At Issue in Politician’s Trial: Does He Love His Son?

NEW YORK — The lawyers in the four-week corruption retrial of Dean G. Skelos, the once-powerful former leader of the New York Senate, have not agreed on much, but they at least had seemed to agree that Skelos was devoted to his son.

Yet even that assumption devolved into debate this week, as prosecutors and defense lawyers made their final pitches to jurors about whether Skelos had traded his political influence for $300,000 in payments to his son, Adam Skelos, who is also on trial.

Prosecutors — while initially acknowledging Skelos’ love for his son — later suggested that he had in fact abandoned him in his testimony over three days. Skelos criticized his son for invoking his father’s name as he sought employment, and expressed his dismay that Adam would take a no-show job. The former senator also acknowledged that he had asked executives at three companies to help his son out of concern for his son’s temper and troubled past.

“Dean Skelos tried to blame his son,” a prosecutor, Thomas McKay, said in his closing arguments in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday. Skelos had described Adam Skelos as, at times, “abrasive” and himself as disappointed — testimony that McKay called “shameless.”

“Enough blaming all this on Adam Skelos,” McKay said. “When he took that witness stand, he took responsibility for nothing.”

But G. Robert Gage Jr., a lawyer for Dean Skelos, attacked that position in his closing arguments.

“They tried to drive a wedge between Dean and his son,” Gage said Wednesday. The senator had only ever acted out of love for Adam Skelos, Gage said, and it was the prosecutors’ argument that was shameless — and “frankly, I say, disgusting.”

Those dueling interpretations of Skelos’ testimony and his relationship to his son marked the entire closing arguments in the retrial of both Skeloses for extortion, bribery and conspiracy. Both father and son were convicted in 2015, but those convictions were overturned last year after the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of public corruption.

McKay cast Skelos as a domineering and calculating politician, who leveraged his weight as the leader of the Senate’s Republican majority to threaten business leaders if they did not funnel payments to his son.

Skelos would make the requests for payments during political meetings about legislation on which the companies depended, McKay said, and which he had the power to scuttle.

“What message was Dean Skelos trying to send?” McKay said.

Of Skelos’ unexpected decision to take the stand in his own defense — a departure from the original trial — prosecutors warned jurors not to fall for the act of a career politician.

“For 30 years, Dean Skelos was in the business of convincing people to vote for him,” McKay said. He had done the same on the witness stand: “He was trying to win your vote. To charm you.”

But Gage offered a different portrait of Skelos: A doting father, solicitous legislator and longtime loyal friend.

He reminded jurors of Skelos’ testimony that he had not single-handedly controlled the Senate’s agenda, but rather had worked with his colleagues to change the autocratic culture of Albany. Gage dismissed the idea that Skelos could have threatened the company executives who testified against him, noting that they were wealthy, influential political donors with ties to many other elected officials.

Most of all, Gage repeatedly and relentlessly called into question the motivations of those executives, several of whom have cooperation agreements with the government. At least one of the executives, Anthony Bonomo, has been ousted from the Long Island insurance company that he managed after being accused of financial crimes.

Gage said Bonomo and the other executives were implicating Skelos — their longtime friend — in a desperate bid to avoid prosecution themselves.

“You point the finger at Dean, you get your pass,” Gage said.

The only consistent figure in the closing arguments was Adam Skelos. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers described the senator’s son as impulsive and immature, even into his late 20s and early 30s.

Prosecutors said the executives’ decisions to keep him on their payroll — the younger Skelos allegedly rarely showed up to work and threatened to smash a supervisor’s head in — proved a corrupt scheme between father and son.

“Absolutely no one would tolerate an employee like Adam Skelos unless they felt like they had no choice,” McKay said.

John J. Kenney, a lawyer for Adam Skelos, was perhaps even more unsparing.

“This is a part where Adam might want to close his ears, but we still have to talk about it,” Kenney said in his summations Wednesday, before listing Adam Skelos’ various outbursts and faulty job applications. Of a recorded phone call to Dean Skelos in which Adam Skelos lamented a decision by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that could hurt his business prospects, Kenney acknowledged that it opened with “a long, childlike wail, which may still be ringing in your ears.”

Still, Kenney said the timeline of alleged threats and subsequent payments to Adam Skelos did not line up, as the legislation the executives sought was passed either before or long after the payments in question.

Kenney suggested that it was the executives who had used and abused the Skelos name, not the other way around. They knew that hiring Adam Skelos would help them make influential business connections, he said.

“Because his name is Skelos, they answer the telephone,” Kenney said. “There’s nothing wrong with that access.”