Newly elected Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson has hired the former Manhattan prosecutor who paved Thompson’s path to victory by dropping out of the race last summer, The Post has learned.
Abe George, 35, did Thompson a big favor by taking his name out of the field in July — a move that killed front-runner DA Charles “Joe” Hynes’ chances of keeping the job.
George spoke with Thompson before quitting, endorsed his former opponent the same day and went to work on the Thompson campaign.
“The percentage shows that my dropping out put us over the top. I knew we were going to split the vote,” George told The Post after Thompson’s landslide primary victory over Hynes.
Thompson hired George as deputy bureau chief of the DA Major Narcotics Investigations Bureau.
A Thompson strategist in September revealed the conversations between the Thompson and George camps that led to George’s withdrawal.
“We spent a lot of time doing a lot of work to ultimately try and make the case to Mr. George and his supporters that the only place their votes were essentially going was to re-elect Joe Hynes,” Thompson strategist Neal Kwatra said on NY1’s “Road to City Hall.”
Kwatra said his team showed the George camp their research in late July — shortly before George dropped out.
When show moderator Errol Louis said it was “almost unheard of” for Thompson to share research and polls with a competitor, Kwatra answered, “We didn’t share it exactly with him, but with people around him who could understand the importance of a head-to- head race.”
Hynes lost both the Democratic primary and the general election to Thompson in massive landslides.
George, a Brooklyn native, was a Manhattan ADA for eight years working in the homicide and special narcotics bureaus.