‘She’s a Class Act. You’re Not’: Attacks on Families Heat Up N.Y. Governor’s Race

As his voice cracked with emotion, Marcus Molinaro, the Republican candidate for governor in New York, delivered an unusual warning to the incumbent, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

“My wife, my six-month pregnant wife, is out of your league,” Molinaro said in a video posted to Twitter last month. “Out of your league. She is above you. You want to pick a fight? Stick with me. She’s a class act. You’re not.”

With Election Day less than six weeks away, a recent flash point in the New York governor’s race is not the economy, the city’s subways or the $160 billion state budget. It’s about two women — the significant others of Cuomo and Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive — and questions surrounding those women’s personal finances.

It is a curious take on the year of the woman, with accusations and invective lacing both men’s campaigns at a time when female voters and candidates have proved to be a potent force in the electorate.

Cuomo, a Democrat seeking his third term who is holding a sizable advantage in polling for the general election, launched the first salvo last month — raising questions about a job that Molinaro’s wife, Corinne Adams, had held for three years at a Hudson Valley architectural firm, Tinkelman Architecture. Molinaro, 42, and Adams, 31, were married in November 2015, several months after she got the job.

Cuomo’s campaign has suggested that Adams’ employment at the company was questionable, citing about $70,000 in county contracts and hundreds of thousands of dollars in other subsidies that Tinkelman received from a Dutchess County development agency.

Molinaro denies any connection between his wife’s job and Tinkelman’s good fortune, but Cuomo doubled down on the attacks last week, with a campaign advertisement saying Molinaro “personally profits” because of Tinkelman’s employment of “a member of Molinaro’s family.”

The ad was released the same day that Joseph Percoco, formerly one of Cuomo’s closest friends and aides, was about to be sentenced in a federal corruption case that involved payments to Percoco’s wife, Lisa Toscano-Percoco.

That ad blurred out the word “wife,” in reference to Adams, though it was still visible. An earlier video advertisement was more explicit, suggesting that in return for “hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax breaks,” Tinkelman “hired Molinaro’s wife.”

That video, released on the same day that Molinaro unveiled a revitalization plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, led to Molinaro’s “you want to pick a fight” post on Twitter — which effectively overshadowed his own transportation plan.

The focus on Molinaro’s wife has prompted him to suggest that there might be a need for new legislation to increase scrutiny of the finances of romantic partners of lawmakers, which, not coincidentally, would include Cuomo’s longtime live-in girlfriend, Sandra Lee, a food television personality.

“Do you know anything about the house that he lives in, the place that he calls home, or the individual that he lives with?” Molinaro said last week in Albany, adding, “If he wants to go down that road, God bless him, but at the end of the day, I think New Yorkers expect better.”

Lee is the author of 25 books, and has had a series of licensing agreements over her career. The four-bedroom house she owns and shares with Cuomo in New Castle, New York, is valued at $1.3 million, according to public records. But her financial situation is difficult to scrutinize, in large part because her company, Sandra Lee Inc., is privately held.

Because Lee and Cuomo are not married, the governor is not required to list her on his financial disclosure forms. Cuomo, 60, divorced Kerry Kennedy in 2005; he is technically single, though he says he shares living and property tax expenses with Lee, his partner for more than a decade.

Molinaro’s family is in a much lower tax bracket: He earns about $140,000 as county executive, and says that his wife’s total income at Tinkelman, for doing public relations and social media work for the firm, was about $80,000 over three years.

“She had no role in the company’s administration, and no role in advocating for government contracts,” he said, adding she left on good terms this year to focus on her pregnancy and the couple’s other child, a toddler.

In addition to the county contracts, the Cuomo campaign also points to a batch of small campaign donations Molinaro received from executives with Tinkelman — a little less than $7,000 over his political career — as well as a series of sales, mortgage and property tax exemptions received by the company, via the Dutchess County Industrial Development Agency as part of plans for a multiuse development in Poughkeepsie, approved in June 2015.

That’s roughly the time Adams was hired, though the firm’s managing member, Steven Tinkelman, says the subsidies had been in the works long before that, calling them standard development incentives, an argument echoed by Molinaro. Tinkelman, who contributed $1,000 to Molinaro’s campaign in July, said Adams was a good employee. “We’re very proud of the work she did,” he said, noting her work on the company website and Facebook page. “Obviously she’s skilled.”

“How this has gotten twisted around really makes us sad,” he said.

For his part, Molinaro says the county development agency wasn’t under his direct purview, though its members are approved by the county executive. He added that Tinkelman’s contracts with the county were competitively bid, and “minuscule” in terms of the millions in design and architectural spending by the Dutchess County government.

“It’s a distraction,” he said of the governor’s efforts to tie his wife’s employment to corruption. Molinaro has tried to make ethics reform one of his campaign platforms, releasing an “Albany Accountability Act” designed to restore trust in government, and criticizing the governor for what he has called ethical and criminal lapses in his administration.

Molinaro has seized on the conviction of Percoco as emblematic of the administration’s problems. After Percoco was sentenced, Molinaro released a statement saying, “Andrew Cuomo was sentenced today. He just doesn’t have to do the time.”

The Cuomo campaign noted that the governor was not accused of any wrongdoing in the Percoco case, and that its political ads targeting Molinaro were meant to highlight his own potential pay-to-play issues, and were not meant as ad hominem attacks. Dani Lever, a spokeswoman for Cuomo’s campaign, did not address Molinaro’s call for more disclosure about Lee’s finances, but reiterated that the alleged connections between the Tinkelman job for Adams and county contracts were “surely unethical and possibly criminal.”

“Molinaro should worry about his illegal conduct under the current law before proposing a new law,” Lever said. “The real question is why Marc Molinaro violated the public officers law.”

Molinaro and Adams are expecting their second child in November, not long after Election Day, at which point the political attacks should end.

And not a moment too soon, said Molinaro, who said that his wife hadn’t really appreciated his bringing Lee into the skirmish, either.

“I went home and my wife said, ‘Don’t attack her,'” Molinaro said, adding that his wife was educated, competent and intent on not being a political pawn. “She doesn’t want to be dragged into any of this.”