Mario Cuomo: The Governor Looks the Other Way

It’s time we started taking Mario Cuomo seriously.

He’s in his sixth year as governor, and mamma stories, as rich as they are, just won’t wash anymore — at least not as a substitute for governance. The four-year presidential tease of the Great Liberal Hope is over; an ethnic northeastern governor with a record is the nominee. The disenchanted of this state — the homeless, tenants, environmentalists, minorities, and reformers — can’t afford more schmaltzy personality profiles that devote a few buried paragraphs to Mario Cuomo’s government. It’s time to judge him for who he is and what he is doing, rather than forever anticipating what he may become.

This is the story of one test of Mario Cuomo’s government: its ethics. The governor has set a rather high moral standard for himself. He says he is inspired by no less than Saint Thomas More, who was executed for a principle. Son Andrew Cuomo, who at 30 is the only man Mario Cuomo actually listens to, has been attracting news attention for years about the ties between his booming law practice and his father’s governments. He practices in a Park Avenue office under a picture of Thomas More.

More had a word or two for moral miscreants. “The air longs to blow noxious vapors against the wicked man. The sea longs to overwhelm him in its waves, the mountains to fall upon him, the earth to spilt open beneath him, hell to swallow him up after his headlong fall…” The wicked don’t drive Mario Cuomo quite as mad. Indeed, as the six episodes in this story demonstrate, he is gracious in the face of wrongdoing, even when committed by those with whom he has intimately shared his public trust. Loyalty is also a More virtue, but in these tales, Cuomo takes it to perverse lengths.

Documented here is a record of Cuomo indifference to the grave ethical errors of several high state officials, ranging from longtime Cuomo confidant Al Levine, who twice helped set up companies in his daughter’s name that indirectly did business with the state agency he worked for, to onetime Battery Park Authority chairman Robert Seavey, the Cuomo appointee who formed an upstate business partnership with a developer seeking designation on a Battery Park site.

This two-part series starts with the takeover of a seemingly mundane state agency, the Thruway Authority, by Levine and Hank Bersani, another Cuomo aide who’d been with him for a decade. It details their apparent attempts to turn the Authority into their own personal toll booth, and their determined support of a new Thruway exit seemingly designed to benefit a major Cuomo contributor. The final episode this week deals with the same Cuomo contributor’s attempt to secure a lucrative state lease. Three Cuomo officials — Seavey, OGS Commissioner John Egan, and State University Construction Fund chairman Sheldon Goldstein — play disturbing roles in the exit ramp or lease tales.

In each of the instances that will be described this week and next week, Mario Cuomo emerges as a man who empowers sleaze, watches in silence when news of it surfaces, and then, if pressed, publicly forgives it. Even Cuomo’s admirers have long found his tolerance for the tawdry as curious as it is consistent; it clashes with his studied monasticism. He has put himself on a contemplative hill, revering “the law” while sectors of his government slide toward the sewer.

Under the glare of an aroused media after the first suicide attempt of Donald Manes, Ed Koch has had to answer for his government’s ties to and handling of the less-than-sublime. Well, Mario Cuomo has his own Victor Botnicks. His are less notorious, mostly because they and the governor who appointed and excused them have been protected by the Albany cocoon, operating daily 180 miles outside the range of city cameras.

While Cuomo will not discuss these issues, his secretary, Gerry Crotty, his counsel, Evan Davis, his son, Andrew, and other advisers will. They make some good points for him, and these arguments should not be a footnote to this story.

The Cuomo advisers point out that he took on the legislature in 1987 to fight for an ethics bill. He did, it got dirty, and the governor stood his ground. He vetoed a bill and forced them to make it better. It is a fact that the performances of assembly speaker Mel Miller and senate leader Warren Anderson have frequently made Mario Cuomo look saintly; but this story is not a course in comparative ethics.

Andrew describes a father who at a gut level would not broach a wayward turn. He has his own tales — about the governor dispatching him in a helicopter on a Saturday morning to a park retreat when they learned that two high officials had brought their wives there on a weekend lark at state expense. He recounts how the governor gathered lists of the state’s summer employees and compared them with the names on his own executive chamber payroll, looking for relatives who might be getting a well-placed perk.

Andrew, whose own virtues include the fact that the private HELP group he founded for the homeless may build more permanent housing than his dad’s government, tells these stories with conviction. In the end, though, Andrew’s anecdotes only make the governor’s, and his own, conduct in these tales even more inexplicable. They are apparently quite willing to resist their own finer instincts.

I asked Evan Davis three times to name a single personnel action by the governor that sent a message that he will not tolerate unethical conduct, even if that conduct does not lead to a criminal indictment. Davis kept dodging the question. The governor missed the essence of More — who spit in a king’s eye rather than acknowledge his illicit marriage, even though the king was his friend. Sometimes a moralist has to be mean.

Al Levine’s Thruway Dowry

When Mario Cuomo was appointed secretary of state by Governor Carey and assumed his first public office in 1975, he began a 12-year relationship with a savvy former Air Force major who’d already been working at state for years, Al Levine. Except for a brief stint during the second Carey term, when Levine was employed by another state agency, he would work directly for Cuomo until his abrupt resignation as Thruway director last November.

Levine was so close to Cuomo that during the dark days of 1981, when Cuomo was lieutenant governor and his chief of staff was arrested for stealing the paychecks of fictitious employees, he asked Levine to assume the top staff job. Levine continued to run Cuomo’s office throughout the gubernatorial campaign of 1982, and he and his wife handled the computerized mailings to campaign donors out Levine’s suburban home. When the new governor took office in 1983, Al Levine, a high school graduate who’d worked his way up the military ranks as an enlisted man, was given the title of administrative director of the executive chamber, making him a centerpiece of the new power structure on the second floor of the Capitol building.

In March 1984, Cuomo made Levine executive director of the Thruway Authority, a traditional patronage haven. Levine came into the Authority shortly after a new Cuomo chairman, Hank Bersani, who also had been with Cuomo since the start of the governor’s public career.

Neither Levine nor Bersani had transportation, engineering, or even top-level managerial backgrounds. But the two did share a similar, seedy élan: the white-haired, deal-talking Bersani, who’d risen from the street politics of grimy Syracuse, and the burly, tattooed Levine, who’d ingratiated himself with the Cuomo clan, particularly the governor’s wife, Matilda, over the years. On one wall in his Thruway headquarters office Levine hung a framed copy of the governor’s speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. On the other wall he displayed half a dozen photos of his favorite trotters.

Though ensconced after 1984 at his own public agency for the first time, Levine assiduously maintained his ties to the state’s first family. That year he set up the Executive Mansion Preservation Society, a private, prestigious corporation charged with raising funds to refurbish the Albany mansion that the Cuomos rarely left. Levine met frequently with Matilda Cuomo to plan the renovations, and managed the $850,000 collected from wealthy donors like Harry Helmsley ($25,000). He used the Thruway Authority’s accounting firm to manage the books and his own lawyers to incorporate and represent the society.

When Thruway chairman Bersani had to resign suddenly in June 1987 — provoked by revelations about his criminal past — Cuomo once again turned to Levine, describing him publicly as “a trusted old friend” and asking him to take Bersani’s title while retaining his own. The combination would have made Levine the first simultaneous chairman and director of the Authority. But six days after Bersani’s resignation, a letter signed “Concerned thruway employees” was delivered to key senate Republicans. The letter leveled detailed charges about Levine’s involvement in a computer services firm that provided software to engineering companies under contract with the Thruway Authority.

As soon as the governor’s office formally submitted Levine’s nomination to the senate in mid-June, Gerry Crotty, then the governor’s counsel, got a copy of the anonymous note from a legislative source, and immediately passed it on to Cuomo’s in-house inspector general, Joe Spinelli, who began an investigation. Levine withdrew his nomination a few days later, labeling the charges in the anonymous letter “totally unfounded.”

The next day Cuomo urged the anonymous tipster to come forward, promising his “personal protection.” He also warned that the issue should not be blown out of proportion. “Let’s not elaborate this to unreality,” he said. The IG’s investigators, however, went to the Authority immediately and found willing witnesses — including the two top Carey holdovers there, deputy director James Martin and counsel Bob Farrell, both of whom were at odds with Levine and had been identified by insiders as possible authors of the letter.

Levine took sick leave for a week while the charges exploded around him, mostly in upstate newspapers, but the decision was made to stick with him. Cuomo told reporters: “I choose to believe that he is a man of the highest quality and I have seen no evidence that proves otherwise. I know him. I love him. He’s a good fellow. The process will work and it will prove he did nothing illegal or unethical.”

But while Levine remained director, Cuomo had to come up with another candidate for chairman. Former Power Authority chairman John Dyson turned the offer down when he couldn’t get assurances from Cuomo that he could replace Levine with his own director. “I knew that Al Levine had to go,” Dyson said later. “I had heard he might have ethical problems,” referring to a period before news of the IG probe broke.

Cuomo then turned to Bill Hennessy, the former Carey transportation commissioner and ex-state Democratic Party chief. Hennessy’s first act as Thruway chairman was to fire Martin and Farrell. Levine remained in charge for months, while the suspected whistleblowers were already out the door.

Betasoft Bombshells

Looking over IG Joe Spinelli’s shoulder virtually from the inception, and questioning many of the same people approached by him, was the State Investigation Commission (SIC), the quasi-independent, anticorruption irritant that had dogged the Cuomo administration on many ethical cases in recent years. Also a recipient of the anonymous letter, the SIC took a temporary back seat to Spinelli, but the inevitability of its eventual report had to be a prod, pushing the IG probe. In the end, Spinelli came up with hard evidence of Levine’s misconduct, then laid the details of it out in a report bereft of meaningful conclusions.

In October, the report was referred to two state prosecutors, but Spinelli carefully told reporters: “This referral does not represent a finding with regard to possible violations of the law.”

Indeed, Spinelli’s written recommendation was that a prosecutor “review” the allegations “to determine if there is a basis to commence criminal proceedings” — a curious conclusion since that was ostensibly the purpose of his own probe. The highlights of Spinelli’s factual findings were:

● After determining that the Authority needed precisely the sort of software Betasoft would eventually offer, Levine set up the company and put together a small group of investors and directors, including his daughter Michelle, which met 30 times in Levine’s home during the two-year life of the firm. The four initial partners, in addition to Levine’s daughter, an employee of the state Parks Department, were also state employees long tied to Levine — two Thruway staffers, the computer chief in the governor’s office, and the deputy general manager of the State University Construction Fund. Levine’s wife incorporated the firm and opened its checking account, and Levine personally attended all its organizational and board meetings, offering advice and acquainting himself with all of the company’s business activities.

● Betasoft’s business was almost entirely based on the solicitation of engineering firms under contract or seeking contracts with the Thruway Authority. Even after Thruway staffer Cynthia Bloom became Betasoft’s chief operating officer, she remained at the Authority, reporting only to Levine and contacting potential Betasoft customers from Thruway offices even though the customers were Thruway contractors. According to Bloom, Levine even gave her computerized lists of Thruway consultants to solicit. In three instances he brokered discussions between Thruway contractors and Betasoft, playing a central role in the company’s first sale. Though 30 per cent of the Authority’s consultant payments went to the four engineering companies that did business with Betasoft, Levine, who single-handedly selected the consultants for the Authority, talked of going to work for Betasoft when he left state government.

The governor refused to comment on the findings, but his new Authority chairman Hennessy concluded: “There’s no criminality of any kind even inferred here.” Hennessy said Levin was “hurt” by the Betasoft controversy, “but he’s fine. He has no misgivings about his role in it and he knows perfectly well this will have to play itself out.” Levine’s criminal attorney, Richard Meyers, said Levine had viewed his participation in Betasoft as a “good idea for his child.” In what some saw as a reference to Mario Cuomo’s role in setting up the Manhattan law firm that employs his son, Andrew, and represents clients that do business with the state, Meyers said: “Presidents and governors do it.”

The 59-year-old Levine was on sick leave when the report was released, and had already quietly submitted his retirement papers. He was awarded a discretionary disability pension, meaning that his retirement was technically not due to the findings of the Spinelli report, but to a heart condition. Combined with his federal pension, Levine began collecting $44,480 a year in benefits.

The only disciplinary action to result from Spinelli’s findings involved George Kash, a Levine protégé and $58,000-a-year data processing supervisor in the governor’s office. A shareholder and active director in Betasoft, Kash was orally reprimanded by Cuomo aide Hank Dullea for not seeking clearance from the governor’s counsel about “the appropriateness of his outside business activity.” Though the governor’s press office once claimed that Kash would also be transferred to another state agency, he still runs Cuomo’s computers.

The SIC took another five months before releasing its own report, which drew the conclusions Spinelli had hesitated to make. “The Commission has concluded,” said the April 1988 report, “that Levine crossed this line between unethical and criminal conduct,” suggesting that upstate federal prosecutor Fred Scullin “consider the merits and feasibility of a prosecution for extortion.” The unequivocal SIC judgment was that Levine’s “conduct falls within the Hobbs Act definition of extortion,” a reference to the federal criminal statute.

The Commission was also tough on Levine’s state-employed partners, blasting Kash because he knew that the company was owned by Thruway employees, yet sold software to Thruway consultants, and criticizing the Thruway employees for “violating the Code of Ethics” and “conducting Betasoft work during Thruway work hours.” But the report was harshest in its description of Jay Handwerger, the counsel and number-two man at the State University Construction Fund. Though the SIC assailed his “poor judgment” in “overlooking the ethical issues,” Handwerger wasn’t even admonished. The governor’s counsel, Evan Davis, says that Cuomo, who appoints the Fund’s board, is powerless to act.

All the governor would say about the SIC findings was that they were “consistent” with Spinelli’s. He expressly rejected the legislative recommendations made by the commission concerning conflicts of interest, saying that the changes in law sought could be adopted by regulation. John Baniak, a Levine protégé, was inserted in his place at the helm of the mansion preservation society, and as the new number-two man on the staff of the Thruway Authority.

The SIC decision to refer the case to the feds was more likely to lead to a prosecution than the governor’s earlier decision to send Spinelli’s report to the office of Albany D.A. Sol Greenberg — a burial ground for public corruption cases. Even though Greenberg had not questioned a single witness named in Spinelli’s report, he had already publicly dismissed the possibility of any criminal case against Levine.

Second Time Around

Almost as a footnote to its report, the SIC uncovered an early warning of Levine’s propensity for this sort of conflict of interest. The Commission found that Betasoft was the second time Levine had helped set up a company to do indirect business with the state agency he worked for, and the second time he’d used his daughter as a shareholder.

The first time was in 1980, when Levine was with the state’s student financial aid agency, the Higher Education Services Corporation (HESC), working with another protégé, HESC’s executive vice-president, Michael Cruskie, a computer whiz with a straight-arrow reputation.

The SIC reported that Cruskie, Levine, who was HESC’s director of system support development, and three other top officials of HESC combined to form Charter Account Systems Inc. expressly to sell computer services to the same lending institutions that were participating in HESC’s loan programs. Indeed, one service marketed by Charter to the banks, sometimes by Cruskie, was the administration of their student-loan portfolios, including the filing of reports with HESC. While Cruskie and the others invested directly, Levine’s stock was held by the then 19-year-old Michelle.

What the SIC did not examine was whether Levine’s role in this blatant conflict was known within the governor’s inner circle for years and ignored. In fact, it was, and the high-level indifference to Levine’s prior moral lapse may have been one of the factors that led him to believe he could get away with Betasoft.

The Cruskie/Levine affair was extensively described in a December 1981 memo by HESC counsel Gilbert Harwood, who concluded that the three Charter partners then still with HESC had “failed to meet” the ethical standards of the Public Officers Law. Harwood also noted that Levine had left HESC and had pulled out of the company when asked to ante up $7,500 on top of the initial $2,500 investment. “Insofar as Al Levine is concerned,” Harwood wrote, “inasmuch as he’s no longer with HESC, the issue as to him is moot.” As a result of the Harwood memo, Cruskie was required to sever his ties to Charter, and he claimed in a March 1982 letter that he was complying with that directive. Neither HESC nor Cuomo will answer questions about whether Levine’s involvement in Charter was known within the Cuomo inner circle at the time it surfaced in late 1981, when Levine was simultaneously taking over the management of Cuomo’s lieutenant governor’s office.

On Levine’s recommendation, Cruskie was appointed Cuomo’s deputy commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services in March 1983 (three months later Michelle Levine went to work for him as a project assistant). In the spring of 1984, he had to file his first financial disclosure report with the state’s Board of Public Disclosure, and the board’s counsel, Bennett Leibman, noticed that Cruskie had disclosed his membership on the Charter board, an apparent violation of a Cuomo order barring such corporate connections. Leibman wrote a memo to two disclosure board members — Michael Delgiudice, the governor’s secretary, and Gerry Crotty, his counsel — calling the Cruskie revelation to their attention. They instructed him to look further.

Leibman retrieved the Harwood memo and noticed Al Levine’s involvement. He wrote another note to Delgiudice and Crotty, reviewing the findings regarding Cruskie and mentioning Levine’s role. Both recall learning of Cruskie’s and Levine’s involvement, but add that they “don’t think” they told the governor. All they did was instruct Cruskie to step down from the Charter board, an automatic requirement under the governor’s regulations. Though Crotty conceded that Cruskie’s reported activities “bothered” him, no further action was taken against Cruskie.

When the Charter issue resurfaced as part of the SIC’s probe of Betasoft, Cruskie tried desperately to cover up the fact that he had never cut his ties to the company as required in 1982, even “fabricating” a stock certificate and lying before the Commission, according to the report. A perjury and obstruction of justice case against him has been referred to prosecutors. Earlier this year Cruskie suddenly resigned from Criminal Justice, and went to work at Charter.

Mario Cuomo has yet to make a single public comment about any of the HESC or Thruway conduct, or amend the last sweeping public endorsement he made of his old friend Levine. Neither has the newly installed leadership at the Thruway Authority passed a resolution or issued a statement acknowledging any wrongdoing and pointing toward a new way of doing business. State officials have made no policy or personnel changes directly attributed to either Levine affair.

Loyalty for a Bagman

When Lee Alexander was elected mayor of Syracuse in 1969, Hank Bersani, the president of Syracuse Canada Dry and longtime Democratic kingmaker, was the electoral engineer. A few months later, shortly after Alexander began 16 consecutive years as mayor, Bersani, already in his 10th year as treasurer of the county party, started making kickback collections for Alexander from city contractors.

Appointed by Alexander to the Planning Commission, Bersani’s job was to make periodic deliveries of cash payoffs to Alexander — usually set at 10 per cent of the value of a city contract. When Bersani would arrive at City Hall for a private visit with the mayor, Alexander would open the top left-hand drawer of his desk and Bersani would drop the envelope into the drawer without saying a word. If Alexander got confused about who the cash was from, Bersani would write the name on one of the lift-up pads kids play with, and then erase the name with a yank of his wrist.

Before Alexander was fully indicted, this onetime president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors would collect millions in bribes, burying them as nearby as in a floor safe built under his laundry room, and as faraway as Panamanian bank accounts.

After fundraising for Alexander’s unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1974, Bersani pulled back from the day-to-day tribulations of being an Alexander bagman, and went to work for Hugh Carey’s new secretary of state, Mario Cuomo. He would later claim he left because Alexander got too greedy, escalating his demands; but Alexander, backed by Bersani’s replacement as a bagman and a contractor, would later say Bersani was dropped because Alexander suspected him of shorting him on a $9,000 bribe. In any event, Bersani introduced his open-palm substitute — a business partner — to contractors at meetings in his bottling plant, and gradually drifted out of the kickback scheme.

No one ever figured out just what Bersani’s public responsibilities were as a community affairs coordinator in Cuomo’s office, but he still did campaign fundraising and organizing in the Syracuse area for local and statewide campaigns, including Cuomo’s in 1978 and 1982. Eventually, his cousin Gene Bersani, a Syracuse lawyer whose firm did millions in city business and kicked back hundreds of thousands for it, also became an Alexander bagman. For years, Hank Bersani’s paychecks came from whatever office Cuomo held — switching from the secretary of state job to the lieutenant governor’s staff, and finally to the governor’s office, always holding the title of Cuomo’s area representative in Syracuse. He had long ago given up his troubled soda business and had been dabbling in local real estate, getting headlines when he stiffed city government for $50,000 in back property taxes. His 1984 appointment, at age 63, to head Cuomo’s Thruway Authority was a backroom toll-taker’s ultimate dream.

But a year after Bersani began his nine-year term at the authority, U.S. attorney Fred Scullin began the grand jury probe of Alexander. Finally, in August 1986, the FBI raided Alexander’s home, as well as the home of Bersani’s bagman successor, seizing records that detailed the scope of the extortion scheme. By September, even Bersani’s cousin was a cooperating witness. Though the writing was on the wall, Hank Bersani held out. Since his bag operations were supposedly more than 10 years old, the statute of limitations might have run on his crimes, unless he was charged under the RICO statutes. All the time he bartered with the government, Bersani remained Cuomo’s man at the authority, even though prosecutors soon discovered he had already brought some of the Alexander predators into a Thruway deal.

In early 1985 Bersani moved to declare a three-acre parcel owned by the authority, located just outside of Syracuse, to be surplus property. Thruway staff was mystified because the property was used to stockpile supplies and change authority truck tires. But Bersani pushed for an immediate sale of the property, staging an auction a month after the property was offered for sale and getting only one bid. The buyer, who paid the authority’s minimum price of $260,000, was a Syracuse developer who’d gotten $1.5 million in no-bid construction contracts from Alexander and had become a target of the grand jury probe.

Four months after Bersani signed over the deed, the developer sold the property to a national motel chain at a $400,000 profit. The developer used two brokers on the deal — Gene Bersani and an Alexander appointee on the city’s zoning board — and paid them $66,000. Federal investigators are still examining this deal.

The prosecutors, and the FBI, kept the governor’s office broadly informed about the case against Hank Bersani. While the FBI described Bersani’s bag operations in the conversations with state officials and predicted Bersani would be indicted, Scullin was more sanguine. Scullin says he told the state that Bersani was “a concern to us,” and that his office was “looking at certain things” involving Bersani very closely. Scullin says he gave state officials no advice about whether or not they should dump the Thruway chief, adding that he told them to “proceed as they normally do.”

Bersani Hangs On

Mario Cuomo and his advisers decided that the sketchy information they were getting — combined with the uncertainty of Bersani’s indictment — justified retaining him until the picture cleared. One predictable lobbyist for this posture was Bersani himself, whose name was by then popping up in upstate news stories about the Alexander probe. He roamed the corridors of the second floor, assuring the governor’s staff that he believed he could emerge from the case unscathed. Though Scullin now says Cuomo’s office had no basis to take action against Bersani during this period, he did remain in a key public position for a year after the first revelations about his kickback activities, even though there were indications that he was engaged in suspicious land deals at the authority.

Scullin eventually sent an indictment of Bersani to Washington without a recommendation that it be approved. “I dropped it in their lap,” he says. Washington rejected a RICO conspiracy count, so Scullin gave Bersani limited immunity, meaning he couldn’t be charged for any crimes he testified about, but could still be nailed in the second phase of the probe that is still ongoing. Only when the Alexander indictment was imminent did Bersani finally resign.

Bersani’s June 1987 resignation was attributed in news stories to the fact that he had been drawn into the Alexander probe. All the governor’s office would say was that he’d quit for “personal reasons,” insisting that his departure had “nothing to do with the activities of the Thruway Authority.” But then, when Bersani was named as Alexander’s “bagman” in the July indictment, the mum Cuomo finally had to answer questions at a press conference. He called Bersani “a very, very fine individual who gave us public service” and insisted, “I know nothing but good things about him.”

When a reporter said that Bersani had been implicated in the Alexander case, a combative Cuomo challenged him: “He was not implicated. I wish you would not say that. He was not named in the indictment. I hope you don’t report that. Let’s get something clear. He was not named. He was not accused. He is not charged. Maybe he will be. I don’t know.” This was precisely the distinction Bersani had been making for months. But, in fact, though he hadn’t been indicted, he was named in the Alexander indictment and called a bagman.

The Bersani issue largely disappeared until March 1988, when the Syracuse Herald American sent Cuomo copies of Bersani’s grand jury testimony, released by prosecutors as part of a presentencing memo about Alexander, who had pleaded guilty. The Herald American wanted Cuomo to examine the testimony to see if it warranted a state investigation of Bersani’s Thruway dealings, especially after the revelations that the owner of one of the companies that paid Alexander bribes was also a Thruway contractor who’d used Al Levine’s software company. A Cuomo press spokesman said he was too busy to read the testimony, and wouldn’t react to it.

Then, on the heels of this stubborn defense of Bersani, the governor named a new Thruway chairman with his own ethical baggage. Bersani’s replacement, Bill Hennessy, a longtime Albany pol, had been running his own consultant business since 1985, earning most of his money lobbying the state transportation department he’d once headed. When Hennessy took the authority job, he and the governor’s office issued an unusual statement, announcing that Hennessy would remain a 90 per cent partner in his lobbying firm, and the firm would still be permitted to lobby state agencies. Hennessy agreed, however, not to share in the profits the firm makes from its lobbying activities. (The $25,000-a-year part-time chairman, contacted by the Voice at his lobbying firm, said that his only outside earnings now are from the real estate appraisal end of his business and that he “hopes” he will be able to leave the authority soon and return to full-time lobbying activity. He acknowledged that other than a listing of his firm’s lobbying clients with the authority, the policing of this arrangement has been left to him.)

One current Hennessy client, on a $30,000-a-year retainer, is Unisys, the defense contractor whose New York lobbying operations are a focus of the Pentagon probes. The Hennessy firm began representing the company in 1987 and reported lobbying the executive chamber, the division of the budget, the comptroller, and the Office of General Services about the state’s procurement regulations concerning the purchase of information systems. Hennessy chose a former transportation department deputy, John Shafer, to replace Levine. Hennessy had appointed Shafer to his earlier transportation post, had subsequently lobbied him on behalf of private clients, and had even received a $13,000 consultant contract from Shafer.

Highway to Heaven

In January 1984, when Mario Cuomo appointed Hank Bersani to the Thruway Authority, he also made one other Thruway announcement. In his State of the State address that month, the governor declared: “We will also explore a number of highway improvements elsewhere in the state that may have significant economic development value — for example, the construction of a new thruway interchange near Sterling Forest.”

It was an unusual statement for several reasons. The top management of the Thruway Authority had no idea it was coming, neither did the local Democratic assemblywoman who was trying to attract support for such a ramp. New exits off the thruway rarely occur. None have ever been built as a trigger to development; transportation and traffic needs have dictated thruway policy. In addition, an exit at Sterling Forest — the 30-mile tract of Orange County private timberland only an hour from the city — had been rejected repeatedly when raised in the 1960s and 1970s because of traffic studies that demonstrated it wasn’t warranted.

The other unusual feature of the Cuomo announcement was its specificity, not at all characteristic of the broad sweep of so grand a speech. Neither before nor since has the governor, the authority, or anyone else surveyed the 400 miles of thruway to determine where it might make sense to open exits for economic development reasons. Instead, the only consequence of the Cuomo declaration was that the new team at the authority — Bersani and Levine — made the Sterling Forest interchange a top priority.

Levine pushed the interchange relentlessly despite the opposition of his own planners and those in the Transportation Department. One top deputy recalls that when he raised numerous technical problems with the exit, Levine stopped making rational arguments and said simply, “This is heavy-duty political stuff.” Misrepresenting a neutral report on the exit as if it were an endorsement, the governor announced in June 1985 the submission of an end-of-the-session bill to authorize up to $7 million to build it. That July, Cuomo went to the Orange County Fair to sign the bill with great fanfare, despite the emergence of environmental issues that would’ve stalled a strip-miner.

The environmental questions began with the fact that the state identified the Sterling Forest tract, owned by the Home Group Insurance Company, as the prime potential beneficiary of the interchange, suggesting that several corporate research facilities be built on the timberlands, as well as a conference center and hotel. But at the same time, New Jersey’s and New York’s environmental agencies were contemplating acquiring portions of the tract, which lies in both states, for conservation and outdoor recreation purposes. So, in addition to the howls of environmentalists, the interchange managed to earn the enmity of the environmental agencies of both states.

New Jersey was in a rage because the interchange-connected development of the timberlands would destroy its nearby reservoirs, the source of water for two million people. Even the New York environmental agency wrote repeated letters questioning the premises of the project, ultimately concluding that there was “little need for it other than speculative purposes,” and warning that the department “may be unable to make a positive finding” in favor of the exit.

Even as these issues publicly surfaced, Levine was quoted as insisting that the project was still one of the governor’s top priorities. It also attracted the leeches at the Cuomo Thruway Authority. The Authority awarded a no-bid design contract for the interchange to a consultant represented by a law firm that once included Gene Bersani and still did joint legal work with him. The consultant was then approached by Levine, who suggested they use Betasoft to handle their computer services.

One active developer in the region is Shelly Goldstein, a tough-talking, Rockland County-based owner of luxury condos and federally subsidized apartment complexes. Goldstein, who has personally given $49,000 to Cuomo campaigns, was one of the governor’s largest individuals donors when he was scratching for money in the struggle against Ed Koch in 1982.

At that time, Goldstein was also the most important client of the small Manhattan law firm that Cuomo’s longtime aide Jerry Weiss had set up, at Cuomo’s request, as a possible nesting place should Cuomo lose the gubernatorial race. Weiss also became a Goldstein partner in a major real estate deal, and candidate Cuomo went out to a Rockland golf outing hosted by Goldstein to raise contributions for the campaign. Over the years Cuomo became friendly with the flashy 59-year-old Goldstein, who drives a new silver Mercedes convertible, dresses “Miami Beach,” and, at one point, dyed his hair jet black.

Once Cuomo became governor, he appointed Goldstein to the chairmanship of the State University Construction Fund. Goldstein’s son Jeffrey began getting contracts to manage state housing projects. Neither Goldstein nor the governor will answer questions about whether they ever discussed the interchange; Weiss told the Voice he never had anything to do with the project.

Goldstein’s Land Grab

What’s clear is that Shelly Goldstein has owned property in Orange County that would benefit from the interchange for 20 years, and that he began to develop a 30-store shopping mall on a 28-acre site in the Town of Chester shortly after the new exit was announced. Goldstein also bought a 160-acre site owned by the International Nickel Corporation (INCO) and his own environmental impact statement found that the development of this site would be enhanced by the interchange. Most importantly, Goldstein submitted a $35 million bid in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire the Sterling Forest tract itself, principally for the same sort of luxury housing he planned to build on the INCO site.

By the time Goldstein bid on the Sterling Forest property in 1986, however, he was no longer represented by Weiss, who’d abruptly quit the practice of law in late 1984. Andrew Cuomo, who had worked summers at the Weiss firm while in law school and joined as a full partner in 1985 at age 26, and his then girlfriend, partner Lucille Falcone, had taken over the banking and real estate interests of Shelly Goldstein. The relationships that developed were so close that Goldstein placed Andrew Cuomo on the board of a Union City, New Jersey bank as part of a settlement that permitted the bank’s management to avoid a Goldstein takeover attempt, and did the same for Falcone at the Savings Bank of Rockland, where Goldstein is a major shareholder.

At one point in 1986, the Sterling Forest acquisition was clearly the biggest deal in Andrew Cuomo’s life. He was not merely representing Goldstein, as he did on two Rockland co-op conversion plans filed with the state attorney general’s office; Cuomo was scheduled to get both legal and real estate brokerage fees on the sale, and Goldstein was going to allow him to retroactively invest those fees as a partner in the purchase.

Goldstein and Cuomo, who ran his father’s two gubernatorial campaigns and was a special assistant to the governor during the early days of the administration, had another partner in the venture with powerful state ties — Bob Seavey, chairman of the state’s Battery Park City Authority. Seavey, 61, a developer of subsidized housing projects in the city, had been appointed by Cuomo in 1984 as the part-time head of the Battery Park board. Seavey’s son Avery later became a partner in the Cuomo firm, and Seavey and his wife joined it in 1986 — not as partners but as counsels to it. Lucille Falcone and the senior Seavey, a rumpled and grandfatherly figure, now head the firm’s booming real estate department.

A millionaire with homes in the Hamptons and Williamstown, Massachusetts, Seavey allowed one of his state- and city-subsidized projects — a luxurious complex located at 401 Second Avenue, built long before the Cuomo era — to become home for the singles wing of the Cuomo network, including at one point everyone from Falcone to Cuomo’s daughter Maria to the daughters of Cuomo friend Jimmy Breslin. The failure of many of Seavey’s tenants to meet the income requirements of the subsidy program was of little apparent concern to anyone.

Seavey’s connections to the Sterling Forest deal with Goldstein were somewhat awkward. Seavey’s Battery Park board was then in the middle of selecting a developer for its next phase of state-subsidized luxury housing. One of the finalists was Shelly Goldstein. In addition, Seavey was helping to raise financing for his and Goldstein’s Sterling Forest bid. Sometime between May and October, several developers with Battery Park City sites, including the Milsteins, some of the principals of Dic Underhill, and Related Housing, were asked to invest in the project and told that Seavey was a partner in it. Seavey’s board had acted on leases for some of these same developers, all of whom eventually declined to invest. But then, Seavey has made a career of living on just this sort of edge.

Seavey first became a focus of media attention in the mid-’60s when the State Investigation Commission criticized him for wearing two hats — representing both the cooperators in Mitchell Lama co-ops and the builder. The SIC also focused on Seavey’s relationship with Tammany Hall leader Ray Jones, the first black county leader in New York and Seavey’s number-one client. Seavey’s financial records were subpoenaed, revealing a pattern of four $5,000 payments from one Harlem housing company to Seavey, each of which was followed by huge withdrawals from Seavey’s account.

Later a Seavey corporation and his partner were indicted in Brooklyn on charges of bilking the Mitchell Lama project at Cadman Plaza; but, after waiving a jury trial, they were acquitted by then Supreme Court judge Vito Titone. In the late ’70s Seavey was also eyed in the city’s day-care lease scandal and the comptroller wound up withholding $158,000 in rental payments to him because of suspicious overcharges.

In August 1986, just as Seavey, Goldstein, and Andrew Cuomo were getting together their bid for Sterling Forest, the Voice and Mike Oreskes, a reporter for The New York Times, were preparing news stories about the curious clients attracted to Andrew Cuomo’s small young law firm. Both Seavey and Goldstein became the focus of reporters’ questions. In a letter addressed to Mario Cuomo, dated August 26, the day before both stories appeared, Seavey referred to a conversation he’d had with the governor the night before and announced he would be resigning from the Battery Park board, effective five days later.

In an extraordinary sequence of events, Goldstein’s partner wrote a letter to Battery Park two days after Seavey’ resignation from the authority, withdrawing his proposal for Battery Park designation. The letter noted that Goldstein’s organization, the Lynmark Group, had decided to “stay within our geographic area,” adding that it has “entered into negotiations on one of the largest parcels in that area,” an obvious reference to the Sterling Forest deal. A month later, however, Home Group Insurance Company rejected the Seavey/Goldstein offer.

Seavey and Goldstein got so friendly during the course of this deal that Goldstein installed Seavey on the same Bank of Rockland board as Falcone, and bought a condo in the Sovereign, a luxury building at 425 East 58th Street where Seavey has lived for years. Andrew Cuomo, too, continued to work closely with Goldstein, joining him in a Florida bank takeover bid that blew up in ugly court cases and uglier headlines last year. While Cuomo managed a successful settlement of the Florida situation, he says he was disturbed enough by Goldstein’s performance in this and other cases that he “has not talked to him for six or seven months.” Cuomo says Goldstein “threatened to kill” the bank’s resistant owners.

Andrew’s Answer

In a wide-ranging defense of the events surrounding the interchange, Andrew Cuomo contended that there was no conflict because Goldstein was a Rockland developer who did not enter the Orange County market until after the interchange was approved. In fact, Goldstein owned substantial property in two Orange County towns — Chester and Woodbury — and started discussing the development of a mall with Chester officials in 1985. Cuomo, who says he knows nothing about these properties, handled Goldstein’s purchase of a third Orange parcel, the INCO site, and maintains that Goldstein’s option on this site was obtained after the passage in July 1985 of the bill authorizing the interchange. Neither Cuomo nor INCO officials, however, will say precisely when that option was signed or show the Voice a copy. INCO’s president, Sam Goldberg, testifying in a local zoning case, refused to get specific about the timing of Goldstein’s initial interest, though he did concede that the property was put up for sale within days of the 1984 Cuomo speech.

Cuomo’s argument also ignores Goldstein’s longtime dominance as a developer in neighboring Rockland, even though the governor’s memo on the interchange bill said that the exit would “enhance significantly the economic development of Orange and Rockland Counties.” Vincent Monte, the Democratic county leader in Rockland and a private realtor who’s handled title insurance for Goldstein, told the Voice that Goldstein “had always intended — long before the governor’s speech — to expand his Rockland condo development into Orange County.”

Finally, Cuomo sweeps aside the importance of the on-again, off-again nature of the governmental approval process, particularly with a project that has so many downsides and roadblocks. Goldstein, Seavey, and Cuomo could afford to speculate on the likelihood of future state actions that might impact on the interchange with a little more certainty than the next guy. If the Andrew Cuomo group had actually become the owners of this tract in 1986, the state would then have been put in the difficult position of conducting a highly controversial environmental impact review to justify the construction of a virtual driveway into the governor’s son’s land.

Cuomo’s defense of Seavey, who would not comment, is that if any of the Battery Park developers had joined the Sterling Forest bid, “I wouldn’t have gone ahead with the deal, and I don’t think Bob would have either,” which makes it even stranger that Seavey asked them. Cuomo stresses Goldstein’s withdrawal from Battery Park and Seavey’s resignation as acts that minimized the “appearance of conflict,” adding that “any solicitation” Seavey “may have done” of BPC principals “may have happened” after his resignation. “Once all the pieces were put together on a deal” for Sterling Forest, if the offer had been accepted, he and the others would’ve analyzed the package and, if there was a conflict, “we wouldn’t have gone ahead with it.”

A year after the Goldstein bid was rejected, the exit project was suspended. By then the project was awash in opposition elicited during the environmental process and buffeted by a Times story a few months earlier that explored some of the conflict issues. New Thruway Authority director John Shafer, who had shepherded the interchange through the Department of Transportation when he was there, issued a terse and inexplicable explanation for the suspension. He cited concerns that the project would be “inconsistent” with “the possibility of state land acquisition or land-use planning for park and other environmental purposes in the vicinity.” That problem had been apparent from the inception of the project three years earlier.

Various top Cuomo officials have made contradictory claims to the Voice about how it died. Hennessy says he decided to stop it without ever talking to the governor who announced it. Cuomo’s counsel Evan Davis says it was killed “on the advice of condemnation lawyers from the attorney general’s office.” A spokesman for the attorney general says a representative from that office attended a top-level 1987 meeting on the second floor about the interchange but made no recommendation of any sort. Supposed decisionmaker Hennessy knows nothing about this crucial meeting. The demise of the ramp is as mysterious as its origins, and these conflicting recollections appear to conceal the hand of the one man with the power to both create and kill the project, Mario Cuomo.

Lease Lust

Around the same time in 1984 that the governor first announced the Sterling Forest interchange, his largest campaign contributor, Shelly Goldstein, was getting himself involved in another controversial state project. He began discussing a partnership arrangement with Rockland County builder Harry Partridge, who had bought the old police property building at 400 Broome Street in Little Italy. Partridge had snared a multi-million-dollar state lease for the dilapidated and abandoned building in the dying days of the Carey administration, and when Cuomo became governor, he was going broke trying to renovate it.

Goldstein’s interest in the building would ultimately become a titillating feature of a SIC investigation that raised questions about his own conduct, as well as Andrew Cuomo’s and that of another top state official, General Services Commissioner John Egan.

The criminal focus of the Broome Street saga was on the relationship between Partridge and Joe Siggia, a middle-level OGS director who picked sites and helped negotiate leases for the move-out of thousands of state workers from the World Trade Center. Siggia retired from OGS and went to work for Partridge shortly after delivering the lease to him, just as he did for two other landlords who won state leases in the move-out sweepstakes. Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau eventually indicted both Siggia and Partridge on bribery charges but convicted them only of lying under oath at the SIC about whether or not they’d discussed Siggia’s future employment while Siggia was still in his state job. A judge dismissed the perjury counts after the conviction, and his ruling is now being appealed by Morgenthau.

But the SIC did not spend two years conducting over 200 interviews and 25 audits because of a penny-ante relationship between an unknown builder and a hustling bureaucrat. Beneath the surface of these shady dealings were intimations of an extraordinary power play pitting Cuomo and son Andrew against the ex-governor’s appointments secretary and Democratic Party chief John Burns.

It was lobbyist Burns, retained by Partridge, who managed in late 1983 to get his old friends from the Carey days — OGS commissioner John Egan and Cuomo deputy Hank Dullea — to approve the state’s rental of an additional Broome Street floor. And it was Andrew Cuomo, then his father’s special assistant, who mysteriously got wind of this last-minute boon for Partridge, and the old boy network that produced it, and turned himself into a one-man state police force, interrogating deputy commissioners in the middle of the night and taking days to plough through OGS’s files on the lease. Not surprisingly, Andrew Cuomo’s expressed suspicions prompted Egan to cancel the new floor he’d just ordered, and Mario Cuomo’s displeased questions quickly convinced his deputy Dullea to turn his back on Burns.

The Cuomo version of these events is that sleuth Andrew smelled influence peddling and blew the whistle. The SIC, which never released Andrew’s testimony and never grilled the governor, could not settle the question of whether or not there was any connection between the actions the Cuomos took to block the rental of the additional floor, and Shelly Goldstein’s reasons for wanting it blocked. But the apparent coincidences of the Broome Street affair, when combined with the similar coincidences of Sterling Forest, present a disturbing scenario of possible conflict — one that has now been embraced in an ongoing civil suit brought by Manhattan Savings Bank, which financed Partridge’s renovations.

The bank’s attorney, Terry Gilheany, has argued in court that Andrew Cuomo acted “at the behest of a major campaign contributor to the governor.” The bank’s court papers suggest that the Cuomo-provoked cancellation of the additional floor, and the state’s refusal to pay the full rental that Partridge claims he is due, were part of a campaign to either force Partridge to sell up to 60 per cent of Broome Street to Goldstein at a discounted price or at least to punish Partridge for defaulting on an unrelated contract he had to install windows in a New Jersey building owned by Goldstein.

Goldstein concedes in his own SIC testimony that he “blew up” at Partridge when Partridge failed to deliver new windows on a 21-story federally subsidized project Goldstein owned, with Jerry Weiss and others, in New Jersey. “I threatened to ruin him in the state of New York. I threatened to do anything,” Goldstein testified. Partridge recalls that Goldstein said: “I am going to fucking destroy you so that you will never do business again in New York State. I am going to fucking destroy you in a way that you will know exactly where it came from, and how it was done, but you will never be able to prove it.”

Paul Adler, a Partridge lobbyist who’d known Goldstein for years and was well connected in Albany, testified that Goldstein threatened him at the same time in almost precisely the same language. “He told me my name would be mud,” said Adler.

A Sudden Reversal

The Broome Street brouhaha climaxed in January 1984 — the same month that Mario Cuomo announced the Sterling Forest interchange. The governor simultaneously embarked on a sudden and angry campaign to get at the root of OGS’s decision to award Partridge an additional floor. His counsel, Gerry Crotty, got the lease file from OGS. Then, according to SIC testimony, the governor summoned one of his top deputies, Hank Dullea, and grilled him about his contacts with Burns, asking if anyone had suggested that the governor had a personal interest in the issue of the extra floor. Once Cuomo told Dullea he’d gotten the facts wrong about the need for an additional floor, Dullea left the meeting “very troubled.” Later Dullea, approached by Burns to talk about Broome Street near the elevator on the second floor, accused him of misrepresenting the situation in their previous discussions, and walked away.

After Crotty returned the file, Andrew Cuomo reclaimed it. Andrew would subsequently testify, according to the SIC report, that his interest in the lease was piqued by an anonymous oral tip that made no clear allegation but merely suggested that “it would be worth looking at 400 Broome Street.”

The flurry of intense activity at the highest levels of state government that following this “tip” was most unusual. In a Voice interview, Andrew Cuomo conceded that anonymous callers did not frequently get through to him in the executive chamber, and that his information might not have come from one, but rather from a confidential source whose identity he has since forgotten. He insists that it wasn’t his father, Goldstein, or Goldstein’s lawyer and Cuomo confidant Jerry Weiss who suggested he begin his unusual investigation. Andrew Cuomo also could not explain why he didn’t turn this inquiry over to the SIC, or the comptroller’s office, or a D.A. In any event, shortly after Cuomo began his internal investigation, he told Egan to kill the deal.

By February, an embarrassed Egan, who had awarded Partridge the additional floor against the advice of all his top staff, traveled out to Broome Street, introduced himself to Partridge for the first time, and told him that he couldn’t go through with it. Egan told the Voice that his conversations with Andrew and others had convinced him that the governor himself was “damn upset” about the maneuverings to deliver the floor.

Then suddenly Goldstein’s attitude changed. He had learned all about the Broome Street lease and, according to Partridge and Adler, began talking buyout. “He indicated to me that he could cure” the extra floor problem, Partridge testified. And in a letter Partridge wrote in 1985, he claimed that Goldstein promised “to make me a rich man again” if Partridge brought him into Broome Street, suggesting he could get the lease negotiated.

A macho man who wore cowboy boots and fashioned himself a frontier entrepreneur, Partridge was by then on his knees, damaged by the decision about the additional floor and the escalating costs at Broome Street. “He broke down crying at one meeting that he was being ruined because of this building in New York,” recalled Goldstein. “Harry is a big man. This really cracked us up a little bit.” Partridge says he refused to sell to Goldstein; Goldstein says Partridge just never gave him the hard numbers on which he could base an offer.

At one point, lobbyist Adler says Goldstein told him: “What the hell’s the matter with that guy — isn’t he afraid of me, of what I can do to him? Tell him to see — he’ll be rich again.” But Partridge never buckled, ultimately lost the building, and went bankrupt. “I think it was too close a coincidence,” Adler told the SIC, “and I think there was an opportunity there to take advantage of a business venture at a weak point. I think the eighth floor was taken away.”

A Blast from the Past

With contradictory testimony and no clear resolution, the SIC dropped this aspect of its probe. Its May 1986 report was instead an unprecedented attack on a sitting state commissioner — the gregarious career civil servant Egan. “The predominant and disturbing conclusion of the Commission’s investigation,” said the report, “concerned the utter failure by OGS to demonstrate an appropriate degree of concern for the standards of conduct required of state employees.” Citing the $371 million OGS budget, the report said that “attitudes towards ethical conflicts within the agency must be profoundly changed, from the field level employees up to the Commissioner.”

The rationale for this assault was Egan’s apparent indifference to Siggia’s conflicts with Partridge and two other landlords associated with the World Trade Center move-out, as well as his accommodation to Burns on Broome Street. The SIC characterized the Broome Street dealings as “self-serving behavior and favored treatment for old friends,” concluding that Egan’s “evaluation and professional judgment appeared to have been formed to a far greater extent on the basis of who last spoke to him rather than on the merits of the transactions.”

The SIC may have come down on Egan this sharply because, after pouring resources into its two-year probe, the commission stopped short of bringing the Cuomo/Goldstein issues to any conclusion. In any event, its hard-hitting findings against Egan have been blithely ignored by the governor’s office. Indeed Andrew Cuomo’s attitude about the SIC probe is one of contempt, even though three of the seven commissioners who conducted it, including the chairman, David Trager, were appointed by Governor Cuomo and came from the top levels of the U.S. attorney’s office. A fourth commissioner, appointed by the assembly, was Joe Hynes, whom the governor subsequently named special state prosecutor.

A couple of weeks before the report was released, Goldstein quit his post as chair of the State University Construction Fund, but Andrew Cuomo says the resignation had nothing to do with Goldstein’s bullying conduct in the Broome Street affair. Of course, Andrew Cuomo’s relationship with him grew closer in the aftermath of the report, so there was certainly no attempt by the Cuomo family to distance itself from him.

Half a dozen top OGS officials immediately below Egan were slammed in the report, or embarrassed at the hearing, none more savagely than OGS counsel Emeric Levatich, who was described as routinely approving the most blatant conflict-of-interest arrangements between OGS staffers and firms doing business with the agency. Egan and Levatich respond that Siggia’s employment by landlords who benefited from his state decisions didn’t violate the law until new legislation was passed last year — a law the SIC recommended be adopted.

While one deputy commissioner has left the agency to return to a high-level post at the Corrections Department, it is unclear that this transfer was in any way connected to his role in the lease scandal. Other than him, a couple of low-level agency personnel were demoted. This record of response tends to confirm the indifference the report identified.

Egan says he’s survived because the governor “has a lot of trust in us.” He says Cuomo “was very much aware of the report,” and that “if the governor thought any of the allegations were true, I’d be long gone.” The commissioner makes an impassioned defense of his agency’s overall record for honesty, citing the World Trade Center move-out as an aberration that bypassed the normal leasing procedures. He also points out that he referred the case against Siggia to the D.A., though it was long after the SIC had opened its own probe, initiated by a complaint from the Republican senate.

John Egan is a man who learned early in life how to please those with power. He personally handles the petty favors in Albany that make powerful friends — everything from state cars to office furniture. Just as he had shuttled feverishly from side to side during the Broome Street battle, he appeared to weave back and forth again as a witness at the SIC a year later. In his first appearance he testified that Andrew Cuomo hadn’t advised him to cancel the eighth floor, and then, after Andrew said he had, Egan confirmed Andrew’s testimony in a second appearance. He says he didn’t know about Andrew’s intervening testimony.

Egan advertised himself during a Voice interview as someone who’d been around long enough to anticipate what governors and those with power expect of him. At the SIC he might’ve anticipated wrong. But in the end, his performance obviously satisfied the only audience that really mattered. ❖