The well-heeled husband of a former soft-porn movie star played a key role in the campaign-finance scandal engulfing embattled city Comptroller John Liu, a defense lawyer told jurors yesterday.
Supermarket magnate Jeffrey Wu — whose sultry wife, Veronica Yip, appeared in Asian skin flicks before retiring to raise a family — arranged a May 2011 fund-raiser for Liu after the Democratic mayoral hopeful approached him at a Queens restaurant, lawyer Gerald Lefcourt said.
Wu, who’s also a major real-estate investor and bank director, invited several businessmen who promised to round up donors to contribute $800 each to Liu’s political war chest, Lefcourt said.
But when the unidentified businessmen couldn’t find any donors, they secretly provided the cash “on their own, to impress Jeffrey Wu,” the lawyer said
The shady scheme paid off in spades for at least one businessman, who landed a $4.5 million contract from Wu, Lefcourt noted.
But Lefcourt insisted that his client — former Liu campaign treasurer Jia “Jenny” Hou — had no idea what was going on.
During opening statements at the trial of Hou and former Liu fund-raiser Xing Wu “Oliver” Pan, Lefcourt also said that an undercover FBI agent used Pan to arrange a private meeting with Liu “to see if there was any wrongdoing” in which Liu was involved.
“They thought, through Oliver Pan, they could get to John Liu,” Lefcourt said of the feds.
Prosecutor Brian Jacobs told the Manhattan federal jury that Pan arranged to introduce Liu to the undercover agent, who claimed he wanted help cutting through bureaucratic red tape so he could open a chain of restaurants.
Jacobs said Pan and Hou conspired to “corrupt an election” by funneling illegal donations into Liu’s campaign.