Andrew Cuomo is Governor of New York. He is running for his third term. The New York Times endorsed him in the Democratic primary. The next day, it wrote an editorial about the swamp of corruption in Albany.
Eight days after Cuomo’s primary victory, the Times published this article about his closest aide, who was convicted of accepting bribes. The code word for bribe was “ziti.”
Why Joseph Percoco’s Conviction Matters, Especially to Governor Cuomo
“Thursday will not be a good day for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
“One of his former closest aides and friends, Joseph Percoco, will be sentenced at 2 p.m. for his conviction in March on federal corruption charges.
“Mr. Percoco, 49, held the title of executive deputy secretary, but that didn’t begin to describe how powerful and important he was to Mr. Cuomo. With Mr. Percoco almost certainly heading to prison, here are five things to know about the case and its importance.
“Who Is Joseph Percoco?
“Mr. Percoco was viewed as a behind-the-scenes muscle man and logistics specialist, who handled preparations for many of the governor’s events. Mr. Percoco had also been close to Mr. Cuomo’s father, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, and was described by Andrew Cuomo as “my father’s third son, who I sometimes think he loved the most.”
“But after a nearly eight-week trial, Mr. Percoco was found guilty of soliciting and accepting more than $300,000 in bribes from executives working for two companies with state business in return for taking official actions to benefit the firms. Much of the money came in the form of a “low-show” job given to his wife, Lisa Toscano-Percoco, by an energy firm that wanted to build a power plant in the Hudson Valley.
“Mr. Percoco’s trial symbolized what prosecutors, good government groups and Mr. Cuomo’s political opponents have said was Albany’s culture of influence peddling and secret deals, under the governor’s watch.
“Indeed, Mr. Percoco’s name became a campaign watchword for corruption for Cynthia Nixon, Mr. Cuomo’s vanquished primary rival, and it is certain to remain so in the upcoming general election, where Mr. Cuomo, who is seeking a third term, will face off against Marcus J. Molinaro, a Hudson Valley Republican.
“Corruption in Albany? Say it ain’t so.
“If the Percoco conviction had a familiar ring to it, there’s good reason: It was the first of two major corruption cases to buffet Mr. Cuomo’s administration this year, and one of several to shake the state capital in his second term.
“In July, Alain E. Kaloyeros, the former president of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, was found guilty in a case involving the governor’s signature upstate economic development project, the Buffalo Billion. Mr. Kaloyeros, once hailed as a genius by Mr. Cuomo, was convicted in a bid-rigging scheme that included a state-funded $750 million solar panel factory on the banks on the Buffalo River.
“That case was sandwiched between the retrials and convictions of two other major Albany figures: Sheldon Silver, the former Assembly speaker, and Dean G. Skelos, the former Republican State Senate leader, who was convicted days after Mr. Kaloyeros on bribery, extortion and conspiracy charges.
“Albany has had dozens of politicians convicted of various misdeeds over the last decade or so. Indeed, even when Albany tries to take on corruption, it sometimes ends up with more scandal. In 2014, Mr. Cuomo was heavily criticized for interfering with and eventually shutting down a corruption commission that he himself had set up.
“What was the trial’s most pivotal moment?
“Todd Ransom Howe was the star prosecution witness for good reason. Once one of Albany’s better-known lobbyists, Mr. Howe — like Mr. Percoco — had a relationship with the Cuomo family dating back to Mario’s time in the Executive Mansion, working for the elder Mr. Cuomo as a traveling aide. He later served under Andrew Cuomo at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, working as his deputy chief of staff. All the while, he was friendly with Mr. Percoco.
“Still, financial and professional problems soon flared up for Mr. Howe, including a 2003 bankruptcy and a felony theft charge in 2010 after he made a fake bank deposit.
“Prosecutors said Mr. Howe engineered the bribes paid to Mr. Percoco, and Mr. Howe pleaded guilty to eight felonies and was cooperating with prosecutors. But his star turn on the witness stand nearly backfired when he admitted in court that he had violated the terms of his cooperation deal by trying to defraud a credit card company. He was jailed midtrial, although he later returned to testify, and Mr. Percoco was convicted.
“Considering Mr. Howe’s notoriety, it is not surprising that the Cuomo administration has sought to downplay Mr. Howe’s connection to the current governor. But in August, The New York Times obtained nearly 350 pages of emails, showing that Mr. Howe had entree to the top levels of Mr. Cuomo’s administration for years and in the months leading up to Mr. Percoco’s arrest.
“But Mr. Howe’s most lasting legacy may be his — and Mr. Percoco’s — widespread use of a single word: ziti.
“Ziti?
“Other than the drama surrounding Mr. Howe, a sideline curiosity emerged during testimony and email exchanges showing that Mr. Percoco and Mr. Howe joked and fretted about bribes, which they had code-named “ziti,” a term used in the HBO mob drama “The Sopranos.”
“Typical was this kind of exchange, after a payment from a company to Mr. Percoco was slow to arrive.
“I have no ziti,” Mr. Percoco wrote. Another time, Mr. Percoco seemed more testy. “Where the hell is the ziti???” he wrote.
“On yet another occasion, Mr. Howe wrote to Mr. Percoco about “Operation Ziti Replenishment.”
“The pasta parlance almost became a running joke during the trial, but it also provided a powerful symbol for the prosecution to invoke in the complex case. In the government’s closing argument, a prosecutor, David Zhou, cited the emails from Mr. Percoco, who he said was “begging, requesting, demanding” ziti.
“He was demanding cash bribes,” Mr. Zhou said.
“And in the end, the jury agreed.“
I appreciate the article, but I think it might be a little to arrogant to declare that anyone will never be President, given what we saw in 2016.
I disagree with the use of “arrogant”.
It’s not arrogant to allege that someone will never be president. It’s a prediction just like all the predictions in 2016 that were probably right until the Russians interfered in the election in addition to the assembly-line of lies and misinformation from the Alt-Right’s propaganda, conspiracy theory media machine, Fox News designed to manipulate a plethora of deplorable voters.
The Emperor of lies, Donald the Fraud Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes and Failed Businessman Donald Trump also won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states — states the Russians specifically targeted with a strategy designed to keep as many Democrats from voting as possible. It worked.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/swing-state-margins/
On reflection I agree that “arrogant” is imprecise and sloppy of a word, here. Maybe “too presumptuous” is what I’m looking for. There’s a lack of humility, here. It reminds me of this:
How do you make God laugh?
Tell him/her your plans.
Does God laugh?
There is an old saying: “Man plans, God laughs”
HOLY COW.
And I thought Louisiana was the epitome of corruption. I feel dirty just reading this. It pains me to think that I was fooled by Mario. No chance of being fooled by Andrew, yet corrupt governor he will continue to be.
Perccoco was sentenced to six years in prison today.
When the Schoharie Creek bridge collapsed – killing 10 motorists on the NYS Thruway (I-87) Mario claimed it was “an act of nature” – ignorant of his DOT’s role in fraud against the Feds. One of the dead was an interstate truck driver so the ICC sent it’s OWN investigators who determined the NYSDOT had lied in an engineering report – claiming they had reinforced the pillars supporting the bridge deck with steel plates and boulders to prevent the creek waters from ‘scouring’ away the sand under the pillars (NY Times report).
This was a deliberate crime perpetrated by state employees – compounded by continued fraud in failing to inspect the construction while filing claims those inspections WERE performed. Typical in the USA where so many bridges (AND Dams) are now publicly known to be ‘deficient’ and unsafe.
And, more recently, son Andrew’s pride and joy (the Mario Cuomo Bridge) has seen bolts falling out of the superstructure – BEFORE it was officially opened to traffic!
I wonder why the people of New York keep putting him back in office. His name may be a magnet of some sort, but people need to look behind the name and see the content of his character.
The property tax cap he devised and shepherded through the assembly and senate remains as popular a piece of legislation as you will find in the modern political era, with 75%+ approval statewide and even higher than that in suburbs with the highest school spending.
His challenger in the general election is running on a platform of large tax cuts, a message that will resonate powerfully especially in the state’s many red counties, like Suffolk. Cuomo will prevail but it will be much closer than the primary.
The property tax cap Cuomo devised strangles public schools across the state.
Districts that need to raise taxes by mor than 2.0% to keep up with inflation must get a 60% vote to pass it. That’s undemocratic. Why 60%, not 50% plus one?
As a charter school advocate, you enjoy the idea of public schools in jeopardy. I get it.
As Tim notes, though, the property tax cap is supported by the vast majority of New Yorkers including the vast majority of Democrats in the super high-tax districts where budgets have been most impacted by the law.
Voters don’t want to pay for schools. The tax cap is undemocratic. Why 60%? Why not simple majority?
If voters don’t want to pay for schools, then they are especially miserable in Westchester and parts of Long Island, where districts spend $25k to $30k per student, with 75% to 90% of that revenue raised from local taxpayers.
Some argue that super-majority voting thresholds ensure a necessary degree of consensus and moderation over policy changes that will have very large impacts on an entire constituency. Sort of like the anti-democratic 60-vote requirement used to provide for Senate approval of Supreme Court nominees. But you’re correct that anything more than simple majority is undemocratic.
The current disaster in the Supreme Court is the result of eliminating the 60-Vote requirement for confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice. That forced presidents to choose justices who could pick up votes from the other party, not extremists like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
This is not comparable to a popular vote, where decisions are made by a simple majority. If we required a 60% majority in elections, no one would ever be elected.
It could be worse (from the perspective of those who want property taxes to increase by more than 2% every single year). The law could provide a hard cap on property tax increases with no provision for override by popular local vote.
Homeowners in these ultra-high property tax districts like this law a lot. If they didn’t, they would have voted in droves for Cynthia Nixon, who opposed the property tax caps. Needless to say, they didn’t. This law is here to stay for the very long term.
Fortunately, most elections to raise the tax cap have passed overwhelmingly. Especially in affluent districts where parents value their public schools and know that the school taxes are a bargain.
The tax cap was hardly the deciding issue between Cuomo and Cynthia. He had $35 Million to spend. She raised $2 million in small contributions. He filled the TV with boasting. She was invisible. He made a dirty deal with the Hasidim to get their bloc vote. He strong-armed the unions.
So maybe it turns out voters do like spending money on schools.
The reality is Nixon was never within spitting distance of Cuomo in any polls, even well before he opened the campaign coffers in the last few weeks to blitz the media, and despite the substantial media attention she got due to her celebrity and anticipation that Cuomo would be swept away by a so-called socialist wave.
California went through this in 1978 with Proposition 13 along with two-thirds of California’s voters. We voted for it because property tax in California was climbing like a rocket and was more than the mortgage + interest payments for many homeowners and landlords. Prop 13 in California had a one percent rate cap and was based on property values at their 1976 level.
Reassessment was allowed when a house was sold and changed hands, and it takes a two-thirds vote from local voters to add something anything the property tax.
That means if you owned a home in 1978 and kept it all these years, you might be still paying the same tax rate based on your home’s 1976 value.
With baselines set sky-high from years of school budgets routinely going up by 8 or 10 or more percent annually, the median NY district spent $26,000 per student in 2018, hardly “strangling”.
Voters in all districts, from rich to poor, appreciate the spending discipline the cap helps to provide. Fewer and fewer districts even attempt an override: this year, it was only 14 out of about 680. Only 7 of the 14 override votes were successful.
The fact remains that school spending equity in NYS will be a pipe dream until all local taxes go to the state rather than school districts, and the state dispenses school funding based on student needs. This will result in high-end suburban districts getting, say, $15,000 per kid rather than $30,000, and the high-needs districts getting a modest bump up from whatever they spend now. The Cynthia Nixon plan—allowing rich districts to continue to spend $30,000 or $40,000 per wealthy student in de facto gated communities and demanding taxpayers cough up more to match that level statewide simply isn’t reasonable or sustainable. There are two sides to the equity equation and, anyone who is ignoring the side where schools are massively overspending on well-to-do kids isn’t on the level.
Good news for the rich charter industry and their billionaire backers.
Your comment confused me so I went to the 2019 budget for New York State and discovered that the slice of pie that is labeled Education is only 4-percent of the state budget. I found that pie chart on page 7 of the 333 page report. Higher Education’s slide was another 10-percent. The largest slice of the pie was Transpiration and it was 40 percent.
Lloyd, you are looking at the wrong budget. What you linked to is the capital budget: spending on assets like infrastructure (which is why transportation figures in it so prominently). I can assure you that the state of New York spends a lot more than $616 million on schools LOL!
The current state operating budget calls for $26.4 Billion to be spent on PreK-12 public education, or more than a quarter of the state budget (see page 15): https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy19/exec/fy19book/BriefingBook.pdf
However, as has been alluded to in previous comments, the sizable majority of school funding in NYS is derived from property taxes paid directly to local districts, not to the state. An exact number for FY2019 is not yet known, but this local share of funding will be in the neighborhood of an additional $40 billion or so. And then you throw in another $4-5 billion in restricted Federal funds.
It is expected that an ordinary $500,000 home in the four suburban counties closest to NYC to carry an annual property tax bill of $12,000–$15,000 or more. Upstate arguably has it worse: their taxes aren’t that much lower, considering that home values there are, in contrast to downstate, at or below—in some places significantly below—the national average. Generally the property tax/income tax situation in NYS has led to many businesses leaving and made it impossible to attract new ones.
So again, if the question is what positive things New Yorkers see in Cuomo, his efforts to do something, anything, about runaway property taxes is a good place to start.
Most Democrats vote for the incumbent if he or she is a Democrat.
You always have to remember that he speaks for Eva Moskowitz and her billionaire buddies, who adore Cuomo because he gives them free rent and blocked a higher tax on those with annual income over a million dollars.
He showers favors on the charter industry.
They don’t care that his closest aide just received a six-year jail sentence for taking $300,000 in bribes or that Cuomo’s prize economic development project—Buffalo Billions—was riddled with corruption.
That’s why they gave him a war chest of $35 Million to assure that no one would run against him. Just an actress that no one would take seriously.
Regarding the “ziti,” it’s another example of life imitating art, with real gangsters – Ratface Andy and his sticky-fingered crew – appropriating the language of fictitious ones.