(Photo Credit: albany tim)

By Neil Fabricant

For those who are appalled at the antics of the towel-snapping frat boys in Albany, we thought it would be useful to provide a brief account of how Albany works or doesn’t.

By now you know that you can’t believe what these people who are serving the public, otherwise known as public servants, say about their motives. Nor can you take at face value what the newspapers print. The reporters aren’t inside the room, and what their sources tell them is always self-serving. That isn’t to say, there aren’t some fine reporters who are able to piece together a rough approximation of what’s going on, but their editors and publishers often have their own agendas and even when they don’t, journalistic protocols prevent them from reporting on the crimes and conspiracies, at least until an indictment has been filed.

So you have to be able to read between the lines with a skeptical eye. With some of the accounts, as with Bloomberg the Golfer, a feature that recently appeared on the front page of the New York Times, the first question to ask is “why is this here?” If you have some context, you can generally walk things back to the story assignment.

I spent a lot of time in Albany and after any meeting, I would always ask those on my side of the table “What do you think just happened?” It was always a useful exercise – think Rashomon or Rorschach.

Having some context makes it easier to figure things out. We’ll have to do it in installments. Here’s the first.

The cliché of three men in a room – the governor, speaker and majority leader who decide everything – is accurate but vastly oversimplified. The political world is more complicated for those who earn their livings at it. And now, with the weakest governor in memory unable to bring to bear the power of that office, and with no senate majority leader firmly in place, the descent into dysfunctional hell was inevitable.

The basic political architecture can be viewed as a series of separate, interconnected networks populated by officials who have legal authority to decide things, and by others who for one reason or another can influence them. Every person within one of these networks is sniffing the air constantly, on the alert for anything that may affect his or her interests.

There are as many networks as there are areas of government policy, a banking network, a housing network, an energy network, and so forth. All the state’s important interests are represented in one or more of them. Most entities maintain a lobbying presence in Albany and New York City. The players know one another or they know of one another. They regularly interact to advance or block government actions in their spheres of interest. It’s almost meaningless to say this or that person has “clout.” It depends on the context. The head of the teachers union, for example, is a player in the public education network, but her members care about jobs, pensions, working conditions and so forth. She may sign a letter as a member of a coalition for this or that cause, but the insiders understand that she can’t or won’t mobilize her members for anything but a core interest. Her voice is meaningless inside the banking network.

The interests and the entities are permanent; the people come and go. If you don’t know who they are, what they want, and how to influence them, you might as well stay home and watch C-Span.¹

The Private Players

The larger business organizations have in-house political managers who hold titles like government relations director, vice-president for external affairs or similar titles that suggest the person’s status and function. That person is likely to be a former legislative committee chairman or high-ranking executive branch aide. S/he knows the field, has access to industry data and analysis, understands the political process, and knows the players. It’s their job to examine everything that touches on the interests of those who employ them. The entities have internal procedures for arriving at their positions, methods of communicating them to other insiders, and, if useful, to the press. They advance their positions through legislation, regulatory actions, budget allocations, putting key supporters into the relevant agencies — whatever suits the circumstances. They contribute cash and services to the people who support them and to those who can hurt them.

Business entities have agendas particular to their own interests but they also have common agendas with others. Their collective interests are advanced through trade associations that have their own political operatives. The in-house government relations people handle these association relationships, sitting on committees and boards, doling out political cash, and in general advancing their employers’ agendas within the trade association. The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) is one such industry group. Few are as dominant in their spheres as is REBNY. The real estate crowd is a driving force behind what’s going on in Albany right now. In the future, we’ll explain more about how it works.

When a particular business has an important interest that falls outside of or is incompatible with the industry’s consensus agenda, it may hire a contract lobbyist. These lobbyists aren’t employees of any one firm, but, as the name implies, are independent contractors. They may specialize in one policy area, or they may work across a broader range of policy networks depending on who their clients are at any given time. Of course not all insiders enjoy equal power or influence. Some have more power than all but the top government decision-makers.

In recent years, the most prominent of these contract lobbyists was former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato, “The Fonz.” During the twelve-year Pataki regime (1995-2007), D’Amato, first, as a three-term senator (1981-1999) and then, following his defeat in the 1998 senatorial election, was perhaps more influential than anyone in the state save for Pataki himself, and many would argue that D’Amato was more powerful. Why did he enjoy such power and how did he exercise it? Tracing the trajectory of his political career in its barest outline is illuminating.²

D’Amato started out as a minor town official in Nassau County, Long Island. The Nassau County Republican machine was a potent force in New York politics. Until civil law suits and federal indictments ended the practice, county employees had to pay one-percent of their salaries to the Nassau Republican party. Nassau’s state legislative delegation was tightly disciplined by the county leader, Joe Margiotta, an assemblyman. D’Amato thrived inside this corrupt system and eventually became a U.S. Senator.³ Margiotta went to jail.

In 1983, during the Reagan presidency, D’Amato advanced Rudy Giuliani’s appointment as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The boyz in Washington were glad to see him go. In any case, the two men became fast political friends. D’Amato had some other friends – the occasional indicted mobster – on whose behalf he would call Giuliani from time to time.

The ties of friendship were frayed when Giuliani went after Michael Milken, the head of Drexel, Burnham, the junk bond empire that fueled the corporate takeover battles of the 1980’s. Milken was an important D’Amato funding source, having become such shortly after D’Amato announced that his senate subcommittee would hold hearings on the junk bond industry. Giuliani indicted a number of other people, including Richard Schermerhorn, a Republican state senator, Jack Libert, D’Amato’s campaign finance committee treasurer and his law partner, and Armand D’Amato, the senator’s brother. There was much evidence that he was trying to flip various defendants in an effort to nail “The Fonz” himself. The friendship was over.

Giuliani left his U.S. Attorney’s job to run for mayor in 1989. D’Amato engineered a Republican primary campaign against him, putting up Ron Lauder, the multimillionaire cosmetic heir as a candidate. A party leader’s threat to throw a primary candidate against a political opponent is always a worrisome thing for an incumbent. Even if the candidate has no chance to win, the incumbent is forced to spend money and defend himself against attacks on his character and record. (Michael Bloomberg slipped into office only because of a bitter Democratic primary battle. It’s what he hopes for today.) Giuliani won the Republican primary but lost to David Dinkins in a close election. Political professionals attributed his loss to the damage that the DAmato-Lauder primary campaign had inflicted.

Four years later, in 1993, Giuliani prepared to run against Dinkins again. He feared another D’Amato-funded primary campaign. But D’Amato was facing a tough re-election campaign himself. Corruption and Mafia-related rumors continued to dog him. D’Amato needed the politician-prosecutor with his image of incorruptibility and Giuliani didn’t want another primary. Polibiz is polibiz, so the break was only temporary. Giuliani The Incorruptible made a deal with the Fonz. He endorsed D’Amato. The threatened Republican primary against him never materialized. When he ran for mayor, he received major financial and political support from D’Amato’s extensive network, including an endorsement from Ed Koch. This time Giuliani narrowly defeated Dinkins.

In that same 1994 election, D’Amato delivered the Republican nomination for governor and large amounts of cash to George Pataki, an obscure state senator. But Giuliani hadn’t been bought; he had only been rented, and with the U.S. senate endorsement, he felt that he had marked his due bill to D’Amato “paid.” He endorsed Mario Cuomo who at the time looked like a winner. With a grateful Cuomo as governor rather than a rival Republican, Giuliani planned to wrest control of the Republican Party from D’Amato’s grip. In announcing his Cuomo endorsement, he said that a Pataki win would usher in a state government “of D’Amato, for D’Amato and by D’Amato.” “If the D’Amato/Pataki crew ever get control ethics will be trashed.”

Giuliani was right about the ethics, but off in his political calculus. Pataki won. He and D’Amato then toppled the Republican senate majority leader, replacing him with Joe Bruno, an upstate senator. Bruno, among the more primitive of the Republican Neanderthals, is under indictment. It appears that his business associates have received millions in state funds. Not part of the indictment but in plain sight, Bruno’s son became a lobbyist on deals that his father could advance or block. Bruno assured the voters that there were no conflicts of interest because his son only talked about such matters with the senator’s aides! Many other close D’Amato political and private associates have gone to jail, but the former senator escaped. Seeing him recently on television standing just behind David Paterson and Karen Gillibrand, on his tip toes, straining his neck to be seen by clients and potential clients speaks volumes about the terminal rot of the state’s political system.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

NOTES
[1]Sometime in the 1980’s, the New York State Legislative Institute, that I ran began publishing the annual “New York State Directory.” The compilation of and contact information for public and private players who constitute each policy network is the Directory’s organizing principle.
[2]The story of the Giuliani-D’Amato off again-on again marriage is well-known in New York political circles, but many of the more salacious items are not. Wayne Barrett, New York’s best investigative reporter, recently wrote a biography, “Rudy!” (Basic Books, 2000) that recounts them in vivid detail. The Pataki-D’Amato marriage has yet to receive full-length treatment.
[3]Kicking in part of your salary to hold onto your government job wasn’t unique to the Nassau County Republicans. Onondaga County (Syracuse) Republican party officials were convicted for forcing county employees to pay a fixed percentage of their annual salaries to the county committees as well. See the fact patterns in U.S. v. Margiotta, 688 F.2d 108 (1982) and Cullen v. Margiotta, 811 F.2d 698. Also see People v. Mulroy, 439 N.Y.S.2d, 108 Misc.2d 907 (1979)