It was a mission to kill the incoming governor of New York.
Only days before the 1974 gubernatorial election, Hugh Carey — the then-congressman who would become the Empire State’s 51st governor — was targeted for assassination, according to explosive, never-before-released FBI files obtained by The Post.
On Oct. 30, 1974, a man called the FBI in New York and said he “was involved with three unidentified individuals in a plot to assassinate United States Congressman Hugh Carey on Monday, Nov. 4, 1974,” according to files unsealed in response to a Freedom of Information request.
The would-be assassin said that “he had been paid $5,000 for his involvement in the hit and would receive $20,000 when the job was completed,” an FBI memo explains.
When the FBI learned of the plot, agents quickly put the NYPD and US Secret Service on alert and notified Carey and his top aides in New York and Washington.
In Manhattan, 19th Precinct cops quickly traced the call to a man on the Upper East Side. The suspect was immediately “committed for psychiatric observation.”
The man, who is still alive but whose name was withheld by the FBI, told cops that he had been released just four months earlier from the now-shuttered Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island.
Word of the plot never reached Carey’s family. At the time, he was a recently widowed father of 12.
One of his daughters, Susan Carey Dempsey, told The Post that it was “disconcerting” to learn of the threat on her dad’s life after all these years.
“Thankfully, [he] lived a long and full life,’’ she said of her dad.
“One of my brothers pointed out how difficult it must have been for our recently widowed father to learn of such a threat and shield his 12 children from it.”