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.
Hi, it's the Capital Connection.
I'm Alan Shartock.
Joining us this week is one of the best guys we ever have on this program.
Colonist and Albany Bureau Chief for the New York Daily News.
Ken Love it.
Welcome back, Ken.
It's good to be here.
Well, Ken, you're the man of the hour.
Everybody's talking about one of the major stories that is hit Albany politics.
And that has to do with the Moreland Act Commission.
Maybe you could sort of recapitulate your major fine, your major story, which is far as I'm
concerned you deserve a Pulitzer for.
Wow, we found that Governor Cuomo who had formed this commission to look into corruption
and said it would be independent.
It can go wherever it wants to go, including his 29 million, including his 29 million that
he's raised, turns out not so much.
Not so much.
Not so much.
Apparently the commission has been meeting privately with the governor that's chair people
and the governor's people have grabbed control of it and have basically told them not to
send out certain subpoenas, including to the real estate board of New York.
The commission was looking into this developer deal.
There was a bill that passed a housing bill.
And in the middle of this complicated bill, five developers got these really sweet lucrative
tax breaks.
So what ends up happening?
They subpoena, which they should do, these five developers.
However, I then did some stories.
This was a few weeks ago that the governor received Boku Bucks a lot of money from these
developers right around the time he was signing the bill.
After that, the commission said we're going to send out a subpoena to the real estate board
of New York, which is very close to Andrew Cuomo and was told by the Cuomo administration
no, don't do that.
They were going to send out a subpoena to the state and legislative ethics commissions,
you know, J. Cope and the legislative ethics commission.
And we're told no, we don't want you to do that.
So they didn't do it.
And then lastly, it turned out that they did subpoena the state Republican Senate and
the state independence party.
And the reason they were doing that is the Republicans had funneled a lot of money from their campaign
account to the independence party, which then ran ads in districts that were competitive.
So while they were doing this, they said, well, while we're doing this, we should also
send a subpoena to the state Democratic party, which is controlled by the governor and which
raised $7 million this year and used most of that money to fund ads promoting the governor's
agenda.
Well, we don't know if the governor's office was involved in this one.
It's assumed it was, but basically they withheld serving that they stopped serving that
subpoena and never went out.
And instead they sent it to the Senate Democrats.
You're a very good reporter.
Can't love it.
How do you find out that the governor who is appointed an independent commission said they
go where they want to go and we're not going to interfere?
How do you find out that they did interfere?
Very good sources.
Yeah.
People who want to do the right thing, I guess, is the best thing.
Look, the governor had promised, and the truth is the legislature looked at this and had
been concerned from the start that this would be a political witch hunt, that the governor
would use this to hang things over their heads and it wouldn't be a real investigation.
So in other words, like people like Shelley Silver and some of the other.
They'd scale a scale.
They would say, okay, this guy's going to send this more than that commission after us
and we don't like that.
In fact, they went out and found lawyers because of the separation of powers between the
legislature and the governor.
And that leads into another whole thing.
And a lot of people felt that, look, if this commission did the job it was supposed to
do and went wherever it wanted to go, that would be a good thing.
It would shine a spotlight on what goes on in New York and both the legislative and executive
branches.
That would be worthwhile and maybe real change could come out of that.
But if it looks like the governor is interfering and look, he has a pension, a reputation for
wanting to control everything.
But by doing it here, I think it severely damaged the credibility of this panel because
it played right into the fears of the lawmakers.
Another thing that happened, the commission had sent out a letter to the lawmakers and we
want outside income information from you for anyone making over $20,000 in private jobs.
We want more information.
So a lawyer, a lawyer who is a sitting senator, we get this letter saying, you have clients,
we want to know where the money is coming from.
Exactly.
And basically the legislature told them, no, we don't recognize your jurisdiction in this
issue.
We already provide a lot of info in the new reporting we agreed to do a couple of years
ago in the first ethics package we agreed to.
So we're not going to follow it.
So the commission was understandably upset and a bunch of the commissioners said, why
don't we just subpoena the information?
And they were told by the governor's office, no, don't do that.
I want to negotiate a ethics reform package to hold off on any subpoenas.
It's also been learned that when they sent out the letters to the lawmakers, a big part
of the people who were writing it was the governor's council, my own dinner steam that she
really was involved in heavily editing that letter.
Why?
The commission has its own legal team, its own council.
Why are they looking to the governor's office and allowing them to write the letter and
add in what they want to add in?
Okay.
So let me ask you this, Ken Love.
The Moreland Act commission, Long History in New York State, Tom Dewey, you know, there's
used these Moreland Act investigatory commissions to root out corruption and to do this kind of
thing.
And Cuomo says to them, go where the money is, follow the money and everybody shakes their
head.
So they appoint two heads, right, for the Moreland Act commission themselves.
Who are the chairs?
Well, three.
We have the governor's two co-chairs, this Catholic and rice, the Nassau County District
Attorney and William Fitzpatrick who is the Anandaga District Attorney, you know, out in the Syracuse
area.
Who's the Republican?
Who's the Democrat?
Fitzpatrick is the Republican.
Rice is the Democrat and then you have Milton, oh God, can you believe I'm talking about Milton
Williams, I think, who is Eric Schneiderman's pick to be a co-chair.
They make the crucial decisions.
Now I talked to somebody on the Moreland Act commission who told me a prosecutor who
told me that the chairs had been very receptive to what some of the very prestigious people on
the commission had said to them and made suggestions about where to go.
Is that your sense?
Yeah, up until a point.
But what I'm told now is for a while what had happened was and the governor was not
happy about this was there was a kind of a split.
The governor had appointed a woman named Regina Calcutta as the executive director and she
was basically seen as doing the governor's bidding what he wanted to get accomplished
and yada yada.
And apparently a lot of the commissioners she rubbed them in the wrong way.
Recognizing this, the governor then turned to Fitzpatrick and has been going through him
a lot of the time.
Now he's the Republican.
He's the Republican and a lot of the stuff that has not gotten done of late.
The subpoenas that had not gone out in large part it went through Fitzpatrick who stopped.
Now I think this gets so complicated but it's so interesting at least to me and that is
that the Republicans in New York State are being kept alive.
And the New York State Senate I would submit to you can love it by the governor.
Yeah, absolutely.
He's the one who allowed them to draw their own districts and he's the one who looked
the other way well for Democrats to broke off and became neo-Republicans doing all this.
And so the fact that he goes to the Republican on the Moreland Act Commission makes a certain
amount of sense.
They don't want to rug pull that from one of them.
No, and I guess he was more receptive as well.
I can't tell you why he has a very good relationship with Fitzpatrick.
He and Kathleen Rice have an often on kind of relationship.
Don't forget.
We've had her here on this very show and she said she's her own person.
She said that to us.
She was an originally don't forget.
He wanted her to run for attorney general against Eric Schneiderman and it was believed
that he was backing Kathleen Rice and when her race didn't take off as they thought
they kind of backed off that but they've had a love.
I don't want to say hate but it's certainly a complicated relationship.
Yeah.
Well, she looks like a commer to be honest with you and somebody who may play a role in
statewide politics as things go on.
This is interesting.
So now the governor has, I hate to use this word but plays footsie with the Republican
on the Moreland Act Commission.
You know, can I don't know how to say this to you but it seems to me there's always what
looks like the up front idea like the Jay Cope ethics group looked like a good idea.
They were going to have control over the legislature for the first time.
It's going to be a statewide commission.
It turns out to be a big flood.
He gives away too much and my, as my mom has said, accidentally on purpose, he gives away
the right to appoint all the people and you know and they don't want to go anywhere and
they don't do anything and that's what we have.
Now he does the same thing with the Moreland Act Commission.
It isn't what it seems.
It seemed like go get them boys but in fact no.
No and I agree.
I think he wanted to use this as a hammer to hold over them to get them to do things,
especially heading into an election year.
And I think once they started showing it flexing a little independent muscle, they decided
to rain it in.
But he really in a lot of people's minds should have resisted his temptation to control things
and let them do their business or not to appoint a more than that commission at all.
But if you don't want them to be independent then don't appoint them.
That's the thing.
Like where they were heading, I don't think he liked the fact that they were going to
look at some of his donors and some of his big donors and so he rained them in.
I don't necessarily think he thought it would become public but it did and I really think
it's damaged in a lot of people's eyes the credibility of this commission now whenever
they come out with.
Well, does it hurt the governor?
Yeah, well, absolutely.
And now he wants to look at a way to get out of it.
You know, we reported that I think I told him that at one point they wanted to send
subpoenas to the law makers who didn't give them the information and the second floor
said no.
But we want to try and negotiate a deal with these people.
I think it's another reason.
What kind of deal do you mean a deal?
I mean, that's another ethics package.
And I think that's one of the reasons when they were going to send a subpoena to Jacob
and to the legislative ethics commission.
One of the things I'm told they were going to ask for were prior complaints against
the law makers and I think the law makers would have seen that, you know, specifically as
an act of war.
And I think the governor has been trying to, which is the wrong thing to use this commission
for, but I think he's been trying to straddle online.
One where publicly he can say I'm doing something about corruption.
But on the other hand, he didn't want to antagonize the legislature so much.
But things started getting out of control.
You know, I had a column I think was three weeks ago where legislative sources were saying
he's jeopardizing his agenda, his legislative agenda next year with this commission.
And I think that's scared him because the last thing he needs in an election year is a
war with the legislature.
I wrote in a recent column that his fiercest enemy now was Shelley Silver.
And I heard, let me just say with that, devolging sources, I heard straight now that they
were not pleased with my having said that.
But I think it's true, isn't it?
Yeah, I think certainly Shelley Silver has been the chief foe Democrat or Republican to
many of governor in the last two decades.
And I don't think Andrew Cuomo is any different.
I don't think they will show it publicly necessarily, you know, because they are both Democrats.
I think Shelley Silver as long as he's in power, which right now he remains in power
although weakened, but I do think that how he can do it.
But I do think that as long as he's doing what his conference wants, there's not a lot
of love in his conference right now for Andrew Cuomo.
And as long as he's there, you know, I think that's where it's going to be the hardest
because, you know, the Democrats are safe.
They have a veto proof majority right now in the assembly.
The Republicans need the governor because they are not safe.
They barely are clinging to power in the Senate.
So they are, he's keeping, he's keeping, right.
And so there are a lot more willing to deal than the assembly dams might be.
OK, the best story I have heard in a long time, it's unfortunate because I never like
to see people hurt is the story of Willie or William Rapfolgle.
And this is an incredible story.
I mean, it's the kind of thing when I explain it to people, they said, really did that really happen.
Tell us about it.
Yeah, for two decades, Willie Rapfolgle, who is very close to the speaker, Sheldon Silver,
whose wife is Shelley Silver, chief of staff, long term to, since really first became a,
a, a, a, some women in 76, he had been the head of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish
poverty, a major social services organization in New York City.
He has been fired from that job in August and then subsequently charged with being part
of a kickback scheme where, um, he pocketed a million dollars, they stole five
million, he worked with an insurance company that had sold policies to the Met Council.
And inflated prices.
So the Met Council would pay the extra costs.
And then that money would be divvied up between people involved in the scheme,
including Rapfolgle.
And then part of the money was then taken by the insurance company and spread
around to Met Council's friends in the form of campaign donations.
Do we know who those recipients were?
Well, you know, Shelley Silver, who's one of them, Chris Quinn was one of them,
you know, bunch of the people built Thompson receive money.
A bunch of people around for mayor, um, you know, the Met Council received millions and
millions of dollars in member item money, pork prop money from both the legislature,
state legislature and the city council.
Its lifeblood is government funding.
So Rapfolgle had this scheme according to the investigators,
which is Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office and a Comptroller,
Thomas D'Appos.
They found that by a letter, right?
Somebody wrote him a letter.
There was a whistleblower to the Met Council and then the Met Council forwarded it to Schneiderman.
But it's been going on for two decades and, you know, he had 400,000 stashed
away in his houses.
And now I want to stop you're a point.
Now I want to stop you right there.
So the investigators get a subpoena.
They go into the house.
They look in the closets and they find two boxes filled with cash, right?
Moral.
That's yeah.
They said that they found money and stuff in a bedroom closet in their New York city.
Co up and then he also said here, here's the money I had stashed away.
He actually brought them the bulk of the 400,000 any admitted right away that he had made mistakes.
Yes.
He put out a, uh, an odd statement where he apologized where he said he made mistakes.
But he didn't really say what he was apologizing for.
A lot of people think he's going to plead to something obviously.
But what was also interesting was how quickly,
well, without going into detail of his own crimes, possible crimes, he apologized.
But how quickly he not only apologized,
but had his lawyer put out a statement saying,
and my wife, Judy Rapfogo and Assembly Speaker,
Sheldon Silver knew nothing about this.
Well, first of all, in my house, if I drop a quarter in a closet, you know,
I say, Rosal, did you see that quarter?
She's going to say, yes, under the lip, where you keep the shoes on the thing.
So the idea that you had, um, you had, uh, uh, shoe boxes filled with money is hard to fathom,
although who am I to say whether or not she just wasn't a good housekeeper and didn't see the money in the shoe box?
I mean, you don't know.
You, you don't know.
She says to her friends and people that she doesn't.
She has not been as of a week or two ago.
She hadn't been questioned by investigator.
She doesn't have a lawyer.
I want to stop you because I talked to a prosecutor about this one who said
quite frequently in order to get a guy to take a plea, you say, maybe it happened to me.
Of case, maybe not.
We'll leave the wife out of this if you comply and take a plea.
And look, she's going to be the sole breadwinner.
I mean, he's going to be in jail and all likelihood if he does plead guilty.
And I think they want to protect the speaker too.
I mean, they're very close friends since Willie Rapfogo was 16 years old.
Yeah.
Sheldon Silver was his community basketball league coach.
That's where they first met.
They've been friends for a very long time.
The thinking is what does he know about the speaker?
And what do we know?
And will they look into, you know, did the people who received these donations know what was going on?
Everyone says no, but will that be investigated?
Do you think, because I don't, I think Shelley Silver is one of the canniest,
most facile players in the game.
I have certain reservations about the fact that he takes a lot of money from the law firm.
He works for that wants to reform our tort reform system.
But I think there's not one to reform the tort reform.
Yeah, that's not what that's right.
I don't see him as a guy who's a crook.
I think he knows better than that.
They go after him for things like taking an upgrade on a hotel room, you know, but that stuff doesn't stick.
He's too smart for that.
I have a feeling when he heard about Willie, he was really shocked.
That's what he says.
Shock and sad, and you know, don't know.
I mean, the weird thing is like, all these scandals keep happening.
And Shelley Silver is on the periphery of all of them.
You know, the Vito Lopez scandal, all these other issues.
And you know, they haven't gotten a smoking gun on them certainly.
And there's no evidence.
I've not seen it yet.
Well, Vito Lopez, who was Vito, grow peas as we say, it was clear.
Shelley was protecting his members once again.
That's different.
But Rappfogal has the potential.
If anything was going to bring Shelley Silver down, it would be this scandal because of how close Rappfogal is,
because of who his wife is and what Rappfogal might know.
You know, if Rappfogal decided to sing about anything he knew, if there is anything to sing about.
And look, one of the stories, news day broke it.
We followed it was that when the assembly several times when the members got together to talk about where we're going to send our pork money,
Judy Rappfogal sat in on the meeting as a representative of Sheldon Silver.
Now, a lot of people who I've interviewed, lawmakers who were in those meetings said,
not once did she ever say you should give to the Met Council.
One person told me they specifically asked her, should we give to Met Council?
She goes, I'm not going to tell you that, but I will tell you that whether you give or not give it has no impact on the speaker.
In other words, you're not being pressured.
However, you know, seeing the chief of staff of the speaker, who's the wife,
and that you know as the wife of Met Council, you know, it's hard to believe, you know,
when she's sitting on these meetings, it's not in people's heads that I can curry favor with the speaker by sending my money that way.
Okay. Put yourself into Shelley Silver's head.
Do you fire Judy Rappfogal now?
I think she's a political liability that's going to be there.
But remember, she's been on every major political calculation this guy's ever made.
And I think, you know, she knows a lot of stuff too.
And also the reality is, and we've seen this to a fault.
You know, he doesn't have a lot of people who are very close to him, but those who are, he's extremely loyal to.
We saw it with Michael Boxley.
We saw it with Bill Collins.
Michael Boxley, the accused rapist.
Yeah, twice.
And you know, the first time Shelley Silver stuck by him saying, yeah, we'll look into it, but I think he'll be exonerated.
And then, you know, we saw it with Bill Collins, the council who's involved in a lot of these investigating and looking into the sexual harassment within the assembly,
who finally was forced to step down this year after another case came forward.
So he sticks with people he feels comfortable with because he doesn't have a lot of people he feels comfortable with.
So, you know, Judy Rappfogal right now they're saying she's not going anywhere.
Now, maybe she decides on her own.
She knows what he says.
Go, Judy, and we'll take care of you some of them.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Because that has the potential to be a major liability for him.
Yeah.
That's just a fascinating question.
Let's talk about Cuomo and Build a Blathio.
This is unbelievable.
So it now turns out that the Blathio, who most people didn't know a lot about and who the negative researchers did not get to in time for the primary now has a little bit of background,
Sandinista background, you know, other stuff that the papers have been dredging up.
But also he's a progressive.
And New York City voters are saying we want a progressive now.
We've had too much of the other guy.
He's up by 50 points.
Yeah, he certainly wanted.
Yeah, we don't want that, you know, the sort of Bloomberg tale of two cities.
And so they take the guy and he's kind of an ethnically diverse family.
He's New York.
He's very New York.
Along comes Andrew Cuomo.
He says, you know what?
I'm not doing too good upstate.
So what I want to do is go back to my original strategy and start hitting on the taxes are too high.
Along comes the Blathio and says, no, we want to soak the rich in New York City.
And there are a lot of people who think that this could be a major confrontation.
Absolutely.
I think the governor is looking for ways to avoid it.
But there's no doubt that the governor wants to cut taxes next year.
And I don't see him wanting to raise taxes on the rich in New York City, which by the
way is probably the place he's doing best in the polls right now.
Sure.
And I think it's going to be a major issue.
Tax cuts in the suburbs and upstate, as you said.
And here comes Bill DeBlasio who wants to raise the personal income tax on those making
500,000 more so he could fund pre-K and some other education programs.
I've written a couple of probably two months ago that it's a no go in the legislature next
year that the governor is not going to want to do that.
And that certainly the Republican Senate in an election year is not going to approve
the higher taxes on the rich.
You know, that's their bread and butter.
So I don't think that's going to happen.
The governor has yet to take a position on the proposal.
But I think he's going to seek a way to try and fund pre-K in these programs probably
by restoring aim that had been cut for years.
And funding for the city that he had been cut years ago probably restore that that they
can then have the money to fund these programs without raising tax.
This could be a potential disaster for Cuomo, couldn't it?
Because here's this very now up and coming and popular guy in New York City, as we are
seeing.
And Cuomo has been around a little while.
He said his trials and tribulations, his numbers went up.
Then they went down a little bit.
They're down upstate.
And why would he need a fight with DeBlasio of well people?
And you know, the truth is they do have a solid friendship.
DeBlasio works for Cuomo at HUD.
They do like each other, where I think it's really going to hurt Cuomo is where he's weakest
within the party, which is the progressive side of things.
They don't trust him, the progressives.
And if he has national ambitions and look, you know, it doesn't look like he's going
to run in 2016.
He's still a young man.
But you never know.
And he's going to have to win over progressive wing of the party that dominates in democratic
primaries.
And really does not trust him.
Yeah.
Well, OK.
So one thing really quickly and that's Casinos, New York has to vote for them.
There's a big hell of a fight going on right now.
Some of the polls are saying that people want them or that by a narrow margin, at least
they want them.
We're going to have Casinos, isn't he?
I think, well, one way or the other, the fix is in on this one.
Not only do you have all these groups that the governor put together a coalition that are
going to put big money behind the effort to get this past, but also if the wording of
the language of the ballot language is basically, do you support Casinos because they would be
amazing for economic development?
Yeah, that's obviously not a direct quote, but that's the message.
So that's feeling is that, you know, that they're trying to tip it in the, well, the governor
is forward.
And then on top of that, even if it fails, even if it fails, they will create three new
big video lottery par as these were seniors.
Yeah, yeah.
So even they have one in South Dakota, right?
So we're going to vote against expanding Casino gambling.
Yeah.
You got expanded Casino gambling.
Right.
And yeah, they have one in South Dakota.
There's nine of them across the state.
We are talking to Ken Loveitt.
I have to tell you, I want to ask you a question real fast, Ken.
Do you sleep well at night?
Because you know, and take some of these characters on the way you are.
It's going to be a little daunting, even I, in my limited position, feel it every once
in a while.
How do you cope with that?
Look, you know, it's a good question.
Look, it is daunting, but you feel if you're on the right side of things, I think I'm flexible
enough if someone makes an argument I buy and not tied into my position that I will ignore
it.
But if I feel I'm right, I will dig in and I will report what I think is the truth.
Do your editors ever get worried you people?
No, to be honest with you, I've had really good editors who have really backed me up.
And that's the only way you can do stuff like this because if you don't have the support
at the top and they're not going to let you run with what you have, then there's no
use in picking these fights.
Well, Ken Loveitt, I admire you an awful lot.
I want to tell you that and I want to thank you for all you're doing for all of us because
information is central to democracy and you're providing an unappreciated very much.
Our guest has been columnist and Albany Bureau Chief of the New York Daily News.
Ken Loveitt, Ken again, thank you for joining us and we'll be seeing you, I'm sure, a lot
more in the coming year.
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