Brian Benjamin just the latest in a long line of sleazy New York polsBy Dr. Joel Zinberg
April 13, 2022
New York is not the most corrupt state in the country — and won’t be as long as Illinois and Louisiana remain in the union — but it’s close. The latest in the rogues’ gallery of political figures to fall is Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin, who Tuesday resigned and surrendered to authorities to face federal bribery and campaign-finance fraud-related charges.
Benjamin was appointed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who promised to end an era of impropriety in Albany when she took office after Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned under a cloud. Era of impropriety is an understatement. The list of ethically-challenged New York politicians is long and undistinguished.
Cuomo resigned last year after multiple women accused him of harassment; he was also accused of falsifying nursing-home death data. His former top adviser and confidant Joseph Percoco went to prison in 2018 for soliciting and accepting more than $300,000 in bribes. (Percoco was also close to Gov. Mario Cuomo, with Andrew describing him as “my father’s third son, who I sometimes think he loved the most.”) Around the same time, another former state official and friend of the governor, Alain Kaloyeros, was convicted of federal wire-fraud and conspiracy charges involving bid-rigging of state-funded high-tech construction projects in Buffalo and Syracuse and sent to prison.
Cuomo had been the last of the so-called “three men in a room” who ran state government. He was preceded out the door by the other two power brokers: Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who recently died in prison after conviction on corruption charges, and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, who resigned in 2015 following his arrest (he was later convicted) on federal corruption charges.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/04/13/brian-benjamin-just-the-latest-in-a-long-line-of-sleazy-ny-pols/
