According to the complaint, Competitive Power Ventures Holdings paid more than $287,000 in bribes to Percoco and his wife in exchange for official help in winning a state contract worth more than $100 million, which was to be used to finance a almost $1 billion power plant in Wawayanda, New York.
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“The new construction and its promises of increased economic development and jobs have now been tainted by the acts of people who held positions of power”, Cohen said.
The U.S. Attorney’s office was investigating whether Percoco received income from companies that were working with New York State. At the former governor’s funeral previous year, Andrew Cuomo called Percoco “my father’s third son who sometimes I think he loved the most”.
Hear the story from Capital Correspondent Karen DeWitt.
Kaloyeros masterminded much of Cuomo’s vast upstate economic development programs.
Two former close aides to Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York have been hit with federal corruption charges involving alleged bribery, corruption and fraud, The New York Times reports. Howe was also reportedly an adviser to Polytechnic.
Howe faces eight charges, including conspiracy, wire fraud and extortion. The Buffalo developer, for example, appears to be LPCiminelli, whose leader Louis Ciminello, a major Cuomo donor, and executives Kevin Schuler and Michael Laiple are also charged today. Apparently, Percoco came up with using the word “ziti” as code for money because it was used in the The Sopranos (“about 45 boxes of ziti”). Thick as a pulp novela and nearly as tawdry, the 80-page criminal complaint unsealed Thursday morning shows Cuomo’s reputed “right-hand man” Joseph Percoco giving his best audition for “The Sopranos”, in referring to bribe payments as “zitti”.
Cuomo issued his own statement indicating that he was “saddened and profoundly disappointed” at Percoco’s arrest. Leibell pleaded guilty in 2010 to filing false tax returns and taking $43,000 in kickbacks. Bharara was asked by a reporter whether, based on his investigations so far, he could give Cuomo a “clean bill of health”.
“There’s no allegation of wrongdoing on the part of the governor”, the prosecutor insisted when the Observer pressed him on whether it was realistic that Cuomo had been oblivious to the activities of his aides and allies.
“This is big time stuff and it goes to the core of how I think state government operates and it’s distressing and disconcerting”, Bharara said at a press conference Thursday to announce the charges. In response to the charges, SUNY suspended Kaloyeros without pay.
Democratic Attorney General Eric Schneiderman brought separate state charges against Kaloyeros and a real estate developer not charged in the federal case, saying Kaloyeros steered or agreed to steer contracts to hand-picked companies, rigging the bidding process for three multimillion-dollar contracts.
Joseph Percoco, left, with Governor Cuomo in 2013.
Another prominent state official mentioned in the indictment is Alain Kaloyeros, the head of the State University of New York’s (SUNY) Polytechnic Institute and a physicist entrusted by Cuomo to oversee high-tech development projects throughout New York State.
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“It’s stupid. This scheme is unusual in its brazenness“. As part of the its proposal the contractor offered to provide a $3,000,000 research grant to SUNY Poly.
