A Brief History Of Past Cuomo Scandals And Controversies

Governor Andrew Cuomo is now fighting for his political life, embroiled in two unrelated scandals. One concerns his oversight of nursing homes, and how his administration withheld data on coronavirus deaths there. This is reportedly the subject of a federal investigation.

Soon, Cuomo will face another investigation from a law firm deputized by the State Attorney General, Letitia James, which will probe at least three sexual harassment allegations made against him.

For those uninitiated to New York State government, these scandals may seem like outliers. If the response to them has been unusually charged—wall-to-wall national coverage that has made Cuomo, once more, a household name during the pandemic—their existence is not unique. Throughout Cuomo’s decade in office, there have been several major scandals and controversies that attracted outside condemnation and even federal indictments. Here are just five.

The Moreland Commission

Governors usually arrive in Albany promising to clean up corruption, only to run into a culture of secrecy and pay-to-play that transcends generations. Cuomo’s first winning gubernatorial campaign, in 2010, emphasized good government: as the state’s attorney general, Cuomo vowed to be an independent, transformational force who would change how Albany operates.

In 2013, Cuomo created a special commission of investigators to root out corruption in Albany. Known as the Moreland Commission, it would be, by Cuomo’s vow, “totally independent” and free to pursue wrongdoing anywhere in state government.

“We must root out corruption in politics and government,” Cuomo said when he impaneled the commission. The commission, he promised, would “convene the best minds in law enforcement and public policy from across New York to address weaknesses in the States public corruption, election and campaign finance laws, generate transparency and accountability, and restore the public trust.”

But the reality was quite different: when the Moreland investigators, hunting for violations of campaign finance laws, issued a subpoena to a firm that had placed millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements for the State Democratic Party, a top Cuomo aide, Lawrence Schwartz, called a co-chair of the commission and told him to pull back the investigation. The firm had counted Cuomo as a client when he ran for governor.

Cuomo would dismantle the commission in 2014, less than a year into its existence, after it began investigating possible corruption tied to the executive branch. The decision was abrupt, shocking good government groups and ethics watchdogs.

Cuomo’s decision to close the commission would prompt an investigation from Preet Bharara, the hard-charging U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. In 2016, Bharara released a statement that his office had found “insufficient evidence to prove a federal crime.” The Moreland Commission did bear other fruit: Bharara successfully indicted and secured convictions of the two powerful legislative leaders in Albany, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, on corruption charges.

But Bharara was not done with those closest to Cuomo.

Joe Percoco

Joe Percoco was so close to Andrew Cuomo that he proclaimed, at the funeral of his father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, that Mario viewed Percoco as a “third son.” An aide to both Cuomo governors, Percoco was known as an extension of each man, an enforcer who could wrangle lawmakers, represent the state on critical business, and inspire fear in those who crossed the Cuomo administration. Percoco, on any given day, could handle just about anything for the governor, from setting up events to keeping track of which politicians deserved, in Cuomo’s eyes, retribution.

One state senator, Liz Krueger, revealed recently that Cuomo deputized Percoco to berate so many different officials in state government that he maintained a “do-not-yell-at” list for a select few people. “I responded, ‘You people have such a list?’” Krueger told the New York Times. “He said: ‘It is very small.’”

Bharara never indicted Cuomo, but he was able to reel in Percoco, who served as executive deputy secretary to the Governor. In 2018, Percoco was found guilty of soliciting and accepting more than $300,000 in bribes from executives working for two companies with state business in return for taking actions to benefit the firms. Much of the actual money came from a “low-show” job given to his wife by an energy firm that wanted to build a power plant in the Hudson Valley.

Percoco was sentenced to six years in prison. In a statement at the time, Cuomo said his closest aide was “paying the price for violating the public trust.”

"And it should serve as a warning to anyone who fails to uphold his or her oath as a public servant," Cuomo continued. "On a personal level, the human tragedy for Joe's young children and family is a very sad consequence."

The Buffalo Billion

After losing Western New York in the 2010 general election to a right-wing, incendiary real estate developer named Carl Paladino, Cuomo was eager to win Buffalo in the next election. As part of an effort to revive Western New York and win over voters there, Cuomo vowed to invest state money in the ailing city.

Cuomo announced a $1 billion economic package, known as the Buffalo Billion. The money led to upgrades, like new waterfront parks, modern factories, and medical and technology facilities. The man picked to spearhead it all was named Alain Kaloyeros, who Cuomo once referred to as “New York’s secret weapon.” He oversaw, in particular, the biggest project: a $750 million solar-panel plant.

Kaloyeros, the founder of SUNY Polytechnic Institute, came into the crosshairs of federal prosecutors. He earned an $800,000 state salary, drove a Ferrari with the license plate “Dr. Nano,” and repeatedly boasted about his wealth and political connections on Facebook while posting misogynistic memes. None of this behavior ever drew a public rebuke from Cuomo.

He was later, in 2018, sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison for his role in a bid-rigging scheme that steered more than $850 million in state-funded contracts to Cuomo allies.

A federal jury found Kaloyeros rigged the process to ensure contracts went to politically connected developers LPCiminelli and COR Development. Both were major donors to Cuomo’s campaigns. Cuomo, however, was never charged in the case.

Despite his close relationship with Kaloyeros, Cuomo immediately distanced himself when his ally was convicted. “This was under the State University system. There’s a separate board called the SUNY board. This was a subsidiary of the SUNY board, so SUNY was primarily responsible for supervising those entities,” Cuomo told reporters. “Before you get to me, there’s 57 levels, right?"

The Independent Democratic Conference

In 2011, during Cuomo’s first year in office, four Democrats in the State Senate broke away to form their own third conference called the Independent Democratic Conference. At the time, the lawmakers expressed frustration with the mainstream Democrats, who had been reeling from corruption scandals and chaotic battles over leadership. The four, led by State Senator Jeff Klein, a power broker in the Bronx, were largely less liberal than their colleagues, with closer relationships to the real estate industry and the charter school sector. With Republicans in full control of the upper chamber, their machinations were little more than an Albany curiosity.

That changed in the fall of 2012,when Democrats won enough seats to chase Republicans from power in the State Senate. Most political observers expected Klein and his cohort to rejoin the Democratic conference, or at least form a power-sharing agreement with them, to govern in the majority.

Instead, Cuomo reportedly encouraged Klein behind-the-scenes to form an alliance with the Republicans to keep them in the majority. The result was an unprecedented coalition-government that made both Klein and the Republican leader, Dean Skelos, the majority leaders of the Senate. Cuomo reportedly played a direct role in the IDC-GOP partnership, though he publicly professed neutrality. Cuomo did not attack Klein publicly and didn’t use his enormous campaign war chest to help Democrats when he ran for re-election in 2014.

The IDC wielded great power—by keeping Republicans in charge of the Senate, they guaranteed progressive goals like stronger rent laws, criminal justice reforms, and abortion protections would never become a reality as long as the coalition existed. Tenant advocates were particularly frustrated, trying and failing to save rent-stabilized housing from further deregulation. Klein and Cuomo, who both fundraised aggressively from real estate developers, took no action on tenant protections.

In 2018, progressive primary challengers emerged against the IDC members, who had grown their conference to eight. Six of them were defeated in an anti-Trump backlash and the conference was effectively disbanded. A year later, with Democrats back in power, many of the long-sought progressive goals, particularly on repealing vacancy decontrol, were achieved. Cuomo had far fewer ways to frustrate the Democratic majority.

The MTA

There was no criminality or Republican empowerment here: merely neglect and inefficiency. Though many residents of New York City don’t realize this, the subway system is controlled by the state government, not City Hall. City subways belong to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a statewide authority that also operates the commuter rail lines and buses.

The mayor of New York City, whether it’s Bill de Blasio or anyone else, can appoint members to the MTA board, but has no significant role in the decision-making of the authority. The governor, Cuomo, appoints the MTA’s chair and a plurality of board members. Almost every governor, until Cuomo, treated the MTA and the subway system as their direct responsibility.

That changed in 2017. For years, the subway system had been on the decline, with track signaling technology dating back to the 1930s. The system both lacked funds for serious upgrades and suffered from remarkable inefficiencies that Cuomo, as governor, had done nothing to correct. In New York, the cost of building new subway infrastructure far outstripped what other cities paid around the world, due in part to a lack of competitive bidding on projects. Cuomo never attempted to reform the process.

In the spring and summer of 2017, the subways broke down repeatedly, leading to crowded trains and many delays. Though Cuomo had proudly cut the ribbon on the Second Avenue Subway just months earlier, he proclaimed, against all available evidence, he was not in charge of the subways at all. Somehow, though, he was able to declare a “state of emergency” for the MTA.

Cuomo deputized his MTA chair, Joe Lhota, to make a legal argument that New York City itself was responsible for the subway system, though no available expert agreed with this interpretation. “That’s never been the understanding since the MTA was created,” Richard Ravitch, who is credited with rescuing the MTA from its nadir in the 1980s, told Politico.

Lhota’s tenure as MTA chairman was ethically fraught. While running the MTA, he simultaneously served on the board of the Madison Square Garden Company, which controls Madison Square Garden. The World’s Most Famous Arena sits atop Penn Station and two subway stations, all controlled by the MTA. Lhota was quietly forced to resign.

Cuomo would go on to hire Andy Byford in 2017, a well-regarded British transit expert, to oversee the turnaround of the subways. Cuomo repeatedly overruled and interfered with Byford’s work, finally prompting his resignation in February 2020.

In an interview with CBS New York weeks after his departure, Byford said Cuomo’s undermining had made his job “intolerable” and accused Cuomo of deliberately excluding him from important meetings and decisions, as well as upbraiding his staff.

“It’s the governor’s prerogative to see whomever he wants, I get that, but I just would not accept the fact that my people were being yelled at, they were being given direction and I was deliberately excluded from those meetings,” Byford told reporter Marcia Kramer. “That’s just not right.”