{"id":182128,"date":"2015-12-12T18:42:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-12T23:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/12\/12\/drip-drip-drip-4\/"},"modified":"2015-12-12T18:42:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T23:42:00","slug":"drip-drip-drip-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/12\/12\/drip-drip-drip-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Drip, Drip, Drip\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And now the second of Albany&#8217;s &#8220;3 Men in a Room&#8221; has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/12\/12\/nyregion\/dean-skelos-adam-skelos-guilty-corruption-trial.html\">been convicted of corruption<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Dean G. Skelos, the former majority leader of the New York Senate, and his son were found guilty of federal corruption charges on Friday, a quick and devastating follow-up punch to the State Capitol, which has seen two entrenched leaders convicted and removed from office in less than two weeks.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The jury in Federal District Court in Manhattan took roughly eight hours over two days to reach its verdict against Senator Skelos, 67, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, 33, finding them guilty of all eight bribery, extortion and conspiracy counts.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Skeloses were undone by the perversion of a simple fatherly impulse: There was little that the elder Skelos would not do, or ask, for his son. They used the father\u2019s position as majority leader to pressure a Manhattan developer, an environmental technology company and a medical malpractice insurer to provide Adam Skelos with roughly $300,000 via consulting work, a no-show job and a direct payment of $20,000.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Dean Skelos, a Republican from Long Island, had been one of the most powerful men in state government until his arrest this year, and his conviction \u2014 along with the conviction of his former colleague, the longtime Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat \u2014 is sure to have repercussions beyond the courtroom. As in Mr. Silver\u2019s case, which ended on Nov. 30, the verdict resulted in Mr. Skelos\u2019s expulsion from the State Legislature, where both men had served for more than three decades.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I cannot imagine that UU Attorney Preet Bharara does not his sights on the Governor&#8217;s office after all of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And now the second of Albany&#8217;s &#8220;3 Men in a Room&#8221; has been convicted of corruption: Dean G. Skelos, the former majority leader of the New York Senate, and his son were found guilty of federal corruption charges on Friday, a quick and devastating follow-up punch to the State Capitol, which has seen two entrenched &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,972,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-justice","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182128"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}