Spin Cycle

Why wait to speculate? One of the more cutting-edge observers of the local scene, whose modesty forbids being quoted by name, finds it entirely plausible -- if unsupported by any evidence -- that Hillary Clinton, after losing the presidential race, would quit the U.S. Senate and run next year for New York City mayor.

There is always an extra burden for any City Council speaker to run for mayor. The last two tried and did miserably. So if Manhattan's Christine Quinn also fades from the contest for the Democratic nomination, Hillary could ride in as the only well-known woman candidate -- an advantage. And she could run unopposed, our sage says, as she did in 2000 when she arrived in the state to seek the Senate seat.

Mike "the Maintainer" Bloomberg leaves due to term limits at the end of 2009. But he has fixed up -- and maintained -- Gracie Mansion very nicely without ever having moved into it. So the Clintons could choose to keep or turn over the place up in Chappaqua, depending how the real estate market is doing.

One side-effect: Gov. David Paterson, if striving for a term of his own in 2010, could keep Attorney General Andrew Cuomo from breathing down his neck by appointing him to the Senate seat vacated by Clinton.

In the storm over the sexual and alcoholic escapades of Rep. Vito Fossella Jr., one or two telling episodes of the region’s past and present have escaped proper mention.

Remember Guy Velella? He was a Bronx state senator, married with four children, in 1987 when he publicly acknowledged fathering a child with an Albany girlfriend. Velella, also the county GOP chairman, won re-election eight times over the next 17 years. He lost the seat in 2004 only when he pleaded guilty to an unrelated criminal charge involving fixing of state contracts.

And, in 2006, Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) was hit with a paternity suit by the son of an ex-staffer -- and subsequently became minority leader, succeeding David Paterson, who ran for lieutenant governor. Smith was married and promised support if it was proven he was the dad, which he declared to be a private matter. With a net gain of two seats in November, Smith stands to become majority leader, one of the most powerful state positions.

Fossella, however, has dealt himself a lousier hand in what looks like a tougher game. His second family became known only after he managed to get himself stopped on the road with a blood-alcohol level said to be twice the legal limit. The woman with whom he acknowledged involvement, retired Air Force officer Laura Fay, collected him from a Virginia jail. Of most political consequence is that before any of this emerged, Democrats were targeting his seat.

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), Fossella’s fellow downstate Republican in Congress, spent time with him last week as the crisis built. Colleague King, clearly saddened, described Fossella as enduring “incredible heartache.”

Other friends, meanwhile, said Fossella clearly had a death wish -- at least politically.

Dan Janison

The “letter” to DA Thomas Spota, posted here, to the lower right of the NYPD Confidential blogsite of Len Levitt, is not genuine but a satire, according to the horse’s mouth. Levitt’s been tweaking the Police Foundation for its decision to keep certain information secret, and the letter makes reference to Spota going after counterfeit goods.

Dan Janison

Much was made of the idea that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's conference bumped off the plan known as "congestion pricing."

But it was never made clear how many of his 42 votes the house's Republican minority leader had for the plan, or for that matter, the Senate's GOP majority leader, whose 8 Long Island members didn't exactly form a cheerleading squad for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal.

One Assembly member from Long Island said late last week: "I was very much on the fence. There are many pros and cons to this that we really need to continue take a real good look at... On one side issue, yes, the environment and global warming has to be adddressed -- for the enitre nation. On the other hand, on Long Island, if we want encourage to people taking the railroad, we should lower the fare."

But the stalled drive to charge motorists access to Manhattan below 60th St. was not so much an environmental initiative, but a project of the real estate elite which, if it really wanted to reduce congestion, would have agreed to curb the city's over-development craze, argues Paul Moses on Ron Howell's Brooklyn-based blog.

UPDATE: There is also this take in the Voice, which talks about how the GOP Senate came to duck a vote.

Dan Janison

Nassau's own Bruce Blakeman, the defeated GOP candidate for state comptroller in 1998, is setting his sights on another possible run a decade later, with even higher stakes: mayor of New York City, according to the publication City Hall, which also posted the photo above.

Blakeman these days is a commissioner at the bi-state Port Authority and a lawyer. “I have left the door open to the possibility of going back into a public life and [mayor] is a very interesting position where you could do a lot of good for people,” he told interviewer Andrew J. Hawkins.

As you'll see, he gets some supportive chatter from former Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari and current Manhattan GOP chairwoman Jennifer Saul Yaffa.

Before his comptroller run, and his appointment to the P.A. by former Gov. George Pataki, Blakeman was on the Hempstead Town Board and a Nassau legislator, where he served as presiding officer and majority leader in the late 1990's.

The floating of Blakeman's name for next year's race, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg departs due to term limits, was apparently too much for Democratic Nassau blogger John Rennhack to resist. He posts this on his Nassau GOP Watch site: "He did such a good job in Nassau that he was sent packing during the 1999 elections, moved to Manhattan and wants to re-enter politics a decade later."

Other possible GOP contenders in the Democratic-dominated city include supermarket tycoon John Catsimitidis and, some say, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Dan Janison

In the overblown public politics of baseball, Yankees chief operating officer Lonn Trost told the Post in yesterday's editions that "there may be criminal issues" in the construction worker's stunt of burying a Red Sox shirt at the construction site of the new and utterly unnecessary Yankee Stadium being built on what had been apportioned as public park land.

The president of this organization is former NYC deputy mayor Randy Levine (photo above), who showed up for the circus-like event to condemn the "dastardly act" and the "heroic" action of those who dug the out the shirt carrying the "curse."

Give him credit for some tongue-in-cheek, maybe. But Levine was once in the U.S. attorney's office himself -- which leads to the question if in that job he would have wasted even a minute of taxpayer time reviewing such nonsense.

Dan Janison

Oh, good night nurse, here we go again. In New York City, another closed little circle of officially-denied but officially-fed speculation has been launched about Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who this time is allegedly trying to find a way around term limits to run for a third four-year hitch in 2009. Reports are here and here. This bears the M.O. of the Keep-Him-Relevant unit of municipal government, in the style of the recently-ended Mike-for-president speculation that of course came to naught.

You can see the advantage to Bloomberg. Without this stuff, the stories about the city's disturbing pattern of building accidents, the lack of urban housing, the faltering economy, and the prevailing idea that the Manhattan toll has been defeated on the merits -- just like the ill-considered West Side stadium -- might be all we hear about the administration.

The mayor's spokesman said Bloomberg will be out of office by the end of next year, but hey --how can you let it go at that when somebody else in a nearby office....

Dan Janison

Perhaps it won't win the man a lot of muscular friends on Rte. 111 in Suffolk. But one urban scholar, Owen Gutfreund, in a Times Op Ed today makes a pretty logical argument that new tolls should be weighted toward the oversized gas-guzzlers and against the more fuel-efficient vehicles. This is a worthy read when you consider that New Jersey, Massachussetts and now New York have all sputtered in their highly-emotional efforts to get a grip on gridlock and fund mass transit through toll policies. Congestion pricing is like Rasputin -- keeps getting killed, keeps getting up, which is kind of why we didn't load this site with daily updates in recent days on its life-death cycle. Plus, Bloomberg leaves at the end of next year due to term limits, making him a lame duck -- private funding power or none -- who is unlikely to get any major initiatives through Albany.And say, isn't that a city SUV that drops him off at the subway station when he goes to City Hall? Will his successor be downsizing to a Prius?

Dan Janison

The top NYC political story, of course, is the City Council's acknowledgement that it used fictitious names to account for funds -- slush funds, really -- that Speakers past and/or present would use at his or her discretion to dole out to chosen programs.

Seasoned Council correspondent Frankie Edozien broke the scandal in the Post yesterday, and everyone else follows up today. Questions abound as to what the storm may mean to Mayor Mike Bloomberg's Manhattan toll plan, given Council Speaker Christine Quinn's backing for it.

It looks for now as if the budgeteers in the Hall thought up a cute and creative way to track money flows for the pork barrel. Remember, this is a budget so large and complicated -- think of a state-sized government just for the five boroughs -- that Rudy Giuliani's travel costs to Long Island were sent through the obscure Loft Board and his construction of a multimillion emergency management office was silently authorized without a cottage industry of monitors even knowing about it.

Dan Janison

Via Azi and the Observer, here's Quinn talking:

With all forms of buffoonery permitted today, Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger got a few colleagues going with this "announcement":

WALL STREET CEO GIVES BACK GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES; "We Didn't Deserve this Corporate Welfare," Exec Says

The outgoing CEO of the Bear Stearns investment firm, which was just bailed out of near bankruptcy with a $30 billion guarantee from the Federal Reserve to enable JP Morgan Chase to purchase the firm at a huge discount, announced today that the firm had performed so poorly that it was returning all government subsidies that it had received, including
$37 million in tax breaks and other incentives given by the City in 1991 and the $75 million benefits package also given to them by the City in 1997.

CEO James Cayne, who is stepping down, said, "We didn't earn or deserve such corporate welfare, so we're giving it all back. At a time when one in five of the city's children live in homes without enough food, our company can't, in good conscience, keep taxpayer support that could better be used to fight problems....

The city press spoofed the Spitzer scandal in its Inner Circle revue Saturday, with the song “Love Client No. 9” and an “E Harmony” style video ad featuring ersatz hookers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg avoided it in his own response sketch, which had a walk-on by Giants QB Eli Manning. Paterson quickly dropped in; Nassau Executive Thomas Suozzi attended.

More on the satire here .

Sure, they were running mates. Sure, both are Democrats. Sure, they worked mostly in tandem as governor and lieutenant governor.

But it would be hard to find men with more different personal styles than Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson. It is a contrast that goes deeper than obvious facts of race and disability.

Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president who was the party's 2005 candidate for New York City mayor, knows them both.

"Monday night, I said a prayer for two guys who are friends of mine," said Ferrer, now in private life. "Both are blazingly smart, in different ways. One is impulsive, the other is thoughtful."

Paterson, says Ferrer, is "thoughtful and deliberate, and thinks things out a number of steps." As for advice, Ferrer adds, "the thing he will need to do - and it's easy to say now that I'm out of politics - is curb his natural tendency to be witty."

Say what you will now that he's done, but nobody ever accused Spitzer of being a schmoozer or a raconteur. The Albany crowd knows that in private.....

Dan Janison

New Yorkers are expected to vote in relatively huge numbers on Tuesday, marking their biggest participation in a presidential primary in 20 years.

For the Democrats, election officials said yesterday, turnout could reach or surpass the levels of the 1988 scrum among Mike Dukakis, Jesse Jackson and Al Gore, who drew more than 1.5 million votes combined.

And that year had no Republican contest, with Vice President George H.W. Bush the insider GOP candidate. This year, Republicans choose from five candidate names, including contestants Mitt Romney and John McCain, who is now the favorite of the state’s party leadership.

“We’re preparing in a way similar to a November presidential general election,” said Steve Richman, counsel to the New York City Board of Elections. “Yes, we are anticipating heavy turnout. Because it’s both Democrats and Republicans, there is a larger portion of the eligible-voter base that can participate.”

“I’d compare this to 1988,” said Nassau Democratic chairman Jay Jacobs, who backs Hillary Rodham Clinton against Barack Obama. “It was the last time New York was in play as a state whose delegates could make a difference.”

Fellow Clinton supporter Richard Schaffer, the Suffolk Democratic chairman, concurred with the comparison, saying....

Dan Janison

Ethnicity tends to get raised in a New York campaign, and here's a little cross-section of its varied pushes and pulls:

In the Bronx, a traditional center of Latino electoral life in the city, Councilman Joel Rivera, son of county Democratic chairman and Assemb. Jose Rivera, is hosting a presidential “debate watch” party Thursday for Hillary Rodham Clinton delegates.

Assemb. Adriano Espaillat (D-Manhattan), left, a strident critic of Suffolk Executive Steve Levy on illegal immigration issues, is also on the Feb. 5 ballot to become a Clinton delegate. In Suffolk, Dominican-born Legis. Vivian Viloria-Fisher appears on Democratic ballots to be a delegate for Sen. Barack Obama....

In Brooklyn’s Borough Park, a center of Orthodox Judaism in the city, veteran Assemb. Dov Hikind (photo right) has not endorsed in the Democratic primary. He urges Clinton to support the release of life-sentenced spy Jonathan Pollard and questions Obama’s Chicago pastor praising minister Louis Farrakhan. Hikind doesn’t offer comment on the candidacy of Giuliani, who’s popular in his community, but whose mayoral aides once pushed what a jury deemed an unfounded criminal case against him...

In the Irish Voice, Niall O’Dowd warns on immigration: “Every Republican candidate with the exception of McCain has demagogued this issue to death hoping to milk votes from it. In the end, though, it may come back to haunt them.”

Dan Janison

Eight years ago this week, Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered his seventh State of the-City address, marking the midpoint of his second and, by law, final term. It was laced with the usual self-congratulation, aimed in part at an audience beyond the five boroughs.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered his seventh State of the City address, marking the midpoint of his second and final term. It, too, was laced with the customary self-congratulation - and aimed a bit at an audience beyond the five boroughs.

When Giuliani, Bloomberg's possible rival, spoke in City Hall on Jan. 13, 2000, he'd started running for higher office - U.S. Senate - without having announced that he was doing so. And when Bloomberg spoke at the new ice rink in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park yesterday, he, too, had started running for higher office - the presidency - without saying so.

Ballot preparations and strategies and planning have moved far enough along now that for billionaire Bloomberg the only question is whether he pulls the plug in the coming weeks on his unorthodox stealth candidacy - or embraces it in full.

All this presidential fanfare, though, hides the sobering truth of his day job: Having two years left in office means a shrinkage of municipal power and the prospect of a government adrift.

With economic storm clouds looming, Bloomberg called yesterday for sacrifices by unions. But labor leaders in the room knew full well that Bloomberg now lacks leverage. He leaves in 2009 - and the latest round of contracts is already negotiated and signed.

Key parts of his broader agenda appear doomed as well. Nobody applauded, for example, when .....

Dan Janison

New York City Councilman Jim Oddo's candid response to a European TV outfit's Ali G.-like attempt to waste his time with a fake interview became an ad-hoc YouTube hit just a little while back. Perhaps playing off that cyber-fame, Oddo has sent out invites to his Jan. 9 fundraiser in the Woolworth Building, where tix go for $250 to $1,000 that show a beaming Oddo next to the adjectives: Shy, Bashful, Introverted, Reserved, Reticent and Soft-spoken. For those just turning in, here's a holiday rerun of the cult classic, showing we really have strayed far from the days of FDR's radio-broadcast fireside chats.But make no mistake: The Staten Island Republican's hair-trigger don't-tread-on-me spirit won him fans among libs and righties alike. Underneath the original is a subsequent interview with the Councilmember. What would you have done?

The feds have long been looking into the finances of Rev. Al Sharpton's 2004 presidential campaign. Now they've raided the headquarters of his National Action Network in Harlem, as reported by Greg Smith and Larry McShane in the Daily News here. Sharpton has scheduled a 10:30 a.m. press conference, where as always he will undoubtedly tell everyone the unvarnished truth.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is headed to China next week and while his schedule is still being worked out, the mayor says there’s one thing he must do, lest he be “derelict in his duty as mayor of New York City.”

Visit the Great Wall of China?

Distribute Big Apple keychains?

Ride the subway?

Nope.

Talk about freedom.

The mayor, at an afternoon news conference, said “there are concerns that I have — press issues, and human rights issues and transparency of financial statements — that really do matter to New Yorkers and to Americans — and there’s a forum to be able to discuss that...."

Karla Schuster

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn says she'll stick with the term-limits law as it is -- undoubtedly part of some calculus involving 2009 when the mayoralty comes open after two terms under Michael Bloomberg.

She and other contenders for speaker to succeed the term-limited Manhattanite Gifford Miller last year spoke about the various downsides of the term-limit law, including loss of experience and continuity. That was certainly the popular position among incumbents on the Council facing ouster. But that was then and this is now, and even an extension of the limit from two terms to three has already been rejected once at the polls (Giuliani and Vallone had pushed that one) and you can see how it might look risky for the Council to push a change through on its own without mayoral support -- Bloomberg has said repeatedly the law should remain as is.

Dan Janison

Quinn's full statement is below:

Big trouble springs from small agencies.

For first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, it was the White House travel office, which ordinary folks would never have thought to care about. In 2000, at the height of her first Senate campaign, the Bill Clinton-era independent prosecutor concluded she gave false information about her role in firing staffers there - which her aides then spun as an exoneration.

Under Gov. George Pataki, the New York State Canal Corp. attempted to sell private development rights to large stretches of the old Erie Canal to a single developer for a mere $30,000. The deal was killed.

For Mayor Ed Koch, it was the unassuming Parking Violations Bureau, exposed as corrupt when he ran City Hall. Prosecutions followed. For Mayor Michael Bloomberg, it was the New York City Local Conditional Release Commission - which he said he'd previously never heard of. The panel granted an embarrassing early release to a one-time Republican ally, former state Sen. Guy Velella, who'd been jailed on corruption charges. The release was revoked and the panel dispersed.

Today, as Rudy Giuliani chases the world's most powerful office, the small stuff usually known only to those inside municipal government has aroused annoyance or worse for his campaign. Last week, a tempest arose over travel costs budgeted through obscure mayoral agencies. Also on Giuliani's watch, you had embezzlement at the Housing Development Corp., theft from a little-known jail fund and other fiascoes - probed and prosecuted under Bloomberg.

Dan Janison

Turns out that New York City officials and Nassau Off-Track Betting had a chat about merging operations a couple of weeks before Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched the no-bailout talk, which threatens operations. Karla Schuster reports the details here. Comments are welcome from the horse-savvy -- or maybe the patronage-oriented -- on how this idea would have come up and why it might or might not work. That's meeting participant and deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, pictured at left in front of a promotional sign for the city's ultimately unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Jim Callaghan recalls a time when a New York City mayor was committed to settling labor disputes regardless of whether they were public or private. He describes Mike Bloomberg as missing-in-action on the current high-cost Broadway strike.

"As New Yorkers watched the strike unfold, the mayor –heretofore known as Missing in Action Mike- was busy giving the keys to the city to the singer Fats Domino and dining at a midtown bistro, to help one business owner. Bloomberg has an uncanny tin ear when it comes to those moments that call for decisiveness and ingenuity; indeed, during last summer’s half-hour rainstorm that closed down the city for an entire day, the mayor was very busy honoring a baseball player, Tom Glavine, who also got the key to the city, which won’t help him much in Atlanta as he recently bade Gotham farewell."

The full piece is here.

Controversial publishing player Judith Regan claimed in a lawsuit this week that she was smeared by executives in Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp., allegedly to guard the political prospects of Rudolph Giuliani. That prompted news outlets and blogs to recall how diligently Giuliani worked as mayor a decade ago to help Murdoch’s Fox News Channel gain a slot on a city cable franchise run by competitor Time-Warner, owners of CNN.

One interesting historic footnote: mayor-to-be Michael Bloomberg played a cameo role in that court case — which Giuliani ultimately lost. His Bloomberg Television News entered the fray, getting in on Fox’s bid to secure a channel on city cable.

We chatted with Fran Reiter, who was involved in the issue as a Giuliani deputy. Reiter, now a private consultant who supports Sen. Hillary Clinton for president, insists that the goal was altruistic and the mayor would have done the same for any New York-headquartered company unfairly cut out of the action.

Politically, she feels, it was unnecessary to have fought this battle and lost when ultimately, the corporate entities involved would reach a private settlement months later.

Dan Janison

What is it about being in the middle of a second term as New York City mayor that creates the impulse to speak negatively of someone whose death is causing you political annoyance?

In March 2000, amid his campaign against Hillary Clinton for Senate, an undercover officer shot to death unarmed private security guard Patrick Dorismond during a botched police drug sting. Giuliani managed to fan political and racial flames by releasing Dorismond's sealed juvenile arrest record, in a bid to establish in defense of police that Dorismond was no "altar boy." Actually, he had been -- and went to the same Brooklyn Catholic school as Giuliani. Some time later, after repeatedly defending his actions, Giuliani said something about regretting that he had not seen the "human" side of the situation.

Which brings us to this week, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg said controversially of the late James Zadroga, a police detective who worked for hundreds of hours on the smoldering pile at Ground Zero: "We wanted to have a hero, and there are plenty of heroes... It's just in this case, science says this was not a hero." The medical examiner had found that Zadroga's death was not directly related to WTC dust....

Dan Janison

Reporting by Greg B. Smith in the Daily News this week examined the role of former Bloomberg lobbyist "Skip" Piscitelli and his off-the-bat political and government communications with City Hall officials shortly after he was out the door and back in the high-powered lobbying firm of Wilson, Elser -- now to be probed as a no-no under ethics laws. The original story is here. Followups are here and here. One question raised is whether the city government officially dispatched help for Republican Nassau clerk Maureen O'Connell in her race to beat Democrat Craig Johnson earlier this year.

For some time, Skip's father Peter Piscitelli has been a big-time lobbying figure in New York City and Albany and was a player back in the Koch administration. Ken Shapiro, former top aide in the state Assembly, also is associated with the firm. The younger Piscitelli's communications with Kevin Sheekey, the mayor's master of political promotion, form a rare glimpse of conversations tracked by e-mail.

Hearings by that public panel to explore so-called congestion pricing -- which calls for a toll on autos and trucks in Manhatttan -- begin tonight at Hofstra University in Nassau and in White Plains. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his former top aide leading the panel but there will be dissident voices as well. Some complain that officials have only whispered word of the hearing schedule -- a grievance described by Newsday's Karla Schuster here.

Tomorrow night the show moves to Hunter College in Manhattan, to York College in Queens next Tuesday, to Hostos Community College in the Bronx next Wednesday, New York City Tech in Brooklyn on Thursday, a week from tomorrow, and to the College of Staten Island on Monday, Nov. 5. All the hearings start 6 p.m.

Where will it all lead? With Bloomberg's relations with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver shaky on other issues, the future of this plan is of course as speculative as ever. Anyway, the Assembly (as did the Senate) posted the fuller specifics of the panel's hearing schedule last week on its Web site here (in case you somehow didn't peruse those sites carefully in the course of your daily life).

Here's some video of Cardinal Egan joking about the Eliot license plan at the Smith dinner. Word is that Bloomberg got a much more enthusiastic reception than the gov.

The Bloomberg Administration is about to announce agreement with the United Federation of Teachers that allows for a new 55-years-old/25-years-in retirement deal, city sources say. Looks at first blush like the education department will be clearing the ranks of many of the more experienced members of the teaching force.

Al Baker of the Times describes the ins and outs of a potential Ray Kelly candidacy for mayor here.

It might make more sense to suppose that if a Democrat wins the White House next year, Kelly's skill set would serve him well in an important appointed role -- perhaps as attorney general, or FBI director, or homeland-security chief.

If he's a municipal candidate, on the other hand, the controversy surrounding his department's arrests of protesters and non-protesters during the 2004 GOP convention might raise a talking point or two.

Being a hard-charging strategist and competent law man, even one of broad career experience, may well be quite a different role from being the protector of the people's liberties, say, or negotiator of services and political budgets.

Dan Janison

By now the profanity-laced video of SI Councilman Jimmy Oddo throwing a fake Ali G.-type "reporter" out of his office has made the rounds of the blogosphere, and as reported here, he apologized for the cursing but not the sentiment behind it. If you read the Youtube comments, you'll see the mix of opinion, but there are a lot of "way to gos" for his spontaneous indignation. We hear the feedback to his office has been flowing mostly in his favor -- much of it from outside the state.

Occasionally it seems as if a police radio scanner would make a handy tool for tracking New York politics. A full roster of elected officials, former elected officials, their associates, and their appointees find themselves in legal trouble or under an investigative shadow. All these cases are likely to generate news in the months ahead.

NOTE: If someone relevant is omitted here, no slight was intended. Just let us know.

Brian McLaughlin — the former Queens Assemblyman and labor leader — was charged with ripping off $2.2 million from different sources, including campaign funds and even a Little League. Federal charges of embezzlement, fraud and bribery, filed nearly a year ago, are still pending. Part of the case involved renovations to his 13-room colonial house in Nissequogue.

Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, while engaged in a political war with rookie Gov. Eliot Spitzer, remains vexed by a federal probe that surfaced late last year involving his private business deals. No charges have been filed.

Also under extended review, of course, are the business activities of relatives and former aides of ex-state Comptroller Alan Hevesi....

A sad and bizarre death has hit the family of New York City's elected public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum. Carol Anne Gotbaum, was the daughter-in-law of her husband, retired D.C. 37 chief Victor Gotbaum. She had been in custody at an Arizona airport after a dispute with authorities who refused to let her board a plane. Details are sparse, and the public advocate in an appearance today asked the press for privacy. News report here.