Posted on 10/02/2010 9:43:29 AM PDT by Fitzy_888
(...)
"Andrew gave him a bye," Paladino told The Buffalo News in an interview published Tuesday. "And then he comes and he pays Andrew off with a $1.2 million salary he gave him and $800,000 in political contributions."
Paladino told the News the Farkas association is criminal in nature.
(...)
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Cuomo strides outside Housing to fight battles BALTIMORE SUN | June 03, 2000 | By Susan Baer
Excerpt:
Cuomo’s most notorious continuing battle has been with his department’s inspector general. Since 1995, when Gaffney raised questions about a program run by Cuomo, who was then assistant HUD secretary, he has been trying to discredit her. Gaffney, in turn, has kept up a drumbeat of attacks. Generally praised by Democratic and Republican lawmakers as a by-the-book bureaucrat, Gaffney told Congress in 1998 that Cuomo “is uncomfortable with the concept of an independent inspector general who is not subject to his control.”
Even Cuomo’s fiercest fans say he is zealously concerned with control and image – in at least one case to the possible detriment of the taxpayers.
A Boston-based energy conservation company, run by two Democratic fund-raisers, brought a lawsuit against HUD in 1997 charging that the secretary wrongfully canceled a lucrative HUD contract after a Wall Street Journal article implied that the company won the contract through political connections. Even though the newspaper ran a correction three days later saying there was no evidence of impropriety, HUD officials told the principals it was canceling the contract because the Journal article “potentially creates the appearance of an impropriety.”
HUD admitted liability for canceling the contract (which would have saved the government millions in energy costs, the company contends). A judge is deciding whether the government must pay the $13.7 million in damages that Energy Capital Partners is seeking or the about $1 million that HUD lawyers argue the department owes.
The lawsuit paints an unflattering portrait of Cuomo, saying he threatened one of the Boston businessmen in an effort to get him to drop the suit, warning of “potential adverse ramifications to him and his business interests from any failure to do so.”
Cuomo’s admirers are resigned to the secretary’s tactics and personality as part of the package.
“His confrontational style doesn’t always get the best results on some of the smaller things,” says Harvey of the Enterprise Foundation. “But if that’s the price you have to pay for putting housing front and center, the rewards far outweigh some of the style issues.”
———————————————-
BUSINESSMEN WIN $8.8M IN SUIT AGAINST US UPSET THAT FEDERAL HOUSING OFFICIALS CANCELED CONTRACT Boston Globe | Aug 24, 2000 | Peter J. Howe
Excerpts:
“Energy Capital said it will seek to recover millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees from HUD, citing the “bad faith misconduct of Secretary Cuomo,” who personally threatened Leventhal in February 1998 that he would harm his business unless he dropped the suit.”
(…)
“Federal Claims Court Judge Edward J. Damich awarded Seigel and Leventhal’s company $8.8 million in lost profits, a ruling Damich acknowledged was rare in suits against the federal government.”
Andrew Cuomo was widely known at the time as the corruptest head that HUD ever had, and that’s saying a lot.
The chief questions are:
1. Do the voters of New York really care, or would they like to have a proven pork-grubber running the state and spreading the loot around?
2. Will the news media report this, outside of the areas where Paladino is known and admired?
Keep up the pressure. Cuomo has many skeletons. The media wants to keep Paladino’s allegations questionable since he’s “so unstable”, don’t you know.
I would love to here an honest account of what really transpired between Washington Mutual and AG Cuomo.
I think the voters in New York State really care. It’s just that we are so surrounded by Liberals, Unions, takers, and incompetent government shills that it’s hard to know who is actual and who isn’t. The media is very powerful in this state because so many people are “brain dead.”
No matter how it gets out there...Paladino's name is now in play.
Cuomo is trying to figure out how many cartons of cigarettes he has to give out at this point.
What is certain....Cuomo will not bring change.
I wish Guiliani would run for the Senate.
I also wish Guiliani would have run for the Senate.
Well, I think a lot of ordinary people care. But it’s been rare in New York for politicians to really appeal to that. Meantime, you have the unions and the liberals, as you say, and all those people they have put on welfare who’d like to have more of it.
And all the kneejerk liberals who seem to live in the suburbs these days, who think their consciences are telling them that “the poor” need more free handouts. Without realizing that the politicians they vote for have put the poor there in the first place and made them permanently dependent. It’s an insidious business.
Anyway, Cuomo was a big-time crook, if they can just get the word out. They did finally grow disgusted with his father, Mario, and threw him out.
Expose RAT dirt and corruption everywhere and at every level of government. Destroy them with the truth.
Exposure is the only thing RATs fear. Intimidation and personal destruction are their tools of choice.
Did you know that Rudy Giuliani is pro partial birth abortion? Did you know that he proclaimed NYC a sanctuary city for illegals?
Do a FR search using keyword: guilianitruthfile for the lowdown on him.
ping!
But he's not running for New York state governor ~ instead we've got people like Don Cuomo. He's in favor of partial birth, or pre-birth, or even post-birth extermination of the young if that will get him one more vote than he would have otherwise gotten.
These sociopathic personality types don't care what you think.
I think I'll engage in some vote fraud and drive up there to vote for Paladino 50 or 60 times ~ maybe more!
I remember when Giuliani first ran for Mayor against Dinkins. He was pro life then. He lost, and when he came back for the next election, suddenly, he was pro abortion.
He’s such a liberal, and yet, he has a reputation for being a conservative. People don’t do their homework.
He demonstrated what it takes to win there ~
I suggest we pull our forces out and build a wall around the place.
I agree - specifically around Bloomberg, and everyone who voted for him.
By Lucy Komisar
Aug 22, 2006 [Part 1]
As Secretary of HUD, Andrew Cuomo reversed the policy of selling defaulted mortgages so that families could keep their homes. Instead, he chose to foreclose on mortgages, which meant that families lost their homes and insiders cleaned up on fire-sale priced properties. The US Treasury also lost billions.
This story starts in 1989 with Catherine Austin Fitts, then a savvy Wall Street investment banker.
Fitts got the chance to join the new George H.W. Bush administration as Assistant Secretary of Housing. Working for HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, she saw him run the agency to generate fees for friends.
This story begins with Fitts’s discovery of the Bush fees for friends operation, because that’s what Cuomo reverted to after Cisneros left.
Fitts discovered that the big-time beneficiaries of the HUD system were political friends. These scams lost taxpayers billions of dollars every year, skimming off monies that were supposed to be returned as refunds to homeowners with FHA mortgages..
Fitts had many run-ins with Kemp over what she came to see as fees for friends. Fitts repeatedly opposed political favors, and in August 1990, after 18 months, Kemp fired her.
HAMILTON
When Fitts left HUD, she started the Hamilton Securities Group, Inc., a Washington investment bank…
Then Fitts got another chance at HUD reform. After Bill Clinton became President, Hamilton in 1994 won a competitive bid to serve as the lead financial advisor to the FHA under HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros.
By the time the Clinton team came in, defaults on HUD-insured properties were enormous… There was $12 billion in defaulted mortgages: $4 billion on single-family homes and $8 billion on multi-family projects.
Reviewing information on HUD mortgage portfolios, Hamilton found patterns that Fitts later realized showed systemic fraud. They could have been Sopranos stories.
Traditional beneficiaries of the existing system included big time developers and property management companies… Fitts wanted to break up the monopoly system that allowed a select group to make money at taxpayers’ expense. She wanted to stop insider deals.
Fitts said, “By running the inside baseball game, HUD had been losing a huge amount… They skim off the premium profits and transfer it to their pals in the housing sector. This hurts millions of Americans using FHA mortgage insurance to finance their homes.”
But policies that benefited homeowners and taxpayers didn’t seem to be HUD’s priority.
PROTECTING FEES FOR FRIENDS
Andrew Cuomo had been appointed HUD Assistant Secretary of Community Development (CDP) under Cisneros. In 1996, Cuomo told Inspector General audit chief Chris Greer that he was planning to get rid of Fitts and Hamilton Securities.
Instead of saying what’s best for the community and taxpayers, to produce affordable housing at the lowest cost to taxpayers, he said, ‘How can we generate fees for our friends.’ There was a tax shelter refinancing pork fest.”
“Cuomo clearly had no use for Austin Fitts. The fights with Fitts were political. Everything Cuomo did was political; he was a totally political animal. He ran the CDP block grant in HUD and fixed the system so awards would be made to places he wanted them made to for political reasons, primarily in New York, because he had his eyes on going back and running for governor.”
In October 1997, Cuomo fired Hamilton. He announced to the press that this was “just one case” in a campaign of “zero tolerance for waste, fraud and abuse” at HUD.
Cuomo reinstated the old HUD cash-cow-for-political-friends system.
Istead of working out the defaulted single-family mortgages, he was foreclosing. There was a spike in families losing their homes and investments. But contractors and people handling property management and disposition made money.
Two independent investigations a few years later provided more detail about HUD corruption under Cuomo.
The GAO, in 2000 found that …fraudsters would buy property, often in poor neighborhoods, make cosmetic repairs and get puffed up property appraisals based in part on falsified documents attesting that homes had been renovated.
They would sell them at high prices, with inflated mortgages, to unsuspecting buyers who trusted the appraisals.
The owners of the houses quickly discovered their state, but often couldn’t afford to repair their homes, or pay the mortgages, so the mortgages were foreclosed, generating fees for property managers. And “flipped” again. It was the fraud dramatized by the Sopranos.
The hearing found that HUD exercised lax oversight over lenders. Cuomo rejected the blame.
CUOMO’S HUD SUDDENLY CAN’T FIND BILLIONS read the entire story
Cuomo resigned as HUD Secretary in 2001 when George W. Bush took office.
Throughout Cuomo’s tenure, HUD’s Single-Family Mortgage Insurance Program remained on the annual GAO list of federal programs vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement.
* * * *
Postscript
When Cuomo fired Hamilton… two of the biggest beneficiaries were the National Housing Partnership (NHP) and Andrew Farkas’ Insignia. Farkas became one of Cuomo’s major fundraisers in his unsuccessful run for the 2002 Democratic nomination for New York governor. Cuomo reported a 2003-income of $288,983, but with $660,238 from Farkas, that jumped to $819,473 in 2004.”
The End
… and now the Dems and the media want you to elect Cuomo governor… because he doesn’t raise his voice and behaves himself in public… it’s not Cuomo’s public conduct that is dangerous to New York and New Yorkers… it’s what Andrew Cuomo has done – and will do again - behind closed doors.
More Andrew stuff at Buddy's Blog
Good stuff!
Please contact me if you’re interested in being added on or taken off the Carl Paladino for Governor ping list. This looks to be a fairly high volume ping list for a while, probably until the election.
BTTT!
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