Former State Comptroller Alan Hevesi finally paid the piper yesterday, net ting a one-to-four-year sentence for his craven pension-kickback scheme.
Hevesi took a felony plea for steering $250 million in pension investments to a crony businessman who provided him $1 million in gifts, sham contracts and a mountain of campaign contributions.
The sentence was a long time coming.
As chief prosecutor Ellen Biben said yesterday, Hevesi “fostered a culture of corruption that permeated the highest ranks of the comptroller’s office.”
And during his years running the pension fund, Hevesi destroyed its “most valuable asset — its integrity,” Biben added.
As the state’s chief fiscal officer, and a distinguished student of New York politics who spent 35 years in city and state office, he should have known far better.
He should have been far better.
But Hevesi’s resume has been wiped clean, and simply reads today:
* Disgraced recidivist felon, who also defrauded the public by using taxpayer dollars to aid his ailing wife.
* Highest-ranking official to topple in a three-year investigation by the New York attorney general’s office.
State Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus heard pleas for mercy, but rightly gave Hevesi a stiff sentence.
“When a person in that situation violates that trust, the damage . . . is quite profound,” he said.
Hevesi’s lawyer insists his client is in such poor health that a long prison term could be a “death sentence.”
But Hevesi, now 71, is likely to be out of prison on good behavior long before that. And a prison sentence is precisely what he earned.
Hevesi determined his own fate — and yesterday wrote his own political obituary.
“I publicly disgraced myself. I have only myself to blame,” he said in court.
“I will live with this shame for the rest of my life.”
Indeed he will.