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NYS Announces Medical Marijuana Licenses

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The New York State Department of Health today announced the five companies it will license to grow and produce medical marijuana. Here is the list:

medmar by Nick Reisman

None of the applicants from western New York were selected. This includes Lewiston Greenhouse, LLC, which had hired Steve Pigeon’s PAPI Consulting to lobby the state on its behalf. Lewiston Greenhouse fired Pigeon shortly after the May 28th state and federal raids of the homes of Pigeon, former Deputy Mayor Steve Casey, and Chris Collins’ Chief of Staff, Chris Grant.

Dan Humiston, the founder of the “Tanning Bed” chain also submitted a rejected application to grow marijuana in the former Tyson chicken plant in South Buffalo. It’s believed that Humiston is Pigeon’s landlord.

Out of 43 companies that submitted applications, three were from western New York.

How The Preetsmas Gang is Spending its Summer Vacation

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Note: The Attorney for the Brown Campaign spoke with me after this piece was published, and that update can be found here. 

We’re still waiting for the inevitable Preetsmas fallout. The statute of limitations for all of the alleged misdemeanors expires in the next month, so everyone expects something to happen shortly.

Although somewhat hobbled by a federal and state investigation into alleged campaign finance fraud and illegality, Steve Pigeon’s crew is still active in the Michele Brown for Family Court race. The endorsed Democratic candidate is Kelly Brinkworth.

The Buffalo News and Geoff Kelly in the Public have recounted the political oddballs helping Brown out, and the curious inflow and outflow of money regarding that campaign. Most notable was the $10,000 to Steve Casey’s LSA Strategies – a business carefully set up using a proxy Brooklyn address, perhaps to thwart or slow scrutiny into its ownership. It remains an open question whether this is the rumored company that Casey co-owns with Chris Collins’ Congressional Chief of Staff, Chris Grant.

Local political veteran Ken Kruly runs an excellent blog, and he looked into the Brown campaign’s campaign disclosures, noting this:

  • As of July 15th, Ms. Brown had $125,205 in her campaign account, more than the amount that Freedman ($64,791) and Brinkworth ($38,048) had combined.
  • Brown has raised nothing from individuals, corporations, other candidates, etc.
  • Brown loaned herself a total of $60,000 in three different loans.
  • Brown has also received a $100,000 loan from her husband, Eugene Cunningham.
  • The Brown campaign paid $10,000 to LSA Strategies LLC, the consulting firm operated by Steve Casey.  (Just wondering, is Chris Grant a partner in that firm?)
  • The Brown campaign paid $4,000 to political consultant Maurice Garner.
  • Grassroots of Buffalo was paid $750.
  • The Brown campaign paid $2,000 for petition circulation to Louis Turchiarelli, who has previously petitioned for at least one Pigeon-supported candidate in Niagara Falls, an effort that stirred some controversy.
  • The Brown campaign paid $5,568 to the committee of David Hartzell, Clarence Town Supervisor, for petition work.  Why is the campaign of the Republican town supervisor in the business or circulating petitions for other candidates?  Looking at the dollar amounts that were paid to “consultants” to the Hartzell committee, it looks like they turned a nice profit.  There are contribution limits that apply to various offices and it may be that $5,568 exceeds the legal limit that the Brown for Family Court committee may give to Hartzell’s committee.
  • The Brown campaign gave $1,500 to the committee supporting Christine Bove, a candidate for West Seneca supervisor in the upcoming Democratic primary.  Bove allies also circulated Brown petitions.  This one has an interesting twist.  Steve Casey is working on the redevelopment of the former Seneca Mall site in West Seneca and it would certainly be nice to have some connection to the town supervisor.  But the incumbent supervisor is Sheila Meegan, the daughter of Chris Walsh, and Walsh is Steve Pigeon’s mentor.  So the question is, why would Casey be working with an opponent of the Meegan-Walsh-Pigeon alliance?
  • Casey and Kristy Mazurek, of Pigeon’s WNY Progressive Caucus fame, carried petitions for Brown.
  • Pigeon ally Joe Makowski, who resigned his State Supreme Court seat in 2009 , is assisting in the management of the campaign, operating out of his law office.

The “payments” made by the Michele Brown campaign are indeed wrong on a number of levels:

1. You can’t “hire” a political committee to do work for you, since the very nature of a political committee under the IRS code exception is to keep the money going in and out  “tax free”. As soon as a political committee gets into the business of making money by being paid for circulating someone’s petitions, they have become a profit-making entity subject to state and federal taxation.  What Clarence Supervisor Hartzell is doing is “earning” money payable to his political committee without paying taxes on it. This is pretty basic, and not an obscure rule, so the Michelle Brown campaign is participating in a tax avoidance scheme. Since she has now stated that she paid the money for petitioning services, will she be sending the Hartzell political committee (and the Christina Bove committee in West Seneca) an IRS 1099 form, as a vendor? And will his committee start filing tax returns and pay income taxes on the money received? If not, that’s illegal.

2. The legal limit for “contributions” to the Hartzell campaign is about $1,000 for the primary race against Town Councilman Pat Casilio, and $1,000 if Hartzell makes it to November.  Brown’s campaign “contributed” – and he “accepted a contribution” – of over $6,000.  Seems like a pretty big faux pas on the part of such a business savvy town supervisor. The limits in West Seneca for the Bove “contributions” may be higher.

3. The Brown campaign has another problem. If she has listed these payments, under the sworn signature of her treasurer, as “contributions” made to two candidates’ political committees, judicial ethics rules prohibit such “contributions” generally, but makes an exception for the attendance at political parties as a part of “campaigning”.  The committee for a judicial candidate may purchase up to 2 tickets (@ $250/each) for attendance at such political events. Paying another political committee for petition labor doesn’t count, and any such contribution is illegal.

So, we have the same old crew running the same old racket, with Pigeon as boss and Casey as underboss. As always, the promise of money and patronage help them marshal a crew of soldiers, (who are, at best, ignorant), to break laws and ethical rules in order to funnel campaign cash into friends’ vendor businesses and buy an elected office. In this case, it’s comparatively small potatoes, since the Family Court judgeship doesn’t control a significant number of jobs. This amounts to an attempt to stay relevant even when under investigation.

But as set forth above, they seem to have an almost innate inability or unwillingness to follow the law and rules, prefering instead behavior so brazen, one could coin a new phrase, “political racketeering”. They’re taking a big risk, because there is an Attorney General and US Attorney who are aggressively pursuing violations of laws that had previously been subject to lackadaisical enforcement.

Unfortunately for western New York, our Erie County District Attorney is completely absent when it comes to prosecuting blatant, repeated violations of election law.

The Heroin Epidemic & Erie County

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The Buffalo News’ headline announces that there have been ten heroin overdoses in just 24 hours. People throughout WNY are dying after taking a deadly mixture of heroin and fentanyl. Erie County Health Commissioner Gale Burstein calls it a “public health crisis”. It’s not limited to any one neighborhood or town – it’s regional. We are apparently on track for overdoses to double those of 2014.

In 2007, the Erie County Legislature received $1.4 million from Albany to fund a program “targeting drug abuse among young people.” Then-County Executive Joel Giambra supported the program, and the control board was on board with the county’s participation.

In 2008, new County Executive Chris Collins abruptly pulled the county out of the program before it had even had a chance to begin. Why?

Collins’ deputy, Mark Davis, who has been reviewing a long list of county contracts, deemed it not in the best interest of county taxpayers, aides said.

…Collins administration officials reasoned that county caseworkers already focus on drug abuse, as do numerous not-for-profit organizations. The county also was expected to provide an office and computer equipment for what was going to become a new unit, so the program was not totally free to Erie County taxpayers.

Further, Collins and Davis did not want the 20 new unionized employees, to be represented by Local 815, Civil Service Employees Association, to become the county’s responsibility if the grant money dried up after the first three years, the aides said.

The County under Chris Collins pulled out of a specialized program to tackle drug abuse because “the taxpayer”.

“Under the grant, New York State dictated how the program would run,” said Collins spokesman Grant Loomis, “and the administration does not feel those terms make for an efficient program.”

Loomis said the county is asking the state and its Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services whether Erie can use the money to hire private or nonprofit agencies that target drug abuse.

So, a program that was funded by Albany and approved by a prior administration, the county legislature, and the control board were just set aside unilaterally by Chris Collins. To be fair, Collins had an alternative proposal – that the county would spend the $1.4 million to hire more counselors at ECMC, but that’s not the same.

“I’m really not happy about this,” said Legislator Robert B. Reynolds, D-Hamburg, one of the lawmakers who want to know how Collins can abandon a program, especially one that helps young people, after the Legislature and the control board had approved.

Since Erie is New York’s largest upstate county, with a large number of child-protective cases, it was to be an “evaluation county” whose experience with the program would determine whether it should continue.

At the time, people were scrambling even to find out if what Collins had done was legal. Did he have the authority to simply disregard previously voted-on and approved county actions?

The Legislature gives the county executive authority to sign contracts, but it is unclear what happens when the county executive decides not to or wants to cancel a contract.

The county’s state-appointed Fiscal Stability Authority cannot affect Collins’ decision.

“Under our authority, we review and approve or disapprove county contracts of $50,000 and above,” said Chairman Anthony J. Baynes. “Even if we approve a contract, if someone decides at a later date that they do not want to enter into the contract or to cancel that agreement, that’s not within our scope.”

Collins’ staff is drafting a letter to lawmakers explaining his reasoning. Meanwhile, Legislator Thomas J. Mazur, D-Cheektowaga, is among those who want an opinion from the Legislature’s new lawyer.

“I don’t think he can just pull the plug on a project like that,” Mazur said.

The County Legislature reacted in May 2008 with a resolution, “Opposition to the County Executive’s Termination of a 100% State-Funded Grant to Provide Substance Abuse Services for At-Risk Families“:

2008 Erie County Resolution Re: Substance Abuse

The matter was referred to the committee on health and human services, and the only member to vote against sending it to the full legislative body was Ed Rath. The full legislature voted on the resolution, and the minutes record: “MR. MAZUR moved to approve item Number 3. MR. REYNOLDS seconded. MR. MILLS, MR. RANZENHOFER, MR. RATH and MS. IANNELLO voted in the negative. CARRIED. (10-4).”

In hindsight, it’s shameful and anti-democratic that the County Executive was permitted to simply refuse to implement a program that the legislature and his predecessor had pushed forward and approved, with support from the control board. Government ought to help and protect its poorest and most vulnerable, and Mr. Collins – who has since been promoted to Congress – not only abdicated that role repeatedly during his tenure as County Executive, but did so by simply ignoring duly enacted laws and procedures. Having pledged to run government “like a business”, I’d be wary of any business that would act with such cavalier disregard to the dictates of its board of directors. I’d avoid any business that would refuse to participate in a cost-free program to help vulnerable customers struggling with substance abuse.

A Preetsmas Recap and Update

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It’s been just over two weeks since we first celebrated Preetsmas, and here are the posts we’ve done so far:

The First day of Preetsmas (5/28/15): State and Federal investigators raid the homes of political circusmaster Steve Pigeon, former Deputy Mayor Steve Casey, and Chief of Staff to Chris Collins (NY-27), Chris Grant. We examine the likely connections between these three individuals, a brief history of the WNY Progressive Caucus (AwfulPAC), and we celebrate the first day of Preetsmas by concluding that there was likely a plan to move a casino to West Seneca.  There were more questions than answers, especially: why wasn’t AwfulPAC treasurer Kristy Mazurek raided, and what does Chris Grant have to do with anything? Could this reach as far as the Governor?

The Second day of Preetsmas (6/4/15): An in-depth look at the history and activities of the WNY Progressive Caucus, or AwfulPAC. I reported on this Pigeonista conflagration extensively as it happened, so I pulled it into an overall narrative.

The Third Day of Preetsmas (6/2/15): Seneca cigarette bootlegger Aaron Pierce and his various and sundry LLCs are brought up quite often, and we examine his connections to AwfulPAC and other politicians, including Assemblyman Mickey Kearns.

The Fourth Day of Preetsmas (6/3/15): More on the Kearns/Pierce connection; Chris Grant’s Herd Solutions is now based out of North Carolina? Steve Pigeon’s connections to Bricklayer’s Union boss Gene Caccamise; Mazurek is reported to be cooperating with authorities; the Senecas fire Pigeon’s PAPI Consulting as their Albany lobbyist.

The Fifth Day of Preetsmas (6/3/15): We discovered Steve Pigeon’s tax liens, the total of which approach $300,000. This directly contradicted the detailed and scholarly analysis that Bob McCarthy, amateur Esther Gulyas tax sleuth, conducted of Pigeon’s “tax records”.

The Sixth Day of Preetsmas  (6/4/15): Bob McCarthy’s reporting on Pigeon has been sloppy, overly deferential, and approached TMZ quality at times. Especial disgust is reserved for the Buffalo News’ repeated tactic of allowing a public figure to prove some point or another by showing his tax returns to reporters who, in turn, report on them as if they know what the hell they’re talking about. Carl Paladino, Chris Collins, and Steve Pigeon have all been able to avoid any real scrutiny or transparency by letting an untrained, non-expert reporter summarize what was contained in some papers that may or may not have been legitimate tax returns. We also published certain key documents from a pending lawsuit brought by the estate of the late Conservative fusion Party guru Billy Delmont against an LLC controlled by people including Pigeon and longtime acolyte Jack O’Donnell. Apparently, they spent over $300,000 on a newspaper group and building without having done a stitch of due diligence. We learn of a possible grant of immunity to someone inside City Hall, Ed Betz’s name comes up a few times, and Terry Connors denies that he’s representing Tim Kennedy, despite Kennedy’s campaign having paid Connors over $60,000 in late 2014.

The Seventh Day of Preetsmas (6/5/15): Frank Max and his PAC gave way more than the maximum allowed to two AwfulPAC candidates in 2013; we examined some very odd financial “disclosures” involving “Responsible New York”, GDSP, LLC, “Citizens for Fiscal Integrity”, and “People for Accountable Government. Roger Stone’s name comes up, and we take a brief look at current aide to State Senator Marc Panepinto, David Pfaff. We wonder about coordination, given that Wes Moore gave $300 to the PAC then supporting him, we examine that weird AwfulPAC loan to Pigeon’s Landen Associates, and some other financial oddities regarding the Dick Dobson for Sheriff campaign. AJ Pierce lost a big court battle, and we look at whether State Senator Tim Kennedy and some other entities should have been filing as having participated in the 2013 primary races.

The Eighth Day of Preetsmas (6/7/15): There was a Buffalo News story about money orders that had allegedly been bought and donated to AwfulPAC in contravention of several laws, and we reported that someone had put Matt Connors’ name on those money orders, without his knowledge. Connors works for local developer Nick Sinatra. We write some more about Jack O’Donnell, Kristy Mazurek, Marketing Tech and its connection with Steve Casey, and we break the story about how AwfulPAC changed its status in mid-stream.

The Ninth Day of Preetsmas (6/9/15): Examining Pigeon’s claimed addresses, including Sandi Schmidt’s Cheektowaga address, his apparent residency in a condo owned by ganjapreneur Dan Humiston, the fee liens filed against that condo, his use of attorney John Bartolomei’s address, and we look at the lobbying activity of PAPI Consulting, LLC and GDSP, LLC.

The Tenth day of Preetsmas (6/11/15): We define the term “Pigeoning” or “to Pigeon”, and look back at prior efforts to Pigeon races in 2004 and 2008 using various campaign entities, including Tom Golisano’s “Responsible New York”. We compare this to the activities of AwfulPAC in 2013 – especially the Sam Fruscione race – and we examine Chris Grant’s only available financial disclosure to the House of Representatives, dated March 2013.

The Eleventh Day of Preetsmas (6/12/15): We’ve obtained the CF-02 and revisions, as well as the very very late CF-03 for AwfulPAC and examine what it all means, including the absence of some key names from that document. Also, Channel 2’s Steve Brown reported on interesting interactions he had with the owner of Marketing Technologies, and with a spokesman for Nick Sinatra .

Preetsmas: In their Own Words (6/14/15): Using quotes taken directly from the Buffalo News, we take a little trip down memory lane, revisiting prior electoral issues surrounding Steve Pigeon, and we see the progression in the AwfulPAC investigation from total denial to attorneys making statements.

No one’s been accused, indicted, or convicted of any crime in connection with any of this. The purpose of these various Preetsmas posts is to push out what’s there, to establish patterns of conduct among groups, individuals, and campaigns, and to try and figure out what may ultimately come from all of this. We just don’t know yet, but rumors are now swirling that indictments should come within the next several weeks. We don’t know against whom or for what.

Preetsmas Update

The Buffalo News published an interesting article on Sunday focusing on direct mail. Specifically, it’s alleged that Steve Casey and Chris Grant were deeply involved with direct mail for AwfulPAC, which accounted for a huge chunk of that group’s expenditures in 2013. Casey would reportedly come up with the general concept, and Grant would turn that into an actual mail piece, and the files were sent to Marketing Tech and Gallagher Printing for production and mailing. However, if you look at the financial disclosures, only the payments to the printing shops show up – these shops would allegedly, in turn, pay Casey and Grant directly, (or through Casey’s “LSA Solutions” and Grant’s “HERD Solutions”, respectively).

From the News’ article:

The WNY Progressive Caucus paid the printer for the design and printing costs, and then the printer paid Grant and Casey, the sources said. The total cost therefore showed up on campaign filings as an expense paid to the printer.

A similar billing process was used for work Grant and Casey also did together for Brown’s 2013 re-election campaign, according to a source who has knowledge of their relationship.

State election law requires that second-party payments be itemized if they are over $5,000. The News could not find evidence of any political campaign in New York State filing such reports.

9 NYCRR §6200.8 says,

Whenever a person or entity, such as a consultant acting on behalf of a political committee which supports or opposes candidates for any public office or party position or which supports or opposes any proposition, subcontracts for finished goods or services, the treasurer of the committee shall, in addition to reporting the expenditure made to such consultant or agent, report the name, address and amount expended to each person or entity providing such goods or services the cost of which exceeds … $5,000. The treasurer of any committee which makes such expenditures may, in lieu of providing such information on the statement which lists the expenditure, include the information on a separate schedule to be filed with the committee’s 27-day post general election statement or if it relates to a primary election, with the 10-day post primary statement. In such case the schedule entry shall reference the statement in which the expenditure is listed.

Any lawyer will tell you that the regulatory or legislative use of the word “shall” denotes mandatory – not discretionary – conduct. The question isn’t whether anyone – or no one – actually does what the law says, but whether the law requires it to be done. No one goes 65 on the New York State Thruway, but that’s not a defense to getting a ticket for going 80.

From the Buffalo News,

… the billing process used to pay Casey and Grant for work done for the WNY Progressive Caucus raised a red flag for investigators. Their probe includes following the money trail to learn where Pigeon’s political committee raised money, and where the money went.

And several elected officials contacted by The Buffalo News, who did not want to be identified because they didn’t want to be drawn into the controversy, said that while it was legal, the billing process WNY Progressive Caucus used seems unusual. Casey was placing the orders with the printer who paid him and Grant, which resulted in the printer being identified on campaign records but not them. That gives the impression that the two didn’t want their role with Pigeon’s organization publicly known, these sources said.

Was it “legal”? Perhaps not, according to the letter of the law – more specifically the regulation shown above as it relates to any fees to consultants in excess of $5,000. It also violates the spirit of the law, which exists to provide the public with transparency and information as to who is paying whom for campaign and election work. AwfulPAC contracted with Byron Brown’s Deputy Mayor and a Republican Congressional aide to design the campaign literature for candidates from whom AwfulPAC was allegedly independent.

Is there enough here to prove illegal coordination? It’s nice to have confirmation that the Republicans are actively involved in conspiring with the Pigeon faction to sabotage the Erie County Democratic Committee and its candidates. We can take Mickey Kearns’ word for it – “Chris Grant does work for all Republicans”. More specifically, could AwfulPAC have simply been a joint effort by the Pigeonists and the Republicans to embarrass ECDC and its Chairman, Jeremy Zellner, and to ensure that a Republican majority would take over the County Legislature? The entire Pigeoning M.O. relies on stealth – it was wholly by accident that we learned of AwfulPAC when we did, so it should come as no surprise that it would dance around the edges of legality in order to hide the identities of its consultants, vendors, and supporters to whatever degree possible.

Turning back to AwfulPAC’s disclosure – even today, we have no idea who produced the Dick Dobson TV commercials that AwfulPAC paid for. Someone was paid to produce them – did that person interact with the candidate? How did they obtain the photographs of Dobson that were used in the ads? Did AwfulPAC use a middleman or consultant to place TV ads with Buying Time, LLC from Washington, D.C.? Mayor Byron Brown and Governor Andrew Cuomo also use that firm, and it was the subpoena to Buying Time that reportedly caused Governor Cuomo to interfere with the Moreland Commission’s investigation. This all seems like a pretty major league operation just to screw around with a handful of small-potatoes county legislative races.

Hell, if we really want to get into the question of coordination, here’s a question – AwfulPAC paid “Start to Finish” $500 for “photography” on August 26, 2013. Whom or what did they pay to photograph? The gentleman whom I called refused to answer.

D’Amato & Park Strategies

The Daily News published an article about former Senator Al D’Amato’s power in Albany, and this passage caught quite a few eyes:

But the recent D’Amato scandal connections don’t all revolve around Albany. The FBI and state investigators hit the headlines in Buffalo recently when they raided the homes of three major political operatives, including Steve Pigeon and Steve Casey, both of whom work for one of D’Amato’s biggest upstate clients, the Congel family, father-and-son mall developers.

Their companies paid D’Amato $2.7 million in federal and state lobbying fees. Not only did D’Amato represent the Congel company on a troubled Rochester project, he represented the Monroe County government that backed it.

Pigeon ally and donor Joel Giambra heads up the local office of D’Amato’s Park Strategies.

Kennedy hires Ed Betz

Ed Betz is a young lawyer whose name has come up quite a bit in connection with recent Pigeonings. He has represented Aaron Pierce, and he represents Jack O’Donnell and Steve Pigeon in connection with the lawsuit brought by the Billy Delmont estate.

In May, Betz became an employee of the state Senate as counsel to AwfulPAC donor State Senator Tim Kennedy. He is a former employee of the City of Buffalo and the Erie County Water Authority.

The Sinatra – Pigeon Connection?

Ever since local developer Nick Sinatra’s name came up within the context of the mysteriously purchased money orders, no one has quite understood the connection between them. Perhaps a few articles from faraway San Diego might clear that up? In May 2014, the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote about the real estate situation in that area, and this is notable:

“This business is not for the faint of heart,” said Anthony Nanula, the group’s San Diego manager. Last month, American Coastal sold a home at 1330 Eighth Ave. in downtown that was built in 1920. The Irvine-based group bought the property for $720,000, restored it and closed a deal for about $1.825 million, a sale price they consider a success.

American Coastal Properties has about 12 projects in San Diego County and 30 in Southern California. Those add to the 50 homes already revamped and sold. The group also recently secured $50 million from Colony Capital and the Pritzker/Vlock Family Office to buy and redevelop single-family properties throughout coastal Southern California. That continues a big change from what founding partner Nick Sinatra originally did in 2009: buy homes at auction to fix and flip in the Inland Empire.

“We were purchasing properties at the trustee sales, buying from banks, fixing them up and reselling them,” Sinatra said. “That business sort of was getting squeezed out by some of the institutional people, so we started to look at adding more value through construction.”

So, Pigeon assocate Anthony Nanula is the San Diego manager of a company founded by Nick Sinatra. The Nanulas also work with Sinatra on at least one local project. For his part, in 2013 Pigeon donated $1,000 to San Diego’s GOP Mayor, Nathan Fletcher, raising some Californian eyebrows.

The Nanulas’ Clarence office was the address for the AwfulPAC-backed Wes Moore campaign. The Sinatra projects are funded, at least in part, by an investment from the Pritzker/Vlock Family Office.

Feel free to send tips, info, hints, and bags of cash to buffalopundit[at]gmail.com.

On the Tenth Day of Preetsmas

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What is the true meaning of Preetsmas?

The Story of Preetsmas has many purposes and goals, and among them is to establish that the campaign finance irregularities and accusations surrounding Steve Pigeon and his coterie are not novel nor rare, but chronic and longstanding. Let’s call it “Pigeoning”.

Pigeoning: pi·geon·ing \ˈpi-jən-iŋ\: (n) (1) A periodic use of New York’s byzantine election law to actively sabotage and undermine the Erie County Democratic Committee; (2) The action of accumulating and using money, power, and influence.

But really, the sabotage bit has been a secondary goal, if it’s been one at all. The singular unifying thread has been to enable Pigeon and his hangers-on to gain money, influence, and political power. This is accomplished by, among other things, exploiting the squishy edges of a state election law that’s not written for ease or transparency.

It’s accomplished through doling out patronage and buying people’s loyalty. It’s accomplished through a magnetic attraction to big money, and by our typically New Yorkish corrupt-but-legal minor fusion party horse-trading. Through his machinations, Pigeon has, at times, controlled the Independence fusion line and influenced the Conservative fusion line. We can probably read some volume of quids pro quo within the word “machinations” in the preceding sentence.

Even now, literally not one District Attorney in Western New York has bothered to investigate or prosecute any alleged illegalities, and even enforcement by the Board of Elections has been lukewarm, at best. How convenient it must be, then, for a PAC to simply file a piece of paper and retroactively alter its very nature and being into an unauthorized or authorized committee.

The Pigeoning

Back in 2004, Joe Golombek challenged Sam Hoyt for the Democratic nod for Assembly, and found the backing of a committee called “Renew NYS“, the address for which is the home of Pat Ruffino. (There exists a similarly named, earlier PAC called “Renew New York“.  Inactive now, its address is listed as 101 Reo Avenue in Cheektowaga, which we know from the Seventh and Ninth Days of Preetsmas, is the home of Pigeon bookkeeper Sandi Schmidt.) Renew NYS was started and funded by Pigeon and Joel Giambra.

In a complaint to the state Board of Elections, Hoyt alleged that Renew NYS was illegally coordinating with the Golombek campaign. In addition, Hoyt alleged that the PAC was acting as an unauthorized committee, spending money on behalf of the Golombek campaign and against Sam Hoyt’s, but was not legally constituted to do that. Renew NYS simply re-constituted itself as a multi-candidate committee and refunded whatever contributions had been above the limits that such an entity could accept, and avoided enforcement action or prosecution.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work, though.  The purpose of these election laws isn’t to enable committees to violate the law and then, when caught, re-declare themselves as something completely different, and have that apply retroactively. Candidates and the public deserve to have accurate information in real time – not months later, after the campaign is long over.

As far as evidence of coordination, take a look at the complaint brought against Pigeon’s and Golisano’s “Responsible New York” in 2008 and recall that Pigeon was a co-signatory for the Joe Mesi campaign while simultaneously running a pro-Mesi PAC, and that Jack O’Donnell was helping Responsible New York while simultaneously a co-signatory on the Barbra Kavanaugh campaign’s committee.

This is likely what Kristy Mazurek’s and Steve Pigeon’s WNY Progressive Caucus (“AwfulPAC”) tried to do when it filed its CF-03 in February 2014 to transform it – retroactively – into a multi-candidate committee participating and spending on candidates’ behalf in the 2013 primaries. We are awaiting final confirmation, but sources indicate that the AwfulPAC declared – nunc pro tunc – that it was an unauthorized committee for Dick Dobson in the primary and general elections, and in the primary for Joyce Wilson Nixon, Barbara Miller-Williams, Rick Zydel, and Wes Moore. They also claimed to be an unauthorized committee for Mark Manna for Amherst Town Board in 2013’s general election. Had AwfulPAC done that at its founding, it could have spent money on behalf of those candidates without coordination; however, as it was originally constituted it was legally only allowed to raise and donate money to campaigns. We’re meant to believe that it broke the law at the time, but a retroactive “oops” filing of a piece of paper retroactively rendered all its activities legal.

The Pigeoning: Niagara

Those of you who pay close attention may recall the AwfulPAC’s brief foray into the Niagara Falls City Council race, specifically working on the behalf of Sam Fruscione. Literature appeared that smeared and defamed Buffalo developer Mark Hamister, who is working on a subsidized hotel project in the Falls.

At the time, Channel 2 ran a story on it, and AwfulPAC admitted it was behind the lit.  Again – not something a PAC is allowed to do. Fruscione lost his election, and it was this piece of literature that led Governor Cuomo angrily to confront Pigeon over the smear against Hamister. 

We’re waiting to see whether Fruscione is among the candidates for whom AwfulPAC declared it was an independent expenditure committee. 

Mark Manna & AwfulPAC

Note that the AwfulPAC’s retroactive reconstitution as an unauthorized committee included the general election race for Mark Manna. Manna’s campaign’s 2013 10 day Post-Primary disclosure shows the AwfulPAC paying these amounts on his campaign’s  behalf, which Manna reports as “in-kind” donations.

(Click to enlarge) – that’s almost $5,000 in expenses that AwfulPAC supposedly paid for. CORRECTION: These expenditures appear as line-item expenses on AwfulPAC’s own disclosures here and here.  However, they are not disclosed as being expenses made on behalf of the Manna campaign.  Manna listing these as “in-kind” reveals that these expenses were authorized – not unauthorized – expenditures on his campaign’s behalf by an independent committee.

Three of the four AwfulPAC expenditures on Manna’s behalf relate to a Conservative fusion Party primary he had in September 2013. The maximum allowable contribution for that race, however, was $1,000. The fourth expenditure was for lawn signs, which conceivably could have been used for both the primary and the general elections and pro-rated over the two elections.

As for AwfulPAC, they’re in a bind – on the one hand swearing on their paperwork that the money was not authorized by Manna, but Manna swearing that the amounts were authorized contributions. That authorization is held and given by the candidate, not the committee.

This must be another one of those mysteriously accidental clerical errors on the part of the AwfulPAC. How does an independent expenditure committee, claiming no coordination with the candidate or his committee(s), pay for lawn signs? What does it do with them? If AwfulPAC bought the signs and gave them to the candidate or his committee, that’s “coordinating”.

One more point on coordination and AwfulPAC: in a Geoff Kelly article that ran in Artvoice at the time, Mazurek said,

Mazurek laughed off the controversy and called her detractors cry-babies, saying that she’d grown up around hardball politics. She also shrugged off responsibility for the content of the Hogues mailer, saying that the messages were crafted by the managers of the campaigns her PAC supported. “I don’t micromanage,” she said; she just writes the checks.

That bolded part sure sounds like “coordination” to me.

Chris Grant’s Disclosure

Little has been written about Chris Collins’ Chief of Staff, Chris Grant, whose home was also raided back in late May. We know of his involvement with Herd Solutions, but you’ll recall that we’ve written quite a bit about Aaron Pierce and his questionable tobacco money, and ties that Pierce had to Mickey Kearns. One of Pierce’s companies invested heavily in the AwfulPAC in 2013.

Here’s Grant’s disclosure. Note that he was paid to advise Aaron Pierce‘s campaign to become Seneca President, and also Kearns’ Assembly race.

Grant Disclosure

There’s also a sizeable income – over $150,000 – from his side-business at Herd Solutions while simultaneously employed by the County. Grant earned around $160,000 as a federal employee last year, yet Herd Solutions is still in existence and consulting on campaigns, as recently as November 2014. Working in the public sector is great, as Grant took a $9,000 payout of accrued vacation time from the County when he left.

Ganjapreneurs Fire Pigeon

We know that Pigeon’s PAPI Consulting, LLC lobbying firm lost its contract to lobby the state on behalf of the Seneca Nation. We know that Pigeon is renting his home at 1003 Admirals Walk from ganjapreneur Dan Humiston. We now also know that Pigeon’s PAPI Consulting, LLC lobbying firm was recently fired as the lobbyists for “Lewiston Greenhouse“, the marijuana growing company that Modern Disposal now operates as a tomato growing plant called H2Grow.

You can see the original contract between PAPI and Lewiston Greenhouse here.

Note: on Monday we revised our information about Matthew Connors, noting that it was his name that appeared on some mysterious money orders that ended up with the AwfulPAC, but that he had nothing to do with obtaining them. So, who used his name and possibly forged Connors’ signature on these money orders in order to hide the source of these funds? Why didn’t AwfulPAC file a proper disclosure?

Above all – wouldn’t you love to compare AwfulPAC’s bank records with its election law disclosures? I’ll bet they don’t remotely match up.

On the Seventh Day of Preetsmas

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preetclaus

 

In case you missed them, here are the Preetsmas posts so far:

It’s more likely than not that the investigation into the Western New York Progressive Caucus – or “AwfulPAC” has spread into other areas, and the feds are following their own investigation and not just helping out state and local investigators.

‘Sup Frank Max?

New York’s election law is an overcomplicated morass designed to guarantee full employment for anyone with the herculean patience to figure it out. For instance, the maximum allowable campaign contribution in the 2013 Democratic primary election must be calculated based on the number of Democrats enrolled in the district under NYS Election Law 14-114(1)(b).  When calculated, the Board of Election posts it to its website. For instance, the maximum anyone could contribute to the (AwfulPAC-backed) Rick Zydel and Wes Moore 2013 Democratic primary election campaigns was somewhere around $1,100 – 1,200, for a single contributor.

Back during the 2013 primary season, Cheektowaga’s Frank Max was closely aligned with AwfulPAC – in fact, it was commonly referred to at the time as his & Mazurek’s. The name of his longstanding operation is the “Progressive Democrats of WNY” (all [sic]). If you take a look at that group, it gave the following to Zydel’s campaign:

  • 5/9/13     $2,500
  • 6/10/13   $150
  • 6/11/13   $600

Total: $3,250:  Nearly triple the maximum allowed.

There’s even $100 to the “Real Conservatives”, which we discussed briefly here. You always expect a “progressive” group to contribute to the “Real Conservatives” and The “Hamburg Conservative Club”

In the same document, three checks to the Wes Moore campaign from Max’s group are revealed:

  • 5/9/13    $2,500
  • 6/10/13  $150
  • 6/13/13  $350

Total: $3,000.  Over double the maximum allowed.

Frank Max should know better than that. He was until recently town chair of the Cheektowaga Committee, hoped to be the county chair – can he claim that his personal political organization didn’t knowingly and willfully violate the law?  Assuming the authorities have flagged this, it could be a useful way to encourage him to provide information on the entire AwfulPAC scheme.

Max is the treasurer for the Progressive Dems. Kristy Mazurek is (or was – the address is likely out-of-date) the treasurer for “Friends of Frank Max”.  It’s believed that Max was deeply involved with the goings on of AwfulPAC in 2013, but we haven’t heard much from Frank since the heat was turned up on the investigation.

Some History

Way back in 2009, Tom Golisano and Steve Pigeon’s absurdly named “Responsible New York (RNY)” PAC or “independent expenditure” committee had some interesting filings.

Note in its 2009 filings – the year after it attempted to bring democracy back to the NYS Legislature – on May 15, 2009, it received back as a repayment a “refunded expenditure” the sum of $120,000.  Such “expenditure” was supposedly made in August, 2008 by RNY.  And who “refunded” that $120,000 – why some entity known as “GSDP, LLC”.  A review of the Department of State website reveals that this LLC, which features Pigeon’s initials, has a registered address at Pigeon’s former law firm, Underberg & Kessler.

Good for GSDP to refund that huge sum of money to Responsible NY. There’s a problem, though – no such expenditure exists; Responsible NY never gave any money to GSDP. Maybe more interesting would be for the Tax Man to look at how GSDP “earned” that $120,000 (which is taxable) but then tried to write off a “refund” of an obligation that wasn’t GSDP’s. You can’t pay someone else’s debt and then deduct it as a business expense.

Oddly enough, the Board of Elections’ wonky website shows only two expenditures made to GSDP – from the Niagara County Republican Committee. It bears mentioning that the Cheektowaga address that GSDP lists in those disclosures matches that of “Citizens for Fiscal Integrity“, which gave money to Joel Giambra and Responsible New York. It also contributed to “People for Accountable Government“, whose treasurer appears to have been Pigeon associate David Pfaff. That group received $1000 from GSDP. In 2007, it reported $100 from Steve Pigeon and $2000 from Joel Giambra’s committee. In 2008, Pigeon supposedly contributed $20,000. That was the year of the Mesi campaign. CItizens for Fiscal Integrity was formed in 2005, and took in $13,500 from GSDP that year. It also took in $8000 from Roger Stone and his wife. It’s not clear from the disclosures whom that group was intended to help or harm.

What was this refund to Golisano’s committee all about? Golisano was drawing out a lot of the money by repaying his initial loan, so it could have been a refund not to GSDP but to Golisano himself, possibly in connection with the Joe Mesi race.

David Pfaff

Pfaff is a longtime Pigeon associate, and is currently employed in the office of State Senator Marc Panepinto. In 2013, Pfaff was living off the “consulting fees” of $800/bi-weekly, being paid by Frank Max’s “Progressive” Democrats while he was working for the Dick Dobson for Sheriff campaign and AwfulPAC – all at one time. In his 2015 bankruptcy filing, Pfaff claims not to have earned enough money to file tax returns for 2013 and 2014. But he had the cash to contribute $25 to Dobson?

Sources report that Pfaff petitioned in 2013 for candidates supported by the AwfulPAC, and assisted Dobson in Board of Elections proceedings.

Wes Moore

Moore was the beneficiary of thousands of dollars’ worth of expenditures by AwfulPAC against his primary opponent Wynnie Fisher, and on his behalf. It bears repeating that the smear campaign that Moore helped engineer with Kristy Mazurek against Fisher on the eve of the November election was thanks to information sent to Moore c/o Mazurek’s address, despite the fact that his Treasurer was shown at the BOE as being first in Buffalo and later in Clarence. The stench of illegal coordination is overpowering.

It, therefore, bears mentioning that Moore is reported to have contributed $300 on August 21, 2013 to the AwfulPAC making supposedly “independent” expenditures on his behalf. That is bizarre; practically unprecedented for a candidate who is the beneficiary of an independent expenditure to actually contribute to that very committee.  Was there a fundraiser for AwfulPAC that he attended? Did he speak with anyone there?

Amendments and Oddities

It appears as if AwfulPAC has amended its filings to eliminate what had originally been reported as a $25,000 fee to Landen, LLC – you can see it referenced in former Assistant District Attorney Mark Sacha’s complaint to the Moreland Commission. It appears here as an outstanding loan, but the original “loan” itself is nowhere to be found. Note that Landen, LLC is now listed at the same 101 Reo Ave address as GDSP and “Citizens for Fiscal Integrity”, as shown above.

Pigeon also used that Reo Ave address for many of his own contributions. For instance,

If you look at this article I wrote at the time, I reported that Landen had given Dick Dobson $200, but now the link shows an additional $400. I don’t know that financial disclosures were allowed to be so … fluid. Likewise, in Dobson’s first post-primary report, “Democratic Action” donated $9,000. That’s fine – that’s what a PAC is legally empowered to do. Except Democratic Action hadn’t filed a single disclosure during that cycle, its last being a “no activity” report in July 2013. Its last reported fund balance? $2,400. If you’re going to BS people, at least do so credibly.

A.J. Pierce Again

Aaron Pierce filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court against three trucking companies that supposedly lost or converted $785,000 of untaxed cigarettes that Pierce was trying to transport from WNY to another Native American on Long Island. Pierce accused the trucking companies of stealing the cigarettes, and Justice Marshall dismissed the complaint because you can’t enforce an illegal contract.

Order Dismissing Complaint


It looks like Mr. Pierce and AJ’s Wholesale, LLC is out $785,000, and if the state Department of Taxation requires that state taxes be paid and stamps affixed to the cigarettes when they were placed on trucks for shipment through New York State to a different Nation, then he may also owe state taxes. Remember that one of Pierce’s companies was already in big trouble, with a big civil forfeiture for what amounts to a conviction for bootlegging cigarettes.  Did he really wire that $20,000 to Buying Time, as the AwfulPAC claims?

AwfulPAC’s Money

Here’s a handy chart of all the money that went into and came out of the WNYPC “AwfulPAC”. There is the aforementioned “loan” of $25,000 from Landen, LLC which is completely unaccounted-for. Also not the discrepancies in terms of the dates of money coming into AwfulPAC from Frank Max and Tim Kennedy. How was AwfulPAC able to account for $4000 in donations from the Progressive Democrats that didn’t come in until days – or weeks – later? Friends of Frank Max supposedly gave $1750 on 9/3/13, but it only had $100 on hand in the most recent previous filing, and there appears to be no entry for that sort of outflow.

WNYPC Money

As for Tim Kennedy, he contributed $85,000 to AwfulPAC and $10,000 to Democratic Action – which promptly turned around and donated it back to the favored candidates of the AwfulPAC – Dobson, Miller-Williams.  So Kennedy gave a total of $95,000 to the two committees, which he had to know were backing candidates in the September 2013 Democratic primary election. Under Election Law 14-102 (1), Kennedy for Senate (as did Democratic Action) “participated” in the primary election and had a duty to file pre-primary and post-primary campaign finance reports with the New York State Board of Elections.  However, neither did.

Under no circumstances is it legal or proper for a campaign or committee to participate in a primary election,  but make people wait until the following January to find out what they did. This may be a crime pursuant to Election law 14-126 (3). 

As to Democratic Action, all of a sudden in mid-2013, it received $10,000 from Kennedy and another $2,000 from Nancy Krzyzanowski, an employee of Collucci & Gallagher. That seems like an odd donation from to an obscure and largely inactive PAC. Then again, she’s also given $500 to Chris Collins, $1000 over time to the Tonawanda Democratic Committee, and – oddly enough – $3000 to the New York State Republican Committee in 2004. 

More to come as the Preetsmas gifts get hung on the chimney with care.

On the Sixth Day of Preetsmas

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Courtesy Chris Van Patten

Courtesy Chris Van Patten

As a consumer of information, you should be appalled.

As recently as May 24th, the Buffalo News’ political columnist, Bob McCarthy, dutifully did Steve Pigeon’s bidding, producing an opinion piece that amounted to faithful stenography of a longtime source’s spin. In this case, it was Pigeon spinning about why he had ended what had until recently been a likely mutually beneficial relationship with a Rochester-based law firm. Pigeon told McCarthy it had nothing to do with any investigation – but the state and federal raids came literally four days later.

At the conclusion of the piece, McCarthy took a story that should have been about Erie County Democratic Committee chairman Jeremy Zellner being one of only about 250 party leaders nationwide to meet with Hillary Clinton at her New York City HQ, but instead became one that disrespected Zellner as just another Lenihan henchman.

But it’s worse than that. A simple search of the Buffalo News’ website reveals ample droppings of Pigeon-sourced or Pigeon-puffing material. Some of it was so empty – consider Pigeon releasing to the press (PoliticsNY.net also had it) that new Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie had joined some local pols – including a couple who are now under investigation – at Pigeon’s house to watch a boxing match. Releasing it is one thing – McCarthy including it in his Sunday column is straight-up TMZ garbage.

Here, McCarthy gives equal time to the investigation into the WNY Progressive Caucus and a totally bogus claim that former Board of Elections Commissioner Dennis Ward ripped up someone’s nominating petitions in a fury. One resulted in a federal and state probe; the other one doesn’t exist.  Or how about quoting Pigeon in connection with a completely unrelated obituary note, thusly:

Few travelers along the campaign trail have made more friends than Tom Fricano, the former UAW leader and 1996 congressional candidate who died Feb. 14. Former Erie County Democratic Chairman Steve Pigeon, a longtime associate, recalled him like this: “He was a gentle person who was a true believer and did not demonize his enemies.”

Oh, how heartfelt, coming from WNY’s king ratfckr.

Here, we have McCarthy treating Zellner like a guy who somehow didn’t deserve the 69% of votes cast for his re-election as party chair. Note the headline and theme – it’s not about Zellner’s victory, it’s about Zellner’s foes and what they might do. Say what you want, but for a guy who the Mayor, the Governor, labor, and a bunch of Pigeonista malcontents apparently wanted out of the party chairmanship, Zellner crushed it.

Here, we find out that Pigeon opposed cross-endorsements by Zellner of Republican judges.

Pigeon will run his own slate of judicial nominating delegates – and will appeal for support from the seven smaller counties of the Eighth Judicial District.

A close political adviser to the governor, Pigeon’s efforts will encourage as strong a Democratic turnout as possible for Cuomo and his effort to sweep the western counties he lost to Republican Carl Paladino in 2010.

That’s nice. Pigeon’s slate failed miserably, and what does Pigeon’s efforts as a “close political adviser to the governor” – which is likely taken verbatim from Pigeon’s gob – have to do with anything? Where is the article about how Pigeon and his crowd backed Republican Deana Tripi over Democrats Carney and Crapsi in 2013? Where is the article about how Maurice Garner and Mike Darby were put in charge of the Pigeon effort to promote Tripi and defeat the Democratic slate? I hear Grassroots has since been embarrassed by its support of Tripi, and am waiting for confirmation of a story about something that happened in connection with a protest over the Eric Garner case. Where is the article about how this year, Pigeon’s people are helping Republican family court candidate Brenda Freedman?

In addition to this, we have this new phenomenon of candidates or political figures attempting to prove something to journalists by showing them documents purporting to be tax records. In 2015 it was “political heavyweight” Steve Pigeon showing something to Bob McCarthy, and in 2012, it was Chris Collins (R-Clarence) showing a portion of the records from three tax years to Jerry Zremski.

With respect to Pigeon, McCarthy wrote,

Pigeon opened his tax returns from the past several years to inspection at The News’ request in an effort to quell speculation that his contributions to the Progressive Caucus stemmed from anywhere but his own bank account. His records over the past three years indicate a mid-six-figure income, which he says proves his ability to spare $100,000 even for a fund supporting relatively low-level candidates.

He can afford big donations to a political cause the same way others could contribute to a church, he said, especially because he has no wife or children to support, takes few vacations, has no real hobbies and lives a non-extravagant lifestyle.

“It sounds odd, but when you look at how I live and how much I make, it really isn’t,” he said.

The questions were mild and hardly probative. Mostly because, upon information and belief, Bob McCarthy isn’t a CPA or a tax attorney and is no more or less knowledgeable than you or me when it comes to assessing someone’s purported tax returns .

But Collins was even more blunt with Jerry Zremski,

“My federal return is probably 25 pages long,” Collins added. “It’s too much for the public to absorb.”

It is journalistic malpractice to report on the alleged tax returns that some politician shows to a reporter. Jerry Zremski, like Bob McCarthy, likely has no more or less experience vetting and examining someone’s tax records than any other layperson. For the Buffalo News to arrange for a political figure to simply bring in and show off some paper purporting to be tax returns, and not having a CPA or a tax attorney on hand to provide analysis and guidance is simply shocking. For the News to do this repeatedly and report on it as if they had actually obtained some sort of information is incredible. Anyone can waltz into anywhere with a 1040 and some schedules and make-believe that it represents a tax return. It’s no wonder that McCarthy’s reporting on Pigeon has turned someone sharper since he realized that his longtime source didn’t disclose almost $250,000 in federal tax liens, which would have certainly been relevant within the context of Pigeon’s ability or willingness to fund a PAC in 2013 to the tune of $100,000.

I’m sure the feds are pleased that Pigeon reportedly has $100,000 to blow on obscure legislative primaries, but can’t pay his own taxes.

And what of that – the 2011 arrearage is pretty small – $14,000, but Pigeon’s tax debt for 2013 – the year of the Western NY Progressive Caucus – is over $112,000. How did this come to the IRS’s attention? An audit? Was it part of the forensic accounting that’s likely taking place behind the scenes in conjunction with this investigation? Let’s say Pigeon was right about reporting about $400 – 500k in income on the returns he showed McCarthy – did he underpay? Under-report? His effective tax rate is probably between 10 – 20% after deductions, so that’s a significant under-payment, to say the least. Was there “income” that came to – or through – Pigeon’s accounts that he didn’t report as income, but should have been? Questions abound.

In the meantime, it’s come to light that in 2010 Pigeon and his associate and fellow lobbyist Jack O’Donnell bought the “Front Page” group of newspapers, including Lackawanna’s Front Page and the South Buffalo News from former Conservative Party guru William Delmont. The entity that bought the paper is “South Park Ave Properties, LLC“, which shares an address with the Arab-American Society of WNY in a UPS Store in Blasdell. Delmont has since died, but his estate has filed suit against O’Donnell, South Park Ave Properties, Pigeon, and Sadeq Ahmed for an alleged debt of over $125,000, plus accrued interest. It’s alleged that O’Donnell, Pigeon, and Ahmed were all members of the LLC, and each of them executed a document personally guaranteeing all payments under the promissory note, and by January 2014 were accused of being in default.

Demand Note by Alan Bedenko

The action was brought as a motion for summary judgment, and Pigeon opposed it, claiming that Delmont had vastly overstate the papers’ viability and circulation.

Affidavit of Steve Pigeon by Alan Bedenko

Supreme Court Justice Walker denied the motion for summary judgment, and the case is proceeding in the usual course. Perhaps significantly, Pigeon and O’Donnell are represented by Ed Betz, who was until recently an attorney for the Erie County Water Authority, and before that for the City of Buffalo. Philips Lytle is representing Mr. Ahmed.

The papers themselves feature columns by SCOPE’s Budd Schroeder and articles by Tony Farina. As of January 2014, the papers have a new publisher – Frank Parlato of the Niagara Falls Reporter. Parlato announced that his acquisition is, “in joint venture with its current owners”, O’Donnell and Pigeon.

Next, we are hearing rumors that prosecutors have granted immunity to someone who is – or was – reasonably high up in Byron Brown’s City Hall. If true, it further speaks to the growing breadth and depth of this investigation.

Finally, Channel 2 interviewed Tim Kennedy on Thursday, who denied having lawyered up in connection with the Preetsmas probe. But here’s the thing:

1. Tim Kennedy filed an order to show cause relating to primary day vote counting on September 9th, but the attorney wasn’t Terry Connors – it was the aforementioned Ed Betz, who is also representing Pigeon and O’Donnell.

2. Although Kennedy claims that no one has spoken with him about the WNY Progressive Caucus or any investigation surrounding it, that defies credulity.  We already know that investigators interviewed everyone who gave or received any money from that PAC, and that its victims – like Wynnie Fisher and Lynn Dearmyer – were also questioned. We also know that Kennedy gave $85,000 to that PAC, so he had to have been paid a visit by state investigators.

3. Kennedy’s campaign finance disclosures show over $60,000 paid to Terry Connors’ law firm between August and November 2014. It wasn’t for election law stuff, since Betz was handling that. So, why so much and why then? What for? $60,000 is 200 hours’ worth of work at $300/hr, and that’s pretty much what it would cost to get a case tried. By contrast, in 2012 when Kennedy was in the fight of his political life against a Betty Jean Grant write-in insurgency, Kennedy paid Connors just $25,000.

Speaking of Terry Connors, his law partner’s bid to become a federal judge is moving right along. The Senate Judiciary Committee just this week approved Lawrence Vilardo’s nomination to be the newest federal judge in WNY. Yet, consider,

There is concern in the local legal community, however, over the prospects for approval of Denise E. O’Donnell, Schumer’s recommendation for Buffalo’s other vacant district judgeship. Even though Schumer submitted O’Donnell’s name to Obama in June of last year, seven weeks before he recommended Vilardo, the White House has not yet nominated her.

Why do you think that the White House hasn’t nominated Denise O’Donnell – Jack O’Donnell’s mother – to the federal bench, despite Chuck Schumer’s recommendation? I don’t know, either. Seems very odd.

Merry Preetsmas

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Steve-PigeonOn the first day of Preetmas, my true love gave to me: a search warrant for Pigeon and Casey.

Thursday, May 28 at midday, state police and FBI agents executed search warrants at the homes of three prominent political figures: lobbyist Steve Pigeon, former Buffalo Deputy Mayor Steve Casey, and Representative Chris Collins’s chief of staff, Chris Grant.

All of this raises more questions than answers.

These raids seem to be the culmination of a two-year-long series of inquiries into the activities of Western New York Progressive Caucus, a campaign committee directed by Pigeon that was active in 2013 Erie County races. People in the know believe that the point of prosecutorial entry for all of this—in addition to the likelihood WNYPC bank records betray some skullduggery—has to do with improper PAC coordination with campaigns, and with possible phantom billings to campaigns. For instance, if you’re a politician and you have a huge warchest, you can’t spend that money for any non-political purpose. But what if you contracted with a printing shop to do palmcards or mailers, and money changes hands for work that’s never done? You send me a bill, I’ll pay the bill. The non-printing printer gets a kickback, the cash goes off into the ether, having been essentially laundered.

What other connections are there? Back in 2014, before the state took over the investigation, the county Board of Elections had subpoenaed several businesses that supplied the WNYPC, and some were less forthcoming than others. One in particular—Marketing Technologies—did not respond to a subpoena and the board had to move in Supreme Court to enforce it. At a hearing with Judge Troutman, a representative from Marketing Technologies claimed that he could not obey the subpoena for email records because they had been destroyed, but did provide invoices. In open court, he testified that his point of contact for the WNYPC mailers that his shop produced was Deputy Mayor Steve Casey. This was during a supposed “truce” between City Hall and Democratic HQ. Sources close to the county investigation reveal that David Pfaff’s name kept coming up in connection with mailers and the WNYPC’s BOE filings. Pfaff is now a staffer for Senator Panepinto, and one observer calls the effort to land Pfaff a job—any job—as “frantic”, raising questions about whether that frenzy had to do with placating a potential witness.

Go read this article about the Seneca Mall project, which seems to be at least part of the unifying thread with all of this WNYPC business. Now, why would the Syracuse-based developer of that West Seneca project, Scott Congel, need to engage the assistance and services of all of these politically connected people simply to build some sort of lifestyle center/shopping mall on a piece of derelict West Seneca property? Congel hired Steve Casey to run the project, Pigeon is a consultant, Golisano’s name was brought up when the site was suggested as a Bills stadium site—it doesn’t make any sense. One longtime political observer posits this explanation: Congel retaining Seneca Nation lobbyist Pigeon, and putting Casey on the payroll; getting Tim Kennedy re-elected as he battled Betty Jean Grant—why would that be necessary?

Moving the Buffalo Creek Casino to the I-90 mainline corridor.

In order to move the Buffalo Creek Casino to a more prominent spot along in West Seneca, you would need approval from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and you would ultimately need sign-off from the Mayor of Buffalo and the Governor of the State of New York. That’s where Casey and Pigeon come in; both have influence where it counts. If you wanted to move the casino, you need buy-in, obviously, from the Senecas themselves. Pigeon now lobbies for the Seneca Nation, and don’t forget that the Senecas invested heavily in Kennedy’s own re-election campaign. From 2011—2013, Tim Kennedy’s campaign has been the seventh largest recipient of Seneca Nation money: ($73,850), and the proposed Congel project is what was until very recently Kennedy’s district. Kennedy wrote a letter opposing the idea of a non-Indian Finger Lakes casino. Although the West Seneca site is no longer in Kennedy’s district, he does maintain a rather active political profile in that town, and is close to the supervisor, Sheila Meegan. Meegan is the daughter of Christopher Walsh, a former chair of the West Seneca Democratic Committee, and considered to be a political father figure to Steve Pigeon.

The financial bonanza of a project of this scope and size would be huge for everyone involved. This doesn’t, however, explain why Chris Grant’s house was also searched.

This should be somewhat contextualized, so here’s just a small taste of the history at play.

In 2008, Steve Pigeon set up a PAC as part of an effort to oust political foe Sam Hoyt from the state Assembly. The PAC spent tons of money mailing horrible things about Hoyt to voters—the material was so inflammatory that it ultimately backfired, causing voters to sympathize with Hoyt rather than revile him.

In 2009, Pigeon and his benefactor/client Tom Golisano set up the hilariously misnamed “Responsible New York”, which brought about a coup in the State Senate and elevated convicted criminals Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserratte’s to its leadership. In 2010, a similar coup was executed in the Erie County Legislature, handing a majority Democratic body over to Republican then-County Executive Chris Collins on a silver platter. It was that coup that helped propel Tim Kennedy to the state Senate.

In 2013, Pigeon and erstwhile political commentator Kristy Mazurek set up the WNY Progressive Caucus.  It was set up as a PAC—the election law doesn’t use that term, but as an unauthorized committee, the WNYPC could raise and spend money to donate to specific campaigns, but was not allowed to coordinate with them, or spend money on their behalf. I called it “AwfulPAC”. In early September 2013, just weeks before primary day, the WNYPC paid for thousands of pieces of literature to be mailed to voters, slamming legislative candidates backed by party headquarters—most notably Tim Hogues, Betty Jean Grant, Wynnie Fisher, and Lynn Dearmyer. For example, one piece of WNYPC lit slammed Hogues for being a “Republican” and promoted the candidacy of his challenger, Barbara Miller-Williams—a woman who quite literally conspired with Republicans to execute the aforementioned 2010 coup.

WNYPC’s disclosures were not complete.  WNYPC’s financial recordkeeping was so sloppy that it seemed to be hiding potential illegality. The bricklayer’s union barely had the $25,000 the WNYPC reported to have received from them, and did not itself report any such donation. The WNYPC reported that State Senator Tim Kennedy had donated $40,000 from a long-defunct campaign account. The head of that bricklayer’s union retired just a few months ago.  For a time, it showed the PAC to be in the red—a big no-no. Disclosures came in late, were inaccurate or misleading, in one instance showing a donation from a different, long-dormant Pigeon-associated PAC, Democratic Action. What was odd about that purported $9,000 donation from Democratic Action was that it did not disclose any outflow of money during the same 2013 cycle, and had most recently showed a fund balance of $2,400 and a concomitant “no activity” report with the Board of Elections.

In the Erie County Sheriff’s race, the WNYPC candidate Dick Dobson embarrassed Bert Dunn on primary night. Dunn decided to waste his money and run on a tailor-made third party line, unsuccessfully. WNYPC abandoned Dobson, however, during the general election. There was an unaccounted-for $20,000 that was paid to “Buying Time, LLC” for Dick Dobson ads, which was later claimed to have been a payment reportedly made by AJ Wholesalers directly to Buying Time on the WNYPC’s behalf.  

Buying Time is associated with Governor Andrew Cuomo. So associated, in fact, that the New York Times reported that it was sniffing around Buying Time that prompted Cuomo’s office to begin interfering with the work of the shortly-thereafter-disbanded Moreland Commission on Public Corruption. 

Aside from Barbara Miller-Williams, none of Pigeon’s and Mazurek’s legislative candidates won in September 2013, so she used Michael Caputo’s PoliticsWNY.com to smear Wynnie Fisher, who had defeated Mazurek’s candidate, Wes Moore.  Apparently, Fisher and her neighbors don’t get along, so a story was planted accusing Fisher of being crazy.

The problem was that the letter from Fisher’s neighbors that was the purported source of the story was sent to Wes Moore at an address in Lancaster. But Moore’s campaign committee was based in the Nanulas’ offices in Clarence. The Lancaster address was a house on Doris Avenue where Mazurek was living, and which also served as the mailing address for WNYPC. There was, on its face, a smoking gun of coordination. How and why would Wynnie Fisher’s neighbors decide to send a letter to an address for Wes Moore that didn’t exist in nature?

In late September 2013, Tim Hogues and Betty Jean Grant, with an assist from anti-Pigeon transparency advocate Mark Sacha, filed a formal complaint with the New York State Board of Elections, accusing Pigeon, Mazurek, and WNYPC of various illegalities and violations of campaign finance law. After the Erie County Board of Elections resolved to investigate the complaint, it was turned over to the state BOE, which in turn appears to have turned it over to the Attorney General’s office and State Police. Once an investigation such as this is put into the hands of people outside of Buffalo, you know that the threat of shenanigans is decreased exponentially. Police interviewed several people at the county legislature, as well as at least a couple of the headquarters-backed 2013 Democratic candidates for county legislature. Subpoenas. Search warrants. Forensic accountants. If even a small percentage of the rumors you’ve likely heard are true, the banking records should tell all.

Make no mistake: The news of these search warrants being executed measures a 10.0 on the political Richter scale. It also raises more questions than answers:

1. How far back does this go? Could it go as far back as the 2010 Pigeon-engineered Chris Collins coup of the county legislature? The 2008 effort against Hoyt?

2. How far out does this go? Does it implicate the bricklayer’s union? Tim Kennedy? This property abuts Conservative Party chairman Ralph Lorigo’s—could he be targeted? Was it Seneca money that Pigeon marshaled to fund the PAC? There’s a reason the Buffalo News’ article about this project was penned by Bob McCarthy and not someone on the business or development beat. Could this reach the Governor? The other two men in that room are already under arrest.

3. Chris Grant? Maybe has to do with the 2010 coup? The Buffalo News reports that Grant and Steve Casey operated a printing shop together, but my sources tell me Grant and Steve Casey started a consultancy business that had more to do with voter data gathering and analysis. It had also been rumored that Grant worked on the mayor’s campaign in 2013, which would have put him in constant contact with Casey. Indeed, Collins and Grant attended a Brown fundraiser in 2009. Did you catch Collins’ dismissal of Pigeon in the Buffalo News?

“Anyone in Western New York knows that Steve Pigeon has never been a financial supporter of my congressional campaigns,” the congressman said. “Steve is a political operative who has been active in Western New York politics for decades. I was certainly aware there has been an investigation of him ongoing for some time.”

I mean, Pigeon only helped engineer the coup that handed you the county legislature in 2010, but let’s pretend you never heard of the guy. Also: note the limitation to “congressional campaigns” and the glaring omission of state office campaigns.

4. Kristy Mazurek, who acted as the WNYPC’s treasurer: Was her home searched? If so, why wasn’t it reported? If not, why not? She’s reportedly retained Joel Daniels to represent her, and one doesn’t do that lightly. Certainly if there are questions about financial improprieties and improper collusion, she would be a prime target. Is she cooperating with law enforcement? Has she already turned everything over?

5. Who else is implicated, directly or indirectly? NYSUT’s Mike Deely? Senator Marc Panepinto? Mayor Byron Brown? Amherst Councilman Mark Manna? What other candidates with ties to Pigeon and the WNYPC are being targeted? What about Tom Golisano and Pyramid’s Scott Congel? When BAK USA took Golisano’s money, and the owners were photographed with Pigeon and Mazurek, I had flashbacks to this Soprano’s storyline, it seemed that seedy to me.

6. Just last weekend, the Buffalo News’ Bob McCarthy dutifully transcribed Steve Pigeon’s purported rationale for leaving his job with a local law firm, noting that he is now the chief lobbyist for the Seneca Nation of Indians. Remember the West Seneca parcel Steve Casey now manages for Scott Congel was once floated as a site for a new Bills stadium before renderings went out showing off an entire mixed-use community? For his part, Congel was in talks with Pigeon’s clients, the Senecas, about bringing a casino to one of his Rochester properties in mid-2013, during the WNYPC’s heyday.

No one’s been arrested, but three simultaneous raids of the homes of prominent political actors underscores the seriousness and wide scope of this investigation. For the first time, motivated, disinterested, and aggressive action is being taken on serious allegations surrounding campaign finance in western New York. The limited Erie County BOE investigation has morphed into something that calls for the intervention of state and federal law enforcement, and one has to imagine prosecutorial ducks are already in a row long before this sort of action is taken.

Could this be the beginning of a deep clean of Erie County politics? Hope and change never seemed so close.

5 Years Later, Tea Party Wants to Re-litigate Carl’s Emails

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news_0The tea party have decided to come after me. Bereft of ideas, strategy, or success, this ragtag grouping of political nobodies have decided to accuse me of a “fraudulent email scam”, going on to suggest that I “admitted” to having “fabricated” some emails way back in 2009 in order to do some sort of political harm to then-Deputy Mayor Steve Casey.

All of this is so outrageous and untrue as to be defamation per se, insofar as it specifically accuses me of fraud.

It’s quite odd that this is coming up now, and I can only attribute it to the fact that Jul Thompson is friends with the woman who is running the effort to kill Clarence schools. The post accuses me of perpetrating a fraud; i.e., that I somehow manufactured and concocted Carl Paladino’s XXX-rated and racist emails from 2010. The post was posted Monday to a tea party blog run by Jul Thompson, the wife of Carl’s driver, John “Rus” Thompson.

Immediately after the post was brought to my attention – around 1pm Monday – I called Rus’ cell phone and left a message. I have not heard back. I also left a comment at the blog post; it remains unpublished, stuck in the moderation queue, (note that the time stamp is wrong, and I likely posted it at 1:27 pm).

I posted a quick response yesterday to buffalopundit.com, but let me be clear: I am a lawyer. To fabricate emails and accuse anyone else of sending them would, frankly, put my license to practice law at jeopardy. I don’t put my livelihood at risk for anyone or anything – not to bring down Carl Paladino or Steve Casey or Byron Brown or Steve Pigeon or anyone. So, let’s operate under this singular assumption:  Jul Thompson is a liar. While I may be a public figure, she is accusing me of fraud – a crime – and that is libel per se.

Here is my reply to the false and defamatory blog post: 

Have you ever known someone who leaves a wake of destruction behind them? Case in point, Alan Bedenko, liberal blogger, formerly wrote for ArtVoice, then left with Jeff Kelly and other staff to write for The Public, another liberal rag.

*Geoff Kelly. But never mind.

I sat with a friend today and shared with her my frustrations over my inability to persuade Carl Paladino’s Campaign for Governor in 2010 to answer the ridiculous charge that he was a racist, which were predicated upon emails Bedenko fabricated to “take him out” of the race against Andrew “2nd-Amendment-be-damned” Cuomo. As I attempted to provide her with some documentation to that effect, I found this little gem below, that I had never seen before. I had, at the time, shared the article from the Niagara Falls Reporter in which Bedenko had admitted to having fabricated some emails to sully the reputation of then (real) Mayor of Buffalo Steve Casey.

Let’s be 100% clear here. I have never fabricated any emails to sully the reputation of Steve Casey, or of Byron Brown. I have never fabricated any emails to anyone, anywhere, and I have never fabricated any emails about – or from – Carl Paladino.  Anyone suggesting that I did (or that I would) is a liar. 

I am prepared – at any time – to produce the emails in question to anyone, provided that my source’s identity remains protected. 

I don’t know the author but he is spot-on.

[I omitted here a lengthy paean to Carl Paladino, the savior and messiah of the Buffalo School system].

If I had a million dollars… I would sue the pants off of Alan Bedenko, challenge him to take a lie detector test and let him perjure himself in a court of law. Carl Paladino is one of the finest men I’ve ever known, and he, students and families of the Buffalo Public Schools and the people of New York deserve far better than being lied to by a nutcase on a liberal jihad and held hostage by the race-baiters of the School Board and the Buffalo Teachers Union. It’s a rare bird with “intestinal fortitude” that would subject himself to the outrageous and unrelenting bogus accusations of racism. We who know Carl, know that he is making an enormous sacrifice committing himself to this otherwise impossible task. He has given up his precious time, reputation and personal comfort because he cares so deeply for raising the level of achievement and providing a better future for the residents and families of the City of Buffalo. Jul Thompson Founder, TEA New York

Jul: Presumably Carl can provide you with the filing fee to sue me. I mean, you wouldn’t have standing to sue me, and Carl’s well past the one-year statute of limitations to do so. If I had fabricated those emails – you know, the racist, pornographic emails that Carl had sent and forwarded, including the one showing a horse having anal sex with a human female – why didn’t Carl go ahead and sue me back in 2010? 2011? 2012? 2013? Go ask any of Carl’s bigshot buddies whether he sent them. Ask Jamie Moses. Ask Larry Quinn. I can give you more names, if you want – names of people who might not necessarily be public figures. Email me at buffalopundit[at]gmail.com and I will give you a list of the names of people who received the pornographic and racist emails that Carl sent. Any time.  The reason why Carl never sued me? He sent them. They’re his.

Mrs. Thompson went on to regurgitate a 5 year-old blog post from a guy I contacted on Twitter yesterday. Here is the relevant exchange:

Could some of the Paladino e-mails been forgeries? This, and other questions, that the Albany press refuses to ask by Jerry Myrle Fuller Sunday, April 18, 2010 (Note: Most of you know that I am not a reporter by trade or training, and that my area of expertise is meteorology, so if this reads like a first-person journal entry, that is part of the reason. It seems to flow a little better that way.) By now, most of you have heard about the e-mail leak from a liberal blog known as wnymedia.net that purports, in big letters, to be displaying the scandalous “racist and sexist e-mails” put forth by Buffalo developer and Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl P. Paladino. Immediately I became suspicious. The article asserted that the e-mails were real with all the authority of a Facebook chain message. So, I did some research. Initially, this article was going to be a plain old rant about how this state seems to treat upstate politicians with a lot less respect than downstaters, pointing out the curious parallel between this and Chris Collins’s alleged “lap dance” comments that were unverifiable and blown way out of proportion, killing his proposed campaign for governor. It is no coincidence that both came from Buffalo, and it is also no coincidence that it has been decades since the state of New York has had a governor from the upstate region. However, I began to notice something: while for a few days, it appeared that Paladino’s campaign would indeed go down in flames, as would-be supporters ranging from Curtis Sliwa to Mark Williams disavowed him over the controversy, something funny happened: Paladino’s die-hard supporters rallied around him harder than ever. Paladino has a strong cult following, with passionate and outspoken supporters– something I really don’t see outside the political class for Lazio or Levy. They began to see the outrage over the e-mails as over the top. This led to wnymedia.net trying to push its rebuttal and insist that Carl Paladino was a dirty racist unfit for the office of governor of New York. So, I looked into wnymedia.net– specifically Alan Bedenko, the man who portrays himself as “buffalopundit–” to see who this guy was. To put it bluntly, he’s an ambulance chaser (i.e., an auto injury attorney) who joined the Democratic Party in 2003. Having sporadically read his commentary, he’s always been fairly strongly liberal. This was relatively mundane information, but then I stumbled on a little item from the Niagara Falls Reporter (a local alternative tabloid in the Niagara Falls area) that had something eerily familiar. The article dates to February 2009 and stems from an unrelated e-mail feud between Sam Hoyt and Buffalo City Hall (my emphasis added):

Well, let’s get one thing clear. The author admits that he’s no reporter, and boy is he right. I defend people against whom lawsuits have been brought. I am not an “ambulance chaser”, and haven’t done plaintiff’s personal injury work since 2001. Indeed, even accused drunk drivers know this!

Anyhow, here the author embedded the text from Mike Hudson’s Niagara Falls Reporter:

Big catfight in Buffalo last week between amateur bloggers Alan Bedenko of Buffalo Pundit and Glenn Gramigna of New WNY Politics, precipitated by the self-important Bedenko’s decision to publish what he even said was a series of fraudulent e-mails purporting to have been sent between some top aides to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown last summer. Clearly, the e-mails were meant to slander and defame the people at Buffalo City Hall. Why Bedenko, who is an attorney in real life, chose to publish them is anyone’s guess. Enter Gramigna, who openly speculated that — since Bedenko was the only one to publish the lurid e-mails — perhaps Bedenko in fact had been their author. Actually, the theory makes a lot of sense. The e-mails were shopped to various news outlets last summer, and my impression was that they were created in response to the publication by the Niagara Falls Reporter of another series of e-mails between the married state Rep. Sam Hoyt and a young and comely Albany intern he was carrying on with. The Hoyt camp openly accused Brown’s first deputy mayor, Steve Casey, of being behind the leaking of the Hoyt e-mails — which were genuine — and Casey, perhaps coincidentally, figures prominently in the admittedly fraudulent e-mails published by Bedenko. Also perhaps coincidentally, Bedenko was a strong supporter of Hoyt during the last election cycle, has been a consistent critic of the Brown administration and was, after all, the only one to publish the garbage. Anyway, he phoned Gramigna “in a rage” and, being a lawyer, claimed his rival to be guilty of defamation. For his part, Gramigna is every bit the clueless lump comedians make fun of when discussing bloggers, and immediately posted a retraction. One question remains: Who did write the slanderous and potentially damaging e-mails Gramigna ascribed to Bedenko? Bedenko vehemently denies he wrote them, of course, but who knows?

Glenn Gramigna was being paid by one Syaed Ali, who is widely thought to have been the author of the emails in question, and had no proof other than “open speculation” that I wrote the emails, because Chris Smith published them. Makes perfect sense, right? It’s logic for idiots! But be clear: nowhere in any of these articles have I “admitted” to having forged anything; on the contrary, I vehemently denied that I wrote them then, and I vehemently deny I wrote them now, because I didn’t write them. I didn’t even publish them.

Alan Bedenko has a history of questionable e-mail “leaks” that pre-dates the Paladino e-mail flap. As I understood it, reporters are supposed to check the reliability of their sources before quoting their allegations as fact– something that did not appear to happen when these e-mails were leaked and subsequently went viral. Considering that I’m pretty sure wnymedia.net isn’t on most of the Albany press members’ must-read lists (their articles rarely show up on the major blogs), I’d venture to say there was also some shopping going around with the Paladino story as well.

What “history of questionable e-mail “leaks”? The Syaed Ali stuff? Hell, you can go right here and read all about that, from that time. Here is the article I wrote about Gramigna immediately after he published his “speculation”, and I expressly threatened to sue him. It should also be noted that I never published the emails in 2009 – it was Chris Smith who did so.

From that article: UPDATED: Gramigna has retracted what he wrote, and what his source told him. That’s appreciated, but still horseshit. Apart from this morning, when I called him in a rage, I can honestly say that I’ve never exchanged a single word with Gramigna, despite having helped him promote his dreck-laden site when he started it. His business model is: get local politicians to buy ads, print positive crap about them and negative crap about their opponents. Look for an alternative to completely decimate that business model, coming soon. If I had written the offending emails – which I didn’t – I would have reprinted them last summer, when they were originally sent. They are alleged to have been sent by Mr. Gramigna’s newest advertising client, Syaed Ali. But I didn’t print them last summer. Indeed, I alluded to them a couple of times only in an off-handed manner. I had theories as to who might have been sending them, but someone in law enforcement somehow landed on Mr. Ali, and he alleges that he was subsequently placed into custody and that his belongings have been confiscated. I’ve gone on record saying that, if what Ali said is true, it’s a grave injustice. Furthermore, if I had sent them, I wouldn’t have pimped them to mainstream media – I would have posted them on my site contemporaneously so that the TV and other reporters would give me linkage and credit. But I didn’t write them, I wouldn’t have written them, I have nothing to gain from writing them, and never in my wildest dreams would ever conceive of writing something like that about anyone, much less an elected official. For Gramigna, acting apparently as a conduit for the flailing Ali, to even suggestthat I was behind those emails is a disgrace – and a defamatory one, at that. I have my disagreements with the Brown administration – I don’t like their secrecy, I don’t like their sense of entitlement, I don’t like their Machiavellian machinations to try and upset ECDC and its endorsed candidates, and I don’t necessarily think that they do the best job for Buffalo. That doesn’t mean I would ever stoop so low as to spread vicious, defamatory rumors about him or his officials.

I am not trying to claim that the entire thing is an absolute hoax. Paladino himself has acknowledged that at least some of the e-mails in question were in fact authentic. Many of them, knowing Paladino’s public persona and admitted racial insensitivity, aren’t even all that surprising. However, there is the question that if Paladino in fact did not author some of these alleged e-mails, why did he not come out and deny them? The best answer that I can give is that Michael Caputo didn’t even try to do so. Caputo, after the e-mail controversy broke, stated repeatedly that “We’re not sure about the authenticity of the emails, and we don’t care. I’m not even going to comment on the emails. It’s not something I care to look at.” He has characterized the leak as a “liberal Democrat blog smear” and has declined to delve into the details.

Carl is a lawyer. It doesn’t matter what Caputo did or didn’t say. Carl had until 2011 to go ahead and sue the crap out of me if the emails were frauds. I’m just a middle-class lawyer/blogger and he’s a multimillionaire. Why didn’t he just sue me if it was false?

There could be lots of reasons. The biggest is that they’re provably genuine. Next would be that bringing that lawsuit would have opened up Carl’s own reputation to scrutiny. He knows better than to subject his reputation to the discovery process. Lots of reasons.

As for Syaed Ali, the idea that I wrote emails accusing Byron Brown of being gay is so palpably riduculous and false that Gramigna himself retracted the allegation. Mike Hudson didn’t because Mike Hudson knows how to write a story without crossing over the lines of libel, and didn’t directly accuse me of anything. Jul Thompson is a liar, and “Tea New York” is liable for her defamation. 

I don’t know yet whether I will pursue legal action, but I do know that I now – after 5 years – have to establish, once and for all, the authenticity of Carl Paladino’s emails. That means I now have to produce the emails in an unredacted format, and journalists and laypeople will be perfectly free to inquire of these judges, appointed bureaucrats, elected officials, prominent businesspeople, and developers whether Carl Paladino sent these racist, pornographic, and offensive emails. Given Mr. Paladino’s current status as an elected member of the Buffalo school board, and given the controversy over his ongoing battle with a predominately African-American minority on that board, I don’t know that the timing of this is something that he welcomes, but either way, he has the Thompsons to thank.

Lying Liar Jul Thompson

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WNY Tea Party: Objectively Pro-Horse Porn

The tea party have decided to come after me. Probably because Jul Thompson is friends with the woman who is running the effort to kill Clarence schools. That’s the only explanation for bringing up 5 and 6 year old lies.

Remember: Jul Thompson is a liar. 

Have you ever known someone who leaves a wake of destruction behind them? Case in point, Alan Bedenko, liberal blogger, formerly wrote for ArtVoice, then left with Jeff Kelly and other staff to write for The Public, another liberal rag.

*Geoff Kelly. But never mind.

I sat with a friend today and shared with her my frustrations over my inability to persuade Carl Paladino’s Campaign for Governor in 2010 to answer the ridiculous charge that he was a racist, which were predicated upon emails Bedenko fabricated to “take him out” of the race against Andrew “2nd-Amendment-be-damned” Cuomo. As I attempted to provide her with some documentation to that effect, I found this little gem below, that I had never seen before. I had, at the time, shared the article from the Niagara Falls Reporter in which Bedenko had admitted to having fabricated some emails to sully the reputation of then (real) Mayor of Buffalo Steve Casey.

Let’s be 100% clear here.

I have never fabricated any emails to sully the reputation of Steve Casey, or of Byron Brown. I have never fabricated any emails to anyone, anywhere, and I have never fabricated any emails about – or from – Carl Paladino.  Anyone suggesting that I did (or that I would) is a liar. 

I don’t know the author but he is spot-on.

[I omitted here a lengthy paean to Carl Paladino, the savior and messiah of the Buffalo School system].

If I had a million dollars… I would sue the pants off of Alan Bedenko, challenge him to take a lie detector test and let him perjure himself in a court of law. Carl Paladino is one of the finest men I’ve ever known, and he, students and families of the Buffalo Public Schools and the people of New York deserve far better than being lied to by a nutcase on a liberal jihad and held hostage by the race-baiters of the School Board and the Buffalo Teachers Union. It’s a rare bird with “intestinal fortitude” that would subject himself to the outrageous and unrelenting bogus accusations of racism. We who know Carl, know that he is making an enormous sacrifice committing himself to this otherwise impossible task. He has given up his precious time, reputation and personal comfort because he cares so deeply for raising the level of achievement and providing a better future for the residents and families of the City of Buffalo.

Jul Thompson
Founder, TEA New York

Jul: Presumably Uncle Carl can provide you with the filing fee to sue me. I mean, you wouldn’t have standing to sue me, and Carl’s well past the statute of limitations to do so.

If I had fabricated those emails – you know, the racist, pornographic emails that Carl had sent and forwarded, including the one showing a horse having anal sex with a human female – why didn’t Carl go ahead and sue me back in 2010? 2011? 2012? 2013? Go ask any of Carl’s bigshot buddies whether he sent them. Ask Jamie Moses. Ask Larry Quinn. I can give you more names, if you want – names of people who might not necessarily be public figures. Email me at buffalopundit[at]gmail.com and I will give you a list of the names of people who received the pornographic and racist emails that Carl sent. Any time. 

The reason why Carl never sued me? He sent them. They’re his. Now, let’s take a look at the nonsense that Jul Thompson (the wife of Rus Thompson) has found:


Could some of the Paladino e-mails been forgeries?
This, and other questions, that the Albany press refuses to ask
by Jerry Myrle Fuller
Sunday, April 18, 2010

(Note: Most of you know that I am not a reporter by trade or training, and that my area of expertise is meteorology, so if this reads like a first-person journal entry, that is part of the reason. It seems to flow a little better that way.)

By now, most of you have heard about the e-mail leak from a liberal blog known as wnymedia.net that purports, in big letters, to be displaying the scandalous “racist and sexist e-mails” put forth by Buffalo developer and Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl P. Paladino. Immediately I became suspicious. The article asserted that the e-mails were real with all the authority of a Facebook chain message. So, I did some research.

Initially, this article was going to be a plain old rant about how this state seems to treat upstate politicians with a lot less respect than downstaters, pointing out the curious parallel between this and Chris Collins’s alleged “lap dance” comments that were unverifiable and blown way out of proportion, killing his proposed campaign for governor. It is no coincidence that both came from Buffalo, and it is also no coincidence that it has been decades since the state of New York has had a governor from the upstate region. However, I began to notice something: while for a few days, it appeared that Paladino’s campaign would indeed go down in flames, as would-be supporters ranging from Curtis Sliwa to Mark Williams disavowed him over the controversy, something funny happened: Paladino’s die-hard supporters rallied around him harder than ever. Paladino has a strong cult following, with passionate and outspoken supporters– something I really don’t see outside the political class for Lazio or Levy. They began to see the outrage over the e-mails as over the top. This led to wnymedia.net trying to push its rebuttal and insist that Carl Paladino was a dirty racist unfit for the office of governor of New York.

So, I looked into wnymedia.net– specifically Alan Bedenko, the man who portrays himself as “buffalopundit–” to see who this guy was. To put it bluntly, he’s an ambulance chaser (i.e., an auto injury attorney) who joined the Democratic Party in 2003. Having sporadically read his commentary, he’s always been fairly strongly liberal. This was relatively mundane information, but then I stumbled on a little item from the Niagara Falls Reporter (a local alternative tabloid in the Niagara Falls area) that had something eerily familiar. The article dates to February 2009 and stems from an unrelated e-mail feud between Sam Hoyt and Buffalo City Hall (my emphasis added):

Well, let’s get one thing clear. The author admits that he’s no reporter, and boy is he right. I defend people against whom lawsuits have been brought. I am not an “ambulance chaser”, and haven’t done plaintiff’s personal injury work since 2001.

Big catfight in Buffalo last week between amateur bloggers Alan Bedenko of Buffalo Pundit and Glenn Gramigna of New WNY Politics, precipitated by the self-important Bedenko’s decision to publish what he even said was a series of fraudulent e-mails purporting to have been sent between some top aides to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown last summer. Clearly, the e-mails were meant to slander and defame the people at Buffalo City Hall. Why Bedenko, who is an attorney in real life, chose to publish them is anyone’s guess. Enter Gramigna, who openly speculated that — since Bedenko was the only one to publish the lurid e-mails — perhaps Bedenko in fact had been their author. Actually, the theory makes a lot of sense. The e-mails were shopped to various news outlets last summer, and my impression was that they were created in response to the publication by the Niagara Falls Reporter of another series of e-mails between the married state Rep. Sam Hoyt and a young and comely Albany intern he was carrying on with. The Hoyt camp openly accused Brown’s first deputy mayor, Steve Casey, of being behind the leaking of the Hoyt e-mails — which were genuine — and Casey, perhaps coincidentally, figures prominently in the admittedly fraudulent e-mails published by Bedenko. Also perhaps coincidentally, Bedenko was a strong supporter of Hoyt during the last election cycle, has been a consistent critic of the Brown administration and was, after all, the only one to publish the garbage. Anyway, he phoned Gramigna “in a rage” and, being a lawyer, claimed his rival to be guilty of defamation. For his part, Gramigna is every bit the clueless lump comedians make fun of when discussing bloggers, and immediately posted a retraction. One question remains: Who did write the slanderous and potentially damaging e-mails Gramigna ascribed to Bedenko? Bedenko vehemently denies he wrote them, of course, but who knows?

Glenn Gramigna was being paid by one Syaed Ali, who is widely rumored to have been the author of the emails in question, and had no proof other than “open speculation” that I wrote the emails, because I published them. Makes perfect sense, right? It’s logic for idiots!

Alan Bedenko has a history of questionable e-mail “leaks” that pre-dates the Paladino e-mail flap. As I understood it, reporters are supposed to check the reliability of their sources before quoting their allegations as fact– something that did not appear to happen when these e-mails were leaked and subsequently went viral. Considering that I’m pretty sure wnymedia.net isn’t on most of the Albany press members’ must-read lists (their articles rarely show up on the major blogs), I’d venture to say there was also some shopping going around with the Paladino story as well.

What “history of questionable e-mail “leaks”? The Syaed Ali stuff? Hell, you can go right here and read all about that, from that time. Here is the article I wrote about Gramigna immediately after he published his “speculation”, and I expressly threatened to sue him. From that article:

UPDATED: Gramigna has retracted what he wrote, and what his source told him. That’s appreciated, but still horseshit.

Apart from this morning, when I called him in a rage, I can honestly say that I’ve never exchanged a single word with Gramigna, despite having helped him promote his dreck-laden site when he started it. His business model is: get local politicians to buy ads, print positive crap about them and negative crap about their opponents. Look for an alternative to completely decimate that business model, coming soon.

If I had written the offending emails – which I didn’t – I would have reprinted them last summer, when they were originally sent. They are alleged to have been sent by Mr. Gramigna’s newest advertising client, Syaed Ali. But I didn’t print them last summer. Indeed, I alluded to them a couple of times only in an off-handed manner. I had theories as to who might have been sending them, but someone in law enforcement somehow landed on Mr. Ali, and he alleges that he was subsequently placed into custody and that his belongings have been confiscated. I’ve gone on record saying that, if what Ali said is true, it’s a grave injustice.

Furthermore, if I had sent them, I wouldn’t have pimped them to mainstream media – I would have posted them on my site contemporaneously so that the TV and other reporters would give me linkage and credit.

But I didn’t write them, I wouldn’t have written them, I have nothing to gain from writing them, and never in my wildest dreams would ever conceive of writing something like that about anyone, much less an elected official.

For Gramigna, acting apparently as a conduit for the flailing Ali, to even suggestthat I was behind those emails is a disgrace – and a defamatory one, at that.

I have my disagreements with the Brown administration – I don’t like their secrecy, I don’t like their sense of entitlement, I don’t like their Machiavellian machinations to try and upset ECDC and its endorsed candidates, and I don’t necessarily think that they do the best job for Buffalo. That doesn’t mean I would ever stoop so low as to spread vicious, defamatory rumors about him or his officials.

I am not trying to claim that the entire thing is an absolute hoax. Paladino himself has acknowledged that at least some of the e-mails in question were in fact authentic. Many of them, knowing Paladino’s public persona and admitted racial insensitivity, aren’t even all that surprising. However, there is the question that if Paladino in fact did not author some of these alleged e-mails, why did he not come out and deny them? The best answer that I can give is that Michael Caputo didn’t even try to do so. Caputo, after the e-mail controversy broke, stated repeatedly that “We’re not sure about the authenticity of the emails, and we don’t care. I’m not even going to comment on the emails. It’s not something I care to look at.” He has characterized the leak as a “liberal Democrat blog smear” and has declined to delve into the details.

Carl is a fucking lawyer. It doesn’t matter what Caputo did or didn’t say. Carl had two and a half years to go ahead and sue the shit out of me. I’m just a middle-class lawyer/blogger and he’s a multimillionaire. Why didn’t he just sue me if it was false?

There could be lots of reasons. The biggest is that they’re provably genuine. Next would be that bringing that lawsuit would have opened up Carl’s own reputation to scrutiny. He knows better than to subject his reputation to the discovery process. Lots of reasons.

As for Syaed Ali, the idea that I wrote emails accusing Byron Brown of being gay is so palpably riduculous and false that Gramigna himself retracted the allegation. Mike Hudson didn’t because Mike Hudson knows how to write a story without crossing over the lines of libel, and didn’t directly accuse me of anything.

Jul Thompson is a liar. 

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