Anyone else watching this trial? It's absolutely fascinating and with local Niagara County connections. SS George Maziarz is on the witness list and will be testifying shortly.
Check out the Albany Times Union newspaper and the NYTimes. The Times Union has some pretty good coverage including the indictment and transcripts of the witnesses testimony.
I for one can't wait to see what SS GM has to say under oath as it will be one of the only times he'll be held to the truth. Unless that is, he's so stupid as to perjure himself.
The Albany Times Union reports that Wright Investor's Ken Singer testimony in the trial of Joseph L. Bruno ties Niagara County state Senator George Maziarz to local labor contacts, affiliations, pension deals and alleged felonies.
Read here: BRUNO TAKES BRUSING (Judge Warns Bruno - in no uncertain terms) http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=865205&category=BRUNO
and here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=joseph+Bruno+trial+maziarz&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
Judge to Joe Bruno: "You don't control things here, I do."
Thursday, November 12 For once in your life you dont control something, I do, US District Judge Gary L. Sharpe snapped at former Senate Majority Joe Bruno, on trial in Albany for allegedly using his influence as one of the states three most powerful elected officials to drum up business for an investment firm that employed him as a consultant. Sharpe had overheard Bruno as he muttered something disparaging about the judges decision to allow a prosecutor to re-question a witness during the defenses cross-examination. You ever do what you just did in the presence of that jury again, which is question any of my rulings, I will take measures to make sure you dont repeat that, Sharpe said. Do you understand me?
Coming up on the witness list in the Bruno trial: State Senator George Maziarz of Niagara County, who will certainly be asked how Laborers Local 91 came to invest $10 million in pension funds with Wright Investment Services, the firm for which Bruno consulted.
*SIDE BAR: Maziarz has not been called yet to testify (20 Nov.2009) and may not at all and perhaps at least for now, not in the Senator Joe Bruno trial.
November 6, 2009 By The Associated Press MICHAEL VIRTANEN (Associated Press Writer) Quick Summary
Documents show Bruno approached Pataki, state college for tech company that employed him
ALBANY, N.Y. - ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) Documents presented Friday at the corruption trial of the former New York Senate majority leader show he approached then-Gov. George Pataki and a state college on behalf of a technology company that employed him part time.
In letters between then-Sen. Joseph Bruno and Sage Alerting Systems officials, Bruno claimed he helped sell $1 million in computer equipment in 1993, some to Hudson Valley Community College in his political stronghold, Rensselaer County.
Bruno was paid $44,000 in commissions that year, and the sales threshold let him exercise stock options.
Accused of using his state influence to enrich himself by some $3.2 million over 13 years, depriving New Yorkers of his honest services, Bruno faces eight fraud counts. He was Senate Republican majority leader from 1995 until retiring last year. He repeated Friday that he was simply a businessman with his sideline consulting and did nothing wrong.
Other documents put in evidence showed that Bruno, under his Senate letterhead, proposed that Pataki meet in 1995 with an IBM representative for a possible school computer partnership. Bruno's employer sold IBM computers and requested he set up the meeting.
Prosecutors noted that Bruno's letter to Pataki omitted reference to the company employing Bruno, then called Ameridata Technologies.
Leonard Fassler, co-chairman of Sage and other offshoot technology companies that paid Bruno as a consultant for several years, said Ameridata was paying Bruno at that point. He said "opening doors" was one of the things they'd thought he could help them with, and at another point he sent him a list of top corporations like PepsiCo and Merrill Lynch they hoped he'd help them contact.
Fassler, testifying with a grant of immunity from prosecution for everything except perjury, said he found Bruno's advice and example as a leader worth the consulting fee of $4,000 a month. Bruno's payments from the Fassler companies amounted to $468,000 over 11 years.
The initial employment letter acknowledged limitations on Bruno's business activities because of his state position. "We also recognize ethical considerations dictate that you should not represent us before any state agency or any other state-related business," it said.
Bruno also, at Fassler's request, called a 2005 meeting at his state office with Motorola and other companies jointly bidding for the contract to provide New York with a roughly $2 billion statewide wireless emergency communications network. Those companies included IBM and Vytek, another Fassler company that employed Bruno.
At issue was Motorola's information that the competing bidder M/A-COM, a division of Tyco Electronics, would be unable to fulfill the contract, Fassler said. Bruno listened, and while M/A-COM got the contract, it was canceled last year because of technical problems, he said.
Fassler acknowledged that Bruno didn't disclose to the companies that he was working for Vytek, though of course Fassler and Vytek knew. "He didn't make any disclosures to the company on this list that I'm aware of," he said.
However, Fassler also said Bruno never told him not to disclose the business relationship. When another of Fassler's companies, Convergence Technologies Inc., got a state-backed $1.7 million investment in 2005 through then-Comptroller Alan Hevesi, that was the result of the venture capital company Fassler had approached, and Bruno got nothing. "I told him you can't get any commission fees here because New York state has an interest, and he agreed."
Ex-majority leader faces prison term By Tom Precious News Albany Bureau Updated: December 07, 2009, 11:37 PM
ALBANY Once the top Republican power broker in the state capital, Joseph L. Bruno was convicted Monday on two felony charges of depriving the public of his "honest services," putting the former Senate majority leader in a growing class of top state government officials to fall unceremoniously from their positions of influence.
Bruno was accused by federal prosecutors of getting wealthy hauling in more than $3 million through his consulting firm, whose clients included companies and unions with business before the state.
Bruno was cleared of five more fraud counts, and a mistrial was declared in a sixth count after the jury remained deadlocked. On one count, Bruno was found guilty of mail fraud involving checks he received from companies tied to an Albany-area businessman and Bruno friend, Jared Abbruzzese. The jury determined, in essence, that money received from Abbruzzese's companies amount to gifts because he did not perform "legitimate work" for the firms.
A side venture Bruno had breeding thoroughbred horses also factored into the second guilty count: failing to disclose his participation in a horse business with Abbruzzese and the $40,000 check he got from the businessman for a horse that prosecutors said was "virtually worthless."
The case could have significant implications for New York legislators, most of whom, like Bruno when he was in office, have outside jobs and consulting arrangements with companies that, in some cases, have dealings with the state government. Lawmakers for months have talked warily of a chilling effect a Bruno guilty verdict could create for them if prosecutors seek to use what they call the same murky federal provision to investigate their outside dealings.
U.S. District Judge Gary Sharpe set sentencing for March 31. Bruno, who sat largely expressionless as the verdicts were read, faces up to 20 years in federal prison. He remains free on his own recognizance; the judge denied a prosecutor's request that Bruno hand over his passport.
After hearing the verdict, Bruno vowed an appeal. "The legal process will continue," he said. "In my mind and in my heart, it is not over until it's over, and I think it's far from over."
Much of official Albany was quiet following the verdict. Gov. David A. Paterson was just one of many officials to decline comment on the verdict.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Baxter said that while prosecutors "take no pleasure" from the revelations about the Senate that came out during the trial, the government proved that Bruno "exploited his office by concealing the nature and source of substantial payments that he received from parties that benefited from his official actions and the resulting conflicts of interest."
While Bruno appeals his specific case, all eyes in Albany, and in public offices across the country for that matter, will be closely following three cases coming before the U.S. Supreme Court that seek to challenge what critics call the vagueness of the federal "theft of honest services" statute that has become a powerful tool for prosecutors over the years. The first of the two cases comes before the high court today for oral arguments, and the court's decision could have a significant impact on Bruno's legal future.
"We're confident that things will look differently very soon," Bruno spokesman Kris Thompson said of the Supreme Court cases.
Besides possibly imposing prison time, Sharpe is expected to consider a fine against Bruno of as much as $500,000, as well as forfeiture of any assets Bruno may have gotten from the schemes for which he was found guilty Monday.
The decision came on the seventh day of jury deliberations and after three weeks of testimony at a federal courthouse in downtown Albany in the shadow of buildings and mega-projects Bruno personally helped to drive through as the king of the Capital District's pork barrel at the Capitol. The 12 jurors, surrounded by U.S. marshals, were escorted to their cars as they ignored questions shouted from the throng of reporters surrounding them.
A onetime boxer and Korean War veteran who once ran a telecommunications company with state business while in the Senate, Bruno, 80, came to power as Senate GOP leader following a Thanksgiving week coup in 1994. Over the years, he made a lasting imprint on Albany, pushing a confusing mix of conservative and liberal policy initiatives on everything from gay rights to tax breaks for politically connected industries that saw him cozying up to business and labor alike. Known for his media-savvy ways in a town where officials rarely speak candidly to the media, Bruno was an unabashed financial cheerleader for the Capital District; he used to proudly release computer discs filled with all the pork he drove home each year. A bronze Bruno bust sits in the Albany airport, and a local baseball stadium is named for him.
In his home district of Rensselaer and Saratoga counties, he was known as Uncle Joe, mainly for the billions of dollars in state investments he steered to the region during his days as majority leader, which put him at the table since 1995 with his on-again, off-again partner, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and three different governors.
"We love you, Joe," a woman shouted as Bruno and his lawyers tried to make it down an Albany sidewalk jammed with reporters and cameras.
"Thank you very much," Bruno said.
"I'm going to leave it up to the legal process, and before it's over I think we're going to be OK. I still have a lot of confidence in the legal system," Bruno said before getting into a car with advisers and his son, Kenneth, a former lobbyist and onetime Rensselaer County district attorney.
In December 2006, Bruno shocked Albany when he revealed at a hastily called news conference that the FBI had launched an investigation into his outside business dealings. He professed innocence then, as he has throughout the trial in back-of-the-courtroom comments with reporters and brief press gaggles following court proceedings over the past month.
Bruno had been charged with eight mail and wire fraud counts that centered on a federal statute accusing him of depriving New York citizens of his "honest services" because, prosecutors claimed, he traded on his powerful post to make himself rich. They said New Yorkers had a right to his "disinterested decision-making when performing official duties" and that Bruno needed to disclose any potential conflicts of interest.
The government also accused him of trying to conceal some of his outside work on annual disclosure forms lawmakers must file with a legislative ethics committee. The government alleged the fraud stretched from 1993 until 2006. Bruno resigned his seat in 2008.
The Bruno trial exposed a side of Albany about the mixing of public and private lives that have long been whispered about but, with the tools of a federal prosecutor, became public.
In Bruno's case, it meant revelations about state employees getting paid by taxpayers to do work for the senator's private business dealings; companies that use the connections of a powerful legislative leader to expand their profits; and unions that go beyond just the merits of their arguments to get their legislative wish list in Albany.
"This should be a wake-up call to all legislative members who have outside business interests that they should be very careful about how they divide their public time as public servants and their professional time in their second careers," said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group. He called the Bruno verdict "a political earthquake" for Albany.
