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Defense lawyers in a blockbuster campaign-larceny trial didn’t get their hands on star witness Mayor Bloomberg just yet, but they spent a full day beating up on two of his deputy mayors.
In often-contentious exchanges yesterday — at one point during cross-examination, First Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris told defense lawyer Dennis Vacco, “Don’t yell at me” — attorneys tried to portray Bloomberg as the real campaign-cash crook.
Prosecutors are calling Bloomberg the trial’s victim. They’ve charged campaign consultant John Haggerty with tricking Bloomberg into funding a phantom, $1.1 million ballot-security operation during the mayor’s 2009 re-election campaign, then pocketing the bulk of the cash.
But Haggerty’s defense team hopes to turn the trial’s focus back on Bloomberg, who funded the $1.1 million operation through back channels by donating it to the housekeeping account of the state Independence Party, where it would not have to have been reported until after the election.
Vacco, a former state attorney general, suggested in a series of questions to former deputy mayor and Bloomberg LP exec Kevin Sheekey that in 2009 the mayor was still smarting after taking a public-relations hit over ballot security in the 2005 campaign.
Back then, mayoral opponent and former Bronx Borough President Fernando “Freddy” Ferrer accused the mayor of funding a million-dollar ballot-security operation through similar back channels, and implied that for Bloomberg, “security” was interchangeable with “suppression.”
“Freddy often said things that were not true in that campaign,” Sheekey, who was Bloomberg’s 2005 campaign manager, said dismissively.
“It was hogwash,” Sheekey added of Ferrer’s insinuations, calling it a common practice for Democrats to allege “that ballot security is something that it is not.”
Harris and Sheekey both testified that in approving Haggerty’s $1.1 million ballot-security budget, they relied on his submitted budget, and on his word.
Bloomberg may take the stand as soon as Monday, when testimony resumes.