The top symbol of Gov. Cuomo’s public pledge to curtail “double dipping” by state officials who collect both state salaries and public pensions has begun double dipping himself, The Post has found.
State Police Superintendent Joseph D’Amico, with Cuomo’s secret approval but without any public notice, quietly obtained permission from the state Civil Service Commission in December to collect his full State Police salary and his pension as a former deputy chief of the NYPD.
Top aides to Cuomo told The Post and other news organizations in December 2010, just days before the new governor took office, that D’Amico would not collect his $85,000-a-year pension on top of his $136,000-a-year state salary because of double-dipping abuses involving politically connected individuals at the State Police and at other state agencies.
“Joe is making a sacrifice for public service. That’s what the new administration will be about,’’ a key Cuomo administration figure told The Post at the time.
The ban on D’Amico’s double dipping prompted several stories by The Post and other news organizations that noted Cuomo’s pledge that public service would require personal sacrifice.
The Post was tipped off to D’Amico’s decision to break the pledge by two prominent law-enforcement officials, who accused the Cuomo administration of “hypocrisy” and of misleading the public.
A Cuomo spokesman claimed D’Amico, 52 — the one-time chief investigator in then-Attorney General Cuomo’s office — had concluded he couldn’t make do on his public salary and threatened to resign if he wasn’t granted a “211 waiver’’ — legal authority to double dip.
“When the superintendent started in his position, he did not take his pension. However, it became financially impossible for him to remain in his position . . . and we granted a 211 waiver,’’ said the Cuomo spokesman, who asked not to be identified.
Double dipping by top State Police officials became a major issue in 2003 after The Post revealed that then-Gov. George Pataki’s good friend Daniel Wiese, a State Police lieutenant colonel, was making $220,000 a year after obtaining a 211 waiver that allowed him to collect his State Police pension after Pataki gave him a high-paying job at the state Power Authority.
Meanwhile, several sources close to the State Police, which has been racked by scandal and political interference, said there was widespread unhappiness with D’Amico.
“The professionals had been hoping that the governor would appoint a cop’s cop, but instead we wound up with just another politician,’’ one said.
The revelation of Cuomo and D’Amico’s flip-flop comes as the governor appears ready to flip-flop on another promise: to allow the controversial “millionaires tax’’ on higher-income earners, approved in December 2011, to expire at the end of 2014.
Concerned its renewal could become a campaign issue when he runs for re-election next year, Cuomo has been secretly negotiating an early extension of the tax with legislative leaders, sources said.
Cuomo, who once compared his commitment to allowing the tax to expire to his father Mario’s famous moral opposition to the death penalty, reversed course at the end of his first year in office in the face of the leftist Occupy Wall Street movement.
fdicker@nypost.com
