NEW YORK (AP) - A federal jury was served a steady diet on Tuesday of “ziti,” the word prosecutors said a former close aide to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo used as code to refer to bribe payments he received to push forward projects for three businessmen.
Again and again, the word arose in emails shown to the jury and in the testimony of Todd Howe, the government’s prized turncoat witness who provided details to support the government’s claims against his longtime friend, Joseph Percoco.
Percoco, 48, who directed Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign, is on trial in Manhattan along with the three businessmen who prosecutors said teamed with Howe to funnel over $300,000 to Percoco in return for his help on advancing their business quests.
“I have no ziti,” Percoco was quoted as grumbling in one exchange when Howe said Percoco wanted money to pay his hefty mortgage and other bills. Howe had told him that he was on vacation.
“Enjoy your vacation,” Percoco wrote in an email read into the court record. “I’ll send my kids in the backyard with the garden hose.”
Howe testified a day earlier that Percoco told him the word “ziti” was inspired by its use on HBO’s “The Sopranos.”
Prosecutors said most of the bribes paid to Percoco since 2012 resulted from a consulting job for his wife, a schoolteacher, so he would help clear the way for the opening of a power plant in Orange County. About $35,000 came through checks that two Syracuse real estate developers wrote to her so her husband would help obtain permits necessary for the redevelopment of Syracuse’s Inner Harbor, they said.
A lawyer for Percoco has told jurors that his client acted legally as he worked for decades for the governor and his father, the late Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo. He called Howe a liar who was trying to reduce his sentence after pleading guilty to charges carrying up to 130 years in prison.
Through testimony, Howe made Percoco seem desperate in late 2012 to find work for his wife so he could afford his pricey Westchester County home.
When told in December 2012 that the first of monthly $7,500 checks were about to arrive, Howe quoted Percoco as saying in an email that he was grateful. “Down to the wire here,” he said Percoco wrote.
Testimony and emails also revealed on Tuesday how Percoco and Howe repeatedly referred to one of Percoco’s co-defendants, Peter Galbraith Kelly Jr., as “fat man.”
Howe said in one email exchange that Kelly, an executive with Competitive Power Ventures, was panicking as he tried to arrange a contract to sell power to the state as the company pursued state construction projects related to economic development in western New York.
Howe wrote in one email that he was “heading to Home Depot to buy some … sheets of plywood to build the pine box for fat man.”
He added: “Get the jumper cables out of the state rig, fat man is down for the count. He’s in free fall.”
Kelly has pleaded not guilty.
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