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Prosecution Witness in Albany Corruption Trial Tells a Tale of Cuomo

NEW YORK — It was early 2014, and Todd R. Howe was on the verge of a major victory. Howe, a veteran lobbyist and longtime Albany insider, had been trying to arrange a meeting between one of his clients, Steven Aiello, and top state officials, and he had just learned that Gov. Andrew Cuomo himself might drop in.

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VIVIAN WANG
, New York Times

NEW YORK — It was early 2014, and Todd R. Howe was on the verge of a major victory. Howe, a veteran lobbyist and longtime Albany insider, had been trying to arrange a meeting between one of his clients, Steven Aiello, and top state officials, and he had just learned that Gov. Andrew Cuomo himself might drop in.

“That would be great!” Howe emailed a friend.

His excitement soon turned to anguish.

“That’s the meeting where Mr. Cuomo started yelling at you?” a lawyer for Aiello asked Howe on Thursday during cross-examination in the federal corruption trial for which Howe is the prosecution’s key witness.

“It’s a day that will be forever etched in my head,” Howe replied.

In his seven days on the witness stand in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, which ended late Thursday afternoon, Howe described a medley of backroom schemes and deals that have long been a stereotype of New York state politics. And in doing so, he has also — intentionally or not — come to embody a sort of one-man public relations fiasco for Cuomo, whose name has been omnipresent throughout the trial.

Howe claims to have facilitated bribes between Joseph Percoco, a former confidant of and top aide to Cuomo, and three executives with business before the state, including Aiello, a Syracuse-area developer. Republicans have said the testimony illustrates the unsavory Albany culture they say Cuomo has indulged and even abetted.

While the governor has not been accused of any wrongdoing, his presence has loomed large in the testimony, with witnesses frequently dropping his name and documents showing the defendants’ eagerness to curry his favor.

Still, Howe’s testimony on Thursday — and in particular, his account of that 2014 meeting with Cuomo and the circumstances that preceded it — was one of the first times that the governor has emerged as a major character in one of Howe’s many anecdotes of how he tried to pull Albany’s unseen levers. And it thrust back into the limelight a host of issues that have dogged Cuomo in recent years, from his unwavering attempts to revive the stuttering upstate economy, to his long-standing political feuds, to rumors of his temper.

The occasion for the governor’s anger in 2014, according to Howe, was the dissipation of a major construction project in Syracuse that he said Cuomo had supported.

“He blamed you for what had happened in Syracuse, correct?” the lawyer, Stephen Coffey, asked.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t think that was fair?”

“I know the governor well enough to know what’s fair and unfair doesn’t really matter in a situation like this,” Howe replied.

Howe had previously spoken glowingly of both Cuomo and his father, Mario Cuomo, having worked as an aide to both men. But on Thursday, he seemed to indicate that his admiration of the current governor was tempered by a fearful respect. At one point, he acknowledged Cuomo’s reputation as a “bully.”

The Syracuse project was a proposed new basketball stadium that would replace the famed Carrier Dome, home of Syracuse University’s basketball team.

From its inception, the project was steeped in controversy. Aiello’s company, COR Development, hatched the plans for the new multipurpose stadium and approached Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney with the idea in the summer of 2013, according to a timeline compiled by The Syracuse Post-Standard. A few months later, Cuomo, who has made rejuvenating the upstate economy a centerpiece of his administration, approached Mahoney with his desire to fund a major project in central New York.

But Syracuse’s mayor, Stephanie Miner, was not informed of the governor’s plans to move ahead with the stadium project until December, and she was not pleased, The Post-Standard reported. She declined to endorse it. By January 2014, the deal had fallen apart.

“It blew up, and the governor was pretty upset,” Howe said Thursday.

In an interview Thursday, Miner confirmed Howe’s account of the governor’s displeasure after the stadium deal collapsed. “Todd came to me and apologized and said to me that the governor was angry with him,” Miner said. “And I knew that the governor and his people were extraordinarily angry with me.”

Howe, now a groundskeeper in Idaho, testified that the 2014 meeting he set up, which included himself, Aiello and Cuomo, was an attempt to clean up the fallout of the stadium project. Apparently, it did not go well.

Afterward, Howe said, Percoco tasked him with helping the governor smooth over his relationship with Miner. Those efforts have not appeared successful, either: Miner announced last month that she was “seriously considering” running against Cuomo for governor this fall.

As for the trial, things also do not appear to have worked out as Howe might have liked. Last Thursday, his bail was revoked because he admitted he had tried to defraud his credit card company after he signed his cooperation agreement; he has since spent each night at the Metropolitan Correctional Center a block from the courthouse.

When the last question was finally asked and Howe’s testimony ended, the judge, Valerie E. Caproni, addressed the prosecution’s star witness.

“Mr. Howe, go back to Idaho!” she said. Then she reconsidered his circumstance. “No! Go back to the MCC!”

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