For US Attorney Preet Bharara — who dethroned the heads of both the state Senate and the Assembly — the idea of probing Gov. Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion must’ve been a no-brainer.
After all, having the government hand a billion dollars in taxpayer money to the private sector is dubious in itself — never mind the opportunities it offers for corruption.
So all the recent revelations of Bharara’s Buffalo Billion probe — notably, the subpoenas he’s handed out to several people, including the governor’s former top aide, Joe Percoco — shouldn’t surprise.
Bharara had already subpoenaed various parties linked to the Buffalo plan. That includes LPCiminelli, which is building the main $750 million site, RiverBend — whose owner, Louis Ciminelli, is a big Cuomo financial backer — and the gov’s own economic-development agency.
But the latest disclosures raise new questions and place potential wrongdoing closer to Cuomo himself. Records show Percoco got up to $125,000 in 2014 in fees from two firms, COR Development and CHA, that do business with the state — and that have donated heavily to Cuomo. (Percoco pocketed that cash while on hiatus from government employ — though making over $100,000 as Cuomo’s campaign manager.)
And Thursday’s Post broke the news that Percoco got those payments even as he was rushing to refinance a suspicious $800,000, two-year mortgage on his new home.
Cuomo this week admitted he knew Percoco, perhaps his most trusted confidante, “might be accepting consulting arrangements” while working on his campaign. Which is strange enough.
But the real issue is whether any Team Cuomo member steered contracts to Ciminelli, COR or CHA (or anyone else) in exchange for fees or campaign “gifts.”
Last week, even Cuomo’s own folks admitted Bharara had “raised questions of improper lobbying and undisclosed conflicts of interest.”
We’ve long been skeptical about Cuomo’s Buffalo boondoggle, not least because it made little sense to have hard-working taxpayers build a factory for a firm, SolarCity, owned by a multibillionaire, Elon Musk.
In probing the Buffalo Billion’s billion possibilities for corruption, maybe Bharara will come up with an explanation for that.