NY Times: Bill Thompson Is A Crook

Devastating NY Times article out tonight on Bill Thompson.

Here's the beginning:

As a first-time candidate for New York City comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr. was feted at a downtown fund-raiser in 2001 by two luminaries of the black business world: the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and Mr. Simmons’s money manager, a veteran Wall Street financier who made his fortune promoting hybrid securities known as convertible bonds. 

Speaking in between rap and poetry-slam performances, the financier, Tracy V. Maitland, made clear why he had taken an interest in the little-watched race for comptroller. “When you control $85 billion,” he told 200 guests crowded into a popular art gallery, “you get a lot of attention.”

Over the last 12 years, Mr. Thompson has repeatedly gotten Mr. Maitland’s attention. 

After that fund-raiser, Mr. Maitland became a regular contributor to the campaigns of Mr. Thompson, who is now running for mayor. Later, he pushed unsuccessfully for Mr. Thompson’s wife to be hired as president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, where he is a trustee.

Mr. Maitland’s attention was not unrequited. In 2006, Mr. Thompson honored him at a Black History Month observance. And in 2008, his office for the first time began investing city pension assets in convertible bonds, pouring $324 million into Advent Capital Management, the firm Mr. Maitland founded. By the time Mr. Thompson left office, in 2009, Advent was earning $2 million a year in fees on those investments. 

Mr. Thompson’s ties to Mr. Maitland reflect a pattern that emerges from an examination of Mr. Thompson’s stewardship of the pension funds and, more broadly, the comptroller’s office: Again and again, Mr. Thompson reaped political gains from those he awarded city business. 

As he oversaw the city’s $85 billion pension system, Mr. Thompson steered the funds into a diverse range of new investment categories, expanding from heavy concentrations in stocks and bonds into private equity, real estate and niche funds. Yet performance was lackluster: nationwide, more than half of large public pension funds outperformed the five city funds’ combined 4.84 percent return from 2002 through 2009, according to a widely used yardstick compiled by Wilshire Associates, an investment advisory firm. Meanwhile, the city’s roster of fund managers, and their fees, tripled — and Mr. Thompson collected more than $500,000 in campaign donations from them. 

Mr. Thompson’s credentials as comptroller and a seasoned manager are central to his mayoral campaign, in which he has portrayed himself as the grown-up in the Democratic field — less liberal, strident and showy, but best prepared for the sober task of managing an unruly city. 

But interviews and a review of thousands of pages of records — schedules, e-mails, pension statements and campaign finance reports — suggest frequent overlap of Mr. Thompson’s political ambitions and the comptroller’s operation, and, that like many pension overseers at the time, he raised campaign money aggressively from those seeking business from his office. 

Read the rest of the NY Times story and then recall how the Thompson's campaign has been going after Bill de Blasio for allegedly failing to disclose meetings with lobbyists, going so far as to start a website called BilldeBliar.com to suggest de Blasio is lying about those meetings.

Given how Thompson hit up so many of those seeking city business from his office for campaign donations, if anybody has some truth telling to do to the citizens of New York, it's Bill Thompson.

One more quote from the story to give you a taste of just how Thompson does business:

Nowhere was Mr. Thompson’s embrace of those investment firms more evident than on the guest list to his second swearing-in, in January 2006. The 250 names included a small number of relatives, union leaders and elected officials; more than 50 lobbyists; and another 50 fund managers, placement agents and others who stood to gain from the city’s pension funds.

A small group of friends, family and politicians at his swearing in - the rest were lobbyists, fund managers and placement agents looking to do business with the city, people Thompson would eventually hit up for campaign donations.

And Bill Thompson is hitting de Blasio for meetings with lobbyists?