NY TImes: Bruno, Former State Leader, Guilty of Corruption

December 8, 2009
Bruno, Former State Leader, Guilty of Corruption
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY — Joseph L. Bruno, the former Senate majority leader who, until his retirement last year, was one of the most powerful figures in New York politics, was found guilty on Monday of concealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from a businessman who sought help from the Legislature.

The conviction marked a humiliating fall for Mr. Bruno, a Korean War veteran and a former boxer, whose jovial manner masked the iron hand he used to rule the Senate with almost untrammeled authority for nearly 14 years. He retired amid a federal corruption investigation.

The verdict also blackened the already tarnished reputation of Albany’s political establishment, casting a harsh light on the ways lawmakers blend official and personal business and raising questions about why it took a federal prosecution to uncover Mr. Bruno’s conduct.

After deliberating for nearly seven days, the jury of seven women and five men in Mr. Bruno’s trial found him guilty of two felony counts of mail fraud. The jury found Mr. Bruno not guilty on five counts of mail or wire fraud and could not reach a verdict on another count.

Mr. Bruno, 80, is scheduled to be sentenced on March 31 and faces up to 20 years and a $250,000 fine on each felony count. But Judge Gary L. Sharpe has broad discretion in sentencing, and Mr. Bruno’s defense was expected to appeal.

“I am very, very disappointed in the verdict,” Mr. Bruno told reporters on the steps of the federal courthouse here. “The legal process is going to continue. In my mind and in my heart, it is not over until it’s over. And I think it’s far from over. Thank you all, have a good night and merry Christmas.”

The jury entered the courtroom at 4:16 p.m. and as the verdict on first counts were revealed — not guilty on the first and second, no verdict reached on the third — the mood among Bruno supporters in the courtroom grew almost euphoric.

But as Judge Sharpe read out a guilty verdict on the fourth count, the mood turned. Mr. Bruno’s normally upright frame sagged. “We established at this trial that Bruno exploited his office by concealing the nature and source of substantial payments that he received from parties that benefited from his official actions,” Andrew T. Baxter, the acting United States attorney for the Northern District of New York, said in a statement.

The federal statute under which Mr. Bruno was charged, which makes it a crime for officials to use wires or the mail to deprive constituents of their “honest services” by concealing conflicts of interest, are set to be reviewed by the Supreme Court and could be struck down in whole or in part during the coming months, potentially aiding any appeal.

“We await Round 2,” said Kris Thompson, a Bruno aide.

Jurors acquitted Mr. Bruno on all the counts concerning his work for Wright Investors’ Service, a Connecticut-based investment company that paid Mr. Bruno $1.3 million dollars to solicit pension fund investments from labor unions that had interests before the Senate. They also acquitted him of an array of charges involving other companies that paid Mr. Bruno consulting fees while seeking grants, contracts, or legislative action from state officials.

But they appeared to be more troubled by evidence concerning Mr. Bruno’s relationship with Jared E. Abbruzzese, an Albany-area entrepreneur who sought the Senate leader’s help for an array of ventures, from a nanotechnology company seeking state money to telecommunications firms seeking investment capital.

Jurors convicted Mr. Bruno on one count involving $200,000 that consulting firms run by Mr. Abbruzzese paid Mr. Bruno in 2004. They also convicted him on one count involving a horse-breeding partnership that Mr. Bruno and Mr. Abbruzzese dissolved in 2005, with Mr. Abbruzzese forgiving Mr. Bruno $40,000 in debt and paying him $40,000 for a horse that prosecutors said was virtually worthless.

Those payments, jurors found, were little more than gifts that Mr. Abbruzzese awarded to Mr. Bruno in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grants that Mr. Bruno had previously obtained for one of Mr. Abbruzzese’s companies, Evident Technologies.

Prosecutors also suggested at the trial that the payments to Mr. Bruno were intended to help Mr. Abbruzzese and a group of business partners win rights to the state horseracing franchise, a decision over which Mr. Bruno had significant sway. (The franchise went elsewhere.)

The verdict capped a month-long trial that captivated the state political establishment and laid bare the unseemly side of New York’s Legislature, where most lawmakers have second jobs in the private sector but are required to disclose very little about what they are paid to do.

“The prosecutors and agents involved in this case take no pleasure from what the trial revealed about the culture of the New York State Senate,” Mr. Baxter said in his statement.

It is not known exactly how much Mr. Bruno has spent on legal bills, but it is believed to be well into seven figures. His legal team included Abbe D. Lowell, a prominent Washington lawyer who defended the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and William J. Dreyer, a highly regarded Albany defense lawyer.

Prosecutors called more than 70 witnesses and presented a trove of more than 200 e-mail messages, as well as handwritten notes, calendar entries and memoranda, many culled from the historically secretive Senate.

The trial also delved into Mr. Bruno’s private business, which spanned work for more than a dozen companies during more than a decade and a half, earning Mr. Bruno roughly $3.2 million in fees.

He earned the bulk of that money from Wright, while failing, prosecutors said, to fully disclose his ties to the firm. Mr. Bruno resigned from Wright in December 2007, shortly after The New York Times disclosed Wright’s ties to a host of Albany-area labor unions.

Mr. Bruno did not take the stand in his own defense, and his lawyers instead presented only seven witnesses, including friends and former business associates, to bolster his case. Characterizing Mr. Bruno as a victim of overzealous prosecutors, his lawyers portrayed him as a devoted public servant who tried to faithfully adhere to the law, routinely seeking the advice of Senate ethics lawyers.

His lawyers relied chiefly on cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses, seeking to unravel the links prosecutors drew between Mr. Bruno’s official acts and the business he brought in for his clients.

The official benefits Mr. Bruno delivered for those who did business with his clients, his lawyers argued, were indistinguishable from the legislative action and earmarks he sought for all his constituents, and were driven by a sincere desire to create jobs and help working people.

Jurors refused to answer questions as they left the courthouse flanked by federal marshals.

Mr. Bruno’s own remarks to reporters were uncharacteristically short. Clearly dejected, Mr. Bruno stood in the cold showing little of his trademark brio until a young woman yelled out “I love you, Joe!” as he walked toward a waiting Mercedes-Benz sedan.

“Thank you very much,” he replie