Paladino Has Aides With Tainted Pasts
By MICHAEL BARBARO
As he mounts an outrage-filled campaign for governor of New York, Carl P. Paladino has vowed to forcibly rid Albany of the wayward officials and misbehaving bureaucrats who he says have demeaned state government, promising to “take out the trash.”
But some of the people whom Mr. Paladino has recruited to run his campaign are plagued by brushes with the law and allegations of misconduct, an examination of public records shows.
His campaign manager failed to pay nearly $53,000 in federal taxes over the last few years, prompting the Internal Revenue Service to take action against him. An aide who frequently drives Mr. Paladino on the campaign trail served jail time in Arizona on charges of drunken driving.
Another adviser has been indicted on charges of stealing more than $1 million from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s re-election bid last year. And Mr. Paladino’s campaign chairwoman left a local government position amid claims that she had steered $1 billion in public money to a politically connected investment manager.
Their backgrounds could raise questions about the kind of cabinet Mr. Paladino, a Republican, would assemble if elected in November and cast doubt on his ability to radically remake the dysfunctional culture of Albany, government watchdogs said.
And the issue highlights a growing problem across the country for the Tea Party, which has backed Mr. Paladino: the outsider status and ragtag style that have fueled many of the movement’s best-known candidacies this election season often come with unexpected personal baggage.
Rather than dispute the troubled past of his advisers, or distance himself from it, Mr. Paladino’s campaign appears to be embracing it, adopting a warts-and-all approach that has defined his insurgent candidacy from the start.
In an interview, Michael R. Caputo, the campaign manager who ran afoul of the I.R.S., said, “This is a campaign of junkyard dogs, not pedigreed poodles.”
“Carl knows the background of everyone who works for him,” he added. “He knows that each of us comes to the campaign with warts. And he has his own warts. We don’t hide anything.”
Not all of Mr. Paladino’s aides share Mr. Caputo’s spirit of unbothered openness. When initially asked on Monday about his arrest for driving under the influence, Mr. Paladino’s driver, Rus Thompson, erupted in an expletive-laced tirade and told a reporter, “I fight a lot dirtier than Carl does.” Soon after that, he hung up, but later consented to a longer interview.
The legal problems of Mr. Paladino’s aides could prove especially potent in a race in which both Mr. Paladino and his Democratic rival, Andrew M. Cuomo, are trying to turn the page on the administration of Gov. David A. Paterson, who surrounded himself with troubled aides. One resigned after being accused of not paying taxes; another was suspended after being accused of domestic violence.
Mr. Paladino has reserved particular scorn for Mr. Paterson, calling him “symbolic of everything that is wrong with Albany” and suggesting that he should have been prosecuted for his conduct as governor.
Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog, said Mr. Paladino seemed to have two ethical standards: one for those he wants to toss out of Albany and another for those working on his election bid.
“He has come riding in as street sweeper, but the people with him have questionable backgrounds,” Ms. Lerner said. “It raises questions about his judgment and who he will bring with him to allegedly clean up Albany.”
Blair Horner, the legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, who briefly worked for the attorney general’s office under Mr. Cuomo, called the revelations “unsettling, given what has happened in the Paterson administration.”
“Mr. Paladino,” he added, “has to articulate why people with these backgrounds on his campaign staff should be acceptable to New Yorkers.”
Mr. Caputo attributed his tax problems to his poor skills as a businessman, saying that he opened a public relations business in South Florida without much background in finance.
By 2008, he said, he had fallen far enough behind in his tax payments that the federal government filed a lien against him for $52,788. He said he had worked out a payment plan with the I.R.S. and now owes $9,302. He declined to provide documentation of the payments.
“Most people I know have had problems paying their taxes,” he said. “I am just like everybody else.”
In the early 1990s, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Paladino’s driver, was charged with driving under the influence, damaging a vehicle in a hit-and-run and driving with a suspended license, according to Arizona court records. Mr. Thompson recalled that he had been drinking at a family barbecue, argued with his wife and drove off to avoid making a scene. But he said he hit another car and was arrested.
Records show that he served jail time in connection with the charges.
At one point, according to the records, an arrest warrant was issued after Mr. Thompson failed to show up for a court hearing. Mr. Thompson said he was unaware of the warrant. But he said that, after he completed his jail time, he moved out of Arizona at the suggestion of his probation officer. “I have never looked back, and I really don’t care to look back,” he said, in a second, more relaxed interview.
Mr. Thompson, a Tea Party organizer who is credited with encouraging Mr. Paladino to run for governor, said that he had not drunk alcohol in 20 years, since around the time he was arrested in Arizona. “I saw the course I was on,” he said, adding that he did not like it. “So I gave it up. It was the lowest point in my life.”
Two of Mr. Paladino’s campaign advisers have been accused of misdeeds involving large sums of money. His chairwoman, Nancy A. Naples, decided not to seek re-election as Erie County comptroller in 2005 after The Buffalo News reported that she had directed 80 percent of the county’s bond business to one of her campaign donors.
John F. Haggerty Jr., a political strategist on the Paladino team, was indicted this summer by the Manhattan district attorney, who accused him of stealing $1.1 million from Mr. Bloomberg and using part of the money to buy a house. He has pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Caputo said that Ms. Naples “was never truly accused of doing anything wrong.” As for the charges against Mr. Haggerty, Mr. Caputo suggested that they were politically motivated.
“Carl doesn’t throw his friends under the bus,” Mr. Caputo said.
Asked what message the campaign was sending by relying on these aides, he said: “You introduce me to somebody who is pristine and clean. I would be happy to meet them. But I have never met anybody like that.”
Ms. Lerner of Common Cause said government must be held to a high standard. Told of the Paladino campaign’s self-image as a pack of aggressive dogs, she said after a brief pause: “I don’t think the average New Yorker wants a government of junkyard dogs. They want at least some baseline standards.”
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