Hard as it is to believe, New York’s public-corruption crisis is getting worse. And simply jailing dirty pols won’t end it.
That was US Attorney Preet Bharara’s depressing, but spot-on, message yesterday as he unveiled a wide-ranging bribery scheme — first reported by The Post — involving state Sen. Malcolm Smith and five others.
This is “more than a prosecutor’s problem,” said Bharara. “Because . . . there continues to be, even after a parade of politicians have been hauled off to prison, a lack of transparency, lack of self-disclosure, a lack of self-policing, a lack of will and a failure of leadership.” Only a total “change in the culture,” he said, can fix things.
Precisely. Fact is, New York’s political system is little more than a breeding ground for corruption, providing endless ways for pols to scam the public. As Queens City Councilman Dan Halloran, who was also arrested, put it in an FBI transcript, “Money is what greases the wheels.” Politics is “all about how much.”
Smith, a Democrat, allegedly conspired to buy himself a spot on the GOP mayoral ballot under the Wilson-Pakula act, which allows non-party members to run if they get the backing of three of a party’s five county chairmen. It’s an open invitation to bribery, turning ballot access into a saleable commodity (especially when the party is little more than a shell, like the city’s GOP).
Two Republican leaders and Halloran allegedly took payoffs in return for helping Smith get a place on the ballot, even as one of them, Queens GOP operative Vincent Tabone, was serving as a top aide to another mayoral hopeful, John Catsimatidis.
Then there’s the city’s public campaign-finance system, which was to have cleaned up politics and which Albany is looking to spread statewide. According to Bharara, the pols — like others before them — used it to take public cash illegally.
Yesterday’s indictments also show the lingering, corrupting effect of legislative pork (i.e., “member items”), despite the boasts of “reform” by pols like Gov. Cuomo and Council Speaker Chris Quinn.
It’s no surprise, of course, that the system invites corruption; the rules are written by those who profit by them. And, as Bharara pointedly asked: “What can we expect when transgressions seem to be tolerated and nothing ever seems to change?”
The answer is more of the same.