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”. In another wrinkle that could have come from Mafia fiction, Percoco called one of his alleged co-conspirators “Fat Boy” and “Fat Man”, according to the complaint.
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U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced the charges on Thursday and said a ninth defendant, Todd Howe, another former Cuomo aide, pleaded guilty and was cooperating.
The complaint in part reads in part like an episode of The Sopranos.
Schneiderman’s office has asked Cuomo to veto two bills he said would weaken the state’s three-year-old electronic prescription monitoring system. Over at the executive branch, Percoco, 47, served as Gov. Cuomo’s deputy secretary, confidant to his and his father’s administrations, and “gatekeeper” between January 2012 and mid-2014.
The federal probe revealed a web of individuals and businesses tied to Cuomo that were poised to profit from the Buffalo Billion, Cuomo’s signature effort to boost New York’s second-largest city, as well as Nano, an initiative effectively led by Alain Kaloyeros, president of SUNY Polytechnic Institute who was also named in the complaint. It took a sad downturn, however, in the mid-20th century.
The state will change the way it awards future projects, Cuomo said. But in a betrayal by public servants, prosecutors say, Kaloyeros and others “rigged” the bids.
“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. COR didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Two major upstate developers also have been charged in the complaint: Syracuse-based COR Development and its officers and Buffalo-based real estate developer Louis Ciminelli and two of his executives.
Joseph Percoco is the former executive deputy secretary to the governor.
CPV “purposefully” kept her last name off brochures touting her work developing an education program for fourth-graders living near a plant the company was building in New Jersey, and also kept her from appearing in photos to promote the program, the feds say. It alleges that Percoco actually took inspiration from the TV show about organized crime, using the word “ziti” as a code word when demanding bribe payments and saying at times, “keep the ziti flowing”, and “don’t tip over the ziti wagon”. Authorities say Percoco solicited bribes from companies that stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars in the projects.
At a press conference announcing the federal charges, Adam Cohen, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo Office, spoke in unusually personal terms talking about his NY roots and the economic hardships parts of the state have faced. Percoco allegedly replied, “is he bringing the check?? LOL.” Apparently discussing the wife’s salary, Howe later wrote, “herb – need 7500 boxes of zitti!” Prosecutors say Aiello used his clout with state officials to get his son a raise a year ago. The governor was quick to draw a distinction between himself and his staff. He exists largely out of sight as the governor who had vowed to clean up Albany and wound up presiding over betrayals of the public trust.
Barry Bohrer, Percoco’s lawyer, called the prosecution “an overreach of classic proportions”.
The top Federal Bureau of Investigation official in Buffalo said that the corruption scheme and similar ones elsewhere in the state culminated in criminal charges in part because the participants were so careless in their use of email to spell out their plans. If convicted, Percoco could face 70 years imprisonment, though any possible sentence is likely to be much smaller.
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“SUNY has rightly relieved Alain Kaloyeros from his duties and has suspended him without pay, effective immediately”. The other defendants will be brought to the Western District of NY.
