OMG, Anthony Weiner is now the NYC mayoral front runner!

Oh no, he's back! (Sorry, no penis pictures available.)

by Ken

Howie will have quite a lot to say about the Supreme Court ruling in the morning, and I'm happy to give the subject a pass. I'd probably just fulminate, and probably calumniate -- the Five Supreme Lunks, that is. (Howie's going to have some point-by-point on them too.)

Instead I thought I'd retreat into the political weirdosphere. From our local online news emporium DNAinfo.com this evening:

Latest Poll Shows Weiner Leading Democratic Mayoral Pack

By Jeanmarie Evelly on June 25, 2013 7:01pm

NEW YORK CITY -- A new poll shows Anthony Weiner leading the race for New York City's Democratic mayoral nominee, according to reports published Tuesday.

A Wall Street Journal-NBC New York-Marist survey of registered Democrats showed the ex-Congressman capturing 25 percent of votes, the Wall Street Journal reported -- edging out longtime frontrunner Christine Quinn, who scored 20 percent of votes.

The results show Weiner has surged in popularity since the last Marist poll in May, when he scored 19 percent of Democratic votes compared to Quinn's 24 percent.

Both Weiner and City Council Speaker Quinn remained largely ahead of their other Democratic rivals, according to the poll, which put former Comptroller Bill Thompson in third with 13 percent of votes, followed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio at 10 percent and city Comptroller John Liu at eight percent.

According to NBC New York, Weiner also polled slightly better among women: 22 percent of Democrats surveyed said they would vote for him compared to 21 percent who opted for Quinn.

Among registered Republicans, the new poll found former MTA chair Joe Lhota leading the race with 28 percent of votes, compared to rivals John Catsimatidis at 21 percent and George McDonald who scored 10 percent.

Just a couple of weeks ago, from the opposite coast Howie was asking me about the mayoral situation, and in particular whether Anthony Weiner really had a chance. AW had only had to enter the Democratic mayoral field to soar to second place behind the front runner, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. I said I thought he might if Quinn's support faded, and Howie seemed surprised to hear that I thought that possible. I tried to explain that I didn't see any of the candidates having especially solid support, and that no, I didn't imagine much of anybody voting for Quinn because she's a lesbian. A lot of us would be fine with that but don't see it as any reason to support her.

Or much of anyone else, either. It's not that the candidates are necessarily bad people -- though again, I was surprised to learn from Howie that Public Advocaate Bill De Blasio is supposed to be the "progressive" candidate. I suppose it's possible and I just didn't know it. After all, no one knows anything about the public advocate, least of all what he does. I suspect that the public advocate himself doesn't have much idea.

(You say who or what TF is the public advocate? This is actually an interesting question. Okay, maybe not an interesting question, but a question anyways. If you really want to know, I'd be happy to walk you through it, but let me warn you that you're going to have wrap your head around the death of the Board of Estimate, meaning that you'll have to find out what the hell the immensely powerful Board of Estimate was. You still want to know?)

So why not Weiner? At least people know who he is. You might think that that would work against him, but in a field where people don't have strong impressions of most of the candidates, maybe just being known gives you some stature.

The problem Christine Quinn has is that when your support isn't deep to begin with, and your the front runner mostly because people are used to seeing you near the mayor all the time, and kind of assume you're next, it's not easy to withstand having all the other candidates hacking away at you all the time -- the one issue all the other candidates can agree on.

I tried to explain to Howie that all the candidates are searching for an issue that will, well, make people care who they are. You might think, for example, that former City Comptroller Bill Thompson might have some cred considering how close he came to upsetting Mayor Mike in the last election. In all likelihood the only thing that stood between him and victory was the universal assumption that he didn't have a prayer. That turns out to have been Mayor Mike's baseline strategy: spend so much money that everyone would assume that nobody who ran against him had a prayer. Unfortunately for Bill T, that all seems like it happened in another lifetime. Now it's pretty much Bill Who?

One thing it didn't occur to me to say to Howie is that Mayor Mike seems to have kind of sucked the oxygen out of New York City's political life. Which is strange for a city that once had a candidate for one office or another on every street corner, all getting attention of some sort. It's going to be a strange readjustment when we don't have Mayor Mike to tell us what we think anymore.

Bear in mind that if no candidate gets 40 percent of the vote, there has to be a runoff. (This all goes back to 1969 and the primary victory of a not very funny clown of a man named Mario Procaccino with 32.8 percent of the vote. We can go into that too if you like, but trust me, you'd probably rather hear about the Board of Estimate.) The big news is that it looks like we're going to have our old manual-lever voting machines back for the primary and the runoff. Exciting!

The way I crunch the numbers, by the time we get to a runoff (which will be either September 24 or October 1, depending on whether the state legislature ever got around to pushing the date back -- apparently I wasn't paying close attention), the likely turnout should be in the hundreds. If Weiner can't cash in his celebrity at voting levels like that, well, then . . . um, I guess he won't win.

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Is he a hero or not a hero? No, not the NSA guy! I mean the Tiffany's bandit, of course!

The flagship Tiffany & Co. store on Fifth Avenue

by Ken

There's something about this heist story which has the odd effect of making a person smile. Of course it has entirely to do with the identity of the victim: Tiffany & Co. But that doesn't entirely explain the smile-producing effect. Sure, there may be no business in the country which serves as a more perfect emblem of upper-class privilege and excess, and you know its insurance will cover the loss, but that doesn't by itself make the story amusing, or at any rate titillating, does it?

The event actually took place at Tiffany's flagship Fifth Avenue New York store around 3pm Friday, but seems only lately to have picked up steam. Here's the New York Observer's bemused take, presumably from Saturday:

FEED HIM TO THE YAKS

He’s Crazy About Tiffany’s! Thief Steals $100,000 in Necklaces From Jewelry Icon

By Elaina Plott

It should have taken him at least four seconds to walk from the counter to the door, but this bandit did it in two.

One dark, handsome, rich-looking man with passionate natures and too many teeth is wanted for pocketing $100,000 worth of necklaces from Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue store.

The thief, wearing a dark-colored suit and tie, swiped the duds around 3 p.m. yesterday, police said. Surveillance video shows him chatting up the salesclerk, asking to see two pricey chains from a display. The clerk placed them on the counter and soon turned around, leaving the bandit ample opportunity to scoop up the necklaces and walk swiftly out the door.

The footage also shows a security guard patrolling the door the suspect strolled through, but he doesn’t seem too concerned. The incident prompts questions on the state of Tiffany’s security force, but reps for the jewelry maven declined to comment.

NYPD has yet to make an arrest.

When the story was reported on the radio this morning, on my current news-radio station (well, at night they carry Yankees games), it occasioned banter from the on-air people, to the effect of: How in tarnation does a guy march out of Tiffany's with a fistful of necklaces? Must be an inside job!

How often do you hear that kind of personal involvement in a breaking news story? Okay, too often. What I mean is, here they are, just making up stuff about the story -- and it's sort of what you're thinking anyway.

I suppose that in addition to the unexpectedness of a Tiffany's snatch-and-vamoose story, there's something amusing in the "comeuppance" aspect -- serves 'em right, the polo-playing bastards!

Here's some of the report posted near midnight last night on the CBS 2 New York website:

People catching a glimpse of the world famous store Tuesday night were stunned.

"He's got some guts," said Lizzy Barter of Chelsea, "because I'm pretty sure they have him on many cameras."

"Wow … $100,000?" added Banal Naeem of the Upper West Side. "If I'm not going to be blown away by that, what else am I going to be blown away by?"

CBS 2 showed security expert Ralph Martell the video. He said the theft occurred quickly and easily because of the high-end jewelry store's elegant style.

"Unfortunately, these are crimes of opportunity," said Martell, of Cambridge Security, "especially in an environment like that where you're expected to walk into a wonderful shopping experience. How does security create an environment where they're protecting the goods?"

Police on Tuesday night were trying to track down the thief who made a smooth getaway out the revolving doors at Tiffany's.

Martell believes NYPD investigators may have their own questions for the employee behind the counter.

"I would imagine NYPD is looking at the video and right about now questioning most of the staff at the store," he said.

Martell would not speculate on the possibility of the theft being an inside job, but he said, "My suspicion is something went wrong, whether it was in the policy or there's some involvement on the part of the employee."

Naturally one has to wonder about the significance of the bandit being a well-dressed black man. It's mentioned in all the accounts, of course, and it's a detail that sticks out, but I'm not sure that's "it" either. I don't know, maybe we all need something to take our minds off . . . well, you know. And here's a story that may not be actual entertainment, but in which, at least, nobody gets hurt, except the wallet of the rich polo-playing bastards, or rather their insurance company.

With everyone voicing suspicion of the Tiffany's counterperson, you have to wonder how stupid he would have to be to have been involved, but then, this isn't an Age of Smartness we're living in. Meanwhile, it's worth remembering, though, that in the days between the event and its becoming, well, a story, no progress seems to have been made in apprehending the guy who pulled it off in full view of the store's security cameras.

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Who wouldn't pony up $12 for a beer imported all the way from Chicago?

The "imported" beer on the left, Goose Island, may be a splendid brew, but imported it's not, unless you count its Chicago provenance as such.

by Ken

At my very first job, more than a few summers ago, I was stationed primarily in the company's order-processing and accounts-receivable department, one feature of which was an entire long wall lined with file cabinets that contained the order account records. Yes, this will give you an idea just how many summers ago it was; at the time, it would never have occurred to anyone to do any of the order processing, or store any of the account records, on computers. Oh, the company did maintain certain records on computers, but they weren't computers of its own. One of my jobs, in fact, was to carry the new information to be input to the data-processing company.

(It so happened that only a door or two away from the building that housed that company, there was a deli whose sandwich offerings included a shrimp parmigiana hero that was stuffed with about four-inches'-thick worth of fried shrimp for some insanely plebeian price. I frequently arranged my schedule to stop for lunch after making my data delivery. Of course it was no hardship to be forced to "eat in the neighborhood." On the other side of Fifth Avenue from our office on East 46th Street there was a deli whose sandwich offerings included a comparably overstuffed and punily priced steak-and-onions hero. Do I need to add that both of those shops are long gone?)

Getting back to those file cabinets, all of the company's accounts were filed geographically -- first by state, then by city. At the end of this massive bank of file cabinets was a file drawer labeled "Foreign," with accounts filed by country. One day one of the clerks who worked on those accounts issued a plea for help. She was utterly unable to find the file she was looking for, in Indiana -- even though she had, she assured everyone, searched through the entire "Foreign" drawer.

It would be too much to presume that all these years later that young lady has worked her way up to a position of authority in the concession operation at the new Yankee Stadium. It may just be the work of someone with a comparable background in geography.

It's not that the domestic suds is such a bargain at Yankee Stadium, but for customers willing to pay the stiffer tab, the imported options included Goose Island, which as far as anyone knows comes to us straight from Chicago.
Patrick Wall reports for DNAinfo New York (lotsa links onsite):

Yankee Stadium Calls Chicago Brew 'Import" In Latest Beer Flub

CONCOURSE -- Yankee Stadium has hit another foul at the concession stands, charging thirsty ball fans $12 for an "import" beer that actually comes from Chicago.

It's the second time in two months the Bombers have made a suds snafu.

Last month, the stadium had to rename its "Craft Beer Destination" specialty alcohol booth when a fan pointed out that several drinks sold there did not meet the definitions either of craft or of beer.

Now, the Yankees are hastily altering cart signs that hawk $12 "Large Import Beer" after DNAinfo New York pointed out that the menu included Goose Island -- a domestic brew from the Windy City.

Legends Hospitality, the company that operates the stadium’s concessions, said Wednesday that the company is in the process of switching out signs at its four "import" beer carts to more accurately reflect its offerings.

Legends Hospitality spokesman Eric Gelfand said the new signs will read "Premium Beer" instead of "Import Beer," since the carts sell Goose Island's India Pale Ale, a Chicago-based Anheuser-Busch brew that has never been brewed overseas.

The carts also serve Beck’s, a brew originally made in Germany, which was recently bought by Anheuser-Busch and is now manufactured in the U.S. Their other Anheuser-Busch offerings, Stella Artois and Hoegaarden, are both imported from Belgium.

Gelfand said the carts were intended to sell only imports, but that Goose Island IPA was a last-minute replacement for another Anheuser-Busch import that fell through. He said patrons were clamoring for a good IPA.

"It’s a situation where, quite literally, the cart came before the horse," Gelfand said.

The flub wasn't lost on some of The Bronx's beer aficionados.

"Goose Island: It’s good beer -- but it’s not an import," said Bronx Beer Hall co-founder Anthony Ramirez. "Serious beer drinkers are serious about where their beer comes from and how it’s made."

Yankee Stadium was also caught red-faced during its home opener on April 1, when writer Amanda Rykoff noted that all the marked-up beverages sold at an artisanal-looking stand labeled "Craft Beer Destination" were actually MillerCoors products.

The drinks -- Blue Moon, Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, Batch 19 and Crispin -- are all mass-produced, so they don’t fit the official Brewers’ Association definition of "craft," a chorus of online critics charged.

In addition, Crispin, a cider, doesn't count as "beer," they added.

"Once again, the Yankees have figured out yet another way to charge a superior price for an inferior product," Rykoff wrote on Tumblr.

After Deadspin and other media outlets picked up on the snafu, the stadium replaced the sign in a matter of days. Now it reads, "Beer Mixology Destination."

It occurs to me that Jerry Seinfeld's pal George Costanza, in addition to working for a time for the Yankees, occasional dabbled in the world of import-export, though it was generally an imaginary world. You don't suppose George could have something to do with the snafu, do you?

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What are Boehner and his people doing about this "acute shortage" of luxury housing?

The interior of the seven-story townhouse at 80 Washington Place, priced to move at $28.9 mil, making it "the highest-priced single-family townhouse in all of Greenwich Village"

"Village brokers and buyers alike have reported an acute shortage of luxury homes, and fierce bidding wars for fine homes."

-- from Andrea Swalec's DNAinfo.com report, "Most
Expensive Village Townhouse Hits Market for $28.9 Million"

by Ken

I read this report a couple of days ago, and I don't mind telling you that I've been losing sleep since, worrying about this "acute shortage of luxury homes" in Greenwich Village. It's not clear to me whether the acute shortage applies to other neighborhoods as well, but you know it's hard to keep these blights confined to a single area.

Wouldn't you figure Mayor Mike must know about this acute shortage? So what's he doing about it? I mean, you can only spend so much time pretending to care about those poor souls driven out of their low-lying homes by Superstorm Sandy.

Now the property under immediate consideration in the article -- i.e., the Village townhouse that hit the market for $28.9 million ("the highest-priced single-family townhouse in all of Greenwich Village") -- wouldn't appear to be representative of the acute shortage of luxury housing in the Village. For one thing, even at the quantity of 1 it appears to be in abundant supply relative to demand. In fact, it didn't so much "hit" the market as re-hit it.

Developer William Rainero, who grew up in the landmarked 22.5-foot-wide house, spent three years transforming what was once nine separate apartments into one huge home, Robert Dvorin of exclusive broker TOWN Residential said. Rainero and company decked out the home with four remodeled kitchens, 11 skylights and its own stone waterfall.

"Everything in the house was done at the highest level," Dvorin said.

Despite the high-end renovations, the townhouse sat on the market for nearly a year without a sale, listed at $31.5 million by Douglas Elliman in June 2012. The price was cut by 5 percent, to $29.9 million in January, but there was still no deal.

Now, with a new broker and an additional $1 million chopped off the price, Dvorin said he and colleague Clayton Orrigo are confident the home will sell.

"It's priced well now," he said. "We're relaunching it, and the market now is on fire."

As an occasional viewer of Million Dollar Listing, I'm going to guess that you may not have to fork over the full 28.9 million smackeroos to take possession. This despite the broker's conviction that it's finally priced right, especially with the market on fire and all.

So maybe before you make your offer you want to know what you'd be getting for your $28.9 million (or whatever you offer). Okay, it's "a seven-story, 8,800-square-foot townhouse half a block west of Washington Square Park."

With its own "wine-tasting lounge," spa and a kitchen designed by Da Silvano chef and restaurateur Silvano Marchetto, the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom home at 80 Washington Place is billed as offering luxury living in a historic setting.

American composer and conductor John Philip Sousa once owned the Georgian-style building that was built in 1839. . . .

For cooks, the townhouse has four kitchens -- two of which are outdoors -- and a 700-bottle wine cellar.

Outside, the home has a teak cabana dining area and garden, a terrace, and a roof deck with views of Washington Square Park, the Freedom Tower and the Empire State Building.

From the property's previous experiences on the market you might think it has the whiff of a white elephant, but with an acute shortage of luxury housing and the market on fire, are you willing to take chances? This may be a time to buy first and ask questions later. I mean, if you don't like it, you can always sell it again. Or leastwise try.

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Take a bow, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara -- scourge of kook corruption

A madcap novel of the sloppiest turf war ever launched by the Brooklyn mob. Kid Sally Palumbo has been a loyal servant to the Brooklyn Mafia for years. His specialty is murder, and he is so skilled at it that he has gotten the attention of Mafia boss Papa Baccala. But unfortunately for Kid Sally, murder pays poorly. He wants to make real dough, to get respect, and to be able to tell his colleagues where to sit when they eat dinner. In short, he wants to be boss. The job would be his for the taking -- if only Kid Sally weren't a Grade A moron. . .

-- from the Reader Store overview of the 1969 Jimmy Breslin novel based on the life of Mafioso "Crazy Joey" Gallo

by Ken

Or as the publisher's description of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (which you'll find on book sites all over the Internet) puts it, Kid Sally is "a would-be capo who 'couldn't run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers' cars.' " (The role was played in the much-enjoyed film version by a newcomer named Robert De Niro, who was cast when another young actor, Al Pacino, pulled out to play Michael Corleone in a big-money picture to be made based on Mario Puzo's The Godfather.)

So what does The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight have to do with the price of eggs? Well, the publisher's description notes that "the title has entered into the language as a catch phrase," and as the New York media overflow with tales of local political corruption, it's the image that keeps coming to mind.

The other day Howie walked us through the great breaking story about the roundup of a few NYS pols and assorted other characters in a grand conspiracy of electoral corruption ("Queens State Senator Malcolm Smith And A Gaggle Of Corrpt Republicans Arrested By The FBI"). It's a story that would have been even funnier if Jimmy Breslin were around to write it -- a story about a network of payoffs involving a phony Indian money guy named "Raj" and an Orthodox Jewish wheeler-dealer named "Mo" who was real but, alas for the conspirators, an already-cooperating witness.

All of this in the service of a scheme so preposterous -- and also, we should stress, so inconsequential -- as to represent a slander on any self-respecting corrupt pol. It all revolved around getting "Wilson Pikula"s, a peculiarly NYS institution, to enable washed-up African-American Democratic Queens State Senator Malcolm into the Republican mayoral primaries in NYC's five counties, where he would have had absolutely zero chance of doing anything except embarrassing. That is, even if a bunch of the bribe-takers hadn't taken the money and then reneged on their promises. (This possibility, we know from the government tapes, actually had occurred to Senator Smith. He just never figured out any way of dealing with it.)

I can't say I've read deeply in the paperwork that's been made available, but still -- really, now! As far as I can tell, there wasn't even any public money changing hands. Sure, if there were public officials taking bribes, they should be dealt with, though as soon as one learns that the crooked wheels of this conspiracy were oiled by a cooperating witness, one can be forgiven for wondering whether this whole nutty scheme would have been hatched, let alone gone anywhere, without government support.

Yet there it is: "political corruption," stopped dead in its tracks by the FBI at the behest of the fearless corruption-fighting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. The other "corruption" scandals we've been hearing about from unflinching prosecutors -- both financial and political -- aren't as colorful, or entertaining, but they seem to me every bit as inconsequential.

Does anyone imagine for a second that any aspect of this nonsense has anything to do with the mountain of financial and political corruption, real corruption, that New York, both city and state, are choking under? The kind where the big-money players using influence and cash either to siphon money out of the public till or, more frequently, to manipulate the craven political actors to do their bidding and ensure a supercharged return on their investment?

Yet just the other day, DNAinfo.com, from which I've come to expect better, was touting: "Preet Bharara, New Sheriff of Albany, Eyed for Higher Office":

He's the star prosecutor who, in one week, has taken down one state senator, two assemblymen, a councilman and two GOP bosses in two alleged bribery plots that have rocked the political world.

And he hints more heads will roll.

It's just the latest in a series of high-profile catches for Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has spent the last four years lassoing one corrupt city politician after the next — fueling renewed speculation that the self-appointed Sheriff of Albany might harbor political ambitions of his own. . . .

Bharara has spent the past four years in the headlines and splashed across magazine covers for his work taking down corrupt politicians, prosecuting terror suspects and insider trading, and recovering stolen cash, including the largest-known recovery in municipal contract fraud in U.S. history following the CityTime debacle.

This week, his takedowns included Queens State Sen. Malcolm Smith, City Councilman Daniel Halloran and Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson in connection with two elaborate alleged bribery schemes, including one that tried to get Smith on the ballot for New York City mayor.

Since August 2009, he has nabbed a whopping 15 elected officials and associates in public corruption cases, including State Sen. Carl Kruger, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, and Councilman Larry Seabrook, who was sentenced to five years behind bars. To highlight his cases, the office created a colorful chart featuring all the names, positions, charges and outcomes of each of the arrests.

Non-New Yorkers may be forgiven for assuming that this roster of "elected officials and associates" must matter. Trust me, these are nobodies -- if possible, less-than-nobodies. Oddballs and odd men out, what we might call "kook corruption." Can we expect some poor schlepp of a state assemblyman to be tagged for collusion with a bunch of circus clowns getting out of a Volkswagen?

Whereas does anyone believe for a second that New York City (and State) isn't chock full of somebodies and supersomebodies in urgent need of indicting? The kinds of people who are tied into the kind of people who are real movers and shakers, and in their corruption make our political and financial cuture stink to high heaven?

Do we really have to ask, for example, how many prosecutions the U.S. attorney for the Southern District has launched involving actual actors in the financial meltdown that followed the blowing of the housing bubble? Is anyone else getting the feeling that, hand in hand with the financial concept of "too big to fail," we now have a legal category of candidate felons who are "too big to touch"?

In the nauseating DNAinfo.com puff piece, amid speculation that jobs Preet Bharara might be angling for are U.S. attorney general and director of the FBI, there is this curious note:

But one source in the Justice Department noted that, given the current political climate, there are not many open jobs for Bharara, who formerly served as chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer, leading the 2006 Congressional investigation into the firings of United States attorneys under the Bush administration.

Now this is tantalizing, though I can't say for sure I know what it means. Is the idea that Preet is tainted for being too tough, too willing to investigate? We can't tell, because nothing more is made of it.

And all I can recall of what should have been one of the great scandals of the "Chimpy" Bush administration -- the politicization of the entire Executive Branch, including most unforgivably the Justice Department -- never became a scandal of any consequence. Faced with the stark perversion of the administration of law enforcement by the federal government, there should have been a rash of headlines, firings, indictments, and people in high places spending millions of dollars on PR "handlers."

Somehow it didn't happen, though. I'm sure Senator Schumer and his stalwart chief counsel tried their darnedest, but somehow it just wasn't good enough.

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Queens State Senator Malcolm Smith And A Gaggle Of Corrpt Republicans Arrested By The FBI

Queens Sen. Malcolm Smith, handcuffs not visible

How does on even explain to a non-New Yorker who and what state Senator Malcolm Smith is? It's not enough to point out that one of Congress' most corrupt members, Joe Crowley, is the Capo di tutti capi of the miserably corrupt Queens Democratic Party Machine, out of which Smith, who represents Hollis, crawled. Nor is it enough to mention that Smith has been the ultimate Democrat-Republican opportunist in the contemporary history of New York politics.

The 56 year old Smith started in politics as a senior aide, a protégé, of outrageously corrupt (and conservative) Queens Congressman Floyd Flake. Before being driven from office, under indictment for corruption, Flake, representing one of the most liberal areas in the country, worked for the election of right-wing Republicans from Ken Blackwell in Ohio to Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki in New York. Smith follows his model exactly-- both in terms of conservatism and corruption, which, of course, are inseparable anyway.

Smith was elected to the state Senate in 2000, minority leader in 2007 and Majority Leader in 2009, a post he held for around 6 months. After he was reelected last November he joined up with the Independent Democratic Conference to form a "bipartisan governing coalition" with Senate Republicans and prevent passage of any kind of progressive agenda for the state. And that brings us to him being dragged out of his Addisleigh Park home in handcuffs by FBI agents early this morning. One of his right-wing GOP cronies, as corrupt as he is and a Tea Party-backed political hack, City Councilman Dan Halloran was arrested at the same time. At the same time, FBI agents were hunting down and arresting Bronx Republican Chairman Jay Savino, Queens GOP vice chairman Vincent Tabone and several other corrupt Republicans who took bribes in a bizarre plot to make Smith the Republican candidate for NYC Mayor this year. Halloran, best known for his adherence to paganism and white supremacism, was the go-between for arranging the bribes for the Republican Party borough leaders. Times star investigative reporter William Rashbaum:

Smith has said he was considering running for mayor of New York as a Republican, and the charges contend that he made payments to Mr. Halloran in exchange for the councilman’s assistance in setting up meetings with Republican leaders as part of an effort to get on the ballot, the complaint said.

The criminal complaint in the case was brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and was unsealed Tuesday morning. Mr. Smith, Mr. Halloran and the others were to appear on Tuesday before a United States magistrate judge in United States District Court in White Plains.

Mr. Smith, according to the complaint, agreed with a cooperating witness and an undercover F.B.I. agent, who was masquerading as a wealthy real estate developer, to pay off leaders of Republican Party county committees in New York’s five boroughs. The bribes were to be paid to obtain specific certificates authorizing him to run for New York City mayor as a Republican even though he was a registered Democrat.

The undercover agent and the cooperating witness served as intermediaries between the senator and Councilman Halloran, the complaint said.

“Public service is not supposed to be a shortcut to self-enrichment,'’ George Venizelos, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said in a statement. “At the very least, public officials should obey the law. As alleged, these defendants did not obey the law; they broke the law and the public trust. There is a price to pay for that kind of betrayal.”

...The complaint details a brazen scheme hatched a series of clandestine meetings in hotels parked cars, restaurants and even the senator’s Albany office. The meetings, recorded by the undercover or the cooperating witness, were mostly between the senator, the undercover and the witness, and the councilman and the two government operatives.

Most of those involved, according to the complaint, were looking for something-- cash bribes were sought by the party officials and Mr. Halloran and Mr. Smith were seeking authorization to get on the ballot in the mayor’s race. Ms. Jasmin was seeking an ownership interest in a company she believed was involved in a real estate project.

The senator at one point became impatient, asking the undercover and the cooperating witness during a meeting in his office whether the committee leaders were delaying getting his certificates because they wanted more money.

Mr. Smith, according to the complaint, instructed the two men not to pay the committee leaders any more money until they had “close[d] … the deal.” He also said that before the leaders received “even a nickel more, [he’d] have to stand on the Empire State Building and drop every person [he] endorsed and hold Malcolm up and say he’s the best thing since sliced bread. Matter of fact, he’s better than sliced bread.”

According to the complaint, Mr. Halloran set up a meeting at which the undercover agent and the witness met Joseph J. Savino, the Bronx G.O.P. chairman, and Vincent Tabone, vice chairman of the Queens Republican Party, and negotiated the amounts of the bribes for the documents. In exchange, Mr. Halloran sought and received more than $20,000 in cash for himself, prosecutors said.

Mr. Tabone and Mr. Savino were paid bribes of more than $40,000 and were promised $40,000 more, and they in turn agreed to use their official capacities with Republican county committees to obtain the documents Mr. Smith would need to run for mayor as a Republican.

Mr. Smith, in exchange for help from Mr. Savinio and Mr. Tabone, agreed to use his Senate office to help win state funds for a road project in Spring Valley that would benefit a real estate project that Senator Smith believed was being built by a company belonging to the undercover agent.

The complaint said that on Nov. 16, Mr. Smith met the undercover agent and the cooperating witness at a hotel in White Plains and asked the witness to contact a Republican Party county chairman identified in the charges only as “County Chairman #1” to try to “change him” by persuading him to support Mr. Smith rather than another mayoral candidate whom the chairman had publicly supported.

...On Tuesday, the arrests immediately reverberated through the mayor’s race. Mr. Tabone is a paid consultant to the Republican mayoral campaign of John Catsimatidis, the grocery store magnate. Records show Mr. Catsimatidis has paid Mr. Tabone $3,000 so far this year. Another Republican mayoral candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, recently welcomed the endorsement of Mr. Halloran, who was also arrested on Tuesday morning.

Late last year, Mr. Smith, who was elected Senate president in 2008 and ousted in 2010, joined a group of insurgent Democrats-- the Independent Democratic Conference-- and said around the same time that he was considering running for mayor as a Republican.

He was seen as a key recruit for the conference, a five-member faction that formed a leadership coalition with Republicans in the Senate. Before Mr. Smith joined the caucus, there was criticism that a faction of white Democrats was joining with the all-white Republican conference; the presence of Mr. Smith, an African-American and a last-minute recruit to the Independent Democratic Conference, helped blunt those concerns.

The move came with some incentives: beyond his increased influence, the New York Post reported that his staff budget increased by about two-thirds since he joined the conference.

Mr. Smith has been a subject of several criminal inquiries in recent years. One, which had apparently begun by early 2010 and was conducted by federal prosecutors from the same office that sought the indictment that led to Tuesday’s arrests, was focused on a nonprofit linked to Mr. Smith and a United States representative, Gregory J. Meeks. In that case, the prosecutors subpoenaed records from Mr. Smith’s Senate office that detailed money he had directed to community groups for a decade. Mr. Meeks has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

...Smith, along with the Senate Democratic leader then, John L. Sampson of Brooklyn, was also among those named in a scathing State Inspector General’s report in 2010 that said the Senate’s leaders had manipulated the choice of who would build New York City’s first casino.

The 308-page report, on the competition to install video slot machines at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens, was referred to federal and state prosecutors and the Legislative Ethics Committee and said the senators had leaked information and shown favoritism to a troubled bidder that was donating to Democratic candidates and had ties to key political figures. No charges have been brought in relation to the casino contract.

The Times forgot to mention that Pagan Prince Halloran told a reporter outside his home that he "had no idea" why he was being arrested. Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District: "These six officials built a corridor of corruption and greed from Queens and The Bronx to Rockland County and all the way to Albany. After all the public corruption scandals we've charged, the sad truth may be the most powerful special interest in politics is self interest."

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