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From the
Daily News:
Sen. Malcolm Smith, Sen. John Sampson and now former Assemblyman Eric Stevenson have more in common than just high-profile corruption arrests last year.
Arrests be damned, the three shameless pols kept putting in for travel expenses to Albany — known as per diems — paid out by the state, records provided by the state controller’s office show.
Smith, a Queens Democrat who once was in charge of the Senate, actually led the chamber last year with $21,372 in per-diem reimbursements despite the fact he was hit by the feds in April 2013 with charges of trying to buy Republican support in the Bronx and Queens to get him on the city mayoral ballot.
Sampson (D-Brooklyn) was fifth in the Senate in per-diem reimbursements, with $15,449. Sampson, who once led the chamber, regularly attends the legislative session, but is often seen on the phone outside the chamber when lawmakers are inside debating bills. He was arrested in May on federal embezzlement charges.
He also charged another $9,068 last year for travel expenses related to gas, mileage and tolls, records show.
On the Assembly side, Eric Stevenson, a Bronx Democrat who was charged in April 2013 with accepting $20,000 in cash bribes, received $19,271 in per-diems — the fourth-highest amount in the chamber last year. He also claimed another $5,952 in other travel expenses.
All three had something else in common. They each put in for per-diem reimbursements throughout the year, not just during the legislative session that ended in June.
From
The Politicker:
Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson has been convicted on federal corruption charges, a spokesperson for U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara confirmed this evening.
Mr. Stevenson was convicted on four counts stemming from charges that he drafted legislation and performed official government services in exchange for more than $20,000 in cash bribes–the latest in a long string of corruption arrests hitting the state’s lawmakers.
In a statement, Mr. Bharara vowed to keep investigating pols “until government in New York is cleaned up.”
“As a unanimous jury swiftly found, Assemblyman Stevenson brazenly betrayed the public that elected him,” he said. “Graft and greed are intolerable in Albany, and we will go to trial as often as we have to until government in New York is cleaned up.”
From the
Daily News:
New York’s latest corruption eruption has rattled the mayoral race.
The Bronx assemblyman busted Thursday in a bribery scandal was a former staffer for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the leading Democratic candidate for mayor.
Eric Stevenson worked for the City Council from March 2007 to December 2010, officials confirmed. He was a clerk, earning $57,000 in his final year.
Quinn’s office was quick to distance itself from the disgraced legislator.
At the time of his arrest, Stevenson’s online Assembly biography indicated he still worked for the Council; that line was then edited at the request of Quinn’s office.
From the
NY Times:
Two days after a political corruption scandal rocked Albany, a new, unrelated bribery scheme emerged on Thursday, adorned with a can-you-top-this quality: For more than a year, a sitting state legislator wore a wire intended to entrap at least one of his colleagues.
The secret recordings helped lead to the arrest of Eric A. Stevenson, a Democratic state assemblyman representing parts of the South Bronx, who was charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan with accepting more than $22,000 in bribes to help developers open adult day care centers in his district. Mr. Stevenson was also accused of introducing legislation to block competing developers from building new centers for three years.
He seemed keenly aware of the risk of getting caught, as so many of his colleagues in Albany had been before, according to a criminal complaint released on Thursday.
“Be careful of those things man, the recorders and all those things,” he was recorded saying. “A lot of guys,” he continued, were “working to put a lot of people away, man, believe that.”
Mr. Stevenson’s wariness was well founded: his conversations were being recorded by two cooperating witnesses, including Assemblyman Nelson L. Castro, who had agreed to work with investigators as part of a deal to avoid prosecution on state perjury charges. Mr. Castro agreed to resign once his cooperation led to an arrest; he announced his departure on Thursday afternoon.
