http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/39609.htmFebruary 1, 2005 -- So $339,000 in
dubious consulting fees isn't enough for New York's first lady — she needs a servant paid for out of the state Republican Party's nearly empty checking account, too?
No wonder GOP leaders across the state are fuming over State Editor Fred Dicker and Ken Lovett's Page 1 story in yesterday's Post. News that a maid/"go-fer" for Gov. Pataki's wife Libby is on the Republican Party payroll does not go over well.
Michelle Stubbs — described by one GOP source as "a nanny, a gopher, a cleaning person or some kind of personal valet" — provided personal services to Libby Pataki. Her salary: at least $50,000 a year.
In legal terms, that might or might not amount to
theft of party funds. But it certainly seems to be something like that.
Pataki spokesman David Catalfamo somewhat unconvincingly claims that Stubbs provides secretarial, travel and scheduling services for Mrs. Pataki at the first couple's Dutchess County mansion.
The Post quotes a former boyfriend of Stubbs as saying, "Mrs. Pataki used to call
all the time for crazy things. At one point she was going up to Albany and bringing meals back for the Patakis from the governor's mansion."
That's a 180-mile round trip, so it's no wonder that an employee of a Food Town supermarket in Dutchess County told The Post that Stubbs regularly shops there for the first family — and that she once demanded "goat's milk yogurt" because "that's what the Patakis wanted."
This seems to be a story with legs — so stay tuned.
But, in the end, is it a big deal?
Yes.
It needs to be seen in light of monies paid directly to Mrs. Pataki — more than $339,000 in 2003, according to Ben Smith in the New York Observer — for her work "as a vaguely defined consultant to businesses and charities."
Most of her clients, Smith said, "are linked to friends and political supporters of Mr. Pataki, and some of those friends also have interests before the state."
Other episodes during the gov's reign (e.g., the case of potentially lucrative Erie Canal land rights that Pataki officials secretly tried to sell to a politically connected developer for all of $30,000) magnify the appearance of impropriety.
After all, Pataki's gubernatorial salary is just $179,000.
Yet he and his wife realized an income of some $520,000 in 2003, according to their tax returns.
This raises some serious questions:
* If Stubbs provided purely personal services, as seems to be the case, did the Patakis declare the value of her wages on their own tax returns?
* Were state Republican committee officials complicit in hiring a personal servant — and disguising her as a provider of professional services?
* And, finally, couldn't the Patakis afford to pay for Stubbs themselves? Is there no limit to their sense of entitlement?
During Pataki's tenure, the stench of corruption in Albany, among Democrats and Republicans alike, has become palpable.
"Dysfunction" has become a euphemism for a general understanding that anything in Albany is for sale, and that nothing important is likely to happen without a favored consulting or lobbying firm — or two — being hired first.
Even the "legal" corruption — "honest graft," as George Plunkett of Tammany Hall called it (recall Pataki's 2002 Medicaid hikes followed by an unprecedented endorsement of a Republican gubernatorial candidate by the health-care union) — has reached a tipping point.
The Patakis are at the center of all of it.
This latest episode simply deepens the stench.
- - -
The sharks start to eat their own.....
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