Percoco was Cuomo's foot soldier, not his right hand, lawyer says

Prosecutors have accused Percoco, the governor’s former executive deputy secretary, of trading his vast influence in state government for more than $300,000 in bribes.

Bohrer’s description was markedly different from the one Percoco had cultivated during his time as the governor’s “enforcer,” “hammer” and top lieutenant in Albany. Although Bohrer cast his client as a calendar-keeper and a chair-rearranger, those in state government who dealt with Percoco had long regarded him as one of the most powerful figures in Cuomo’s administration, a man who instilled fear in anyone who dared challenge him.

Prosecutors had reinforced that image, asking witnesses to describe how Percoco was known to speak — or yell — with the governor’s authority. “He had the ability to pick up the phone and get things done,” Todd R. Howe, a former Albany lobbyist and the government’s star witness, said.

Bohrer mocked that depiction.

“Apparently there’s no one bigger than Joe Percoco,” he said. “That’s an exaggeration. That’s a stretch. That’s Todd Howe in action.”

Bohrer said Howe inflated Percoco’s influence to serve his own purpose: namely, to burnish the tales of corruption that he had offered to prosecutors in exchange for leniency. Howe has been cooperating with the government after pleading guilty to eight felonies, many of which involved lying.

Percoco did not have the ability or the inclination, Bohrer said, to try to force state officials to grant contracts to business executives or to waive union labor requirements that the executives found burdensome — the actions Percoco is accused of exchanging for bribes.

“He was a punch-list kind of guy. Doing things on a very basic level. Office manager. Personnel relations,” Bohrer said. “Not a man of immense power.”

If Percoco did anything, he said, it was set up a few meetings as a favor for friends — meetings that he did not even attend.

Making Percoco seem more important than he was, Bohrer said, made Howe also seem more important.

The real corrupt bargain, Bohrer suggested, was not between Percoco and the three executives who are his co-defendants but between Howe and prosecutors who allowed him to sign a cooperation agreement despite knowing his history of dishonesty.

“What Mr. Howe was offering was a right-hand man of the governor of the state of New York,” he said. “So the prosecutors from the United States Department of Justice thought the price was right.”

Howe is in jail, a point Bohrer alluded to repeatedly. He was arrested in early February after admitting under cross-examination that he had tried to defraud his credit card company after he had already signed his cooperation agreement and promised not to commit any more crimes.

Bohrer’s description of his client also differed from ones Cuomo has offered. Percoco started working for Cuomo’s father, Gov. Mario Cuomo, when he was 19 years old, and the younger Cuomo has described him as his father’s “third son.” In the governor’s 2014 memoir, he called Percoco “the total package.”

Cuomo distanced himself after it became clear in 2016 that Percoco was the target of a federal investigation. The governor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has declined to comment on the trial.

In addition to trying to discredit Howe, defense lawyers also said there was no evidence of quid pro quo between Percoco and the other defendants. Daniel M. Gitner, a lawyer for Peter Galbraith Kelly Jr., a former executive with a Maryland-based power company who is accused of bribing Percoco, said in his own closing arguments that there was only “quid pro nothing.”

And lest the topic of pasta go unaddressed — prosecutors had made the word “ziti” a focus of their closing arguments, arguing that Percoco used it as a code for bribes, in a nod to the Mafia drama “The Sopranos” — several defense lawyers turned the word into a recurring joke in their summations.

The word was banter between friends, Bohrer said, not proof of some evil scheme.

If everyone who picked up the word “ziti” after watching the show could be prosecuted, he continued, “millions of people would be in jumpsuits for having watched ‘The Sopranos.'”

Prosecutors are expected to deliver a rebuttal to the defense lawyers’ closing arguments Thursday, with jury deliberations scheduled to begin after.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Percoco was Cuomo's foot soldier, not his right hand, lawyer says

That was the portrait Percoco’s lawyer, Barry Bohrer, painted Wednesday in U.S. District Court during closing arguments of the sprawling corruption trial in which Percoco is a defendant.

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