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 today beating up on two of his deputy mayors.
In often contentious exchanges — 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 his 2009 reelection 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 wouldn’t have to be reported until after the election.
Vacco, the former state attorney general, suggested in a series of questions to former deputy mayor and Bloomberg LP exec Kevin Sheekey today that in 2009, the mayor was still smarting after taking a public relations hit over ballot security in the 2005 campaign.
Back then, opponent and former Bronx Borough President Fernando 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 said 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 on direct examination that in approving Haggerty’s $1.1 million ballot security budget, they relied on his submitted budget, and on his word.
“Mr. Haggerty came in and told us we’re going to pretty much do the same thing we did in 2005,” when the mayor paid for a $1 million ballot security operation via a donation to the Republican Party’s housekeeping account, Harris said.
“It will cost about the same,” Harris said Haggerty told her. “Maybe a little more…Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered.”
Bloomberg may take the stand as soon as Monday, when testimony resumes. But lead prosecutor Eric Seidel has told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel that he will first call to the stand campaign aide Allison Jaffin, accountant Diane Rizzo and Jaffin’s former assistant, Fiona Reid.
Reid has testified to grand jurors that she started an affair with Haggerty just two months before she gave her preliminary approval of Haggerty’s bogus budget and passed it along to her boss, Jaffin, according to pre-trial arguments.
Seidel has said he wants to grill Reid on the affair, in hopes of showing jurors how “manipulative” Haggerty became in his larcenous efforts. Zweibel has said he will likely bar such testimony. Haggerty faces up to 25 years prison if convicted of the top grand larceny charge.