ALBANY - Jurors in former Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno's corruption trial have reached a verdict on two counts but are deadlocked on six others.
"We can not reach a unanimous verdict on the other six counts," the jury told Federal Court Judge Gary Sharpe Tuesday.
The jury did not reveal what verdicts it had reached or which counts remained.
They said they were not ready to give up but asked for additional guidance from Sharpe, who told them to resume their deliberations.
"Take as much time as you need to discuss this," Sharpe told the jury of seven women and five men. "There is no hurry."
The jury deliberated until just before 5 p.m. They are to return Wednesday.
"I'm feeling very upbeat, very optimistic, from what I am seeing and hearing," Bruno told reporters as he left the courthouse.
"We are praying that this gets resolved in a positive way sooner rather than later."
The one-time Republican kingpin is charged with exploiting his position as one of the state's most powerful lawmakers to collect $3.2 million in bogus consulting fees and gifts.
Bruno, who ran the Senate for 14 years until quitting in 2008, faces 20 years in jail.
The jury has deliberated three days. Early Tuesday, jurors asked Sharpe the difference between "reasonable doubt" and guilt "beyond a shadow of a doubt."
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Reprints Share Close LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy JIM DWYER Published: November 20, 2009 Too much about Albany can make a stone of the heart. But wait.
Skip to next paragraph Related Times Topics: Jim DwyerJoseph L. Bruno ran the State Senate for 14 years and, by one count, dispensed $100 million a year to keep it going. The public paid for fancy vans and television studios and printing plants, and legions of patronage jobs. How did Mr. Bruno and friends get this money? Easy: The State Senate just gave the State Senate the $100 million. The Assembly cuts a similar deal for itself.
In the Senate, thanks to this tax-financed payroll, Mr. Bruno had hot-and-cold-running lawyers, drivers, secretaries, gofers.
Meanwhile, he also ran a private consulting business out of his office suite in the Capitol. The people who employed him sent his personal paychecks directly to his government office. So the $100,000-a-year secretary on the public payroll took care of $3.2 million in personal checks paid to Mr. Bruno, and all the attendant paperwork. The lawyers on that same public payroll had to meet with Mr. Bruno’s clients. All this has emerged at a federal trial under way in Albany.
The court case may describe crimes, or lawful greed or, as Mr. Bruno maintains, the ordinary, ethical practice of a part-time legislator, full-time businessman. Yet the Bruno story is about more than a trial, and more than one man’s lack of boundaries.
As a legislator, Mr. Bruno led a party that is in the minority in New York State but was in the majority in the State Senate, weaving the protective web of incumbency and gerrymandering.
Major banks paid to keep Mr. Bruno and his people in place, casually writing checks of $50,000 or so for seasonal campaign galas. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars from his personal fortune to Bruno-run political funds, hoping to fortify Mr. Bruno’s shaky hold on power.
And two years ago, when the public was afforded a glimpse of Mr. Bruno’s sense of entitlement — he was being flown in state helicopters to political fund-raisers and meetings at racetracks — nearly all of Albany rose to his defense.
Like a few other senior public officials, Mr. Bruno could whistle up a state helicopter and State Police pilots pretty much anytime he wanted. In 2007, the logs of these trips were requested under the Freedom of Information Law by James Odato, a reporter with The Times Union of Albany. Drawing on the records, the paper published an article about Mr. Bruno’s frequent use of the helicopters when he had political fund-raisers and about police drivers taking him around when he landed.
At first, the story had a modest impact. Then Mr. Bruno complained he was the victim of police surveillance. A series of articles and editorials in The New York Post took up the theme that the revelations about Mr. Bruno’s travels were an evisceration of his civil liberties that bordered on Stalinism.
After all, who would want to live in a country where a politician can’t command state helicopters and police for what are essentially political fund-raising junkets?
Finally, the state’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, began an investigation. His report quickly disposed of any questions about the legitimacy of Mr. Bruno’s helicopter travels; under the rules in place, even a modest fig leaf of official business could justify them.
The vast bulk of Mr. Cuomo’s report was devoted to the question of how the Bruno flight logs were disclosed. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that they were leaked by the office of Mr. Bruno’s bitter adversary, Eliot Spitzer, who was then governor. The governor’s staff pretty much issued a gold-plated invitation to the Times Union reporter to ask for the documents.
So The Times Union was cast as a stooge for reporting the information about the trips. Now, though, with the hindsight about Mr. Bruno’s sense of entitlement afforded by the federal trial, the helicopter saga is particularly revealing. The scandal was defined not as the possible abuse of public resources by Mr. Bruno, but as malignant leaks by the governor’s office. The truth of the matter was not the problem, but telling the truth was.
All the private business he managed to get done in his public sphere, Mr. Bruno said last week, was a fact of life. “It’s a citizen Legislature, and that’s what the public has to remember and I think will remember,” he said.
A “citizen legislator.” Maybe someone along the lines of Thomas Jefferson, galloping off to the Virginia House of Delegates.
Jefferson, who was frequently broke, would no doubt have envied Mr. Bruno’s acumen in managing to sell what the federal grand jury said was a “worthless” horse for $80,000. Although maybe not. The buyer was a man, the grand jury charged, who needed Mr. Bruno’s help with state business.
So I'm saying------THEIR PAY IS TOO MUCH FROM THE TAXPAYERS AND THEY DONT GET TO VOTE THEMSELVES ANOTHER RAISE...........
........GET THE HELL OFF MY BACK.......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
2 years for Bruno Former Senate leader remains free for now, vows to appeal
By BRENDAN J. LYONS, Senior writer First published in print: Friday, May 7, 2010
ALBANY -- A federal judge sentenced former state Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno to two years in prison on Thursday after admonishing the rags-to-riches political leader for failing to apologize for, or even acknowledge, his crimes.
"I know you don't believe you did anything wrong," U.S. District Judge Gary L. Sharpe told Bruno. "You're not sorry because you don't believe you did anything wrong. ... (But) you trampled on the integrity of the state Legislature." The sentencing is not the end of the case as Sharpe said Bruno, 81, can remain free on his own recognizance until an imminent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the honest services statute used to convict him. In addition, Bruno has vowed to appeal..................>>>>.........>>>>..........Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=928638#ixzz0nF7Un1FO
Wow another unusual supporter? He was found guilty under unsettled law.
The Supreme Court should strike this down as void for vagueness and Bruno should be allowed to enjoy his retirement with his grandchildren. No saint but hardly worse than the pack of jackals that has infested Albany.
Bruno conviction to be nixed By FREDRIC U. DICKER and BRENDAN SCOTT, Post Correspondents Last Updated: 4:38 AM, November 16, 2010 Posted: 1:56 AM, November 16, 2010
ALBANY -- Federal prosecutors, citing a recent US Supreme Court decision, have conceded for the first time that last year's conviction of former state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno on two felony counts must be dismissed, The Post has learned.
The concession came in a letter from Northern District US Attorney Richard Hartunian to Bruno lawyer William Dreyer late last month in response to Dreyer's inquiry about the impact of the unanimous Supreme Court ruling in June throwing out the complicated "honest services" statute under which Bruno was convicted.
Hartunian, after reviewing details of the decision and noting that the judge's instructions to the jury were based on the now-nullified statute, told Dreyer, "We will concede that reversal is appropriate as a result of the instructional error."
The letter asks that Bruno's lawyer agree that new charges under a different section of law could be brought against the 82-year-old Rensselaer County Republican in exchange for the dismissal of the charges.
"There's not a chance that any defense attorney in the world would ever agree to such a stupid request," said prominent Albany trial lawyer Stephen Coffey, a Bruno friend and legal adviser who is familiar with the letter.
Wow another unusual supporter? He was found guilty under unsettled law.
The Supreme Court should strike this down as void for vagueness and Bruno should be allowed to enjoy his retirement with his grandchildren. No saint but hardly worse than the pack of jackals that has infested Albany.
No Saint? I could of sworn he was cannonized....hmmmmm
I always liked Joe Bruno as a person. Without going into details, he has a link to my family.
As for Joe Bruno the politician and public office holder, I believe he did a lot of good things for his district and for the Capital Region and upstate New York. Did I always agree with him politically -- no .. but probably more than I agreed with Speaker Silver and some others from my own side of the aisle.
As for the issue of his outside business interests and how that may or may not have improperly impacted his role as a state legislator -- I would say #1) I don't know all the details of every accusation and I will give Mr. Bruno the benefit of the doubt because the Joe Bruno that I know is a good and decent man #2) the state's ethics laws are quite vague and are applied unfairly and unevenly ... to this day no one seems outraged that Speaker Silver's law firms makes millions of dollars lobbying state government ... or how about the many nefarious deals that George Pataki got away with as governor including the dubious land deal in Florida, the land deal on Lake Champlain, and the fact that somehow his family was able to skirt Medicaid laws and put his Dad in a nursing home at Government expense ..while Pataki and his siblings kept every penny from the sale of their Dad's farm in Peekskill ......
George Amedore & Christian Klueg for NYS Senate 2016 Pete Vroman for State Assembly 2016[/size][/color]
"For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground." Lyndon Baines Johnson
Logged
He's the bad apple-nobody else-everyone else is doing the people's work in Albany? ROTFLMAO!!
