Former Cuomo Aide Joe Percoco, Others To Face Corruption Charges Related To Andrew Cuomo's Economic Development Projects

Finally:

Federal authorities plan to unseal charges against a former top aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as early as Thursday in connection with an alleged bribery and kickback scheme involving the governor’s signature economic-development program, according to people familiar with the matter.

In addition to the former aide, Joseph Percoco, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan intends to bring public-corruption charges against a number of other individuals in connection with the wide-ranging investigation, these people said.

The precise nature of the charges against Mr. Percoco, who for decades was one of Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides and closest friends, wasn’t immediately clear.

For months, Mr. Percoco has been at the center of a probe by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s office concerning allegations of bribery and kickbacks in connection with an economic-development program known as the Buffalo Billion, which Mr. Cuomo has lauded as having revived the sleepy upstate economy.

Since the investigation became public in April, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has distanced himself from Mr. Percoco and ordered an internal review of the Buffalo Billion program. A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

And the fallout for Cuomo:

The probe and expected charges represent the most significant political crisis Mr. Cuomo has faced since he took office in 2011, in part because they are linked to some of his signature programs and major donors, but also because of the alleged involvement of Mr. Percoco in particular.

For years, Mr. Percoco has been one of the governor’s most trusted allies, an individual so tight with the Cuomo family that the governor once described him as “my father’s third son, who sometimes I think he loved the most.”

If anybody knows where some of the Andrew Cuomo administration bodies are buried, it would be Joe Percoco, Mario's "third son."

Some reaction:

Hard to overestimate this story in NY politics: Joe Percoco, Cuomo's longtime top aide, will face bribery charges: https://t.co/P2NC4MA7j8

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) September 22, 2016

Who else will be indicted?

Perhaps Percoco's wife, who also was being investigated for funky payments from one of the companies involved.

SUNY Poly's Alain Kaloyeros was getting looked at as well as part of the investigation, but whether he's part of today's show is uncertain.

I suspect if Kaloyeros were going to go down today, he'd have been part of the leak.

Definitely Todd Howe, who has been cooperating with the feds in the matter, to be charged - the NY Times reports half a dozen people are going to be charged today in all.

As for Andrew Cuomo, the damage to his administration will be big, though probably not fatal.

This is Cuomo's signature economic development program that Percoco and Company were using as their personal cash box and Cuomo, Mr. Accountability himself, had no idea (or so he says) this was going on.

At the very least, the political damage is that Cuomo was not paying attention as those closest to him (Percoco and former Cuomo aide/now cooperating with the feds lobbyist Todd Howe) were engaging in bribery/kickback schemes and other shenanigans.

The NY Times described the fallout for Cuomo as

a devastating blow to the governor’s innermost circle and a repudiation of how his prized upstate economic development programs were managed, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

There remains the possibility that Percoco can be squeezed for what he knows about Cuomo and all those donors (the pattern has been: Donate to Cuomo, Get Contract/Favor in return), though I suspect if that were going to happen, there might already be indication of that in a leak.

In any case, going to be a fun day if you've been waiting for the Cuomo economic development project bribery/kickback/corruption investigation season to finally kick off.

One final point: with Bharara finally making a move on Percoco, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't get some action on one or more of the various de Blasio corruption probes in the very near future.

Bharara Warns Cuomo And De Blasio He's Coming For Them

Preet Bharara was on ABC this morning with a warning for both Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio:

Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara publicly put Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo on notice Sunday that he’s actively searching for evidence of corruption in their branches of government.

“We have found that corruption is rife in a lot of institutions in New York and throughout New York,” Bharara said during a national TV interview.

“That’s true in the legislature. It’s also the case that there’s corruption, we believe, in the executive branches as well. And we’ll ferret it out wherever we find it.”

Bharara’s stinging comments on ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” come amid probes by his office into fund-raising efforts by Mayor de Blasio and suspected bid-rigging in state-funded development projects.

They also followed an interview last month in which Bharara bristled at the suggestion that Cuomo had been cleared of wrongdoing when Bharara declined to charge him for unexpectedly shutting down the anti-corruption Moreland Commission in 2014.

“Nobody gave a clean bill of health to anybody. A non-indictment is not an endorsement of anyone’s conduct,” Bharara told the New Yorker in what the magazine described as “an uncharacteristically icy tone.”

Cuomo's administration is the subject of a massive federal investigation into his economic development projects all over the state.

Cuomo's top former aide, Joe Percoco, is one focus of that investigation.

A second is another former Cuomo aide and close associate, Todd Howe.

A third is SUNY Poly head Alain Kaloyeros, Cuomo's man in charge of the economic development projects.

As the Post piece notes, de Blasio is the subject of a few investigations too.

The election is coming in November, so if anything is going to come of these investigations, it will come before then.

It's not a mistake that Bharara was on ABC News this morning to talk about corruption in the executive branches in this state.

That's a little head nod that something's coming soon.

We know that one of de Blasio's fund raisers is cooperating with the feds, so my guess is, the de Blasio investigations will get movement first.

But there's a lot going on with the Cuomo investigations too.

There's no certainty that Cuomo's going to go down, but given the subpoenas that went out across the state as part of the investigation into his economic development programs, you can pretty much bet some of those associates of his are going down.

And there's an outside chance that after some squeezing, some of those associates will have tales to trade to prosecutors for lighter sentences.

One way or another, it's beginning to sound a lot like Preetmas.

Proposed For-Profit Charter School In Rochester Linked To Cuomo Corruption Probe

We've already had one education link to the ever-expanding Cuomo corruption probe, with former Cuomo aide Joe Percoco's wife, the ex-teacher, getting paid for some education consultant work from a company of interest in the federal investigation into Governor Andrew Cuomo's economic development programs.

We now have a second education link:

Maple Street Charter School, the for-profit charter school hoping to open in Rochester next year, has paid tens of thousands of dollars to a lobbying firm at the center of a rapidly expanding federal investigation into improper influence in Albany, state records show.

Maple Street's parent company, National Heritage Academies, has been using the Albany-based lobbying firm Whiteman Osterman & Hanna since at least 2007. A WOH subsidiary in Washington, D.C., was led until recently by Todd Howe, a former associate of Gov. Andrew Cuomo who is at the center of the probe by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

The Buffalo News reported earlier this week that Bharara issued a subpoena to Cuomo's office requesting, among other things, all documents relating to Howe and WOH. That would likely include aspects of its lobbying on behalf of the Maple Street application.

...

The most recent disclosure report shows NHA paid WOH $12,000 in the last six months of 2015 for lobbying related to charter schools. The expected lobbying targets included Cuomo's office, the state Assembly and Legislature and Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren.

In the same six-month time period, NHA also paid $45,000 to Park Strategies, a powerful lobbying firm run by former U.S. Sen. Al D'Amato, R-N.Y.

NHA Chairman J.C. Huizenga has given more than $400,000 in campaign contributions in New York since 2005. Most of it went to Republicans, but he also has given $49,000 to a Cuomo fundraising entity.

For-profit charters are banned in New York State, in part because a previous NHA for-profit charter was such a problem, but NHA got this current proposal through a loophole - the SUNY charter board used one charter slot left over from 2007 to give the Maple Street Charter School the opportunity to open under the old, less onerous charter rules.

How did they get the loophole exception?

Could it be the lobbying through WOH or D'Amato's Park Strategies?

Could it be the $49K to Cuomo?

Could it be a mixture of all three?

You bet it could.

And then, just as a Buffalo Billion Project RFP was written so that only a Cuomo donor could win it and a SUNY dorm RFP was written so that only a Cuomo donor could win it, this RFP was written so that NHA was pretty much guaranteed to win it:

Because it predates the 2010 ban, that charter can go to a for-profit provider. The request for proposals was written in such a way that NHA was one of only two possible candidates; the request also was not publicized along with a concurrent, broader charter school proposal cycle.

Ah, such fun in New York - if you pay-to-play, you can achieve just about anything.

What an exciting message to teach the kids at the new NHA Maple Street Charter, with its emphasis on "character education."

But I'm guessing now that there's some sunlight on this deal, the Maple Street Charter School may not open as NHA hoped.

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?