In the end, all Carl Kruger’s tears bought him was a seven-year stretch in federal lockup.
The disgraced 63-year-old former Brooklyn state senator may actually serve less time than that, of course.
It’s also a bit less than the 9- to 11-year term that federal prosecutors sought after his guilty plea on corruption charges. (He actually could have faced up to 50 years.)
But it’s more than Kruger had hoped Manhattan federal court Judge Jed Rakoff would impose, following his tearful plea for mercy — not to mention his lawyer’s bizarre insistence that Kruger wasn’t your average brand of corrupt Albany lawmaker.
(We wonder: Just how many types are there? And which is the “good” kind?)
But Kruger certainly deserves every single day of prison time he’ll get.
Surely there must be some kind of penalty severe enough to rein in the spate of political corruption that seems to have only mushroomed over the past decade or so.
Kruger sold his not-inconsiderable political influence for $500,000 in payoffs, intervening on behalf of a high-profile lobbyist’s clients and several health-care execs.
He used the money to buy a Bentley and a garish $1.8 million Mill Basin mansion for his housemate and “intimate companion,” gynecologist Michael Turano.
Not that the cash spigot will be closed while Kruger is doing time: Having resigned from the Senate, he’ll soon be cashing checks from his $60,000-a-year legislative pension.
(This time, for a change, it’ll be legal.)
Kruger’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, was not entirely wrong in citing Albany’s longstanding culture of corruption while pleading for mercy for his client.
But the fact that others may have taken more money to betray their constituents’ interests is hardly an argument for mercy.
And Rakoff, to his credit, didn’t buy it.
Yes, the judge noted Kruger’s good works and the fact that he agreed to plead guilty.
But that, he said, had to be balanced against the harm he’d done as Albany’s latest poster boy for political corruption.
In the end, the truest words were spoken by Kruger himself.
“I’m broken, destroyed and disgraced,” he told the judge. “I have no one else to blame. This will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
As well it should.