U.S. Supreme Court to weigh N.Y. corruption cases

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday will consider a pair of cases that could make it harder to pursue public corruption prosecutions — bids by an ex-aide to Democratic former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and a businessman to reverse bribery and fraud convictions.

The justices are set to hear arguments in the appeals by Joseph Percoco and Louis Ciminelli, who were charged in related cases in 2016 as part of a corruption crackdown by federal prosecutors in Manhattan centered on the halls of the state capital of Albany.

The eventual rulings by the justices, expected by the end of June, also will affect three co-defendants charged in corruption and fraud cases during Cuomo’s tenure as governor involving state contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Rulings favoring the defendants could curtail prosecutors from charging a variety of cases as wire frauds and limit their ability to pursue certain classes of bribery cases, according to Jaimie Nawaday, a former federal prosecutor now working at the Seward & Kissel law firm.

“Prosecutors could face a constriction of their ability to bring charges based on novel and expansive readings of the fraud statutes,” Nawaday said.

The Supreme Court in recent years has hemmed in prosecutors in political corruption cases, including a 2020 decision to toss the convictions of two aides to Republican former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie relating to the Bridgegate political scandal.

The court in 2016 also threw out Republican former Virginia Governor Robert Mcdonnell’s bribery conviction in another ruling narrowing the types of conduct that can warrant prosecution as corrupt.

The charges against Percoco and Ciminelli were brought in 2016 by thenmanhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who also pursued corruption cases against top state lawmakers, including former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

The case Bharara unveiled in 2016 cast a pall over Cuomo’s administration even though he was not charged. Cuomo resigned from office in 2021 in an unrelated sexual harassment scandal.

Percoco, a former Cuomo aide, was convicted in 2018 on bribery-related charges for seeking US$315,000 in bribes in exchange for helping two corporate clients of an Albany lobbyist named Todd Howe pursuing state benefits and business.

Prosecutors said Percoco referred to the payments as “ziti,” a term for money used by characters in The Sopranos mobster TV series. Percoco was sentenced in 2018 to six years in prison.

Howe pleaded guilty and cooperated with investigators. Percoco was convicted alongside an executive at a real estate developer, Steven Aiello, who prosecutors said orchestrated bribes to Percoco.

At the time of the actions at issue, Percoco was no longer serving in government as the governor’s executive deputy secretary but managing Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign, a fact his lawyers said meant he could not be convicted of bribery.

His lawyers argue that Percoco’s status as a private citizen meant that his acceptance of money to convince the government to do something indicated he was not a crook, but a lobbyist, and that upholding his conviction would expose the profession of lobbying more broadly to criminal charges.