Andrew Cuomo’s history of corruption is not what New York City needs right now

Over a decade ago, my work as special counsel to the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption unwittingly set me on a collision course with then Governor Andrew Cuomo. In the aftermath of the Commission's disbanding, I became a whistleblower against Cuomo’s corrupt meddling into our investigations. Now, as he plots his comeback by running for mayor of New York City, it’s worth retelling the story of how Cuomo abuses power and why he is the wrong person to lead the city through this challenging time.

In the spring of 2013, Albany was embarrassed by scandals, prompting Cuomo and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to use the century-old “Moreland Act” to convene a “Commission to Investigate Public Corruption,” which was meant to pursue both illegal corrupt activity and ‘legal corruption’ - behavior that was technically legal but gave the appearance of impropriety. (Like using campaign funds on your swimming pool, which was then legal.)

New Yorkers with impressive legal backgrounds were named to the Commission, including bipartisan co-chairs. Young, idealistic lawyers were hired to staff it. My recent work on the New York City public finance system, inspired by my disgust for the recent Citizens United Supreme Court decision, caught the attention of Danya Perry, the renowned prosecutor who had just been named to head investigations for the Commission. Perhaps naively, I thought the Moreland Commission could do a lot to shed light on Albany’s corrupt practices and make recommendations for ethics and campaign finance reform, and I enthusiastically joined the team.

The job was tense from the start. It was obvious that while Governor Cuomo declared publicly that we’d be “pursuing corruption anywhere we found it,” he was specifically interested in using the Moreland Commission to investigate his opponents in the legislature and not his allies, and especially not his own administration.

One of my investigations focused on sketchy “housekeeping accounts,” where people and corporations could give unlimited money (sometimes as much as a $1 million) to campaign accounts, as long as that money wasn’t explicitly used for electioneering. Every political outfit from the Working Families Party to the Conservative Party used these accounts, and the money flowed generously from the telecoms, big pharma, hospitals, Michael Bloomberg, casinos, etc., to whoever had power - Assembly Democrats, Senate Republicans, etc. Naturally a major recipient of such cash was Cuomo’s Democratic State Committee, which used the money to produce glowing, quasi-campaign TV ads about how great a job he was doing. This was a classic example of something for us to investigate, because it seemed like an end run around campaign finance laws. Danya and I agreed it was only fair to subpoena all housekeeping accounts, because excluding any could be seen as political favoritism.

As reported by the New York Times, when we issued those subpoenas in the fall of 2013, they never made it to their destinations; Cuomo had ordered the process servers back to the office and berated Moreland Commission leadership for allowing the investigation. Eventually, thanks to news coverage of this fiasco, the subpoenas were eventually sent, but the tone had been set. Investigations into entities connected to Cuomo, like the sketchy big money behind the “Committee to Save New York,” would be met with fierce pushback, creating an exhausting standard - ‘do we really want to fight the 2nd floor (Governor Cuomo’s office) on this one?’

Over the next few months we grinded through investigations and reports with constant undermining from Cuomo and his cronies, several of whom had prominent roles inside the Commission. Our statutorily mandated public hearings were scheduled with as little notice as possible, in small rooms or remote locations so few members of the public would attend. When we issued our preliminary report, the co-chairs of the Commission had to watch a Cuomo appointee over his shoulder as he pressed “publish” out of concerns that he would edit the report to Cuomo’s liking at the last minute. Meanwhile, Cuomo bragged about our “total independence” to the press, in an infuriating case of gaslighting. The Attorney General’s office, once actively involved in the investigations, slunk back after Cuomo threatened to take all of the money it’d won from the banks after the financial crisis to help homeowners. When reporters started to pressure him about his interference, Cuomo exclaimed that it’s “my commission”, sounding like Donald Trump, Eric Adams, and Louis XIV.

I learned of the Commission's shutdown via Twitter, where Cuomo dealt it away as part of the budget negotiations in the spring of 2014, with a few feeble campaign finance reforms thrown in. By then the Commission was a shell of itself anyway, with important senior staff such as Perry having been pushed out. If there was any doubt how Team Cuomo felt about the Commission, they took down the link to our work soon after disbanding us. I spoke to reporters off the record about what had happened, which incurred Cuomo’s wrath and contributed to the longest period of unemployment in my life.

The Commission was over, but the corruption was just getting started. Companies connected to big Cuomo donors won lucrative state grants. Top aide Larry Schwartz, Cuomo’s main hatchet man in the Moreland interferences, was investigated by US Attorney Preet Bharara. Another top aide, Joe Percoco, who Cuomo called his second brother, was sent to federal prison on corruption charges in 2018.

In the years ahead, his vindictiveness would be on full display, from unproductive fights with Mayor Bill de Blasio, to disempowering Senate Democrats through the creation of the IDC, to the dismissiveness with which he treated the women who came forward with harassment allegations during COVID. Under the guise of being a strong leader, Cuomo pushed the boundaries of acceptable conduct, usually careful enough to steer clear of the weak campaign finance and ethics laws he refused to fix. As we noted in our 2013 Moreland Commission report, "The real scandal is what remains legal."

Some might wonder why we should care about this scandal from more than a decade ago. I’m a big believer in redemption, but there’s no evidence that this man has changed. The way Cuomo lied his way through the nursing home death scandal during COVID and the way he continues to bully the women who accused him of sexual assault tell me that his behavior has not evolved. He presents his machismo as an effective foil to President Trump, but the more likely outcome is that a personal feud with the president will only hurt New Yorkers caught in the crossfire. Cuomo has long seen the presidency as his destiny, now with a chaotic pitstop as Mayor a necessary speed bump on that path. We can do better.

We have many good candidates to choose from in this mayor’s race. Almost a decade into the Trump era, and after four years of Mayor Eric Adams, do we really need to elevate another leader who thinks he is above the law? Eleven years ago, I wrote this before another Democratic primary election:

Sometimes it seems like the entire political class lives in perpetual fear of an Andrew Cuomo reprisal…Governor Cuomo's general approach to governance is that fundraising nearly exclusively from mega donors, strong-arming independent entities, and bullying Democrats to get in line with his moderate-conservatism is a necessary part of “politics as usual,” and his strongest defense is that the other power brokers of Albany feel the same way. Weak-kneed politicians can perhaps live under this system, but primary voters ought to reject it.

This June, let’s reject it, and invest in a more hopeful and optimistic future for our city.