This Corruption Trial in NYS is Making Me Sick

Alas: the devil is in the details. You have to really sink your teeth in to appreciate the seemingly mundane yet horrifying details.

The bottom line for this particular trial for me is that not only in the NYS political system hopelessly corrupt, but it essentially is a one party state. Or as Gore Vidal used to say of the national parties: "We have one party, The Money Party; with two right wings."

And Cuomo has the fucking GALL to disband the Moreland ( corruption) Commission!

From yesterday's NYT:

>>>WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — State Senator Malcolm A. Smith had a Plan A and a Plan B.

He told two men who were working surreptitiously for federal authorities that he wanted to run for mayor of New York on the Republican line, even though he was a Democrat. Short of that goal, he wanted to be restored as the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, a position he had lost a few years before.

To pave the way for Plan A, testimony in his trial for bribery and wire fraud charges revealed, he wanted to try to cement Plan B to burnish his credentials. And so on Nov. 16, 2012, he met at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here with the two government informers. One was posing as a businessman who called himself Raj but was really an F.B.I. agent who used the name Anil Modi. The other was Moses Stern, a Rockland County developer who, facing the threat of a prison sentence, had agreed to serve as a government lure and informer.

The three men talked about which state senators might need some incentives to support Mr. Smith. According to Mr. Modi, who testified Monday for a third day at United States District Court here, Mr. Smith pointed out that campaign donations might not be enough to sway some senators. Some, Mr. Smith elaborated, might want paid consultancies.


“Sometimes it takes cash, sometimes it takes checks, sometimes it takes a job,” Mr. Modi said in a recorded conversation.

“Right, right, right,” Mr. Smith replied.

Gerald L. Shargel, Mr. Smith’s lawyer, said after the day in court that the judge had alerted the jury that “Senator Smith is not charged with any conduct relating to senatorial elections.”

Nevertheless, the conversation was important not just for what it revealed about New York State politics, but because it was part of the “American Hustle”-style seduction by government informers to see how far Mr. Smith would go to secure the mayoral nomination.

On Monday, the jury heard Mr. Smith in a secretly recorded conversation talk to Mr. Stern abou
the rest ( if you can stand it) at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/nyregion/New-York-jurors-hear-tapes-in-Malcolm-Smith-trial.html