Federal Probe Appears To Go Right At The Way Cuomo Administration Works

Scott Waldman at Politico NY:

ALBANY — U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s inquiry into the state Department of Public Service has broadened in recent days, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation.

A federal subpoena is now seeking all communication, including records of emails and in-person meetings, between senior state energy officials and top Cuomo administration officials, according to the sources. It seeks information on interactions between Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s former senior aide, Joseph Percoco, Department of Public Service chief of staff Tom Congdon, New York Power Authority president and CEO Gil Quiniones and Len Walker, who has worked as a director of special projects at NYPA.

The subpoena also seeks information about the organizational structure of the Department of Public Service from January 2012 to December 2015, sources said. That period includes most of the tenure of DPS head Audrey Zibelman, who was confirmed in June 2013. She is also chairwoman of the Public Service Commission.

Under Zibelman, Cuomo’s executive branch has taken a more direct role in the inner workings of the DPS and the decisions that come before the PSC, insiders say. At the behest of Cuomo, Zibelman is now conducting a series of investigations into energy companies in New York, including the Indian Point nuclear center. She is not named in the subpoena.

Cuomo wants you to think these investigations are only focusing on the malfeasance of two associates of his - he said so again yesterday:

Cuomo said the federal investigation is focusing on whether two people committed wrongdoing, his former deputy secretary Joseph Percoco, and lobbyist Todd Howe.

...

"I come from a tradition, started by my father, of 100 percent integrity in public service," Cuomo said.

"If there's any violation, I will be the first...I literally have put people in jail. No one is stricter than I am," he said.

But given the widening of the subpoena to include "all communication...between senior state energy officials and top Cuomo administration officials," it seems Bharara is looking at more than just malfeasance by Percoco and Howe.

And note that his investigation of DPS is looking at the "organizational structure" from January 2012 to December 2015, a time period when Cuomo subsumed much control of DPS through the hack he installed there, as well as that"decisions that come before the PSC."

That suggests Bharara's investigation has gone well beyond Percoco and Howe and right to the root of the way the Cuomo administration works - including the way Cuomo's executive branch seems to control decisions at entities that are allegedly independent of it.

In other Cuomo corruption news yesterday, Cuomo not only threw his two aides, Percoco and Howe, under the bus (as detailed in the quote above), but also Alain Kaloyeros at SUNY Polytechnic.

Cuomo was making an announcement in Syracuse when he was asked about the $325,000 in donations he took from one of the companies at the center of the U.S. attorney's investigation into his economic development programs:

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday he had no input into SUNY Polytechnic Institute awarding $100 million in contracts to his top campaign contributor in Central New York, COR Development.

He said the more than $325,000 in campaign contributions that COR Development, its executives and COR subsidiaries gave to him had no influence in the awarding of contracts to COR.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in April subpoenaed Cuomo's office for records related to contracts given to COR Development as part of the prosecutor's investigation into Cuomo's marquee economic development projects in Upstate New York.

Bharara, the prosecutor who has already won convictions against former Senate leader Dean Skelos and Assembly leader Sheldon Silver, has issued subpoenas for records related to the Buffalo Billion projects, state contracts with COR Development for Central New York projects, and for a controversial energy project in Orange County, among other things.

Cuomo said the federal investigation is focusing on whether two people committed wrongdoing, his former deputy secretary Joseph Percoco, and lobbyist Todd Howe.

"The way it worked...the state didn't do any of the contracts," Cuomo said when asked about the COR contracts and donations. "It's all done through SUNY, the state university system. They are the ones that actually managed the contracting process."

"They are the ones who ran the contracts, ran the competitions, made the selections," he said. "I had absolutely nothing to do with that."

"It was done by SUNY," the governor said.

Shorter Cuomo: Hey, nothing to do with me, look at Alain Kaloyeros, the head of SUNY Polytechnic,

And yet, look at all the money awarded to COR directly through Cuomo:

SUNY Polytechnic Institute is run by Alain Kaloyeros, the highest paid state employee at $1.1 million in 2015. A board of directors that ran a nonprofit subsidiary set up by SUNY Poly requested proposals to build a nanotechnology building in the Syracuse area.

COR Development was the only company to submit a bid. The SUNY Poly subsidiary awarded COR a $15 million contract to build the Central New York Hub for Emerging Nano Industries, commonly called the film hub, in DeWitt.

Cuomo then awarded Central New York a $500 million award as part of the Upstate Revitalization Initiative contest between seven Upstate regions.

From that award, Cuomo directed that $90 million be used to pay for another contract to COR, to build a factory for Soraa, an LED lighting manufacturer, adjacent to the film hub.

Through his annual awards to regional economic development councils, Cuomo has also approved state grants of about $4 million to COR to demolish the former Kennedy Square housing project in Syracuse and about $4 million to COR to redevelop the former Mercy Hospital site in Watertown.

Cuomo is throwing as many of his cronies as he can to the wolves in order to save himself - it's Percoco, it's Howe, it's Kaloyeros!

Doubtful that this kind of "Not me, them!" thing will fool federal investigators looking into all of this.

And with news coming almost weekly that the investigations into Cuomo's economic development programs are widening, it's doubtful too that Bharara is just looking at Percoco, Howe and Kaloyeros for malfeasance.

As the NY Times reported yesterday, the link between all of this is quite simple - Cuomo donors gave money to Cuomo, got contracts, grants, subsidies or state help in return.

That's at the center of all of this, and while Cuomo wants you to believe that if there's any malfeasance in the donors/state contracting relationship, it was conducted by his under-investigation associates, not him, that seems absurd.

If this kind of thing only happened once, twice, even three times - you might say, "Oh, OK, sure."

But it's pretty clear that this kind of thing happened again and again and again, with Cuomo donors giving money to Cuomo and getting contracts, grants, subsidies or state help in return.

At some point, the feds are going to say, "How is it this happened again and again and again and Cuomo didn't know?

Education Link To Cuomo Corruption Scandals

Dunno if you knew this, but Joe Percoco's wife used to be a teacher.

Percoco, in case you don't know, was once a top aide to Governor Cuomo, so close to the governor that Andy called him a "brother."

He's also now under federal investigation for corruption - and so it appears is his wife, the ex-teacher:

A federal probe involving a longtime aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is examining an energy-company project and a company executive who oversaw it, according to people familiar with the matter.

A focus of the inquiry into the energy company, these people said, is Peter Galbraith Kelly Jr., senior vice president for external affairs for Competitive Power Ventures Holdings LLC, and a program his team oversaw called CPV Educates.

Competitive Power Ventures received a subpoena in recent weeks from the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, a person familiar with the matter said. The company has said it is cooperating with the investigation.

...

The CPV Educates program, which sent teachers and provided curriculum to schools to instruct on energy-related issues, employed Lisa Toscano-Percoco, the wife of former Cuomo aide Joseph Percoco, the company confirmed through a spokesman.

Ms. Toscano-Percoco, a former teacher, was involved in administering the program, the spokesman said.

As previously reported, the probe by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is examining whether Mr. Percoco, who for years was one of Mr. Cuomo’s closest aides, had conflicts of interest with or took official action in favor of companies with business before the state while those entities were paying him and his wife.

Ms. Toscano-Percoco didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Percoco’s attorney, Barry Bohrer, declined to comment or say whether he also represents Ms. Toscano-Percoco. Mr. Bohrer has previously called Mr. Percoco a “dedicated and effective public servant.”

The feds want "email messages, course syllabi and other materials connected to CPV Educates" to see "whether the program did what it purported to do."

At roughly the same time Percoco and his wife were making the outside dough, they had a huge balloon mortgage payment on their $800,000 house and were spending $40,000 on a home theater system.

Gee, why couldn't they do all of that on a teacher's salary and Percoco's government pay?

In case you're wondering what all this might have to do with Cuomo, well, once again, it concerns that lobbyist/former aide he says he doesn't really know all that well:

Also working for Competitive Power Ventures during the period in which Ms. Toscano-Percoco was working for the company was lobbyist Todd Howe, who previously worked for Mr. Cuomo and his father, and whose relationship with Mr. Percoco is being scrutinized as part of the federal probe, according to people familiar with the matter.

Several years ago, Competitive Power Ventures hired Mr. Howe to help set up meetings with people in New York who might help move the Hudson Valley power plant forward, a person familiar with the matter said. The person said Mr. Howe hasn’t been employed by Competitive Power Ventures in the past year.

Boy, I bet Todd Howe's got a lot of stories to tell prosecutors if they ever squeeze him.

Howe's name comes up again and again and again in all these stories.

And, in case you missed it, Howe helped Cuomo take in $25K from one of the companies subpoenaed in the corruption investigation, with Cuomo right there in the room.

Cuomo couldn't have missed what was happening because, well, there weren't many other people in the room other than Cuomo, Howe and the people handing over the checks:

ALBANY — While Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been downplaying his relationship with Todd Howe, a lobbyist at the center of a federal probe of his administration, records show that Howe was steering developers to contribute to the Cuomo campaign as recently as five months ago.

Howe, then a lobbyist for a subsidiary of Whiteman, Osterman & Hanna, hosted a dinner gathering with Cuomo on Dec. 14 in a small upstairs room of the Fort Orange Club, a baronial brick retreat across the street from Whiteman’s Albany offices and up the block from the state Capitol.

The governor walked in at 8:30 p.m., accompanied by two of his top aides, Bill Mulrow and Joe Percoco. He was met by Howe, who worked as his deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, executives from COR Development and Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney, a key Republican ally of the administration, according to public records and four people familiar with the event.

The night’s $25,000 haul came in five checks from three COR executives, the wife of an executive and one of the company’s LLCs. They were deposited on Jan. 12. COR, a Syracuse-based firm, is building two research buildings for SUNY Polytechnic Institute at a business park the company owns in DeWitt.

While Howe’s work was only recently registered with state lobbying regulators, he was a paid adviser to both SUNY Poly and COR at the time of fundraiser. And Percoco, who has managed Cuomo’s political campaigns for more than a decade and shared an office with Howe during Cuomo's 2014 re-election effort, received at least $50,000 in consulting fees from COR that year — something Cuomo has said he did not know.

It's amazing how connected this all is, isn't it?