Welcome to the Capital Connection, a weekly program questioning New York State leaders
on a variety of issues.
Your host is Dr. Alan Shartock, political scientist and professor emeritus at the University
at Albany.
Distributions for the Capital Connection is made possible with the help of New York
State United Teachers, representing professionals in education and healthcare, online at nysut.org.
It's the Capital Connection.
Hi, I'm Alan Shartock.
Joining us this week is Times Union reporter Casey Siler, state editor of the Albany Times
Union and co-host of New York now.
Welcome my old friend Casey.
Alan could be here.
Thanks for having me on.
Delighted to see you here.
Okay.
Albany Corruption.
What's the fix?
Oh, if only I had that written down on a prescription pad.
It depends on who you ask, isn't it?
Is it more disclosure of campaign contributors?
More phony disclosure.
Well, yeah, more phony disclosure.
We're getting more in the way of granular disclosure.
Actually, we're talking on Wednesday, which is the day that candidates and public officials
and others have to turn in the much more granular disclosure forms to the Joint Commission
on Public Ethics.
Now, as you say, much more.
You can't fool me.
I've been around a long time.
I'm over 70 years old.
I know this stuff keeps coming and coming and coming.
So what did they do?
They set up a system which says, okay, you got to say if anybody gave you money or whatever
between this amount and that amount, why can't we have somebody gave me $1,562 and they
always insist that it's this between stuff?
Well, you're right.
But the difference here is that as kind of a compromise between the really lame income
brackets that we had before and the kind of exact figure that you're talking about,
the brackets are much narrower and more informative this time around.
So for example, in addition to knowing how much, for example, just to pick a name out
of a hat, Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver makes as of Council at Whites and Luxembourg,
which is a prominent personal injury law firm, we will also know who, if any, his clients
are at that firm, the same for any other official who has kind of a client relationship
with a prominent business interest or not so prominent business interest.
Casey Sallie, you know how much I respect you, but come on.
What's going on?
What's going on?
What's going to happen here is people are going to say, well, he made between this and
this, their eyes glaze over.
Whereas there's a reason that they insisted that the actual amounts would not be given.
Believe me, Andrew would have loved your Andrew Cuomo, I should say, would have loved
to see that because he would have gotten a lot of credit for it.
No, they insisted because they know that first of all, very few people actually go and
look at that stuff except reporters, right?
I mean, how many average citizens?
But a lot more people would go more, more private citizens will look at it now because we
won't have to go to, for example, the legislative ethics panel or something like that to get
these forms.
They will be posted and I think it's going to be in July.
They will be posted on the J.C.O.P website.
So J.J.O.P.
Go J.C.O.P.
Well, once again, that's a matter of opinion.
But it will be a much more effective tool if the public does want to take the time to
go into it.
Now, will teenage kids start doing it when they get home from school?
Probably not, but it will be available.
The information will be out there.
But to get back to your original question.
You sound like a defense lawyer for these guys.
Not at all.
Not at all.
I'm just saying, you know, and we are setting up a thesis antithesis thing and you are
arguing that it's largely worthless and I'm arguing that, well, well, I didn't say totally
worthless.
I think if they wanted to do it, they could have done it right.
But instead, they're still fooling with us.
Sure.
Fooling, I think, is where the standing in for comes close to something else.
Okay.
Yes.
But is it the solution to public corruption?
If we have people who are lying, who are hiding business connections that are not on
the up and up that involve people who are also seeking political favor or political
laborers on their behalf, disclosure isn't necessarily going to do anything for that.
For example, Eric Stevenson reminded everybody who was assembling men from the Bronx.
Yeah.
Who was one of the first wave of arrests was according to the U.S. Attorney's Office taking
money from the operators of a series of elder daycare facilities to write and submit a
piece of legislation that would have benefited his competitors by placing a moratorium on
the construction of these facilities, I think all across New York City.
A bill that was never going to get passed was probably never going to get passed in
the assembly was certainly never going to get passed in the Senate.
And yet he allegedly accepted, you know, under the table, bribes from these people.
He's not going to disclose that.
That is the kind of corruption that is much more likely to be turned up by somebody wearing
a wire.
Apparently that is what his fellow assembly Democrat member Nelson Castro, who has retired,
retired sort of immediately after a fabulous story.
It's a fabulous story, but it's only the beginning of these kind of weeks of revelations
that we've had.
So Castro, the feds knew that he was guilty and he knew he was going to have to get out
after his term, but he's still wore the wire for the feds.
Well, here's the amazing thing is that Castro in the middle of 2009 was hit with a seal
indictment on a perjury charge that stemmed from a case of election fraud from his first
run in 2008.
So then he went to go work for the Bronx District Attorney.
The Bronx District Attorney, we can only imagine that he was then deployed against other
burrow officials.
And then the Bronx District Attorney apparently then offered him up to the US Attorney's Office,
which then deployed him around the Capitol for at least three years.
So that essentially means that while Castro was representing the interests of his district,
he was also working for the US Attorney's Office.
We always, in the newspaper when we present a lawmaker's name, it's always D or R, hyphen,
wherever, Mount Kisco or what have you.
And you could make the argument that it was Assemblyman Nelson Castro, D, US Attorney's
Office.
That's very funny.
And of course, as soon as this old one public, he had to get out of the way.
So tell me about this.
This is so fascinating.
Casey Siler, one of the things that is so good about this is that the paranoia level
at the legislature is incredible because all of these guys who ever talked to Castro
or to any of the other guys who are wearing wires, including Shirley Huntley and Shirley
along the go last.
She's 74 and going to jail for how long?
A year and a day.
A year and a day.
And that's only because she helped the feds a little bit.
Well, not enough.
But didn't help them enough.
What we know is that Shirley Huntley, who is facing charges of essentially helping to
raid a non-not-for-profit that she helped set up and then falsifying some documents to
kind of cover up that raiding, then offered her services to the US Attorney's Office and
wore a wire against a number of elected officials and a couple of Democratic party operatives,
including a large number of her fellow Senate Democrats, including John Samson, subsequently
arrested on different charges by the US Attorney's Office.
You took a few years.
Malcolm Smith.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Oh, no.
I mean, the charges against Samson are really amazing.
And I guess it's worth pointing out that they don't directly go to his public service,
but the level of kind of criminality is really quite something.
There was a joke there.
Samson, heck, I remember.
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
Right over here.
That's Samson, not Samson.
Yeah.
But I'm sorry.
I'm too little.
I know.
I know.
But it was a good one here, right?
Okay.
And here is an interesting question, which is that in Plunkett of Tammany Hall, Plunkett
says, the old board healer says, there is legal and illegal wrongdoing.
In other words, how stupid do you have to be to take cash for doing something, including
somebody who you'll remember who was indicted for $1,000.
I mean, sold the whole career for $1,000.
Right.
And that's the amazing thing is the level of stupidity that seems to be on display here,
especially with the charges against Malcolm Smith, who once again was accused of attempting
or has been accused of attempting to bribe Republican party officials in the hopes of
getting what's called a Wilson Pacula certificate.
Is it a popular peculula?
Yeah, peculula.
I guess you're right.
No, I just always love that name.
Yeah.
Well, of course.
And you must remember that Alan Pecula directed all the president's men and it's Wilson
Pacula that is the name of the certificates.
Oh, perfect.
It's a good way to remember.
Yes.
But anyway, we digress.
We totally digress.
But the idea that Malcolm Smith could have been the first Republican mayor of New York
city is ridiculous.
You and I have a better chance of being the first African American Republican mayor
of New York city than Malcolm Smith does.
Okay.
So sometimes, I don't add to this, but there have been those who have raised eyebrows
because many of the people who are now the subjects of all these investigations come
from a particular demographic subset to it, many of them are black.
And this is not good for many people who believe that what has to happen here is we have
to have the Justice Department insists on it more people who are representative, representative
of their demographic group.
And yet this has happened.
There's little talk about it.
Although some have mentioned it, does it mean anything?
No.
I think is the short answer.
Although it has been raised already by some minority lawmakers, including in the Senate.
And you're absolutely right.
This wave of arrests all include minority members, most of them African American.
And the point has been raised by Ruben Diaz Sr., who's a senator who says, you know,
are prosecutors going as robustly after lawmakers who come from other ethnic groups.
James Sanders, who is also a Democratic senator, actually co-hosted a seminar of a debate.
You know, arguing, is this conspiracy on behalf of the prosecutors or is a corruption by those
who have been targeted?
And I do not think that race is at all a factor in these investigations.
You are getting a lot of African American people caught up because you're getting a lot
of minority members wearing wires.
And who, if you're a minority member who is facing federal charges and you go to the US
Attorney's Office and say, I can expose corruption among my fellows, who are you going to call
up to get into your office to get on tape?
If you're from the South Bronx, it's probably not going to be just to pull a name out of
a hat, you know, Dave Valesky, who is a, you know, a white upstate senator.
It's not going to be a Republican from the Adirondacks.
It's not going to be somebody from out in Buffalo, most likely.
And also you have to remember that the prosecutors we're talking about here are Loretta Lynch,
who is African American, Pete Barara, who, you know, whose family goes back to the Indian
subcontinent.
And they're all working for the US Attorney General, who of course is Eric Holder, who
is African American.
That's his president.
Yeah, right.
Who works for Barack Obama, who is African American as well.
So I think that is, that's kind of a defensive crouch that a lot of minority lawmakers
fall into.
But I don't think it's a particularly helpful or illuminating analysis.
Well, you're a terrific reporter, a case of Tyler.
And one of the things that I keep hearing these guys are, when they get caught, are
saying things like, hey, we don't even know what we could talk to.
Of course, you know, this is repressing our, you know, our ability to do business.
Well, to get back to the question that we began with, what's going to stop these?
And perhaps if the, if the argument is the total paranoia is total awareness, is the
assumption that whoever you're talking to is wired, going to stop potential corruption
and strikes, that's not a bad one.
The idea that whoever you are talking to might be wired up by the US Attorney's office
is a pretty good deterrent to doing things that you'd rather not want broadcast on a radio
station such as this one.
We are talking to Casey Siler, state editor of the Albany Times Union, one of the brightest
guys we know, and co-host of New York now.
Okay.
So Casey, there was a time when Andrew Cuomo becomes governor of New York, when I had the
sense that everybody who wasn't him was, you know, to be warded off.
So we had Eric Schneideman, the attorney general.
We had the controller, Thomas Denapoli, who he had, I believe Andrew Cuomo had an unthinkable
animus towards.
But I see the things may be getting a little bit better right now.
For example, Andrew Cuomo just appointed a new committee that would help localities.
He wants to.
He wants to.
He wants to, he wants to run through legislation.
Right.
Right.
And on it are all these old enemies that he used to fight with.
That's interesting, isn't it?
It is.
Yeah.
And what we're talking about is a financial advisory panel that would essentially go around
the state and act almost as kind of paratroopers for communities in, in fiscal distress.
In other words, if their reserves had dropped low, if their tax rates are very, very high
as a percentage of the value of the property in that community.
And as you noted, it would include either the, the, the officials themselves are representatives
from the attorney general's office, the controller's office, the secretary of state and someone
from the private sector from the business community.
And the governor announced it or offered the most detail that we've had so far in a red
room appearance down at the Capitol with a lot of officials from unions and from local
leadership, the conference of mayors, that kind of thing.
As noted, it's got to be done through legislation.
But what the governor said is that these localities, if they accepted the kind of aid, be they
loans or grants to potentially bail out or at least assist some of these communities,
they would have to accept as binding the recommendations of the panel.
And those could include service consolidation or wholesale consolidation of, you know, in,
here in Albany, we talk a lot about the idea of the county and the city merging, which
would assist the city, which has, you know, large infrastructure costs, but not necessarily
the tax-based support it.
So if you own a house, you're paying a pretty penny here in Albany.
And it is, it is clearly meant as a way to aid upstate cities, which are kind of facing
an existential crisis where their tax rates do not support their service costs, which
in many cases are very high.
And also to rebut the criticism that the governor is getting from Syracuse's Stephanie
Miner and others who say that the governor needs to do more to lead on some of these issues.
The panel would also have the power if uniformed services, being mainly police and firefighters
and the localities agreed to it to serve as a binding arbitration panel in contract
disputes.
And that has been a very controversial issue.
The current binding arbitration statute expires in June.
And so we're on that, on that issue, we're kind of headed towards a cliff.
So it's going to be interesting to see what the legislature does with it.
What is the Tribal Amendment?
The Tribal Amendment is the amendment to the Taylor Law that says that the provisions
of an existing contract with certain labor groups remain in effect while contract negotiations
are ongoing.
That's the Taylor Law that says that those labor groups do not have the right to strike.
No, you're not a lot of strike.
But as a compensation for not being a lot of strike, your last contract is in effect
until you're negotiating.
And of course, the sort of pro business groups and others hate that because it doesn't bring
the civil servants to the table.
Correct.
So is there any chance that that'll be changed?
No.
Because the assembly will never change it.
The assembly will never change it.
And the governor has essentially said that it's just a nonstarter and it's a nonstarter
for many Republicans as well as many Democrats because of a lot of down on Long Island where
a lot of Republicans have a large degree of labor support.
They're not going to go for that either.
So let's talk topless now is that the old governor Cuomo used to say, let's get down
to it.
We have a governor who without any doubt in my mind wants Republicans as a break on social
policy to stay in power.
But we have more Democrats in the Senate all together.
But for those Democrats have broken off and are now the so-called independent Democratic
Caucus IDC conference.
And the way we heard about this remarkable arrangement was when they made their deal that
they would be in power for two weeks and that the other guys would be in power, the
the regular Republicans, Dean Skelos president would be in power for every two weeks.
Now we see something like, well, but that's only for the kind of ministerial function of
Senate temporary president.
They're both always in power.
Yeah.
But we've been seeing Dean Skelos who got sort of rupt on the gun law, which was unacceptable
to many of his regular constituents now saying, we're not going any further on some of these
things like the women's rights package that cut put together by the government.
Yeah.
And it works right.
The plan and that, that got put together by the governor.
Now at what point does this governor get a little hell for not bringing all the Democrats
in say you guys are in the majority, I want to run for president at some point.
They're going to hold me responsible for arbitrarily making keeping the Republicans in power in
New York State.
Well, he took hell for it when it first occurred.
He took hell from the rest of the Senate Democrats, the mainline Senate Democrats we often refer
to the mass.
He took hell on MSNBC and in the pages of the nation and that's it.
And that's it, I'll have to rely.
Took hell from me and from you as well.
But here's the thing.
I would argue and I put this in my Sunday column that what would have happened if that coalition,
if the IDC and the Democrats had come back together back in December, where would we be today
with all the indictments?
Yes, with two members because let's do the math.
Okay.
Even if you add up the mainline Republicans, the IDC breakaway faction, you've got 33 members.
Okay.
33, you would have 30 Republicans and 33 Democrats in the state Senate.
Now today, two of those Democrats, John Samson and Malcolm Smith are currently under federal
indictment.
But they're still sitting there.
They're still sitting there.
They can vote.
That's the thing.
When you are facing federal indictment, you're a range of interests, narrows.
And it narrows specifically to staying out of the federal pen.
We've seen before how lawmakers who are under the sword of criminal prosecution really
kind of lose interest in being lawmakers.
And also you know very well how transactional politics can be.
Do you want your majority to be dependent?
And if you are a governor, do you want your agenda, the passage of your agenda to be
dependent upon the votes of people who are facing federal indictment?
Yeah, Casey Siler.
Could have watershorter.
It could have been.
But in fact, when the governor did it, he didn't necessarily know when the governor did
what?
When the governor set up his little Jerry Riggs scheme, I think that is supposition on your
part.
There are no fingerprints.
I'm not saying it happened.
I'm not saying it didn't happen.
I'll give you that.
I'll give you that.
I think you're right.
The governor in fact knew that some of these characters were suspect when he was attorney
general.
I think Jeff Klein, who's the leader of the independent democratic conference knows it
even better than the governor does because he used to be the guy in the room with many
of those same people.
He understands.
Yeah, but there are no fascists.
But just to argue this with you, there are those who believe that those four white guys
who left that conference did it because they were unsatisfied with the fact that their
own progress as potential leaders was hampered by the fact that there was a, you know, a group
of black and Hispanic people who were sitting at the top and these four white guys who became
the independent conference didn't like it.
Granted.
In other words, racist or racial instincts.
Well, I think they're kind of realist instincts because you're right.
Going back to David Patterson, the leader of the Senate Senate Democratic conference has
been African-American and that goes back more than a decade easily.
But you had your death in head trouble with some of these.
But I don't think, I don't think they're problem.
I don't think Jeff Klein or Diane Savino and David Valeski or David Carlucci who are the
charter members of the IDC.
I don't think their problems were racial.
I think they looked at that kind of analysis of where the next leader was going to come
from.
And that's what they saw.
But I think it was more personalities than race that caused them to get out.
And I'm not saying that I think, but you don't know.
And I don't know.
Well, I don't know what's in Jeff Klein's heart.
And I know knowing what I know about politics is that everything is a mixture of a wish to
do good, a wish to do well for yourself and a desire to get paid as it were, whether
in political coin or actual coin.
So I love having Casey Siler as our guest here.
He's terrific.
The state editor of the Albany Times Union co-host of New York now, the television show.
Casey, thanks so much for joining us.
We hope you'll come back often.
My pleasure.
Thanks so much for having me.
The capital connection is distributed with the cooperation of the public radio stations
of New York State.
David Castina is the producer of the capital connection, a production of WAMC Northeast
public radio in Albany.
The work for the capital connection comes from New York State United Teachers, representing
professionals in education and healthcare, online at nysut.org and niscasa, the New York
State Coalition against sexual assault, working to support men in their decision to end sexual
violence with the My Strength is not for hurting campaign, online at nyscasa.org.
