Scoop

(September 25, 2005 -- 11:06 PM EDT // link // print)

Let's return to the matter of Timothy E. Flanigan, currently awaiting confirmation as Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and Jack Abramoff.

To review the highlights of our story, Timothy Flanigan was appointed Deputy White House Counsel at the beginning of the Bush administration. He later left that job to become General Counsel of Tyco Corporation, which had relocated to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes to the US Treasury. At Tyco, Flanigan hired Abramoff to fend off legislation which would have forced Tyco to pay its taxes. And, in the course of that hiring and work, Abramoff first boasted of his access to DeLay, Rove and others and then later claimed that he had spoken to Rove and enlisted his assistance on Tyco's behalf.

When we discussed this Friday, I noted that any suggestion that Abramoff had just fooled Flanigan into believing that he had more access than he had was highly implausible since Flanigan, as Al Gonzales' deputy at the White House, would have gotten a good sense of who Abramoff was and the level of juice he had with Rove and other Republican power-brokers.

Now, after I made this point on the site, a conservative acquaintance of mine emailed and asked a sensible question. If Flanigan was so plugged in at the White House -- enough to know how tight Abramoff was with the president's key advisors -- why exactly did he need to hire Jack Abramoff?

Didn't he already have enough access to handle the issue on his own?

Good question. But there's a pretty straightforward answer once you get a clear view of what sort of operation Abramoff was running.

So this a good opportunity to restate the point.

On paper, Jack Abramoff was a lobbyist. And he made a great deal of money for himself. But if you think of Jack Abramoff as just a crooked lobbyist most of the facts coming out about what he did don't make a great deal of sense. He was a key player in a very big political machine and he was managing a slush fund.

Look at the pattern.

Notice how all Abramoff's clients seemed to get 'bilked' out of large sums of money that ended up going to other conservative foundations, consulting firms, Ralph Reed, lobby shops, Grover Norquist, astroturf organizers, politicians, etc.? All of them part of Washington's Republican infrastructure?

In the case of Abramoff's work for Flanigan and Tyco, Abramoff ended up sending the greater part of their $2 million lobbying fee to an astroturf outfit called Grassroots Interactive -- an outfit allegedly controlled by Abramoff and run by a guy who now works as the Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor of Maryland.

The money ended up diverted to other purposes beside the honorable task of whipping up populist enthusiasm on behalf of corporations that relocate to PO boxes in Bermuda to avoid paying taxes. Tyco lawyer George Terwilliger claims the firm "was a victim of a rip-off."

So is that it? Another rip-off? Another corporation which hires a lawyer out of the White House only to get taken in by Jack Abramoff's wiles? Please. How many times can one operator pull off the same stunt? How many times do big chunks of these pay days get passed on to other operators and organizations without the operators and organizations getting wise to the game?

These odd diversions aren't the exception but the rule.

The Republican machine built by DeLay, Norquist, Abramoff, et al. and pulled into high gear after 2001, is a pay-for-play political machine. This is just another part of the operation, like the diktat for trade associations to hire only Republicans. Big political machines need their soldiers taken care of -- jobs on K Street which also discipline the trade associations under Hill leadership. Just so, they need big sums of money to move around off the books. How does Rove keep the millions moving to Norquist? To Reed? To all the other operatives whose names you don't know about?

Indian tribes bursting with millions who need very focused sorts of legislative intervention -- that's one good source of money. Corrupt Pacific Island governments who need similar help -- another good source.

If Tyco wanted help, they had to pay in. That's what the $2 million was. Of course it got passed on to some other GOP outfit with Abramoff connections. That was the point!

September 27, 2005
Demotion of a Prosecutor Is Investigated
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 - The Justice Department's inspector general and the F.B.I. are looking into the demotion of a veteran federal prosecutor whose reassignment nearly three years ago shut down a criminal investigation of the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, current and former department officials report.

They said investigators had questioned whether the demotion of the prosecutor, Frederick A. Black, in November 2002 was related to his alert to Justice Department officials days earlier that he was investigating Mr. Abramoff. The lobbyist is a major Republican party fund-raiser and a close friend of several Congressional leaders.

Colleagues said the demotion of Mr. Black, the acting United States attorney in Guam, and a subsequent order barring him from pursuing public corruption cases brought an end to his inquiry into Mr. Abramoff's lobbying work for some Guam judges.

Colleagues of Mr. Black, who had run the federal prosecutor's office in Guam for 12 years, spoke on condition of anonymity because of Justice Department rules that bar employees from talking to reporters. They said F.B.I. agents questioned several people in Guam and Washington this summer about whether Mr. Abramoff or his friends in the Bush administration had pushed for Mr. Black's removal. Mr. Abramoff's internal e-mail messages show that he boasted to clients about what he described as his close ties to John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, and others at the department.

Mr. Black's colleagues said that similar questions had been raised by investigators for the Justice Department's inspector general's office, which serves as the department's internal watchdog.

Spokesmen for the department in Washington have said there was nothing unusual about the timing of Mr. Black's reassignment in 2002. They said it was appropriate for the Bush administration to want to replace him with a permanent, Senate-confirmed United States attorney.

Mr. Abramoff, once one of the capital's best-paid lobbyists, is now the subject of broad corruption investigation by federal prosecutors in Washington focusing on accusations that he defrauded Indian tribes and their gambling operations out of millions of dollars in lobbying fees.

A spokesman for Mr. Abramoff said he had "no recollection of being investigated in Guam in 2002" but would have cooperated if he had been aware of any inquiry at the time. Mr. Abramoff had a lucrative lobbying practice on Guam and the neighboring Northern Mariana Islands, another American territory; his lobbying clients paid for luxurious trips to the islands for several members of Congress.

Justice Department officials said they knew of no evidence to suggest that Mr. Ashcroft was involved in the decision to reassign Mr. Black. A spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft said the former attorney general and his aides at the Justice Department had done nothing to assist Mr. Abramoff and his clients and had no significant contact with the lobbyist.

Reached in Guam, Mr. Black, who continues to work as an assistant United States Attorney, declined to answer questions about his 2002 reassignment.

The Los Angeles Times and news organizations in Guam have reported on questions about the circumstances of Mr. Black's demotion. The recent inquiries by the F.B.I. and by the Justice Department's inspector general had not been previously reported, nor had Mr. Black's contacts in November 2002 with the department's public integrity section about his investigation of Mr. Abramoff.

In a statement on Monday, the department said it was natural for the Bush administration to replace Mr. Black, whose assignment to run the United States attorney's office was never meant to be permanent, with a White House selection.

The department said the vetting process for Mr. Black's replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, the current United States attorney, was "well under way in November 2002," when the nomination was announced.

Colleagues said they recalled that Mr. Black was distressed when he was notified by the department in November 2002 that he was being replaced.

The announcement came only days after Mr. Black had notified the department's public integrity division in Washington, by telephone and e-mail communication, that he had opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Abramoff's lobbying activities for the Guam judges, the colleague said. The judges had sought Mr. Abramoff's help in blocking a bill in Congress to restructure the island's courts.

The colleagues said that Mr. Black was also surprised when his newly arrived bosses in Guam blocked him from involvement in public corruption cases in 2003. Justice Department officials said Mr. Black was asked instead to focus on terrorism investigations, which had taken on new emphasis after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Whatever the motivation in replacing Fred, his demotion meant that the investigation of Abramoff died," said a former colleague in Guam.

The Justice Department's public integrity section is responsible for cases involving government corruption. It is now overseeing the larger investigation of Mr. Abramoff in Washington.

Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has long focused on issues involving American territories in the Pacific, said the disclosures about Mr. Black's demotion raised questions about a possible conflict of interest at the Justice Department in its investigation of Mr. Abramoff.

"What this starts to suggest is that Abramoff's ability to corrupt the system was far more pervasive, certainly than we knew at the time," Mr. Miller said.

The New York Times
September 25, 2005
A Mixed Message for Ferrer in Primary Voting Patterns
By SAM ROBERTS

Fernando Ferrer won the mayoral nomination by doing better among non-Hispanic whites and West Indian blacks than he did four years ago, but fewer voters from his Hispanic base turned out than in 2001, analyses of voting patterns from the Sept. 13 Democratic primary show.

But the analyses, conducted by The New York Times and by John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center, suggest that while Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg led in polls before the primary and still leads, his margin - 14 percentage points in the latest poll - is bound to shrink.

One reason is that white Roman Catholics, many of them presumably Bloomberg Democrats, stayed home disproportionately in the primary. And if the mayor continues to look like a shoo-in, his more tepid supporters may not vote in November either.

Also, some Bloomberg Democrats in this lopsidedly Democratic city, eager to send a message to Republicans in Washington and Albany, might begrudgingly switch to Mr. Ferrer.

On Primary Day, news organizations did not invest in exit polls, in which people who identify themselves by race, ethnicity, ideology, income and other categories say how they voted. Another, less precise, way of measuring is to analyze the vote in relatively homogenous Assembly districts or election districts and combine that data with pre-election polls and the results of past races.

Only about 450,000 Democrats voted on Sept. 13, when Mr. Ferrer eked out his primary victory, compared with more than 785,000 in 2001 when he forced Mark Green into a runoff. Mr. Ferrer won the nomination this year with the votes of only 7 percent of enrolled Democrats, and they split largely along ethnic and racial lines.

While C. Virginia Fields, who is black, eroded Mr. Ferrer's vote among blacks compared with 2001, Mr. Ferrer appeared to do better among blacks beyond Mrs. Fields's Harlem base than he had four years ago.

"But the reason he hits 40 percent is he gets 25 percent of the white vote," said Jef Pollock, Mr. Ferrer's pollster. In 2001, exit polls said Mr. Ferrer got about 7 percent of the white vote in the first round and 14 percent in the runoff, but "my rough election district analysis is he got 12 percent last time and 25 percent this time," Mr. Pollock said.

In predominantly white Forest Hills, Queens, for example, Mr. Mollenkopf found that Mr. Ferrer trailed Representative Anthony Weiner, but received 17 percent of the vote, compared with 10 percent four years ago. On the West Side, which is mostly white and liberal, Mr. Ferrer doubled his share of the vote.

In 2001, Mr. Bloomberg carried Forest Hills and nearly won the West Side, so any potential inroads by Mr. Ferrer could prove costly in a close election.

"The most Irish and Italian areas of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights were less likely to have voted in 2005 than in 2001," Mr. Mollenkopf said. "Weiner didn't get them to the polls."

He also said that the lower turnout this year might have reflected the absence of a non-Hispanic white Catholic in the race, and the failure of some Bloomberg Democrats to vote.

Mr. Pollock, the Ferrer campaign pollster, suggested that many of those potential Bloomberg voters might stay home in November, too.

"Maybe those voters in Bay Ridge, in Throgs Neck and Maspeth won't be that thrilled either in the general election," he said. "It's not like Rudy Giuliani. I don't believe they are going to come out en masse for Michael Bloomberg."

In November, Mr. Ferrer's chief challenge may be how to woo the blacks, Hispanics and Asians who are projected to constitute a majority of New York City's electorate for the first time without alienating whites, whom he also needs.

"Ferrer's strength is the Bronx and Latino areas, and his people make no bones about it," said William T. Cunningham, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg. "They need a big turnout in the Latino community. That's what they're targeting."

Mr. Mollenkopf said that compared with other groups, the Hispanic turnout in the Democratic primary was "pretty good, and maybe even a little bit better."

In one of the city's most heavily Hispanic Assembly districts, which covers the South Bronx, Mr. Ferrer won overwhelmingly on Primary Day, according to preliminary returns, with about 5,720 votes, compared with 765 for Ms. Fields. Mr. Weiner and Gifford Miller divided the remaining 524 votes. In roughly the same district in 2001, though, he got 11,249 votes.

"Ultimately, the Hispanic and African-American vote are generally going to line up behind him," Mr. Mollenkopf said. "The question is how fervent and how complete is that support."

Similarly, Mr. Bloomberg cannot win without wooing as many as one-third of Hispanic voters and perhaps even more blacks, in addition to whites. He is counting on the fact that Dominicans and other Hispanics don't necessarily vote as a bloc with Mr. Ferrer's fellow Puerto Ricans. Mr. Ferrer did not do as well in Washington Heights, with its large Dominican population, compared with some other largely Hispanic districts.

While Mr. Ferrer is counting on the hospital workers' union and other labor support to get out the vote, Mr. Bloomberg also has a sophisticated Election Day operation to galvanize his supporters, as he did four years ago.

Mr. Bloomberg builds on his incumbency (first-term mayoral incumbents have been deposed only twice in the past half-century), his willingness to spend $100 million or more to keep his job, and the fact that most New Yorkers seem satisfied (if not necessarily thrilled) with his performance as mayor. Still, the federal problems in responding to Hurricane Katrina, and even the presence of Justice Antonin Scalia as grand marshal in next month's Columbus Day parade, may remind Bloomberg Democrats that Mr. Bloomberg is indeed a Republican, if nominally, and that his defeat might be viewed as a slap at the national Republican Party.

Three additional factors might help broaden Mr. Ferrer's appeal, but it's difficult to say how much. The Rev. Al Sharpton's belated endorsement could motivate black voters. And, like Mr. Guiliani, Mr. Ferrer is Roman Catholic; Roman Catholics constituted more than one-third of the voters in 2001. Finally, he is the first Democratic mayoral nominee since 1973 who is not from Manhattan.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Inaudible Announcements in Subways Are Endangering Riders, Critics Say
BY JEREMY SMERD - NY Sun
September 21, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/20304

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority may be putting riders at risk by failing to upgrade the subway system's communications network, critics said yesterday.

Despite an $833 million surplus and the availability of technology that would improve vital communication with passengers, MTA officials testifying yesterday at a City Council hearing said it would take 10 years to fully replace the antiquated public address systems.

William Henderson, the associate director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, a riders' advocacy organization created by the state, said communicating with passengers "is not an integral part of New York City Transit operations and clearly does not rank as a top agency priority."

"If there was a sense of urgency, they could figure out which steps to take," he said of the stalled plans to replace the address systems.

The MTA officials said they shelved plans to replace all the address systems throughout the subway by 2009 when they revised their budget earlier this year. The director of government affairs for the MTA, Michelle Goldstein, said priority was given to a project that would install computer systems to track the location of all trains and their arrival times at stations.

Transit officials said the new technology was a prerequisite for installing address systems with computer-generated announcements and text messaging. However, transportation advocates, citing studies conducted by an engineering firm hired by the transit authority, Carter Burgess, said the new address system could be installed without train location technology.

There are no public address systems in 131 of the system's 468 stations. The current public address system uses copper wiring and produces inaudible announcements 76% of the time during train delays and disruptions, according to another advocacy group, the Straphangers Campaign.

"At least you can say those unintelligible announcements don't penalize people who don't speak English well," the chairman of the council's Transportation Committee, John Liu, said. "No one can understand them, regardless of what language you speak."

The new system would use fiber optics to communicate announcements generated by a computer in much the same way audio is conveyed on new subway trains. With the use of train location technology, those message boards will be able to tell riders the estimated arrival time of trains.

The new address systems would have benefited riders who waited nearly two hours during rush hour yesterday morning when the nos. 4 and 5 trains were delayed because of a bomb scare. Under the new system, which will debut at 24 stations of the L line by the end of the year, computer voice and text messages will be generated, replacing the garbled messages usually heard on subway platforms.

The executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, Beverly Dolinsky, said Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road put a higher premium on communicating with passengers, especially during emergencies, than does the MTA.

In a report published in August, the group said subway conductors and token booth clerks are told by a central command center what to tell passengers during an emergency. Critics argue that more training should be given to conductors in case communication with a command center is broken.

MTA officials, who received high marks for successfully evacuating hundreds of thousands of passengers on September 11, 2001, and during the blackout of August 2003, defended their record.

"It offends me to suggest we don't take communication seriously," the MTA's deputy executive director of corporate affairs and communications, Christopher Boylan, said.

By the end of next year some improvements will be seen, Mr. Boylan said. About 130 more stations will have the new address system. The majority of stations on the lettered lines, though, will not receive improved communication systems until the next capital program, which begins in 2010 and runs until 2015, MTA officials said.

Mr. Liu suggested part of the MTA's unexpected $833 million budget windfall be used to upgrade the address systems and dump plans to use the money to build a platform over the Hudson Rail Yards on the far West Side.

A council member of the Bronx, G. Oliver Koppell, demanded that all subway stations have some form of a public address system within six months.

The New York Times
September 16, 2005
Experts Assess Deregulation as Factor in '03 Blackout
By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - Twenty-five months after a blackout darkened cities from New York to Toronto and Detroit, the Energy Department and its Canadian counterpart held their first public technical discussion on the episode Thursday to talk about one factor widely considered to have been behind it: the deregulation of the electric system.

Engineers, government officials and executives said at the meeting that amid its restructuring the industry needed further changes to reduce the frequency of blackouts as utilities that formerly generated power, transmitted it and delivered it were broken up into separate entities of competing businesses.

"The most serious mistake we can make is pretending that markets do things that they do not do," said Kellan Fluckiger, executive director of the electricity division at the Alberta Department of Energy. "Markets allocate risk, they allocate capital, they provide price signals. Markets do not have a conscience, they do not provide social policy, and they do not do things they are not paid to do."

For example, participants at the meeting said, utilities that once ran the system sometimes added transmission lines to increase reliability of electric power. When they did so, their costs would be reimbursed through the regulatory process; now there is less incentive to take on such efforts, and several participants pointed out that in fact investment in transmission had lagged.

The blackout of 2003 began on Aug. 14 and in some places lasted more than two days. A binational report issued three months afterward did not list deregulation as a cause, instead citing factors like failure to trim trees, train operators and install control systems that could have kept track of the status of all power lines and generators.

Much of the investigation leading to that report was managed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the architect of utility restructuring in the United States. The report called for a separate study - it did not say by whom - on the role of deregulation in the blackout, but that study has never been done.

Experts at Thursday's meeting said the changes in the industry had had several adverse effects, including a loss of experience among personnel. One member of the panel, Jack Casazza, a 60-year veteran of the industry, said the changes had brought lawyers and M.B.A.'s to the head of these competitive companies, rather than engineers.

"They may be decent people, fine bankers, fine lawyers, wonderful golfers," Mr. Casazza said, "but they don't have the background."

He also said that while the old utilities had often maintained large reserve margins of electricity, to minimize the chance of shortages, some market participants now preferred lower margins, to drive up prices.

Others pointed out that information like a power plant's maximum capacity, and its state of repair on any given day, was now considered proprietary and so was not readily available to system operators, which manage regional power grids.

The North American Electric Reliability Council, whose members come from utilities, marketers, customers and federal agencies, said in a paper submitted for the meeting that the increased demands that deregulation's wider trading had placed on the transmission system "require the grid to be operated closer to its reliability limits more of the time than was the case in the past."

That requires better training and control equipment, said the group, which was founded after a vast blackout in the Northeast in 1965.

Still, not all the industry's changes have affected reliability adversely, participants said. In a paper written for the meeting, Dave Goulding, chief executive of the Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator, said "competition leads to trade and greater interconnectedness," which could increase reliability.

The energy bill signed into law by President Bush on Aug. 8 provides a mechanism for creating mandatory reliability rules. It allows the federal government to designate a private group, probably the North American Electric Reliability Council, as an official "electric reliability organization," with authority to set the rules. But that group pointed out in its paper that while the designated organization would assess the adequacy of the system, it would not have the authority to require anybody to build a generating station or a transmission line.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The New York Times
September 16, 2005
Staten Island Ferry in Quebec? Fantastique!
By SHADI RAHIMI

Some New Yorkers who glanced at the East River yesterday morning must have thought that the ship they saw there was very lost.

In fact, the tangerine-hued boat was kicking up its heels in the final hours of a 22-day excursion from its birthplace in Wisconsin to New York Harbor, where it will begin a long indentured servitude as the newest member of the Staten Island ferry fleet.

Along the way, the ferry, named the Spirit of America, startled some Canadians on the Great Lakes who shouted, "Are you lost?'" according to Annette Hobbs, 24, one of the 15 crew members who worked and camped aboard the ferry during its voyage. But not everyone along the route, from the Great Lakes, along the St. Lawrence Seaway to Quebec, to the Atlantic Ocean, to Long Island Sound and eventually to the East River, was so helpful.

One crew member, Ben Stout, 34, said that when they sailed through the Cape Cod Canal, deep in Boston Red Sox territory, several fishermen made obscene gestures and yelled an instruction about what to do with the Yankees. Closer to home, but no less rude, was the construction worker who Ms. Hobbs said mooned her from the Bronx side of the Whitestone Bridge.

Though most onlookers were not as hostile, many appeared confused by the sight of a New York City ferry in their waters, said Mr. Stout, who said he had "danced with this girlfriend," meaning the ferry, since June.

He and the other workers who made the trip from Wisconsin slept on air mattresses and in sleeping bags during the voyage and used the ferry's snack bar to cook hamburgers on hot plates, Richard Menkes, 59, the captain for this trip, said.

A few of the deflated mattresses were rolled up and placed neatly near large suitcases yesterday, and leftover pizza slices sat in boxes alongside Dunkin' Donuts containers on the snack bar's gleaming silver counter.

Gazing out a window toward Staten Island, the city's transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, said, "It's just such a sense of accomplishment," adding that the Transportation Department was working on plans to replace the two 20-year-old ferries still in the fleet within eight years.

The new $40 million ferry is the last of three new 4,500-passenger boats replacing even older ferries.

Drifting through a light drizzle that moistened the sticky air, the ferry announced its noon arrival at the St. George terminal on Staten Island with several blasts of its horn.

Inside the terminal, passengers were waiting to board the American Legion, the 40-year-old ferry that the Spirit will replace.

The newcomer is part of a $400 million project that includes not only the three new ferries, but also the reconstruction of the Whitehall ferry terminal in Manhattan, which was badly damaged by a fire in 1991.

The ferry began its journey at the Marinette Marine Corporation's shipyard, in Marinette, Wis., on Aug. 25. Around 9 a.m. yesterday, it picked up Transportation Department officials who were aboard a launch off City Island. Before it reached the ferry, the launch had stopped at Hart Island, to drop off a Correction Department van with several prisoners who were assigned to bury bodies at the potter's field there.

Even if the ferry drew some stares along its route, it remains an international icon. Whenever he tells people, even abroad, that he works for the Staten Island ferry, James Weber, 58, who has been a deckhand for more than half his life, said, "I always get a smile."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

September 10, 2005
Songs in the Key of Politics
By CAROLYN CURIEL

It was a crowded room and the candidate for City Council was given just a few minutes to work it. "They say we're young and we don't know, won't find out until we grow," his message began.

"I got you babe," he concluded.

The under-40 crowd, packed tank top to untucked shirt into a converted storefront in the garment district of Manhattan, was appreciative. The hopeful, Eric Cesnik, wants to represent the Upper East Side. But before he could stump, and then only briefly, he had to sing, which he did, playing Sonny to a campaign staff member's Cher.

Is there anything a candidate in a crowded election field will not do to get votes? Undoubtedly, but in New York City during the run-up to Tuesday's primaries, the bar is certainly way lower than singing in a club. At the recent "mayoroke" night, none of the actual candidates in the Democratic mayoral primary showed up. Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker - and a self-styled crooner who breaks into "Young at Heart" before senior citizens - was particularly missed.

Other contenders proved gamer, with audience members serving as warm-up acts. Some plodded through, others performed with abandon. The evening's organizer was Drinking Liberally, a Web group that says it promotes democracy "one pint at a time."

Two candidates for Manhattan borough president, Carlos Manzano and Scott Stringer, were on the bill. Mr. Manzano charmed the crowd with a rendition of "I Need You Tonight." Mr. Stringer, claiming laryngitis, was given a pass. An aide to another candidate, Bill Perkins, paced outside, volunteering that if Mr. Perkins had shown up, he certainly would have sung "I'll Take Manhattan."

The spontaneous environment offered an oasis in an otherwise dry campaign. It called to mind how rarely candidates step out of their straitjackets of caution and away from the tinny slogans made for them.

David Alpert, one organizer, is already coming up with other ways to pry politicians from their comfort zones. He may want to consider a true test of who knows how to lead: "Dancing With the Candidates."

September 7, 2005
Urgent Warning Proved Prescient
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Among a steady string of warnings delivered in recent years to New Orleans that they could be devastated by a great hurricane, one of the last was also one of the most chilling.

'Hurricane Katrina. A most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength,' was the headline on the National Weather Service bulletin on Aug. 28, the day before Hurricane Katrina struck.

'Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,' the alert went on.

It read like the kind of hastily typed dispatch one might expect from a meteorologist facing the storm of a lifetime and trying to ensure that leaders and citizens heeded warnings and moved to safety before all communications failed.

Yet it was mostly written years in advance, with just a few last-minute adjustments by the staff at the New Orleans office to reflect specific local conditions, federal weather agency officials said yesterday.

The goal of having the descriptions preprogrammed into computers is to save time for the local meteorologists whose job was both to encourage residents to stay safe and to track evolving conditions, said Walt Zaleski, the Weather Service warning coordination program manager in the regional headquarters.

Blueprint for bribery
For seven years, a secret FBI investigation has targeted corruption in state government, slowly moving ever higher up Albany's political food chain. Only now is the extent of the inquiry emerging.

By BRENDAN LYONS, Staff writer
First published: Tuesday, September 6, 2005

For Ronald Laberge, it should have been a night to remember fondly.

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Laberge drove across Loudonville that summer evening in 1998 for a private dinner with Gov. George Pataki and a small group of influential and well-respected businessmen. It was a chance to mingle with the state's most powerful public official at a time when Laberge's self-built engineering and real estate firms were thriving.

But Laberge hid a dark secret when he dined with the governor that Sunday night. Less than a month earlier, he had authorized one of his employees to pay a $2,500 bribe to a state leasing agent, which was to be a down payment in an illicit deal aimed at winning Laberge a multimillion-dollar lease with the state of New York.

Years later, as the scandal broke, it would force an abrupt end to Laberge's storied career and leave him a disgraced felon.

It turns out he was determined not to go down alone.

A court document unsealed last week as a result of legal action by the Times Union shows that Laberge, in an attempt to avoid prison, agreed to help FBI agents get where they really wanted to go: inside the shadowy world of state contracts and campaign donations, where authorities suspect lucrative state government deals are awarded through political loyalties and money that changes hands with a wink and a nod.

It was an area of Laberge's expertise. His Colonie-based company, Laberge Group, has done millions of dollars in business with more than 200 government agencies across the state. He has contributed thousands of dollars to Republican candidates.

The investigation led to the governor's office, where the FBI broadened its probe to include Pataki's former longtime executive assistant, Monica F. Bell of Loudonville, after Laberge began naming officials who had helped him, according to several knowledgeable sources. FBI agents began to explore whether Bell, 56, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, played a role in protecting Laberge in another leasing scandal and helped the Pataki contributor try to secure a $5.8 million state building lease in Troy -- independently from Laberge's attempt to bribe a state leasing agent.

The FBI probe "did not tend to corroborate the information" Laberge provided, the U.S. attorney's office said in a statement filed in court in July.

Bell would not comment. She retained an attorney, Jerome K. Frost, who issued a written statement on Saturday denying that Bell, who is an acquaintance of Laberge's, had anything to do with Laberge's misdeeds.

"Ms. Bell was neither a target of the Laberge investigation by the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI, nor was she subpoenaed in that investigation," Frost said.

Pataki spokesman Kevin Quinn, responding to written questions from the Times Union, denied any wrongdoing within the governor's office and said Bell did not try to help Laberge win a lease. The governor himself did not comment.

"You're making the false presupposition that Ms. Bell made any efforts to assist Laberge in obtaining a state lease," Quinn said. "She has indicated that she did not."

Late last week, the state Office of General Services turned over copies of two federal grand jury subpoeanas it received in January 2001 in connection with the investigation.

One subpoena sought copies of records, including any internal correspondence or e-mails, in connection with two state projects involving Laberge's company. The second sought records related to another state lease in Troy, at the Hendrick Hudson building, which did not involve Laberge or his companies.

The reach of Laberge's work as an informant had remained secret until last week. It began about four years ago after authorities confronted him with irrefutable evidence that he had bribed a state official. In 2003, Laberge, now 69, began taping telephone conversations with associates and baiting FBI targets at political fund-raisers as he meanwhile held candid talks with agents and federal prosecutors about the hidden world of government payoffs.

"Mr. Laberge also prepared memoranda outlining the methods used by politicians and business owners to contribute money to campaigns and to have those contributions recognized for later business opportunities," according to a sentencing memorandum filed by Laberge and unsealed last week in U.S. District Court in Syracuse. "This information laid out the blueprint for the FBI concerning the manner in which business is often conducted in New York."

It's not clear how far the FBI got in its seven-year investigation. Nor is it clear that the investigation is closed.

When Laberge and the state official he bribed both began working as informants, federal authorities assigned one prosecutor to handle their criminal cases and another to oversee the corruption probe sparked by their cooperation. Yet the only people to face charges so far are Laberge, who is scheduled to be sentenced today; Peter F. Dembroski, 44, a former state Office of General Services leasing agent, who helped Laberge in his efforts to win a major state contract, and Richard B. Sawyer, 55, a former commercial real estate broker who vanished after being indicted four months ago and is the target of a federal arrest warrant.

Andrew T. Baxter, a federal prosecutor who headed the corruption investigation, would not comment on details of the lengthy probe. Federal sentencing guidelines suggest a 15- to 21-month prison term for Laberge, but Baxter has asked a federal judge to consider leniency, given Laberge's "extensive" cooperation, by going one tier lower in a guideline sentence, which would give Laberge six months to one year in prison.

Baxter conceded such recommendations are rare when an informant's work doesn't yield any arrests.

"I can tell you, in general, with respect to substantial assistance (from a defendant) we are typically looking for tangible results," Baxter said. "But we don't always accomplish that."

In his recommendation to U.S. District Judge Norman A. Mordue, Baxter said the tips provided by Laberge could not be corroborated and that over time Laberge had given conflicting information.

Laberge contends his ability to penetrate state government corruption at its highest levels was hampered in part by Times Union stories that first exposed the federal investigation in April 2001 -- about a month before Laberge began working for the FBI, according to court records in the case.

Laberge worked aggressively in his undercover role, attending some 23 political fund-raisers where "he tried to ingratiate himself with politicians and establish a foothold into their campaign-contribution practices," according to a memorandum in the case that was unsealed Aug. 29.

"Cooperating with the government put Mr. Laberge's family and employees in jeopardy, both financially ... and physically, as the targets of these various investigations were very powerful people, who presumably would do nearly anything to retain their wealth and power," the memorandum said.

Stephen Coffey, Laberge's attorney, declined to discuss his memorandum.

None of the alleged "powerful people" are identified in any records filed publicly in Laberge's case or related cases. However, several knowledgeable sources said Bell, who was then the governor's confidential aide and part of the powerful Colonie Republican organization, became a focus of investigators as they traced the source of political interference wielded on Laberge's behalf.

Coffey wrote that the investigation also fell short because federal authorities ignored Laberge's pleas to let him "join the Governor's Club ... where his cooperation would do the most good." The "Governor's Club" is a designation that dates to former New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and has been used by state Republican fund-raisers since to describe significant contributors, sometimes for VIP treatment at special events.

It was in that spirit one Sunday night in 1998 that Bell, a Town Board member in Colonie, where a young Assemblyman Pataki once lived, helped arrange for a dozen men to gather in private at the home of Colonie's Republican patriarch, Harry D'Agostino.

They slipped out of their suit coats and chatted candidly about sports while sipping red wine and feasting on D'Agostino's homemade pasta carbonara and handmade ravioli, according to one attendee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said he was questioned by the FBI last year.

"(The questions were) about campaign finance corruption," the man said. "They were interested in what went on and the kind of people who were involved ... they were looking for people who have seen (cash) money pass hands ... the money that makes decisions."

Asked whether the FBI specifically asked about Bell, the man responded: "More than once."

No evidence emerged that anyone at the fund-raising dinner that night -- which are typical for politicians -- had violated any laws.

"This was a thing where the governor was able to come and relax after a day of functions," said D'Agostino, an attorney. "I cooked some food and we had some wine and talked about sports."

D'Agostino did not want to discuss his relationship with Laberge, saying only they've had "a personal relationship for many, many years."

He said the dinner was prompted by a phone call about a month earlier from Bell.

"There's nothing illegal or immoral about it," D'Agostino said.

Bell, who also was at the dinner that night, left her job at the governor's office in January, joining the state Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation as a special assistant, a job that pays $108,704 a year, according to public records.

A spokesman for the governor's office did not say whether Bell or anyone else on the governor's staff had been questioned by the FBI.

"The Times Union has spent months fruitlessly rehashing this matter, attempting to make it into something it is not," Quinn said. "The fact is our administration fully cooperated with authorities in this matter." incident in which Bell allegedly intervened on Laberge's behalf involved a high-rise building at 41 State St. in Albany, which Laberge purchased in 1997 for $9.65 million. The 12-story building is home to the New York Department of State, and other tenants. Just prior to closing on the deal, Laberge negotiated a new 10-year lease with the state for $17.2 million.

Soon after, a property manager at the building went to the state attorney general's office with allegations that Laberge's company was billing the state through its lease for improvements that actually were being made to another of his properties, the Arcade Building at 488 Broadway in Albany.

The allegations were potentially explosive because at that point Laberge was vying to purchase the former Stanleys Department Store building in downtown Troy in hopes of securing a long-term, $5.8 million lease with another state agency, either the Department of Law or the Department of Health.

The deal in Troy, which eventually fell apart as the FBI stepped in, would have earned Laberge several hundred thousand dollars profit, according to federal authorities. Laberge disputes that estimate and contends he would have lost money.

For reasons that are not clear, the fraud allegations surrounding Laberge's lease at 41 State St. were apparently never investigated by the state attorney general's office, which has no record of the matter.

Federal prosecutors have repeated the allegations in court records and Laberge acknowledged the scheme.

"Laberge later learned of the complaints, which had been referred to ... the OGS and the New York state attorney general's office, from a state official, who was assisting him in his efforts to obtain a state lease for the Stanley Building and who told him that the problem had been take care of," according to a plea agreement signed last year by Laberge.

When the FBI began investigating the bribery scheme, agents eavesdropped on dozens of Laberge's telephone calls and coversations with an informant. During one of those conversations, Laberge told someone, who has not been identified, that his problems at 41 State St. had been "taken care of" by a state official, according to knowledgeable sources.

Frost denied that Bell is the unnamed state official. He said Bell never "acted illegally or inappropriately." was no escape for Laberge from the bribery scandal.

The investigation began in early 1998, authorities said, when Norman S. Leibowitz, who had worked for Laberge for several years, told agents about a bribery scheme just beginning to unfold.

Laberge, in his defense papers, portrays Leibowitz as a corrupt employee who boasted about being an FBI informant and lured Laberge into committing a crime to win the state lease. He contends Leibowitz tricked him into thinking the bribery payment was sanctioned by the FBI at a time when Leibowitz admitted being an FBI informant.

Leibowitz flatly denies that claim and Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Lord, who is prosecuting Laberge's case, filed a memorandum recently attacking Laberge's account.

"The defendant's assertions that he thought the bribe was 'sanctioned' by the FBI as part of its investigation ... are gross distortions of the facts," Lord said. "In the dozens of conversations that were recorded between the defendant and the informant, there is no evidence that the defendant believes that the informant was then working for the FBI, no evidence that the defendant was reluctant to bribe the state employee, and no evidence that the informant was manipulating (Laberge)."

The scheme involving the Stanleys building in Troy hinged on Dembroski, the OGS leasing agent, agreeing to steer a lease to Laberge for a $5,000 bribe. Laberge would make sure Sawyer, the broker, would get $20,000.

Dembroski held a key position at OGS to pull off the deal. His job was to locate and evaluate potential sites that would be rented by state agencies and make recommendations to his superiors at OGS. He would then guide the projects through an approval process that can take years.

On June 15, 2000, while the FBI was deep into its investigation, Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, R-Brunswick, brought Pataki to Troy, in his home district, to announce the project. At the time, the lease wasn't actually finalized. Other state officials and OGS workers were questioning terms of the deal that would have significantly inflated annual payments over the course of the 10-year agreement.

The holdup was in part due to concerns by OGS officials about the earlier allegations that Laberge had been fraudulently charging them through their lease at 41 State St. in Albany.

The premature announcement by Bruno and Pataki fueled the bribery scheme back to life. Dembroski contacted Leibowitz, telling him to hold fast because Bruno and Pataki had already announced the deal, records show.

But the deal collapsed for good in January 2001 when the Office of the State Comptroller sent a memorandum to OGS officials saying it had been warned about the federal investigation and would not approve the lease. Two months later, Dembroski resigned under pressure, and in September of that year he pleaded guilty to federal mail fraud charges.

For four months before he left his job, however, Dembroski had recorded conversations with co-workers and secretly copied documents for the FBI, court records show.

Dembroski told federal agents that it was routine for state OGS workers to be pressured by top officials to steer lucrative rental contracts to landlords who made large contributions to well-connected politicians.

Dembroski was sentenced last year to probation for his role in the bribery scandal. He declined to answer questions when confronted by a reporter recently near his home, saying only that the investigation "obviously was squashed a long time ago." Dembroski now works in the private sector. facet of the case that remains mysterious was described cryptically in a plea for leniency filed by Dembroski and unsealed last year. Federal authorities said one reason the Stanleys building project fell apart for Laberge -- despite Dembroski's best efforts to manipulate the process -- was because a new deal had been inked by the state to occupy office space at the Hendrick Hudson building at 200 Broadway in Troy. "Dembroski described the process by which another large political contributor won that lease," a prosecutor wrote, referring to a five-year, $1.25 million lease for the state Department of Law.

Bruno cut the ribbon on the Hendrick Hudson building project in March 2000, and has been a driving force behind steering state agencies to downtown Troy as part of the city's revitalization effort.

Information about that case was referred to the U.S. attorney's office by the FBI, but no action has been taken.

Brendan Lyons can be reached at 454-5547 or by e-mail at blyons@timesunion.com.

Senior editor Bob Port contributed to this report.


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