An old joke starts with a guy offering a woman $1 million to sleep with him. When she agrees, he asks if she’ll do it for $10. “What do you think I am?” she huffs.
“We’ve already established that,” he replies. “Now, we’re just haggling price.”
The same principle seems to apply to New York politicians asked to return their now-unclean “gifts” from Glenwood Management.
Glenwood, recall, was deeply involved in corrupt payoffs that resulted in the criminal convictions of ex-legislative bosses Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos. The Post has been asking pols — who got a total of over $10 million in donations from the firm — to return the cash. Their answers seem to depend on how much they got.
Mayor de Blasio was first to agree to hand back Glenwood cash, but it totaled just $20,000 — a drop in his campaign bucket.
And after The Post reported that no one on the Legislature’s Ethics Committees planned to return any money, Assemblyman Michael Montesano (R-I-C, Glen Head) became the first state lawmaker to heed our call.
Montesano’s move is certainly the right one: As a member of the Assembly Ethics Committee, he should be setting an example. But he only had to give back $250.
Gov. Cuomo, by contrast, raked in $1.2 million from Glenwood — far too much, apparently, to part with. Similarly, the Senate’s Republican committees won’t return a cent of the $1.5 million they raked in.
On Monday, ex-Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Tony Avella (D-Queens) even defended keeping his $40,000 in tainted cash: “That money was spent on my re-election. [Glenwood wasn’t] indicted at the time. . . So there’s no money to give back.”
Huh? The firm’s owner was an unindicted co-conspirator; its leaders avoided charges thanks to deals with prosectors.
Avella says he spent the cash, but he knows money is fungible: Returning it from the $60,000 he has on hand wouldn’t cheat other donors, as he claims.
Mind you, Avella’s typically seen as one of Albany’s “cleaner” pols — yet he won’t pay a token price to offer a clear “no” to the culture of corruption. That suggests most state leaders are all too happy to say “yes.”
