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Claims by Republi can Carl Paladino’s campaign that he commanded 250 men at Fort Bliss, Texas, during six months of active Army service in 1971 are false, The Post has found.
Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael Caputo, admitted the contentions were wrong after The Post obtained military records showing the Buffalo builder was on active duty for only three months, and was at Fort Bliss for training as a newly commissioned officer in the late summer of 1971, while the Vietnam War was raging.
Caputo last month told Dan Collins, editor-at-large of The Huffington Post, that Paladino spent “six months active duty with orders for Vietnam” and was “responsible for training 250 men during that time at Fort Bliss.”
A Sept. 26 profile of Paladino in The New York Times also claimed that at Fort Bliss, Paladino “was soon given command of 200 soldiers training for combat in Vietnam. ”
Official records reveal that Paladino was on active duty only from Aug. 5, 1971, to Nov. 4, 1971, and that he was at the sprawling Texas military base for an “acad,” or, as a military expert told The Post, “academic” program aimed at training new officers. Caputo’s admission came after The Post arranged for a former senior Fort Bliss officer to review Paladino’s military record. He called claims that Paladino commanded anyone at Fort Bliss “a fraud.”
“That was in quotation marks?” Caputo responded when asked about the comments.
“Well, all right, then I misspoke. When Carl was in active duty, he was commander in his class. That made him a first lieutenant in a class of all butter bars — which means a second lieutenant, a lower rank,” said Caputo.
“During the time he was in active duty, he did not train anyone,” Caputo conceded, although he insisted Paladino did eventually train troops during the years he served in the Army Reserve, where duty is usually one weekend a month and two weeks over the summer.
After leaving active duty, Paladino stayed in the Reserve until March 1979, serving mainly in Buffalo, but also doing assignments at Fort Drum, near upstate Watertown, and at Fort Dix in New Jersey.
Military records show that he rose to the rank of captain and was a company commander for a Buffalo reserve unit.
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Some powerful state Democrats are ecstatic over nutty Rent Is Too Damn High Party standard-bearer Jimmy McMillan’s show-stealing performance at last week’s gubernatorial “debate,” but not for the reasons many may think.
They’re happy that McMillan’s act overshadowed the racially charged rhetoric of the other African-American minor-party candidate, Brooklyn Councilman Charles Barron, thereby undercutting Barron’s chances of getting 50,000 votes on Nov. 2, the tally needed to give his “Freedom Party” official legal status.
With additional reporting by Brendan Scott