I always thought D’Amato was blackmailed. He was a sharp voice for a long time and then out of the blue he clammed up.
Schumer was a Congressman running for D'Amato's seat. D'Amato called him a putz-head, and Schumer said it was racist because he was Jewish. It worked, but D'Amato had previously been caught on the radio making a bad Japanese accent when talking about Judge Lance Ito during the OJ trial.
In Democrat New York, that's all it took.
-PJ