Favors from Assemblyman Vito Lopez always come with a heavy price — just ask Judge Pamela Fisher.
The Post reported last month that a 14-year-old intern appeared to be one of many victims of Lopez’s sexual harassment. He was seen leering at the girl and instructed a female staffer (an old biddy of 24) to dress just like his “sexy” child intern.
Staffers were spooked. The police were called. As it turns out, the intern was Judge Fisher’s daughter.
Now, it’s not nice to ogle children.
And it would seem worse to stalk the cubs of a lioness with a perch on the bench.
But Mama Judge hasn’t made much of a fuss — and therein lies a tale that could only happen in Vito’s Brooklyn.
Like so many others, Pamela Fisher owes her $147,000-a-year gig in county court to King Gropez — the borough’s Democratic party chairman until he was deposed last year after it was revealed he had harassed several employees.
Fisher got her start working for Vito at his power base, a social-services empire called the Ridgewood-Bushwick Senior Citizens Council. She went to law school but never practiced law — so it was quite a stretch when Lopez arranged to place her on the judicial ballot in 2009. She ran unopposed. She won her election. Now she’s a judge — because that’s what Vito wanted.
The whole thing was messy: Fisher didn’t file campaign-finance reports or appear before a judicial screening committee. She was deemed “not qualified” by the Brooklyn and the city bar associations.
There’s more: Her sister, Christiana Fisher, was Vito’s campaign treasurer and the director of Ridgewood-Bushwick.
At least, she was until The Post reported that Christiana granted herself $782,000 in annual compensation and later falsified paperwork for the feds to cover her tracks.
Christiana was fired by the city and pleaded guilty to contempt of court, but it’s clear that Vito’s still got his tentacles wrapped around the whole family.
He gave Pamela a $147,000 judgeship.
He made it possible for Christiana to get her $782,000 salary as head of his “non-profit” group.
And he shot Pamela’s daughter a stare so creepy the cops were called to investigate.
There’s more than a touch of Greek tragedy at work here — the fallen power, the incestuous ties, the sacrifice of the young.
But that shouldn’t be any surprise to the Fisher family. It’s all fairly simple.
When you’re anointed with the grease of the borough machine, you always get dirty.