One of Mayor Bloomberg’s most trusted campaign aides was indicted today on grand larceny charges, accused of stealing $1.1 million of the mayor’s money by concocting a sham Election Day poll-watching operation.
Veteran Republican campaign operative John Haggerty’s activities were first exposed in a series of stories published by The Post.
“The defendant’s fraud was an audacious scheme to steal funds in order to buy a house, cynically using our political party process to hide what was common thievery,” declared Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr.
Vance portrayed Bloomberg as a victim and said he is not a target of an ongoing investigation.
But the DA wouldn’t say the same about the state Independence Party, which acted as a pass-through agent for Haggerty’s brazen plot.
The DA said Bloomberg sent $1.2 million to the political party, with the understanding that $1.1 million would go to Haggerty for a massive poll-watching and ballot-security initiative.
But the indictment said Haggerty never spent any of the funds “for any purpose that could even vaguely be attributed to the Election Day operation. Instead, he simply pilfered it.”
In fact, Haggerty didn’t receive the bulk of the money– $750,000 — until Dec. 11, more than a month after the election.
Four days later he used $550,000 to buy his brother’s share of the $1.8 million family home in Forest Hills, Queens, left to them both in their father’s estate.
Vance said that after The Post began asking questions about whether there ever was a poll-watching operation, Haggerty forged three checks supposedly paid to poll workers and provided them to the Bloomberg campaign, which forwarded them to The Post..
“There are no markings or endorsements on the checks to indicate they were negotiated in any way,” the indictment said.
Haggerty faces charges of grand larceny, money laundering and falsifying business records, all felonies punishable by by to 44 years in prison.
Bloomberg grew testy when asked about indictment and about his contributions to the Independence Party.
“I have a right to make donations to support people in the parties that I think will help this city and this country and this state and I’ll continue to do it and you have exactly the same opportunity to do it and I can only tell you I will never criticize you for doing whatever you think is good and I hope that you do, all kidding aside, spend a decent percentage of your monies on helping others, whether it’s making better government or helping the poor,” he said.