As FBI Closed In, Joseph Percoco Called an Ally: Gov. Cuomo

NEW YORK — Shortly after FBI agents raided his home in Westchester County in April 2016, Joseph Percoco got on the phone with his former boss, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

In a tense call with one of the governor’s top lawyers listening in, Percoco briefed Cuomo on what he thought the agents were hunting for, saying he believed it might have something to do with work he had done for two companies that had business before New York state.

Cuomo was apparently stunned.

“The governor said, ‘What?,'” according to Linda Lacewell, the lawyer who was on the call and testified Wednesday in the federal corruption trial of Percoco in Manhattan.

Percoco repeated his explanation to Cuomo “and said it had all been cleared by the lawyers and had nothing to do with state contracts,” Lacewell, who is now Cuomo’s chief of staff, testified.

She offered her account during the second day of testimony in the trial of Percoco, once one of Cuomo’s closest friends and advisers before he left the governor’s office in January 2016.

In September 2016, Percoco was charged in a wide-ranging corruption case that includes two overlapping schemes that involved bribery and fraud. He and three co-defendants went on trial this week; a second trial is scheduled in June.

Percoco, the former executive deputy secretary to Cuomo, has been accused of taking more than $300,000 in bribes in return for official actions on behalf of an energy company and a developer seeking lucrative deals with the state. Prosecutors have charged that the bulk of the bribe money was funneled by one of the companies to Percoco through a “low-show” job for his wife, who has not been charged.

Prosecutors have not accused the governor, a Democrat, of any wrongdoing, and Cuomo’s office has declined to comment. When the charges were announced, Cuomo publicly distanced himself from Percoco, saying he had “zero tolerance for abuse of the public trust from anyone,” and “if anything, a friend should be held to an even higher standard.”

Yet, in the government’s opening statements Tuesday, it became clear that Cuomo would loom large over the trial because of his long-standing relationship with Percoco.

In her testimony, Lacewell, who had been called as a prosecution witness, offered one striking example of how entwined Percoco and Cuomo were.

As she recalled her conversation with Percoco regarding the raid on his house, he expressed concern that the FBI agents had seized a laptop computer “which might have files on it that were personal to the governor,” in terms of his finances, his family, his children and his taxes.

Asked by a prosecutor, Janis Echenberg, why Percoco would have had such records in his own home, Lacewell responded, “He was very much trusted by the governor, including handling such sensitive matters.”

Lacewell told the jury that before she put Percoco on the line with Cuomo, she spoke to the governor for a moment “about how he should conduct himself during the call.”

Lacewell said that the call with her and the governor was one of several conversations she and Percoco had that day.

She said Percoco also told her that his wife, Lisa Toscano-Percoco, had been working for Competitive Power Ventures, an energy company that was seeking state approval to build a power plant in the Hudson Valley.

Percoco told Lacewell that the job had been arranged by Peter Galbraith Kelly Jr., an executive with the energy company, who has been charged with paying bribes to Percoco.

In one call, Lacewell said Percoco told her that his wife was being paid by a “money guy,” Chris Pitts, who worked with the energy company. Prosecutors have claimed that Pitts funneled about $287,000 to Toscano-Percoco over several years for her work as an educational consultant.

The government has argued that the wife’s job was meant to curry favor with Percoco, an assertion his lawyers reject.

Lacewell also said that Percoco mentioned that Toscano-Percoco had received checks from Todd R. Howe, a lobbyist who was former aide to Cuomo and a longtime friend of Percoco’s.

According to Lacewell, Percoco had explained that Howe owed him money and that he was uncomfortable with the payments to his wife, but he had eventually agreed to the arrangement.

“'He’s cute that way,'” Lacewell recalled Percoco saying.

Howe has pleaded guilty and is expected to be the chief government witness in the case. The confines of a federal courthouse were not unfamiliar to Lacewell, who had served for nine years as a prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York. But she made it clear on Wednesday that the experience of being a trial witness was new to her.

When Percoco’s lawyer, Barry A. Bohrer, noted that she was probably accustomed to being in a courtroom, Lacewell offered a quick retort.

“Not,” she said, “in this seat.”