Here’s the good news: US Attorney Preet Bharara is trying to prevent New York state lawmakers who’ve been convicted of corruption from drawing a public pension.
Here’s the bad news: Because New York is incapable of policing its own system, the US attorney has to do the job for us.
According to testimony Bharara gave before the Moreland Commission this week, his office is now going after the retirement funds of state Sen. Malcolm Smith, Assemblyman Eric Stevenson and City Councilman Dan Halloran. Smith is accused of trying to bribe his way onto the Republican ticket for mayor with Halloran’s help. Stevenson is accused of accepting bribes from local businesses.
As Bharara testified, as bad as political corruption is, what “sticks in the craw of every thinking New Yorker is the almost inviolable right of even the most corrupt elected official — even after being convicted by a jury and jailed by a judge — to draw a publicly funded pension until his dying day.”
He went on, rightly, to attribute the problem to an “error of state law” that grandfathers older pols and seems to protect the pensions of those convicted of corruption in federal court.
So what we have is this: Convicted felons such as former state Comptroller Alan Hevesi gets $166,000 a year even after spending 19 months in the slammer. Or former state Sen. Carl Kruger, who gets more than $70,000 annually after his own stint behind bars.
So while it’s good news that the feds are moving against this injustice, the reluctance to fix its own problem remains yet another sign of Albany’s unseriousness.