Lessons from the Quid Pro Cuo Bros
My column for the Daily News about guys born in Queens on third base who don't think the rules apply to them.
And a long talk on FAQ NYC about the not-so long-ago 1990s with Elon Green, author of Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York about the distrubing role that Bernard Kerik and Rudy Giuliani's mom ended up playing in that story, along with cameos from the likes to Robert Morgenthau, Linda Fairstein, William Bulger, Mike McAclary and Jim Rutenberg.
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“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” a creep born in Queens and on third base once said.
“That’s stupid and offensive,” another creep born in Queens and on third base said this week. That was Gov. Cuomo, asked about profiting off of deaths here as he answered questions for the first time since it finally came out that he was paid $5.1 million for his quickie “Leadership Lessons” book, published in the middle of the pandemic and written with “volunteer” help from his government staffers, about overseeing the state’s response to the public health crisis that’s killed 52,531 New Yorkers as of Friday. That includes 15,430 nursing home patients, a number that, like his book payment, he fought tooth and nail to keep secret for months as he inked his contract and then collected an Emmy for his coronavirus TV briefings and then made the TV rounds again to promote the tome and himself.
After the nursing home numbers came out, sales plummeted and his publisher stopped pushing the book and says it has “no plans to reprint or reissue in paperback” — meaning they’re paying the state’s most powerful pol about $100 for each copy sold, or $300 for each nursing home patient the virus has killed on his watch.
Speaking of stupid and offensive, after buying time by acknowledging “the pain I’ve caused” that “was unintentional and I truly and deeply apologize for it,” Cuomo now flatly says “I didn’t do anything wrong” with any of the 10 women to date who’ve accused him of harassment and worse, including a government staffer who says he put his hand under her shirt after summoning her to his residence at night on “official” business.
That’s especially ugly coming from the governor who spent last summer on TV counterprogramming Trump and offering himself as the state’s pater familias, sharing stories about his daughters (the youngest of whom played junior high school sports with Charlotte Bennett, the former aide who says Cuomo was trying to groom her for sex and that she told him about the sports connection in an unsuccessful effort to get him to back off) and their boyfriends.
The governor who trumpeted in 2019 that “time is up on sexual harassment in the workplace” in New York is talking in 2021 about how “just making someone uncomfortable does not mean sexual harassment” while evading questions about whether he’s slept with staffers with a Clintonian “intimate has a number of manifestations.”
Just as Cuomo has gone from I’m sorry to I’ve got nothing to be sorry about, he’s gone from asking New Yorkers to withhold judgment until various investigations are completed to talking about how we shouldn’t trust the investigators — including his friend Joe Biden’s Justice Department — because it’s all supposedly just politics. He’d know!
About those investigations: Cuomo is being criminally probed by the feds for covering up the nursing home numbers and also for giving VIP virus tests to friends and family (a practice he continued even after tests were widely available and his special tests had been reported on). State Attorney General Letitia James is looking into the sexual harassment claims, which clearly violate the new law signed by Cuomo himself (he’s denied reports that he sent a staffer to the training he’d mandated for all state employees). She’s also looking into whether he used state resources in writing his book. And as it considers impeaching him, the state Assembly is looking at all of the above as well as a report that Cuomo’s administration covered up concerns that the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge he named after his father is structurally unsound.
With his public polling yet to collapse, it feels like Cuomo has stumbled into Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s approach of flooding the zone with excrement.
And Andrew has clearly taken the advice of Chris Cuomo — CNN’s top-rated host, who spent the summer doing goofy shows with his big brother the governor, no hard questions required — reportedly gave on crisis-management calls with administration staffers and lawyers as the harassment accusations kept coming to “take a defiant position,” with Chris invoking “cancel culture” as a reason for Andrew to hold on.
It takes some nerve to get on a call that violates every known code of journalistic ethics to rail against “cancel culture,” but that’s a Cuomo for you.
Thursday night, after CNN put out a shrug of a statement saying “it was inappropriate” for Chris to have been on those calls, he opened his show by reading a brief scripted intro where he told viewers how much he loves his family while assuring them “I know where the line is.”
The line is wherever it needs to be for the Quid Pro Cuo Bros to maintain power and position, and they’ll say or do whatever they need to to make sure that happens.
When you’re a star, they let you do it.
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