater.

While about two dozen local stormwater projects are done, the problem is far from fixed, said David Decker, executive director of the conference.

"There is no one entity taking a look at development trends around the lake."

"This is not an anti-growth mechanism."

"It is a smart growth mechanism," Decker said.

"The lake has the ability to clean itself, but we are starting to invade the tipping point."

"When we get there, we can't reclaim the lake."

He said the park commission is hamstrung by a small budget and staff, and overwhelmed by other duties, like keeping track of permits for hundreds of docks and 10,000 boats that ply the lake.

Fixing stormwater mistakes is more expensive than preventing them.

The conference's flagship project is the former Gaslight Village property in Lake George village, which is being converted into a man-made filter for pollution from West Brook.

It will cost $4.1 million to purchase the 12-acre parcel and another $5 million to build in bends to slow the brook, so settling beds catch sediment and plant beds absorb excess fertilizers.

"We only have four acres to fix this when you really need 50," said Decker.

He wants stricter rules to protect the lake, things like banning traditional lawn fertilizers and highway salt.

"There is no reason to have fertilizer in the watershed when it is absolutely accelerating the decline of the lake," Decker said.

Decker said past mistakes that hurt the lake stem from "a lack of knowledge and a misunderstanding of what it means to be a good steward of the lake."

"Whatever happens in the watershed in the morning gets into the lake in the afternoon."

"It's instant."

Brain Nearing can be reached at 454-5094 or by e-mail at bnearing@timesunion.com.

"Stormwater mix fouls lake's southern waters"

By BRIAN NEARING, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, December 2, 2007

BOLTON LANDING -- Lake George's southern waters, where each year more new residences dot hills and shore, are becoming more polluted.

Phosphorus, commonly found in fertilizers and septic waste, is part of the stormwater mix that is fueling worsening problems.

More than 40 percent of phosphorus entering the water comes from just 5 percent of the land that is developed in 190 square miles of Warren, Washington and Essex counties that drain into the lake.

Stormwater runoff is the "largest controllable source of pollutants," said Lawrence Eichler, a research scientist at the Darrin Fresh Water Institute.

The affiliate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has studied the lake since 1967.

Once pollution is in, it is slow to leave.

It takes eight years for water that enters the 32-mile lake at Lake George village to reach the northern outlet at the LaChute River in Ticonderoga.

Phosphorus feeds more than lush lawns.

It also fuels algae growth, which reduces the lake's legendary clarity and consumes oxygen from water around Diamond Island, the southernmost of five lake-bottom basins.

Each basin is a bathtublike depression at the bottom that keeps water from easily mixing between basins.

Heading north, other basins are around Dome Island, French Point at the mouth of the narrows, Sabbath Day Point and Hague.

Within Caldwell Basin, larger algae blooms are expanding an oxygen-starved zone that inhibits aquatic life, Eichler said.

Measurements taken in 1997, 2001 and 2006 show oxygen levels are continuing to drop.

Leaks from septic systems also foul the lake.

More than one-quarter of water samples taken from storm runoff have coliform bacteria levels that exceed state swimming standards.

In lake water, 7 percent of samples exceeded the standard.

Road salt levels in the lake have more than doubled in 20 years.

If that continues for several decades, water could become risky for people with high blood pressure to drink, Eichler said.

State transportation officials limit salt use, said state Transportation Department spokesman Pete Van Keuren.

Each year, state crews put down between 1,800 and 2,000 tons of salt on routes 9 and 9N, the major highways near the lake, he said.

"It's a balancing act."

"If we use too little, it could be a safety issue," Van Keuren said.

VANITY FAIR

"Bad Blood - The Year of Governing Dangerously"

Many thought Eliot Spitzer was the guy who could clean up Albany—until he went to war with almost every politician, of either party, in New York State.

Interviewing the governor, the author tries to make sense of Spitzer’s troubling, tantrum-filled year.

by David Margolick

January 2008

It was Inauguration Day—Day One, the day everything was supposed to change.

The strains of “Fanfare for the Common Man” dissolved into the chilly Albany air, and Governor Eliot Spitzer, Princeton ’81, Harvard Law School ’84, rose to speak.

“Like Rip van Winkle … New York has slept through much of the past decade while the rest of the world has passed us by,” he declared as his predecessor, George Pataki, squirmed nearby.

But now “the light of a new day shines down on the Empire State.”

(He’d ignored everyone else’s counsel to hold the ceremonies indoors, and the comparatively mild weather, at least for the tundra in January, was surely another sign the gods were with him.)

He promised leadership as ethical and wise as all New York.

He called on his fellow citizens to enter “the arena,” just as his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, had once urged, and as he himself had done.

Then he went Churchillian.

“Lend your sweat, your toil, and your passion to the effort of building One New York,” he implored.

“My fellow New Yorkers, our moment is here."

"Day One is now.”

For all the soaring rhetoric, though, the phrase people would most remember from Eliot Spitzer’s inauguration last New Year’s Day came not from Eliot Spitzer at all.

It came later that day, when James Taylor sang for the new governor and over a thousand guests at an arena—not the kind T.R. had in mind—nearby.

That phrase, combined with Spitzer’s vulgar enhancement of it, would take its place in American political lore, alongside “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and “Ask not what your country can do for you” and “I’m not a crook”—and would become his unofficial motto, though no one would know this for a few more weeks.

“I’m a steamroller, baby,” Taylor sang. “I’m bound to roll all over you.”

In late January, Jim Tedisco, a Republican and the minority leader of the State Assembly, was driving to Albany on the Governor Thomas E. Dewey New York State Thruway—named for the last crime buster before Spitzer to catapult himself to the capital—when his cell phone rang.

It was the governor, asking him to attend a press conference announcing ethics-reform legislation.

Tedisco resisted; he’d just been excluded from some key meetings, and feared he’d merely be a prop.

(Spitzer recalls it was Tedisco, dissatisfied with his treatment by the governor, who initiated the discussion.)

That was when he got what’s now known around Albany as the “Full Spitzer,” or at least the electronic version, minus the bulging veins and spluttering that eyewitnesses get to see.

Spitzer’s voice suddenly changed, Tedisco recalls: it became louder, shriller, more guttural, more menacing.

In three weeks he’d done more for New York State than any governor in history, Spitzer screamed.

He was having enough trouble with the other goddamned legislative leaders, he went on; Tedisco would do what he was told—or he’d be crushed.

As if the point weren’t sufficiently clear, Spitzer put it another way, courtesy of James Taylor.

“Listen,” he shrieked, “I’m a f***ing steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else.”

“I was thinking to myself, My God, is this really the governor?” Tedisco recalls.

“To tell you the truth, I almost drove off the thruway."

"It’s almost like an addiction he has to be confrontational,” Tedisco goes on.

“The only way to help him is to buy a Dale Carnegie course for better communication skills, or 10 counseling lessons on temper control.”

And it was all such a pity, given the high expectations for the man.

“He had everything going for him,” Tedisco says.

“He’s the one guy who could have turned this whole thing around.”

Note the tenses—past and past conditional—because they’re the ones that politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, often employ these days to describe the 48-year-old Spitzer.

Brilliant and energetic, he was as much crowned as elected, swept into office in the biggest landslide in New York gubernatorial history.

A Democrat from New York City, he brought New Yorkers together, Republican and Democratic, upstate and down.

No one seemed better equipped than the former “Sheriff of Wall Street,” arguably the most influential state attorney general in American history, to get dysfunctional Albany, the captive of special interests, unstuck.

Wherever Spitzer went, people wanted to follow, sometimes quite literally.

At six o’clock on inauguration morning, he took a two-mile jog around Albany’s Washington Park, and 200 people got up early enough to accompany him.

But, by any definition, Spitzer has had a rocky maiden year.

As his first anniversary approaches, the State Legislature has largely ground to a halt.

New York’s most powerful Republican, Joseph L. Bruno, now barely speaks to him after Spitzer’s office sicced the state police (and considered siccing the I.R.S.) on him.

Many members of Spitzer’s own party loathe him.

Newspapers, even deadly rivals such as the New York Post and the New York Daily News, have turned against him.

Even his great champion, The New York Times, has soured on him.

The Daily News’s Michael Goodwin, one of his harshest critics, wrote recently that Spitzer “seems incapable of telling the truth, admitting mistakes or working with anybody of either party,” and urged New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to challenge him in 2010.

(In October, a Siena College poll showed that Bloomberg, who strenuously insists he doesn’t even want the job, would beat Spitzer. In November, the same poll found that only one in four voters was prepared to re-elect Spitzer, while nearly half preferred “someone else.”)

Thanks largely to Spitzer and particularly to his short-lived and politically disastrous proposal to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, imperiled state Republicans feel resurrected.

Spitzer’s radioactivity has even spilled over into the presidential race, with Hillary Clinton, through various contradictory statements on the subject, sprinkling isotopes from the license fiasco all over herself before Spitzer withdrew the plan in mid-November.

Many of the usual suspects in all the glowing Spitzer profiles that have appeared over the years have suddenly gone mute.

Ask Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money, Spitzer’s pal from Harvard Law School, about the guy and he is uncharacteristically speechless.

Elite as it was, there turn out to be a few holes in the education of Eliot Spitzer.

It seems he has never learned how to work well with other people.

He has never unlearned how to be a prosecutor.

He did not know Albany.

And, until he bailed out on the license proposal, he could never admit that he was wrong—if not on the merits in that instance, then at least on the execution.

His enemies describe it all with Schadenfreude, and maybe a few I-told-you-sos.

Admirers speak angrily, sadly, almost elegiacally about opportunities lost, maybe irretrievably so.

“It’s all so frustrating, because he actually was right [about things],” says Ester Fuchs, a professor of public affairs and political science at Columbia University and lifelong student of New York politics.

“He just didn’t know how to do it.”

Visit with Spitzer, though, and you sense none of this.

It is as if it were still Inauguration Day, and he’d just gotten off the podium.

You sense the incredible discipline and self-control and intelligence that got him so high so fast, and which, if the gods reappear, will get him out of his predicament.

He is immaculate, formal, upbeat.

Whatever he is feeling, whatever bruises he bears, sit in a closet somewhere: The Picture of Eliot Spitzer.

He even says so:

“I’m not great at the self-reflecting type of answers."

"It’s not my nature.”

As soon as he reached Albany, Spitzer set out to destroy Bruno, first by trying to pick off from Republicans the few seats the Democrats need to take control of the State Senate.

That’s just politics.

So, too, was it just politics when Spitzer’s aides tried to prove that Bruno, who has led the Senate for the last dozen years, was a thief, flying off regularly to partisan political events on the taxpayers’ tab.

What was not just politics, though, was when the governor’s office used the state police to help make his case.

In July, Spitzer’s old nemesis, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, found that, while the governor’s people had broken no laws, the whole thing reeked.

Spitzer quickly and abjectly apologized, something he has rarely had to do.

But Troopergate, as the imbroglio has been called, still hangs over him like a dark cloud.

As Jacob Gershman noted recently in The New York Sun, Wikipedia’s entry for Spitzer now devotes more lines to the scandal than to his glory years as attorney general.

At least as harmful to Spitzer has been his insistence that he had nothing to do with bringing in the state police, and that overzealous underlings were to blame.

Making things worse has been his failure to testify under oath about it, or to hand over e-mails and other documents from his office.

Seven of 10 New Yorkers—about the same percentage that voted for Spitzer—are calling for sworn public testimony.

The state ethics commission is investigating the matter; Spitzer insists he’s prepared to testify before it.

(A State Senate committee is investigating, too, but Spitzer can argue, and justifiably, that it’s a partisan witch hunt, and legal wrangling will likely cripple it.)

Bad Blood from the Get-Go

Even before reaching Albany, Spitzer infuriated legislators of both parties.

You don’t endear yourself to people by calling their world a “cesspool,” then promising to clean it up.

If anything, Democrats, aching for a chief executive of their own after 12 frustrating years under the bland and unremarkable Pataki, are more put out with Spitzer than the Republicans are.

One assemblyman told me that of his 107 Democratic peers 102 were disenchanted with Spitzer.

Ask even friendly colleagues for the names of Spitzer’s champions and long, sheepish silences follow.

Spitzer has disproved John Donne: in Albany these days, he is an island.

Perhaps he should bring back James Taylor—this time to sing “You’ve Got a Friend.”

To give him his due, Spitzer has accomplished some significant things, particularly early on.

He has revamped workers’ compensation to increase benefits for injured workers and reduce employee costs.

He has increased and re-structured education spending so that tax dollars now go more consistently where they’re most needed.

He has lopped some $1 billion off the state’s out-of-control Medicaid tab.

His budget was passed almost on time—a rarity.

He has secured passage of a law for the civil confinement of sexual offenders, expanded health-care coverage for uninsured children, increased legal-aid funding for indigents, and created a $600 million fund for stem-cell research.

Perhaps the negative perceptions, as one of Spitzer’s advisers lamented to me, are a result of New York’s tabloid mentality.

Or maybe they’re due to what he called “Eliot’s famous A.D.D.—that hyperkinetic Eliot Spitzer get-up-at-five-a.m.-and-run” mentality, which makes him more interested in moving forward than in touting what he’s already done.

In any case, Spitzer’s good deeds have been lost in the past few months as Troopergate, along with the license proposal, has slowed down Albany’s glacial governance even further.

Talk of Spitzer as eventual president, once a popular parlor game in New York Democratic circles, has largely evaporated.

A few times in his charmed life—when he got nosed out for the top job on the Horace Mann school newspaper; when he got turned down for college at Harvard; when he lost his first race for attorney general, in 1994; when he fibbed about all the money his real-estate-mogul father had used to bankroll his first two campaigns—Spitzer has faltered, but never like this.

The question now is no longer how many miracles he can perform but whether he can get anything done at all.

Spitzer is at one of those proverbial tipping points, poised somewhere between formidable and vulnerable, redeemable and incorrigible.

His stumbles could furnish him the only ingredients he lacks—humility and empathy and wisdom, for starters—or prove they’re forever beyond his reach.

A great drama will now play out in Albany, one that will determine whether Spitzer is still a comer or what, in another generation, would be called a busted phenom.

Spitzer has met his predicament with a mix of defiance and contrition.

Some days he’s still “Zealiot,” declaring that he’s never backing down, that he’s governing on principles rather than poll numbers, that the voters are getting precisely what he promised—and what they still want.

“You don’t change the world by whispering,” he likes to say.

Other times, he listens conspicuously.

He has belatedly created a kitchen cabinet of wonks, moguls, and sages, including Robert Rubin of Clinton-administration fame.

He’s been making nice with legislative leaders and party powers.

There have been interludes of self-awareness, such as a much-commented-upon speech at the Chautauqua Institution in August, built around theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s warnings about the perils of hubris.

(The speech is predictably hung around his neck whenever he regresses, like the time shortly afterward when he told a Binghamton television reporter pressing him on Troopergate to “get a life, buddy.”)

When we meet, Spitzer takes a third tack: serenity, or at least whatever serenity an intense New Yorker can muster.

Spitzer is not a natural politician; he is a bit awkward, maybe even shy, and speaks too quickly—the legacy, perhaps, of all those high-powered childhood dinner conversations, in which one had to make one’s points quickly or be left ignominiously behind.

The realization is refreshing, even endearing: it means he actually had to work at something.

At times, Spitzer seems almost gentle.

When he explains his famed temper—with passion inevitably comes emotion, sometimes to excess, he says—it’s hard to imagine it’s ever even a problem.

Of course, it’s all spin, but maybe that put-on gentleness is a distant cousin of the more genuine gentleness which, friends insist, resides five layers down, alongside the self-deprecating sense of humor, both aspects of the man that few ever get to see.

Our session is in his New York office, a government-issue room in a utilitarian high-rise on Third Avenue, with none of those Fountainhead views of mighty Manhattan.

The flat water he serves is a politically incorrect import from Maine (Poland Spring) rather than homegrown stuff from Saratoga Springs; then again, Saratoga is in Bruno’s district.

Spitzer rises to none of my bait; there aren’t even any Quarter Spitzers this day.

He is as tightly controlled as his shirt collar, which sits, behind a tie of robin’s-egg blue, snugly against his neck.

(Spitzer is one of those people who look no more informal without a suit jacket than with one.)

I ask him what he thinks of Fredric U. Dicker, the Post reporter who has attacked him relentlessly, and his answer could just as easily be applied to various other antagonists and detractors, such as Andrew Cuomo, CNN’s Lou Dobbs (who lambasted him almost nightly for his licensing scheme), and Rudy Giuliani.

“Let me put it this way,” Spitzer says with a smile.

“I don’t want you to think that I don’t have an answer to the question, but I also think you’ll understand that I’m probably clever enough not to give it to you."

"Plus, I’d diminish the value of my memoirs.”

(Characteristically, he’s not keeping a journal.)

His first year, he insists, went pretty much as expected; one could have foreseen that the tectonic changes he seeks “would evoke enormous pushback.”

He knew things would be difficult.

And they are.

Though he doesn’t say so himself, Spitzer clearly feels that the Times has forsaken him, leaving him to be eviscerated by the Post’s Dicker.

Day after day, in dribs and drabs of 347 or 565 or 478 words on the Post’s second page, the paper’s longtime Albany-bureau chief has gone after him, most notably with the first Troopergate story, on July 5.

What drives him?

Spitzer aides offer many theories: Spitzer hadn’t paid him proper homage; he’s doing a Republican newspaper’s bidding; he’s miffed that Spitzer’s office leaked word about Joe Bruno’s state-funded helicopter rides to the Albany Times Union rather than to him.

More likely, it’s simply that the Spitzer saga is just so damned juicy.

Few stories beat those of Mr. Clean doing dirty tricks or Mr. Competent screwing up.

Or of a role reversal: Utica and Syracuse and Binghamton taking down Manhattan (the Upper East Side overlooking the park, at that), Skidmore College knocking off Harvard Law School.

The Soul of an Old Machine

Skidmore is where Bruno, a handsome and precisely coiffed man of 78, more elegant than you’d expect a state senator to be, went to school, after a hardscrabble boyhood by the boxcars in Glens Falls, between Saratoga Springs and Lake George.

Even without the chopper rides and police escorts, an existential clash between him and Spitzer was inevitable and, indeed, already under way.

Unlike his predecessors, who tolerated the informal power sharing between the parties—each side controls one house in the Legislature—Spitzer is determined to take the State Senate from the Republicans, for the first time in four decades.

He is but two seats away.

Beneath the bravado and rough, roguish charm, Bruno was, at least until the past few months, a desperate man.

Already under fire as the F.B.I. examines his business dealings, he is like Boss Jim Gettys, the cynical old pol in Citizen Kane whom Charles Foster Kane tries to take down, but who manages to take down Kane first—candidate Kane caught in love nest.

“I’m fighting for my life,” Gettys explains to the betrayed Mrs. Kane.

“Not just my political life."

"My life.”

By attempting to rescue the Senate Democrats from political irrelevancy, Spitzer has turned them into the closest approximation of allies, although their loyalty, like every other Democrat’s in Albany, has been tested over the past year.

“He’s not playing the go-along-get-along protection game that’s been going on for decades,” says Eric Schneiderman, a state senator from New York City.

“And he’s moved a smart, progressive agenda that hopefully will serve as a model for the country."

"A lot of Democrats have been disappointed or angry or just plain puzzled at some of the things Eliot has done, but we still believe he very much wants to do the right thing.”

At first, says Bruno, he actually liked Spitzer.

He liked his style: direct and straightforward.

He liked the Christmas card he got from him every year—showing Eliot and Silda Spitzer and their three lovely teenage daughters—and the bottle of jam, made at their country home in Columbia County, an hour south of Albany.

He liked Spitzer’s pro-business, middle-of-the-road politics.

(Spitzer is no woolly liberal; he supports the death penalty, for instance.)

According to Bruno, Spitzer told him that his problems as governor would be with Sheldon Silver, the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, and not with him.

(Spitzer disputes this, clarifying he anticipated he would have problems with the system and not with a particular person.)

Most important, Bruno says, he thought they had a deal: he’d let Spitzer be the best chief executive New York ever had, and Spitzer would let Bruno keep his Senate majority.

Together, they’d run New York.

Then, in what Bruno calls a “sneak attack,” Spitzer began campaigning for Democratic senatorial candidates in the most vulnerable Republican districts prior to the 2006 election.

(There never were any such deals, Spitzer counters, nor could there have been, given his obligations as leader of the state Democratic Party and his commitment to clean Albany up.)

When Bruno called to complain, he says, Spitzer grew angry and abusive.

“I was absolutely astounded,” says Bruno.

“He lost it.”

A honeymoon followed the inauguration, but ended in about the time it takes to drive from Albany to Niagara Falls.

With various blandishments, including job offers—“bribes,” Bruno calls them—Spitzer tried to entice Republican senators from Democratic-leaning districts into relinquishing their seats.

Spitzer pushed for campaign-finance reform, which Bruno says gives an unfair advantage to rich, self-funding candidates like Spitzer himself.

He also moved to cut Medicaid costs; the health-care workers’ union happens to be one of Bruno’s biggest backers.

A rhetorical war between them broke out.

Bruno called Spitzer “an overgrown, rich spoiled brat.”

Spitzer reportedly called Bruno “an old, senile piece of "expletive deleted".”

And the Full Spitzers followed.

In one, says Bruno, Spitzer “did everything but hit his head against the wall and roll around the floor.”

In another, “I thought he was going to have a damned stroke.”

Over the phone once, Bruno says, Spitzer shouted at him, “I will knock you down, and when I knock you down, I will knock you out, and you will never get up."

"You will never recover.”

“I told him to go f*** himself, in plain English,” Bruno recalls.

He also urged Spitzer to enroll in “chief executives’ school.”

“You’ve got to go and learn how to be a governor,” he says he told him.

Several times while discussing Spitzer, Bruno twirled either his index finger or a bottle of Saratoga water by his head—as if to suggest Spitzer is nuts.

Threatening to knock out a former army boxing champion, even one 30 years his senior, is odd.

So, too, for that matter, is threatening to roll over Tedisco, who once played basketball against Pat Riley and still holds a number of scoring records at his college.

Spitzer is just the opposite of a bully: the bigger or tougher someone is, the more tempted he is to go after him.

Many say it all goes back to Spitzer’s father; things might have been very different, they theorize, if only old Bernard Spitzer had let young Eliot beat him once or twice at Monopoly.

Lou Dobbs and Chuck Schumer, U.S. senator from New York, and Joe Bruno may all have called him a spoiled brat, but things have not been that easy for Spitzer.

One’s angst is no less real for being rarefied.

As all those glowing profiles detail, he grew up in an intellectual cauldron.

His father, a self-made real-estate tycoon—estimated worth: $500 million—who built luxury high-rises throughout Manhattan, was demanding; meals chez Spitzer, where Eliot and his two older siblings (Daniel, now a brain surgeon, and Emily, a lawyer) were assigned topics to discuss, sound as brutalizing as they were nourishing.

They left Eliot intellectually agile, hypercompetitive, always with something to prove.

A classmate recalls that when, at 12, Spitzer enrolled in the prestigious Horace Mann School, in the Bronx, his Samsonite briefcase standing out among the backpacks, he set out to ascertain how many of the boys there were smarter than he.

(By his count, there were four.)

Then it was on to Princeton, where Spitzer was president of the student body.

He spent one summer digging ditches and cleaning sewage in the South, then picking tomatoes in upstate New York, just to see how the other half lived.

At Harvard Law School he made the Law Review but starred mostly as a research assistant for celebrity lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz, who was then appealing the conviction of Claus von Bülow.

(Felicity Huffman played Spitzer in the film Reversal of Fortune. Hey, it’s Hollywood.)

He also met his wife, a North Carolinian named Silda Wall.

She is at least as intelligent as and considerably more diplomatic than he.

(I ask a classmate, who still marvels that he landed her, what she did for him. “She made him smile,” he replies.)

He spent one year clerking for a federal judge in New York, then another at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of New York’s most prestigious and politically connected corporate firms.

For six years after that, he tried cases in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Then he returned to private practice at an even more high-powered firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

A partnership there, or maybe a sinecure in his father’s business, beckoned.

But to everyone’s surprise—his wife’s included—he decided to run in the Democratic primary for state attorney general.

It was 1994, and he was 35 years old.

Using as collateral several apartments his father had given him, he took out loans totaling some $4 million to finance his campaign.

Advising him was an old family friend, Dick Morris, then Bill Clinton’s campaign guru, too; Morris recommended lots of commercials, which is where the money went.

Caught with a toe-sucking call girl in a Washington hotel room, Morris soon fell from grace, and from Spitzer’s public orbit; that he subsequently consulted for right-wingers like Jesse Helms, then became one of Connecticut’s most egregious tax scofflaws, assured that Spitzer would keep his distance from him.

Some nonetheless speculate that the two remain in touch; Roger Stone, the notorious Republican consultant whom Bruno brought in last May to neutralize Spitzer, says Morris commended Niebuhr’s anti-hubris essay to Spitzer a decade or more ago.

(“Isn’t this the greatest defense for hubris you’ve ever seen?” Morris exclaimed, according to Stone. “Nixon should have used that!”)

Spitzer denies that Morris gave him the essay.

“I haven’t spoken to Dick in … two years, maybe?” he says.

“A long time.”

Morris, who reportedly collected around $100,000 for each of Spitzer’s first two campaigns, isn’t talking.

Spitzer finished fourth in a field of four, having paid $33 a vote, but he impressed many.

“His jaw actually juts,” the Times marveled.

Everyone saw the campaign as a well-oiled dry run, and for the next four years—from the convenient perch of a law partnership with his former boss and mentor, a Manhattan lawyer named Lloyd Constantine—he drove around the state, making contacts, spreading largesse.

He won the Democratic primary in 1998.

But after confessing that, contrary to his public statements and even sworn testimony, his old man really had funded both his races, he just barely won.

An Attorney General at War

Despite his thin margin of victory, Spitzer compiled a dazzling record.

He went after great financial institutions—huge firms, mutual funds, insurance companies, the New York Stock Exchange itself.

His M.O. became familiar: find fraudulent or deceitful practices; confront wrongdoers; publicize (or leak) the cases against them and thereby wreak havoc with their stock prices; work out massive settlements that would frighten other wrongdoers into ponying up as well.

Full Spitzers, filled with profanity, abuse, fury, and grandiosity—“I’m so f***ing rich, they can’t take me down,” he told the target of one tirade, throwing in for good measure that he’d done more for poor people than anyone in the history of the state—were often in the mix.

Always, the object wasn’t perp walks or jail time—in this respect, he parted ways with his political doppelgänger Giuliani—but to reform entire industries.

There were massive environmental cases, too; in one, out-of-state power companies pouring pollutants into New York were brought to heel.

Someone who once worked closely with Spitzer told me that to understand him properly you have to realize that on some subconscious level he feels he is “slumming.”

People of his pedigree normally don’t seek elective office, much less state elective office.

They flock to the private sector, where they amass money and power and prestige.

Government service is unremunerative and grubby; if they go for it, it’s only when people come to them, to be federal judges or Brahmin diplomats à la Cyrus Vance.

But Spitzer entered the arena, just as Theodore Roosevelt commanded.

(T.R.’s picture still hangs in his office.)

With evangelical fervor, he persuaded other superstars (at least on paper: he has always been dazzled by credentials) to slum with him.

As his marriage proved, he likes having smart people around, though often it turns into an intense competition.

“You couldn’t have a discussion without him screaming,” one old associate recalls.

“He’d talk really fast, agitated, spewing things at you, personal things."

"Even when you disagree on substance, it always becomes personal."

"Somehow he was belittling everything I was, not just what I believed.”

In this instance Congressman Charles Rangel’s famous—and, in context, unflattering—description of Spitzer as “the world’s smartest man” rang completely true: being a state politician “makes him want to show everyone instantaneously, notwithstanding those two chips on his shoulder, that he’s a brilliant, brilliant guy.”

The competitiveness colored his views of other politicians.

He regarded the newly elected Bloomberg, for instance, as a fluke, winning only because of 9/11.

Sure, Spitzer noted, a freshly minted senator from Illinois named Barack Obama had once been president of the Harvard Law Review, but that didn’t prove he was brilliant, only that he was popular.

And then there was Rudy.

Spitzer grew miffed when the then mayor never took his calls.

Only in 2002 did Giuliani initiate a conversation, urging Spitzer to go easy on Merrill Lynch, one of Spitzer’s most celebrated prosecutorial targets and a new Giuliani client; even then, Giuliani was playing the 9/11 card, and Spitzer found it disgusting.

The distaste was mutual: according to The Weekly Standard, Giuliani once said that after spending time with Spitzer he wanted to take a shower.

(“I’d be curious to know when he said that, because the number of times I’ve actually met [Giuliani] could be counted on two or three fingers,” Spitzer says.)

Attorney General Spitzer did not take on fellow politicians, brilliant or otherwise, or the real-estate industry, perhaps also for obvious reasons.

He showed little interest in the more prosaic work of the office.

The high-profile, high-visibility cases invigorated him most, and he courted, and catered to, and followed assiduously, the press.

Mornings, his first task was to read the clips.

Nothing pleased him more than landing on A1 of The New York Times, preferably above the fold.

“He wants to do a good job,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a New York political consultant who worked on Spitzer’s first two campaigns.

“But ultimately what he really gives a **** about is whether Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and The New York Times love him, because, in the back of his brain, if they don’t love him, he’s nobody.”

There was plenty of adoration on the newsstands.

“Make no mistake: Spitzer is the Democratic Party’s future,” Sridhar Pappu wrote in The Atlantic.

Only the conservative business press, which saw him as an anti-capitalist menace and martinet, dissented.

The “Lord High New York Executioner,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page called him.

With the New York Republican Party in shambles, Spitzer was the governor-in-waiting, particularly once his arch-rival, Senator Schumer, opted not to run.

But was Albany a mere way station?

Already, Spitzer’s father, a Jewish Joe Kennedy if ever there was one, was fantasizing about nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Once, he was asked if his son would like to be president.

“It’s his very nature,” he replied.

Spitzer began his governorship aggressively, signing five executive orders—among them, one to prevent state employees from using government property for themselves.

But some felt he squandered the long lead time to his inevitable victory, making his promises of sweeping change from Day One unrealistic, if not reckless.

So, too, did a number of mediocre appointments, largely of cronies from his old job.

“Almost Rudy-esque” was how one political person described it, referring to Giuliani’s well-known penchant for taking a posse of the same old sycophants with him wherever he goes.

“Clearly things had gone to his head, and he felt no need to really actively recruit fresh thinking and new talent,” says someone who watched it all.

Then again, getting superstars to move to Albany—“Albania,” as New Yorkers consigned there like to call the capital, three hours to the north of Manhattan—isn’t easy.

Legislators already put off by someone who campaigned against the “cesspool” in which they all worked were further irked when he bypassed them for critical appointments, as well as by his condescending vibes.

“He felt he could walk on water,” one prominent assemblyman gripes.

Things got worse when Spitzer unsuccessfully tried to get the State Assembly to fill the vacant post of comptroller with his own choice, then denounced those who’d bucked him in picking one of their own.

“Friendships play a role in politics."

"Hillary Clinton is my friend."

"Chuck Schumer is my friend."

"Eliot Spitzer is not my friend,” says Democratic assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell.

“I don’t know who Eliot’s friends are."

"He’s not making friends."

"He seems to think that because it’s right it should happen."

"That’s true."

"But that’s not how governing works.”

Bruno even claims that many Democrats have thanked him privately for taking Spitzer on.

Blowing gaskets and hurling threats doesn’t work as well on fellow politicians as it does on corporate executives, a consultant for another major politician observes.

“If you’re a C.E.O. at a company and I call and I say, ‘I’m going to f*** you, I’m going to destroy you, I’m going to indict your company,’ and I sound totally crazy, you hang up the phone, you go see your chairman of the board, and you say, ‘This guy is crazy, we need to settle,’ because you’re given no option,” he explains.

“If you’re a state legislator and you get the same thing, you hang up the phone, you call the Albany Times Union, and you say, ‘This guy is crazy,’ because you don’t give a ****.”

Of Choppers and Coppers

On January 31, Dicker broke the steamroller story.

(“F—-ing steamroller” is how the Post rendered it. The Times called it “a [expletive] steamroller.”)

It was, people around Spitzer concede, his most egregious rhetorical blunder.

Say “Spitzer” to focus groups these days and it’s “steamroller,” not “Wall Street” or “money” or “fighting the big guys,” that comes to mind.

And it couldn’t be just “steamroller,” but “f***ing steamroller,” giving it a crude, salacious edge.

Spitzer’s communications director, Darren Dopp, said at the time that the story had been “embellished.”

But Constantine, now a senior adviser to Spitzer, who was with him when he said it, insists that the phrase had simply stuck in Spitzer’s mind from James Taylor’s performance, and that Spitzer was smiling when he said it.

“He was John Wayne,” he says.

“It was ironic, it was partially humorous.”

That’s not how it came across to Tedisco or, frankly, to anyone else.

“What sort of an idiot, even if he is a f***ing steamroller, says he’s a f***ing steamroller?” one Democratic assemblyman asks indignantly.

Spitzer himself says he has “only the foggiest” recollection of the exchange.

In May, concerned for his perilous Senate majority and eager to make Spitzer an electoral liability to Democratic state-senatorial candidates in any way he could, Bruno brought on Roger Stone, whom The Weekly Standard recently described as a “political operative, Nixon-era dirty trickster, professional lord of mischief.”

It was Stone who helped stage the controversial “Brooks Brothers Riot” of 2000, in which well-dressed protesters descended upon Miami and helped shut down the recount.

(Like Dick Morris, with whom he once worked, Stone had his brush with scandal: ads featuring photographs of him and his wife seeking sexual partners once appeared in a swingers’ magazine.)

Stone’s monthly fee was $20,000—roughly the cost of three round-trip rides on the state helicopter from the helipad at the Albany exit off the thruway to West 30th Street in Manhattan, the route Bruno so often took.

Under the rules, though, such trips were kosher as long as they included even the merest whiff of official state business.

Bruno clearly knew this, and always covered himself.

Still, when James Odato of the Times Union asked Darren Dopp for information about Bruno’s trips to New York for Republican fund-raisers, Dopp apparently saw a chance to embarrass the majority leader.

A Spitzer loyalist who’d come with him from the attorney general’s office, Dopp began collecting materials on Bruno’s trips, past, present, and future, not just airborne but also on the ground, when the state police, citing death threats Bruno said he had received, provided one of those flashing-lights escorts.

Pitching in were William Howard, Spitzer’s liaison to the police, and Preston Felton, the acting police superintendent.

Top senior Spitzer aides depict the whole operation as amateurish—“a bungling Keystone Kops communications exercise,” one puts it—done by staffers overeager to please the boss.

Dopp, they say, felt marginalized in the new administration.

Howard was a holdover from Pataki, also intent on earning his spurs.

And Felton wanted to remove the “acting” from his title.

In fact, when Dopp proposed a press release detailing Bruno’s dubious travels, Spitzer’s chief of staff, Rich Baum, and chief counsel, David Nocenti, rejected the idea: they knew Bruno had met the travel regulations’ porous requirements.

Spitzer apparently knew enough about the scheme to agree with them.

In late June, Dopp told Odato about the travel documents he’d collected, and Odato got them through a Freedom of Information Law (foil) filing.

On July 1 he reported on the front page of the Albany Times Union that, three times in May, Bruno had used taxpayer-funded aircraft and ground transportation to attend political events in New York City.

(Playing dumb for the story, Dopp pledged publicly to “review this matter carefully.”)

Three measly flights to New York: to Dicker, who’d covered infinitely greater abuses by other politicians, the story sounded orchestrated.

“Bruno Set-Up,” he slugged his own piece for the next day.

Despite its private conviction that Bruno had done nothing illegal, the Spitzer administration quickly asked Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate.

It was a risky move, given Spitzer and Cuomo’s troubled history.

By all accounts, they do not like each other.

Spitzer refused to endorse Cuomo in his bid for governor in 2002.

When Cuomo ran to succeed him as attorney general four years later, Spitzer privately preferred Cuomo’s rival, Mark Green, in the Democratic primary, believing that he posed much less of a long-term threat than a Cuomo resurrected from his disastrous gubernatorial race.

Moreover, Spitzer knew that despite their differing party affiliations Bruno and Cuomo are friendly; Bruno has often spoken, almost wistfully, about what a good governor Cuomo would make.

(“They are still all Italians,” Stone observes. “Note how the I-ties all bind and the Jews fight: Schumer-hates-Spitzer-hates-Silver-hates-Bloomberg.”)

One assemblyman likened Spitzer and Cuomo to two ax murderers vying to lop off the other one’s head first.

On July 5—no sense wasting a great story over the Fourth—Dicker broke word of the plot.

Spitzer and his aides, he wrote, had “targeted” Bruno through an “unprecedented state police surveillance program.”

In a television interview, Bruno denounced Spitzer as a “Third World dictator” and his aides as “hoodlums” and “thugs.”

He, too, asked Cuomo to investigate.

“What he’s trying to do to me he’s capable of doing to anyone,” Bruno tells me.

“He saw Bruno as the only guy standing in his way, who he couldn’t roll over, who he couldn’t hoodwink, that he couldn’t just dismiss."

"So he had to get rid of me.”

Noting Spitzer’s sharp elbows and what the British like to call his control-freakery, even many Democrats say it’s inconceivable Spitzer did not know about what Dopp and the others were up to.

Henry Stern, the former New York City parks commissioner, who has chronicled Troopergate in his political newsletter, called that very notion “cockamamie.”

“Either he consented to the scheme or he concocted it,” he says.

“That he was ignorant is beyond reason.”

But Constantine says ignorant is exactly what Spitzer was.

“If Eliot had known about it, he would have nixed it,” he says.

“And to the very, very limited degree he learned about something, he nixed it.”

For the next two weeks, Spitzer maintained that his staff had simply responded to a foil request, and that the state police had followed its standard procedures.

Only on July 19, he has said, did he learn otherwise.

In the meantime, Cuomo’s investigators were doing their work, interviewing, among others, Felton and Howard.

Spitzer has said his office “fully cooperated” with Cuomo.

In fact, it refused to let his investigators interview Dopp and Baum, having them submit short, unilluminating affidavits instead.

It was, some in Spitzer’s circle complain, the reflexive reaction from the hyper-cautious, politically tone-deaf lawyers with whom Spitzer had surrounded himself.

When word leaked—apparently from Cuomo’s camp—that the Spitzer folks had not been as forthcoming as the governor had claimed, there arose the telltale scent of a cover-up.

An Old Rival Weighs In

On July 23—a Monday, political observers noted, giving the “Eliot Mess” story a whole newspaper week to reverberate—Cuomo released his report.

Spitzer’s office had broken no laws, it concluded, but it had acted improperly, thrusting the state police precisely where it did not belong: “squarely in the middle of politics.”

It recommended that the governor conduct a “policy and personnel review” within his office.

As for Bruno, it gave him a pass.

Strictly as a matter of Realpolitik, Cuomo pulled it all off masterfully: exonerating Spitzer of anything criminal, but implicating him in sleaze.

“Andrew Cuomo has handled himself beautifully, superbly—exactly the way he should,” says former New York City mayor Ed Koch admiringly.

What must Cuomo have thought, I ask him, when his old rival landed in such hot water?

Koch looks skyward and holds his hands in prayer.

“In his heart of hearts, he is saying to himself, ‘Thank you, God,’ ” Koch replies.

(Cuomo not surprisingly declined comment.)

Spitzer immediately apologized for what he called his staff’s “clear lapses in judgment.”

He suspended Dopp indefinitely without pay, throwing what was already an ineffectual P.R. team further off stride, and reassigned Howard to a job outside of the governor’s office.

Without cultivating the relations most politicians enjoy, Spitzer had few defenders.

Some sympathizers faulted him for caving: as Alan Chartock, a Spitzer supporter who hosts a popular public-radio program in Albany, puts it, going after Joe Bruno was exactly why people sent Spitzer there in the first place.

People also wondered why Spitzer had even landed in such a mess; there were so many other, less byzantine ways to go after Bruno.

Besides, what was the great rush?

The most vulnerable Republican state senators are mostly old men.

As is Joe Bruno.

The solution was as much actuarial as political.

To sense Spitzer’s ordeal as the story unfolded, go to YouTube and watch his press conference of July 26, in which Dicker shouts at him, cuts him off, chastises him for his perceived evasiveness.

Spitzer bites his tongue, smiles wanly, tries to keep his temper in check.

Two questions Dicker never did ask Eliot Spitzer that day, Silda Spitzer already had, or so Spitzer told the Times: Why had he even gotten into this line of work?

Would the family business really have been so bad?

Spitzer conceded that the episode had undone much of what he had tried to do.

His advisers tried to get him back on track, beginning with a picnic he was holding that weekend at his country house for 200 friends and donors.

“Do me a favor,” one told him in advance.

“There will be a lot of people there who you previously thought of as blowhards."

"Listen to them."

"Because somewhere in all their blowhardness, there’s probably a nugget of advice that might be helpful to you.”

Somehow, Spitzer had morphed from an ethical crusader into a dissembler, and Bruno from a chiseler to a victim.

Bruno’s campaign was ingenious in its demonic brazenness, akin to the way in which a military malingerer like George W. Bush scored points off of John Kerry’s record in Vietnam.

“Unbelievably well done by them,” one Spitzer adviser concedes.

“They just have such balls.”

A lot of the credit might have gone to Stone, but he was soon gone, after someone sounding suspiciously like him left a bizarre message on Bernard Spitzer’s office phone, warning him he’d soon be subpoenaed about his campaign loans to his son.

“And there’s not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-"expletive deleted" son can do about it,” the message stated.

“Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you!"

"You will be forced to tell the truth, and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will … be … known … to all.”

Investigators traced the call to Stone’s apartment at 40 Central Park South.

“I was a little surprised at the crassness and, frankly, the stupidity of it all,” Spitzer says.

Stone says the voice belongs to an impostor, part of a nefarious plot to get him off the Spitzer case.

Sure enough, Bruno promptly canned him—at least officially.

“Do you think he’s really gone?” one Spitzer insider asks me, telegraphing the suspicion that he’s not.

Dopp, Baum, and Spitzer all did talk, albeit not under oath, to investigators from the office of Albany district attorney P. David Soares.

Soares’s September 21 report went easier on Spitzer, concluding that, even if his people had set out to smear Bruno, no one did anything illegal or, it seems, untoward: since the state police kept the records of Bruno’s travels, that would logically be the place to turn for them.

Spitzer’s critics dismissed it as a whitewash from a Democratic prosecutor.

A Senate committee, really an arm of Bruno, Inc., is also investigating, and has asked to see Baum’s and Dopp’s e-mails.

Spitzer’s office is fighting the request.

It would be ironic indeed if e-mail, the basis of so many of Spitzer’s Wall Street stings, stung him.

His advisers insist there’s nothing from Spitzer to Dopp directing him to implement “Operation Track Bruno,” or some such thing.

Dopp is now ensconced with a high-powered Albany lobbyist and disinclined to dish to anyone about Spitzer, including to me, but that could change if he faces a perjury rap for possible testimony contradictions, let alone jail time.

In the end, says Constantine, Troopergate was piddling stuff.

“It’s rogues, but it’s not rogues throwing Molotov cocktails,” he says.

“These are spitballs.”

What it really shows, he argues, is the extraordinarily high standard to which Spitzer has been held: for their own reasons, supporters and detractors alike demand perfection from him.

“For you or me, we’d have to commit a felony,” he says.

“For him, it’s just wiping his nose on his sleeve.”

In September, possibly to distract people from Troopergate, possibly to please his Hispanic constituency, Spitzer announced plans to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

It made sense, promising to increase highway safety, reduce insurance premiums, and help keep tabs on a hidden population.

But it was introduced with characteristic ham-handedness, with virtually no consultation with political leaders.

Spitzer stepped into a firestorm, with critics, Lou Dobbs being the most vocal, charging that the plan gave cover to terrorists.

Spitzer made things worse by suggesting that his opponents were all rabid right-wingers.

In fact, some prominent Democrats, and even some county clerks (the ones who would actually process the licenses), were among them.

So was Bloomberg, who has generally been sympathetic to Spitzer (“teething problems,” he’s called his difficulties).

When Bloomberg voiced reservations about the proposal, Spitzer promptly called him “wrong at every level—dead wrong, factually wrong, legally wrong, morally wrong, ethically wrong.”

Such overheated rhetoric, and against an ally, has convinced some that Spitzer just can’t turn it off.

When, in late October, Spitzer backed off from some elements of the licensing scheme, he only created new problems for himself.

Once more, he failed to consult beforehand, blindsiding colleagues who had stuck their necks out to support the plan.

Even his beloved Times derided him as a “rookie” and accused him of caving in.

The debacle heartened Republicans; they hoped that, with a man they saw as having questionable judgment, as well as ethics, running their state, New York voters would come to think divided government isn’t so bad after all.

All those considerations undoubtedly led Spitzer on November 14 to chuck the proposal altogether.

Predictably, the decision brought howls of betrayal from those favoring the measure and chortles from his critics.

But in attempting to move on rather than digging in his heels, Spitzer showed a kind of flexibility, and insight, that even some sympathizers feared he simply didn’t have.

Maybe, they hoped, he could start afresh: Day 318 could be the new Day One.

State Assembly leader Sheldon Silver, with whom Spitzer has had a complicated and awkward relationship, sounds guardedly optimistic about the governor’s prospects.

“I really do think he’s learning, and most importantly his staff is learning,” he says.

He can afford to be magnanimous: with all of Spitzer’s difficulties, the Speaker not only has tightened his own hold on the job (there were rumors early on that Spitzer fancied replacing him with someone more pliable) but may well have regained his position as New York’s most powerful Democrat.

Even if Spitzer continues to stumble, he can’t be beaten without a good opponent.

Bloomberg insists he’s not interested, and Cuomo will certainly hang back unless something catastrophic happens.

Meanwhile, acts of God or the F.B.I. or the electorate could intervene—Joe Bruno could get indicted.

The Democrats could win back the State Senate (something that may be less likely with Giuliani atop the Republican ticket).

Hillary Clinton could be elected president, buoying Democrats everywhere.

Or something disastrous could happen, affording Spitzer a chance to shine.

Look at what 9/11 did for Rudy.

Perhaps it won’t be necessary.

Spitzer has recently brought in new, more experienced aides.

He’s turning more to seasoned advisers such as Constantine and, as the license debacle reveals, shows signs of listening.

With three more years to go, he has the calendar on his side, and he still has the skills that got him to Albany:

“He is a crafty-ass politician,” one adviser notes.

“The ability to get out of a jam is something that people forget about the guy.”

To Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, Spitzer is like George Foreman in the eighth round of his legendary 1974 fight against Muhammad Ali: on the canvas, for the first time in a career of professional perfection, in stunned disbelief.

Bu

"Newest adviser seeks to calm Spitzer's wake - Long-time lobbyist is expected to help smooth things over after rough first year for governor"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Monday, December 3, 2007

ALBANY -- If he had his way, Bruce Gyory would be reading and writing about the political history of New York.

Instead, he has a chance to help shape it.

The Bethlehem man ended his 24-year career as a lobbyist last month to join Gov. Eliot Spitzer's inner circle.

As a senior adviser being paid $168,000 a year, it will be Gyory's mission to help repair Spitzer's frayed relationships with other state leaders and rebuild the once-popular governor's image.

"It's very rare that effective governors start off at their strongest," Gyory said in a windowless converted conference room set up as his office on the second floor of the Capitol.

"The stronger governors, the more effective governors, wind up getting stronger as they go along."

Popular among Republicans and Democrats alike, Gyory doesn't pretend to be a savior.

A self-taught political scholar with amazing recall for historical figures, speeches, dates and events as well as the minutiae of elections, he believes Spitzer will end up as one of New York's finest governors.

He isn't worried about Spitzer's early friction and conflict.

"If you're a go-along, get-along governor, not willing to rock the boat, you can have a longer honeymoon," he said.

The upbeat Gyory is unlike most people everybody around the first-term governor.

A student of the Scriptures and lector at his Catholic church, the bookish, bespectacled father of three has experienced tough times.

A change in administration 24 years ago cost him his first government job and set the stage for his transformation into an Albany lobbyist.

"Bruce has got a lot of friends in the Legislature," said Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco, a Schenectady Republican who is among Spitzer's sharpest critics.

"He's always been a straight shooter and a guy you could always trust."

Gyory is familiar with the shifting nature of state government.

He went through that back in 1983 when incoming Gov. Mario M. Cuomo ended Gyory's first foray into government service.

He had just served Gov. Hugh Carey as an appointments office staffer for most of the Democrat's last term.

But Cuomo let him go just two weeks into the governor's first term because of political considerations, said Gyory, who said he was mistakenly linked to a bloc of the Liberal Party that was believed to be less supportive of Cuomo.

At the time, Gyory was living in a one-bedroom Guilderland apartment with a young bride and a baby daughter.

His wife, Amy, a teacher, lost her job during her pregnancy leave and was also out of work.

He doesn't blame those difficult times on anyone but instead looks back on the lessons he learned from five months without a job.

"It was a character-building thing," the 53-year-old said.

As they discussed their future over the kitchen table in their Regency Park Apartments unit behind the 20 Mall, Amy Gyory urged her husband to consider lobbying.

In May 1983, he began his job in that field with Hinman Straub.

He became an expert at the pharmaceutical industry, which he represented in the Capitol with a remarkable zeal, lawmakers say.

He also became an in-house political guru able to give clients presentations akin to professorial lectures.

He shared written theses with politicians and friends, including Spitzer.

With such titles as "The Crouching Future of New York State Politics -- What the 2002 General Election Returns Reveal," the memos suggested a most uncommon lobbyist.

"I always thought of him as much more than a lobbyist," said Sen. Neil Breslin, D-Bethlehem.

"He has great policy instincts."

Indeed, his current charge is to help deliver Spitzer's agenda to the public and the Legislature.

He is also expected to give advice.

"The governor is actually driving the policies put forward," Gyory said.

"My job: Help roll out and explain those policies."

Key members of the Legislature say they hope Gyory will steer Spitzer clear of some of the shoals that have slowed progress during the past 10 months.

"This is not to knock the staff the governor has around him, but I don't think there's a guy with more understanding for the state Legislature and how it works," Tedisco said.

Hiring Gyory, Tedisco said, is the best thing Spitzer has done in a while.

But, like several lawmakers interviewed, he said Gyory's voice is only as good as the governor's willingness to listen.

Spitzer seems to highly value his new hire.

"He has a sense of history, both in the traditional sense going back over the centuries, and also in the more limited sense of Albany over the last 10 or 15 years," the governor said.

"He can help frame what we do and how we do it."

"He can call upon relationships ... help us navigate."

Perhaps his biggest booster in the administration is Lt. Gov. David Paterson, who says Gyory has a long-range and accurate view.

He can also an important message in a friendly manner.

He tells a story about the time the two men were English students at Columbia University in the early 1970s.

A younger Gyory advised a cocky Paterson to get rid of the chip on his shoulder.

"This guy comes to me and says: 'We appreciate how bright you are; no doubt.'"

"'I think that the reason you're having a problem, you're not appreciating how bright we are, too.'"

"'We all got into Columbia,' " Paterson recalled.

"He said, 'Twenty years from now we'll be working together.' "

Gyory's style is different from that of most lobbyists.

Armed with well-developed arguments, he's tended to build his support or opposition to legislation from the ground up, working with rank-and-file lawmakers instead of taking his pitches directly to committee leaders.

"I enjoyed the members," he said.

"I think what is overlooked in the reportage is the more subtle roles of the conferences in driving policy."

"It's always looked like three men in a room, but in reality it was all done at 20 or 30 tables."

Ed Wasserman, former chief counsel for the Senate Democrats and now a lobbyist himself, said Gyory stood out from the pack.

He calls him respectful and an excellent listener.

"He would provide intricate answers to issues, not a surface-y kind of guy; very deep, very substantive person."

"I put Bruce right at the top of the list in terms of depth of knowledge on issues."

A Bronx native, he grew up in a political household active in liberal issues.

His father, Nick, was president of the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union.

The son almost always wears a cap to work as a tribute to his 92-year-old dad.

"As I got older things got a little sparse on top and it helps," he added.

Besides being well-read on politics, Gyory is a New York Yankees fan.

A fanatic New York Giants rooter, Gyory can recite statistics on quarterback Y.A. Tittle as readily as passages from the speeches of Adlai Stevenson.

And his dream job, he says, would be to play center field for the Yankees.

But advising Spitzer carries its own rewards because the governor is battling perception problems, not fundamental leadership flaws, he says.

"Those perceptions are relatively easily handled," he said.

"I'm going to be the guy with the cap, with the knitting needles and a mirror, to knit together the quilt and more accurately reflect ... the guy I know over the years is a polite guy, a funny guy."

James M. Odato can be reached at 454-5083 or by e-mail at jodato@timesunion.com.

"DiNapoli, Thompson to Lead Securities Fraud Suit - New York State and City Comptrollers to represent investors in class action against Countrywide"

New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli today announced his appointment as one of the lead plaintiffs in a consolidated class action lawsuit filed against Countrywide Financial Corporation.

The announcement follows the November 28 ruling by Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer, of the United States District Court, Central District of California, naming both DiNapoli and New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson as lead plaintiffs.

“I’m pleased with the court’s decision."

"As two of the nation’s largest institutional investors, the State and City pension funds are in the best position to represent the interests of class members,” said DiNapoli who serves as sole trustee of New York’s $154.5 billion Common Retirement Fund (CRF).

“Public corporations need to be held to the highest standards when it comes to transparency and disclosure of risks to their businesses."

"We believe that unlawful actions and omissions by Countrywide deprived investors of the information needed to make prudent decisions.”

Countrywide Financial Corporation, based in Calabasas, California, is one of the nation’s largest home mortgage lenders.

The class action alleges that Countrywide’s material misstatements and omissions regarding their lending practices artificially inflated the company’s stock price.

When the truth was revealed, the stock price plummeted and investors lost money.

DiNapoli believes that the CRF and the New York City Pension Fund lost tens of millions of dollars as a result of misleading statements and factual misrepresentations by Countrywide.

The comptrollers have chosen the law firm of Labaton Sucharow LLP, a firm with extensive experience in large securities fraud cases, to serve as lead counsel.

###

Albany Phone: (518) 474-4015 Fax:(518) 473-8940

NYC Phone: (212) 681-4825 Fax:(212) 681-4468

Internet: http://www.osc.state.ny.us

E-Mail:press@osc.state.ny.us

THE NEW YORK TIMES

December 3, 2007, 4:44 pm

"Bruno Won’t Discuss His Other Job"

By Danny Hakim

The State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, the state’s top Republican, was asked by City Room this afternoon about his other salaried position — his job at a Connecticut-based investment company, the Winthrop Corporation, which was the subject of a Times article on Saturday.

The question came at the end of a news conference on negotiations over the state’s expiring horse racing franchise.

Question: “Senator, what do you do for the Winthrop Corporation?”

Senator Bruno: “That’s been in the news, right?"

"And I’m not going to talk anymore about any of that today, because I have reported legally, ethically, what I do and what I have been doing in that instance and in every other instance, and have been accused of nothing wrong, not ethically, not morally, and not legally."

"Thank you, and I hope I see you before Christmas, but not too soon.”

Winthrop manages money for a number of union pension plans in New York, and the unions frequently lobby the State Senate.

Several union officials said they did not know Mr. Bruno was affiliated with Winthrop.

He was hired in the mid-1990s, around the time he became majority leader.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/...-his-other-job/

THE NEW YORK TIMES

December 3, 2007, 6:03 pm

"The ‘Wimp’ Factor in Albany"

By Danny Hakim

The State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, is not on good terms with the other two state leaders.

That’s putting it mildly.

This afternoon, he held a news conference to chastise Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver for stalling on an agreement over who will run the state’s three thoroughbred tracks when the New York Racing Association’s contract expires at the end of the year.

Mr. Bruno is at a disadvantage in the talks, because Saratoga Race Course is in the heart of his district and thus the issue is a far higher priority for him than the other two men who run the state.

That’s a problem.

Start with Mr. Silver.

Mr. Bruno is angry at Mr. Silver, the Legislature’s top Democrat, because he feels the Assembly speaker has grown far too close to the governor.

“He says I called him a wimp."

"And I did!” Mr. Bruno said, eliciting laughter from the press corps.

“You can’t be sensitive in this business."

"O.K.?"

"Step up, show leadership, we can pass bills and send them to the executive.”

For the record, Mr. Bruno called Mr. Silver “the biggest wimp on earth,” according to The New Yorker, which has just published an extensive profile of the governor, “The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer.”

Dan Weiller, Mr. Silver’s spokesman, declined to comment on whether his boss was “the biggest wimp on earth.”

And, of course, Mr. Bruno is on terrible terms with the governor.

“They spend all their time concocting devious schemes about a nice guy like me,” he said of the Spitzer administration.

When was the last time he had a substantive conversation with Mr. Spitzer?

“Three or four months,” he said.

“His priorities are illegal aliens about to have licenses so they, some of them, can go terrorize people and go into public buildings and planes and go get guns,” Mr. Bruno said.

“Thank you, Governor, for that proposal, which you got stuffed by your own party.”

Mr. Bruno said the Senate will return to Albany for a special session on Dec. 13.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/...ctor-in-albany/

THE NEW YORK SUN

"Stressed Spitzer Raises Funds In Manhattan"

By GRACE RAUH, Staff Reporter of the Sun

December 4, 2007

Governor Spitzer raised an estimated $1.5 million at a Manhattan fund-raiser last night, helping to replenish a campaign war chest dangerously low in cash.

The fund-raiser, held at the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street, drew other Democratic officials, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, all of whom Mr. Spitzer thanked by name before addressing the crowd.

Tickets ranged between $1,000 and $10,000 and attendees were served a three-course dinner of salad with grilled apples and goat cheese, free-range chicken with broccoli rabe and roasted vegetables, and cookies, brownies, and petits fours for dessert.

The dishes came from New York farms.

Addressing an audience of about 700, Mr. Spitzer finished off his speech with an anecdote about a recent visit to the doctor, where he was advised to take a stress test.

"I said, 'Doc. Where have you been for 11 months?'" Mr. Spitzer said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Mr. Spitzer is considered vulnerable in 2010, with a recent poll from Siena College that found almost half of New Yorkers say would prefer to elect someone new to the position.

While introducing her husband, Silda Wall Spitzer also acknowledged some of the trials of her husband's first year in office, but praised his administration for "bringing passion back to Albany."

"I think that all of us in this room recognize that this year has been filled with far more than the focus of the media coverage," Mrs. Spitzer said.

"I think that you understand that sometimes the very measure of success in effecting an agenda to move things forward is the ferocity of the pushback and you are here tonight because you recognize that."

Mr. Spitzer's re-election account held roughly $1.5 million in July, according to the most recent figures available, although he raised about $3.7 million during his first six months in office.

Most of the money raised at the start of his term went to the Global Strategy Group, a political and corporate consulting firm.

http://www.nysun.com/article/67436

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Troopergate jury to focus on whether Eliot Spitzer aide misled investigators"

BY ELIZABETH BENJAMIN and JOE MAHONEY, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Tuesday, December 4th 2007, 4:00 AM

An Albany County grand jury Wednesday will examine evidence in the reignited Troopergate probe, with the inquiry centered on whether a former aide to Gov. Spitzer misled investigators, sources told the Daily News.

The News reported Monday that Albany County District Attorney David Soares has sent a subpoena to Spitzer's office for diarylike notes kept by Darren Dopp, the former aide who fed state police records to an Albany newspaper in an apparent attempt to discredit state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno (R-Rensselaer).

A source familiar with the papers said Dopp, while serving as Spitzer's chief mouthpiece from Jan. 1 through late July, regularly jotted down notes alongside his typed memos.

The chairman of the Senate Investigations Committee, George Winner (R-Elmira), said the new effort by Soares to pry loose administration documents should help shed light on how the scandal erupted.

"It's probably the beginning of the unraveling of everything," Winner said.

"We certainly believe that there's a lot more out there."

In his initial look at the scandal, Soares issued no subpoenas and opted not to put witnesses under oath, prompting Republicans to accuse him of waging a whitewash.

Asked about the new subpoena, Bruno said, "All I know is this governor said he would go under oath, twice, publicly, and never has, and is spending a million dollars to keep from replying to [Senate] subpoenas that have been issued."

Spitzer aides had no immediate comment on the upcoming grand jury activity.

jmahoney@nydailynews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2...whether_el.html

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"DA gets tough in Troopergate probe"

Monday, December 3rd 2007, 4:00 AM

The Spitzer administration, which claims to be cooperating fully with all Troopergate probes, stonewalled investigators when it came to a key piece of evidence - a former aide's personal diary.

Albany County District Attorney David Soares was forced to issue a subpoena to obtain the diary belonging to former Spitzer communications director Darren Dopp.

He is facing potential perjury charges related to his role in the botched scheme to discredit Gov. Spitzer's political nemesis, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

The subpoena indicates Soares has empaneled a grand jury in the perjury case.

It is the first subpoena the DA has issued since Troopergate blew up over the summer.

"These guys are so arrogant that [Soares] had to go the subpoena route," said a source with knowledge of the investigation, who deemed this development "devastating," adding:

"It indicates the governor's office isn't seriously cooperating at all."

When Soares first sought Dopp's diary, a top Spitzer aide tried to negotiate with the DA about its release, saying it might contain damaging and embarrassing information.

Soares responded by issuing a subpoena for the diary in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, the source said.

The administration complied early last week.

Soares was criticized by Bruno's Senate Republicans for not issuing any subpoenas or putting anyone under oath in his previous Troopergate investigation.

That probe culminated in a September report that cleared the Spitzer administration of any wrongdoing.

Spitzer spokeswoman Christine Anderson declined to confirm or deny the subpoena, sticking to the administration's policy of refusing to comment while Soares' investigation is ongoing.

The Daily News first revealed the existence of Dopp's diary last month.

The diary came to light when Dopp testified before the state Commission on Public Integrity, which was in the midst of conducting its own probe on Troopergate - the Spitzer administration's effort to collect potentially damning information on Bruno's use of state aircraft.

The commission alerted Soares that Dopp's testimony on his role in the scandal contradicted a sworn statement he had provided to state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in July.

The commission referred its findings and handwritten notes it had received from Dopp to Soares and has indefinitely delayed its expected interview of Spitzer while the DA conducts his probe.

Soares has so far interviewed three top Spitzer advisers - David Nocenti, Sean Patrick Maloney and Peter Pope - all of whom spoke with the DA voluntarily.

The three attorneys were in the room with Dopp when he signed his one-paragraph statement to Cuomo, raising the question of whether Dopp was coerced, threatened or coached.

Albany attorney Terence Kindlon, who stopped representing Dopp last month out of concern that he might have to testify against his client, said yesterday he has not yet been contacted by Soares.

***

Spitzer and Bruno, who had not spoken for several months as a result of Troopergate, recently exchanged pleasantries during at least two separate phone calls, legislative aides revealed.

In both cases, it was Spitzer who initiated the calls.

The first time, the governor rang to inquire about the health of Bruno's wife, and the second time, he called to wish the majority leader a happy Thanksgiving.

During the second call, the two men briefly discussed the need to reach an agreement about the state's Thoroughbred racing franchise, which expires at the end of this month.

But Bruno spokesman John McArdle insisted the call was "not substantive," saying the senator has made it clear since the scandal that he no longer trusts Spitzer and will only negotiate with him in public, not on the phone or behind closed doors.

Anderson, Spitzer's spokeswoman, confirmed that the calls were "social" and "personal" in nature.

ebenjamin@nydailynews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2...gate_probe.html

THE NEW YORK SUN

"What Did Spitzer Do?"

By JACOB GERSHMAN

December 3, 2007

As the governorship of Eliot Spitzer enters the rehabilitation phase — "lessons learned" is the new happy mantra in Albany — a ghost from his past threatens to spoil the storyline.

It's that of Darren Dopp, who worked under Mr. Spitzer for almost a decade as his communications director until his respected career in government went down in flames, a casualty of the scandal known as Troopergate.

After the controversy erupted in July, Mr. Spitzer suspended Mr. Dopp, accusing him of vague improprieties and lapses of judgment.

He was never able to get back his job but resigned under a cloud of ignominy and took a job at a lobbying firm.

For the Spitzer administration, Mr. Dopp, who is under suspicion of perjury, now functions primarily as a scapegoat.

Officials characterize him as a "rogue" who led a misguided and unauthorized mission to expose Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno's use of state helicopters to attend political fund-raising events.

New details that are gradually emerging paint a different story, one that appears to contradict assertions made by the governor to investigators.

They don't answer the question of whether Mr. Spitzer or his aides were aware of the special measures undertaken by state police to gather and recreate records of Mr. Bruno's trips to New York City or were under the impression that police had followed standard operating procedures.

The distinction goes to the heart of whether a "dirty trick" was committed.

The details do, however, challenge the notion that Mr. Dopp was a lone "gunman" and that Mr. Spitzer's involvement in the effort was limited to discouraging Mr. Dopp from going public with the travel records.

According to the report by the Albany County district attorney, David Soares, Mr. Spitzer told investigators that he did not recall taking part in any discussion about referring the travel records to the Inspector General's office prior to July 1, the day the Times Union published its story about Mr. Bruno's trips.

The governor also said he "did not direct the release of any documents at any time to the media concerning Senator Bruno's use of state transportation," the report stated.

The governor's discussions with Mr. Soares's office were not under oath.

A question to consider is whether Mr. Spitzer would provide the same answers under oath before the Commission on Public Integrity, whose ethics investigation is progressing at a glacial pace.

Within the Spitzer administration, recollections have varied.

According to a source close to the governor, Mr. Spitzer before July 1 participated in a discussion about alerting the Inspector General's office.

The source said Mr. Spitzer in late June was shown all of the travel records concerning Mr. Bruno that were retrieved from the state police — including the itineraries that were "recreated" — and signed off on their release to the Times Union.

Mr. Spitzer, along with other senior aides, concluded that the records supplied by the police ought to be treated as public documents, the source said.

The governor's office has a different memory of what happened.

Mr. Spitzer "did not direct the release of documents but knew Darren was responding to a" Freedom of Information Law request, a spokeswoman for the governor, Christine Anderson, told me by e-mail.

Mr. Spitzer was an active participant in the internal debate over what to do with Mr. Bruno's itineraries — a discussion that began weeks before the Times Union submitted a FOIL request.

When the time came to make the call on releasing the documents to the press, was Mr. Spitzer out of sight?

We'll find out for sure if and when Mr. Spitzer testifies.

You could argue that given that the effort to nail Mr. Bruno on abusing governmental aircraft privileges was an unmitigated communications disaster for the administration, it's not unreasonable to hold accountable the director of communications.

It's an argument I suspect many inside the administration have settled on to justify the expungement of Mr. Dopp.

Following the same logic, I suppose you would expect more heads to roll as a consequence of Mr. Spitzer's doomed plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, a policy fiasco that arguably caused more damage to the administration than the state police controversy, which at least didn't explode in the face of the leading Democratic presidential contender.

Both were cases of politics interfering with sound judgment.

In the first instance, an impatient Spitzer administration yearned for a shortcut to toppling Mr. Bruno and the Senate Republicans.

In the second, according to a source close to the governor, Spitzer administration officials had assumed the license plan would help them ward off a Democratic primary challenge by Attorney General Cuomo by locking up the Hispanic community vote.

What's funny is that the same people who convinced Mr. Spitzer that the answer to his Cuomo problem was illegal immigrant licenses are still safely ensconced in the second floor of the Capitol Building.

Mr. Spitzer, meanwhile, must be pondering the irony that the only person he was able to steamroll was one of his own men.

jacob@nysun.com

http://www.nysun.com/article/67362?page_no=1

THE NEW YORK POST

"ONE YEAR AND FAR TOO MANY MISTAKES - AN OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR SPITZER"

December 2, 2007 -- GOV. Spitzer:

It was just over a year ago that I wrote you with 15 suggestions that, based on my three decades covering state government, I truly believed would help you make this a better state.

You had, after all, won a landslide victory pledging to bring the same high level of accomplishment and energy to the state's top office that you were credited with bringing to the Office of Attorney General.

Who could have imagined you would fail so badly?

I write you now with new suggestions that I genuinely believe could help improve your effectiveness as you approach the end of your first year as governor.

This time, I write with a deep sense of pessimism about your remaining time in office, three years, if you can last that long.

I'm pessimistic not only because of the poor grades you've earned so far in your term but also because many close to you don't believe you possess the skills, interest and temperament to be the first-class administrator and leader this state needs.

I think you'd agree - at least in private - that you'd be a lot better off today if you had listened to my suggestions last year, as you claimed you planned to in an e-mail you sent me at the time.

For instance, I urged you - with considerable prescience, as you more than anyone know - to "end the blatant politicization" of the State Police, noting that senior law-enforcement professionals had been "subordinated to political operatives" under your predecessor, Gov. George Pataki.

May I say "Dirty Tricks Scandal"?

It was your subordinates, including a former Pataki operative, who used the State Police in an effort to damage Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, the key Republican you must get along with to have any hope of having your agenda approved.

The first suggestion I made - in response to your promise to energize the state's moribund upstate economy - was to "deliver on your pledge to cut property taxes and then go on to cut income, sales, gasoline and business taxes as well."

Well, you sure haven't done much of anything on that front.

I urged you to "live in the Governor's Mansion" so that, unlike your nearly always absent predecessor, you could use it as a meeting center for lawmakers, "where major policy initiatives can be hammered out in cordial, off-the-record, sessions."

Well, just like Pataki, you've turned the Mansion, as well as the Capitol building itself, into a virtual mail drop and you've paid the price: no collegiality with members of the Legislature and bitter personal animosities with the legislative leaders.

Can we say "government/legislative dysfunction"?

I also urged you to "appoint the highest-quality individuals to the top administration positions" of state government.

Boy, did you let the public down on that one.

Is there anybody in or out of your government who thinks that Richard Baum, your chief of staff, or any of your other top aides have done an outstanding job?

Governor, you may think you still have plenty of time left to change direction, but if you don't sooner rather than later, someone in your own party - say Attorney General Andrew Cuomo - or a potent Republican candidate - say Mayor Bloomberg - will come gunning for you in 2010.

Here are new suggestions that could help make you a better governor:

* Fire your entire "senior staff."

Enough of the killer-prosecutor types from your old AG's Office.

Your administration needs proven public- and private-sector administrators who are committed to making this a better state, not destroying your political enemies.

There are such things as trained "public administrators" and you'd be wise to recruit some.

* Stop lying to the public about what you have been doing.

Driver's licenses for illegals was NOT about national security or making the roads safer (it WAS about delivering on a political promise to a special-interest group); ethics haven't been improved (your Inspector General is a joke and the Public Integrity Commission is privately referred to as the Cover Up Commission).

* Replace your helter-skelter policy approach with genuinely transformative goals - like lowering personal income and business taxes, cutting energy costs by building nuclear and clean, coal-fired plants, and merging duplicative layers of government.

* Bring a new "humility" to dealings with your adversaries - and that means stop trying to destroy opponents.

* Move into the Governor's Mansion and start showing you have the same level of commitment to state government that Govs. Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, your Democratic predecessors, both showed they had.

fredric.dicker@nypost.com

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12022007/news/...2895.htm?page=0

"Sales tax decline raises red flag - Albany County executive warns that revenues are falling short of estimates"

By CAROL DeMARE, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Wednesday, December 5, 2007

ALBANY -- County Executive Mike Breslin cautioned Tuesday that sales tax revenues received so far this year are low and may forecast an unstable economy.

Since presenting his 2008 county budget in October, sales tax receipts have fallen $1.5 million, Breslin said.

"The signs that we are facing an unstable economy are troubling," he said.

"We will monitor our spending practices and the state of the economy very closely over the next year in order to minimize disruptions to essential services in 2009 and to maintain the long-term fiscal health of the county."

In early October, when Breslin introduced a $566.8 million budget for 2008, sales tax revenues were up by about $200,000 over the same time last year, he said.

"We are now down $1.3 million and that is a difference of $1.5 (million)."

He considered the $200,000 increase as basically flat.

His office had expected revenues of several million more at that point.

"When we submitted the budget, we were a little ahead of last year, and now, now only have we fallen, we have fallen to a point where we are below last year," he said.

This year's spending plan projects sales tax revenue at $141,288,961, the county executive said.

So far, it has come in at $111,842,464.

At this rate, he said, "I do not think we are going to meet that projection."

"All indications are that we will be short."

He blames the economy.

"We look at it in housing," he said.

"We look at it in sales and we look at it every way."

"It appears the economy is not very stable, people are concerned, and they are not spending money."

Next year's budget projects sales tax revenues of $139.3 million, or some $2 million less than this year, based on expectations of continued poor economic conditions.

The budget, passed Monday night by the County Legislature, holds the line on property taxes for next year.

Breslin didn't predict what the sales tax revenue shortfall could mean for future county finances.

Sales tax revenues come in roughly every two weeks, so the county executive's staff expects new numbers until the end of the year.

Also, funds will continue to be received into next year that are to be applied to 2007, Breslin said.

The county keeps 60 percent of the receipts for its general operating expenses and distributes the remaining 40 percent to the county's three cities and its 10 towns.

Carol DeMare can be reached at 454-5431 or by e-mail at cdemare@timesunion.com.

Sales tax receipts

Here are Albany County's sales tax revenues as of Dec. 1 for the last three years.

* 2005 -- $107.7 million

* 2006 -- $113.1 million

* 2007 -- $111.8 million

Source: Albany County Executive Mike Breslin