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The Village Voice's Wayne Barrett follow's last week's excellent piece, "The Truth Behind Troopergate", with another great story this week. I'm going to excerpt some of it here, but I hope you'll go read the whole thing. It's an exceptional piece of work.
The Bruno Files: Exploring the Record of the State Senate Leader Calling for a Spitzer Probe
The immaculate record of the state senate leader calling for investigations of Eliot Spitzer
As often as Bruno impacts our lives, we are rarely offered a glimpse of his world, which is crowded with donors and lobbyists, and are only vaguely aware of the facts surrounding the year-old federal probe of his business dealings. His son became a $50,000-a-month lobbyist whose clients prospered in the senate. His brother took a $127,500 post in the Pataki administration and got his state agency to pay $54,400 a year to the local Republican Party boss to rent an unnecessary office just a stone's throw from his house.
The senator, meanwhile, set up a consulting business in his sprawling farmhouse-and even though he neither advertised the firm nor even listed it in the phone book, clients rushed to his door. He still won't say who those clients are, just as he won't say whom he visited on his much-publicized recent trips to the city aboard state aircraft. But the names of a few of those clients have leaked out in occasional news coverage of the FBI probe, including a businessman he steered a half-million-dollar state grant to, and an investment firm that handled the millions he's raised for the senate campaign committee. In real-estate ventures unconnected to the consulting company, Bruno partnered up with two Albany lobbyists in one and purchased property from a state contractor in another. The lobbyists, of course, lived at the senate trough, and an investor in the second deal-personally recruited by Bruno to bail another son out of the deal-got two state grants with the senator's help.
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While it's common for elected officials to dip into their campaign committees for an occasional personal meal or other perk, the filings for Bruno's three committees suggest that he may never pick up his own tab. In 2006 and the first six months of 2007, the committees have spent more than $92,000 on restaurant and country-club bills for "meetings" or "meals," not including any expenses that are listed for "fundraising" purposes. Calls to some of the restaurants confirm that Bruno eats there regularly, often with guests. It's not at all uncommon for multiple meals to be billed for the same day, or for the committee to cover virtually an entire week of dinners (including the weekend), usually in restaurants near the capitol and his home. It is possible that some of these meals are for staff, but one committee has no full-time staff, and it's the one with $38,000 in restaurant billings alone.
MUCH more on the flip...
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