For the second time, they ask the reporters to move.     
                                   
This is Andrew Cuomo’s first press conference out on the street that any of his press and security staff can remember, and they are a little overwhelmed. The backdrop of Broadway is perfect for him to tout his latest victory, getting the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to stop issuing free EZ-passes to board members, but the setting is more public than anyone has come to expect of him as attorney general.

Seeing the crowd of cameras wedged onto the sidewalk, a man in a Knicks jersey and a hot dog in hand jaywalks over to the edge of the scrum.

“What happened?” he asks

“Cuomo’s giving a speech,” says another bystander.

The first one peers through the crowd until he catches sight of the attorney general, head up, hands clasped at the waist.

“Oh, it’s Andy!” he shouts, calling out for attention. “Andy!”

Cuomo, meanwhile, has his eyes locked on a reporter who has just asked a question. He almost takes the bait for a sound bite blasting MTA officials on the symbolism of raising fares while enjoying free rides themselves.

Then, in mid-sentence, he pivots.

“Government must maintain the trust for government to do what it intends to do. Do I believe this was a public trust issue?” he says, asking himself a new, lower-key question. “Yes. I believe it was a legal issue and a public trust issue.”

He takes a few more questions, and then quickly wraps up the press conference. A couple walks by, looking at the dissipating crowd.

“That’s probably, like, a congressman,” the woman says.

The man corrects her.

“That’s Cuomo,” he says.



The attorney general, the one-time gubernatorial candidate, the scion of New York’s very own political dynasty, Cuomo is a genuine political celebrity—if only as the last man standing. Of the state officers voters picked in 2006, Cuomo is the only one still in the position he was elected to hold.

Quotable, easily recognizable and a saga unto himself, Cuomo is a media favorite, and he knows it. But since being sworn in as attorney general last year, Cuomo has done something almost no one ever expected him to do: retreat from the spotlight. He spends more of his days wringing deals out of marathon conference calls than at press conferences, where he usually stands to the side while others talk, rather than in front of the microphones.

“I don’t think it was a deliberate strategy, except to a point,” he says, explaining, “to the extent you get involved in personality press and personality politics, it actually detracts from the work.”

So far, the strategy has been successful. Cuomo enjoys high favorability ratings among Republicans and Democrats alike, across all demographics. His dark days of September 2002, with him quietly dropping out of the gubernatorial primary, seem more than just six years behind him.

But the dark days for New York State government are darker than ever, Cuomo says. Reminded of his 2006 campaign line that dysfunction was too weak a word to describe Albany, Cuomo stands by his rhetoric.

“You could say it fundamentally hasn’t changed—three men in a room, three men in a room,” he says, comparing the situation then and now, two governors later. “But there was an intervening fact, which was Eliot Spitzer.”

The greatest problem with Spitzer’s disastrous first year and the scandal which cut short his second, Cuomo says, is how much further they lowered New Yorkers’ already low opinion of their government.

“You don’t trust the government the way you need to trust the government. You don’t believe in the government. You’re disillusioned, with good cause,” he says. “You’ve been personally let down by the leadership of government. I understand that. I don’t disagree with you. You’re right.”

Enter Cuomo. Using the powers of his office, he presents himself as the man to redeem government. What the people really need, he says, is a good lawyer.

“To the extent that there are issues and problems, I’m going to address them,” he says. “To the extent that there is waste, fraud and abuse, I’m on the case.”

The Spitzer aftermath is especially complex for Cuomo, who not only succeeded Spitzer in the attorney general’s office, but built the closing argument of his 2006 campaign around the “Big Shoes” advertisements, which sought to paint him as the heir to Spitzer’s legacy.

The memory of all his supporters holding up the foot-measuring devices brings a smile to his face. No matter all that has happened since, Cuomo says he stands by the ads.

“That campaign was, ‘Eliot Spitzer was the epitome of what an attorney general should be.’ And the question was: ‘Who could fill his shoes?’” Cuomo says, reflecting on his term so far. “I’m comfortable with the comparison of this office’s performance period, on any scale.”

The tendency to compare Spitzer’s and Cuomo’s approaches to the office is inevitable—or was, at least until Spitzer’s surprise implosion. For a while,  because of his persona and how he approached being governor, Spitzer seemed to somehow occupy both offices at once.

There was a new sheriff in town, but the Sheriff of Wall Street had just moved to the second floor. Few believed that the town, or the state, would be big enough for the both of them.

And, for reasons no one could have predicted, it was not.

Spitzer’s disappearance may be something of a relief for Cuomo, who no longer has to contend with Spitzer for the spotlight, or potentially, for the votes in the 2010 primary. But during those tumultuous 15 months of everything not changing, while Spitzer was the big story, the new and newly headline-adverse attorney general cobbled together a different direction for the office.

Campaigning, he said he wanted to be the Sheriff of State Street. Today, he shies away from that rhetoric.

“It’s the expression I used on the campaign. Yes, I want to do that. I also want to protect people from consumer frauds—student loans, Dell. I want to fight state fraud—state government fraud, member items. I want to fight local government fraud—school pensions. I want to do civil rights. I want to do the environment,” he says. “I believe the real success story is hard to communicate because it defies the one-line theory.”

Cuomo presses very hard to get this message across. Spitzer’s vigilance toward Wall Street was not a mistake, he says—cases like the one against former New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso are still being pursued by the office—but he believes Spitzer’s method of waging of a single crusade, no matter how significant, is outdated.

There is a lot to be done, a lot of attorneys and bureau chiefs to keep busy bringing a lot of cases. They are separate and distinct, hitting a wide and mostly unrelated range of topics. 

There is, however, a common thread.

Unlike Spitzer, who attacked financial crimes he thought people should care about, Cuomo is out to use the attorney general’s office to deal with things already very much on their minds. New Yorkers worry about paying for education, so they care about student loans. They worry about their health, so they care about insurance companies misbehaving. They worry about making ends meet, so they care about consumer fraud. They worry about their children’s safety, so they care about child pornography and abuses of social networking websites. They worry about having safe and solid homes, so they care about the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

“Real people, real problems in real time,” Cuomo says.

But there are already 62 district attorneys and four United States attorneys, all with the power to bring cases. New York needs him to be more than just another prosecutor, Cuomo says.

In his first major effort as attorney general, Cuomo made national headlines by securing 35 settlements with some of the larger universities and student loan companies in America which admitted to giving kickbacks to financial aid officers for referring students. All agreed to a new code of conduct. By the time that he got the Legislature to introduce what came to be known as the Student Lending Accountability, Transparency and Enforcement Act, many of the major players had already adopted its provisions, either voluntarily or as a condition of their settlements, obviating a strong lobbying effort against it in Albany. The bill passed unanimously. A federal version seems clear to coast through Congress.

Spitzer’s office prosecuted the financial sector into submission. Cuomo’s office has a different model: identify an industry-wide problem, prosecute enough cases to generate public and internal attention, settle those cases while gathering information to help piece together a new industry standard, then use the results to create legislation institutionalizing the new way of doing business. Whatever the investigation, Cuomo and his attorneys have replicated the student loan  approach over and over and over again.

“The individual cases we bring are usually part of a larger choreography,” says Benjamin Lawsky, Cuomo’s special assistant and deputy counsel. “We expose the problems and fraud through our cases, and then we seek systemic solutions.”


Technically, the attorney general is the state government’s lawyer. If someone sues New York or a law needs to be defended in the Supreme Court, Cuomo’s office gets the call.

Cuomo interprets his role as a bridge between the people and their government, an intermediary elected by the voters to craft the laws to their advantage. Public integrity cases, he says, get at the heart of this job de scri ption.

“I fundamentally represent the people,” he says. “If you are defrauding the people, get your own lawyer. I’m with them.”

Spitzer often portrayed his focus on the financial sector as being a response to the vacuum left by the federal government’s failure to regulate. Cuomo says his approach to public integrity is filling in a different kind of vacuum, this one created by decades of willful inaction by the state government.

Even when there are indictments that can be made under the state’s nebulous laws, just sorting out who has jurisdiction to make them has proven difficult, Cuomo says. And the Albany County district attorney, who clearly does have jurisdiction, the office receives no additional money or staff for pursuing public integrity cases. Cuomo and his attorneys have been surprised to discover so few avenues for prosecuting state government fraud and abuse. There is, Cuomo says, “a structural void.”

That is no mistake, according to the attorney general.

“I wonder how that happened?” he says. “It didn’t just evolve that way. It was desired by the powers-that-be that there is no police, no monitor.”

By simply paying attention and making sure those in and outside of government alike know that they are paying attention, Cuomo says he and his staff have been able to start reshaping a government which, he says, has grown corrupt lackadaisically.

“‘We were doing this for so long and nobody said anything! We hear that all day long,” he says. “It’s not a legal defense, but it’s speaking to the culture.”

Getting involved in the Troopergate investigation was huge in terms of public profile. But just as important in Cuomo’s view was stopping the MTA board members from getting free EZ-passes and stopping local governments contract workers from receiving full-time state benefits. The point was pursuing a zero-tolerance, broken windows strategy on public integrity.

After a lifetime in politics, Cuomo believes this is the only way.

“Someone’s looking,” he says. “The structural void doesn’t exist anymore.”


Cuomo first got to Albany more than a quarter century ago. The capital was a pretty political place those days, he says, dismissing the idea that things are more political now.

The difference, he says, is that there is less actual governing being done.

“Performance is lower,” he says. “The performance of government, that has suffered.”

Cuomo, however, has gotten some legislation passed, on overarching issues like student loan and online predators protections to smaller ones, like his bill changing the fees on co-op and condominium plans reviewed by his office.

He says he has great relationships with the legislative leaders, nurtured during, and perhaps because of, Spitzer’s attempts to undermine them. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is a friend. Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno is a friend. He has tried to remain close with both.

To improve public integrity, he will need their help: New York needs authority reform, ethics reform, campaign finance reform, local government consolidation, tax reform and school district reform. These are all beyond the power of the attorney general’s office.

But, he says, they are not necessarily beyond the power of Andrew Cuomo.

“Bill Clinton—when you wanted to get a piece of legislation passed, you didn’t go to Capitol Hill. You went to the districts. Change comes when people demand change,” he says. “Talk to the people. The politicians will follow.”

Whenever he draws the distinction between these two groups, which is often, he refers to himself as one of the people, not the politicians.

Cuomo’s office uses a rough calculation of how much time he should spend in each part of the state, whether holding hearings and press conferences or hosting town hall meetings and community forums. Cuomo’s high profile, carefully employed, helps get more coverage for the cases he is pursuing.

“Legislators go back to their districts, and they walk through the supermarket. And someone comes up to them in the supermarket and says, ‘Hey, I was reading about that case Cuomo’s doing about pension fraud. That’s terrible. What are you doing about that?’” Cuomo says. “That’s how legislation gets passed.”

Cuomo has several photos of his father around the office. In one, which he proudly points to, the former governor is on the basketball court, guarding another player with his hand on the man’s back. 

“You know what that is? It looks innocent, right? It’s this,” Cuomo says, demonstrating how the stance enables him to move another body around the room. “That’s what that is.”
Cuomo laughs at the memory, and at those who look at the picture and see his father as only guarding, not also guiding, the other player. 

“That,” he says, “was no little push.”

There are many things about Andrew which remind people of Mario—his way of talking about government as a vocation and obligation, his tendency to work his staff and himself for longer than normal hours, his voice, which sounds more like his father’s every day.

Mario was famous for his hesitancy and indecision, first on running for president in 1988 and again in 1992, then on passing up a nomination to the Supreme Court not once, but twice, in a single week. Whatever else Andrew got from his father, he did not inherit those traits.

On the contrary, he leapt into the 2002 gubernatorial race, despite all the conventional wisdom and Democratic establishment aligned against him. Then his campaign imploded, forcing his withdrawal a week before the primary. He was brash and he took hits for opposing Carl McCall, the first major black gubernatorial candidate in New York. When McCall lost, Cuomo got some of the blame.

There was little question at the time that his political career was over. His high-profile divorce from Kerry Kennedy, which put him back on the tabloid covers in 2003, seemed like an extra nail in the coffin.

His comeback was unlikely and overwhelming. By the morning of Primary Day 2006, there was no question he would be the Democratic candidate for attorney general. By the evening, he had won the nomination with 53 percent of the vote, and with barely having to wage a general election campaign, got more than 60 percent in the general election.

But thinking just in terms of the race for governor and attorney general, Cuomo says, is an incomplete portrait of both him and his political career.

“Here in New York, people tend to focus on 2002 to 2006. That was four years of my life,” he says, rattling backward through the rest of his résumé, from his eight years in Washington to the homeless housing non-profit he founded in his 20s. “I don’t know that I calibrate it that way.”

He is not surprised that people want to know what he will do—he has been around long enough to accept this as a natural part of the game—but he will not discuss his future or possible races for governor, senator or New York City mayor. But he seems pleased that people are talking and he is interested in hearing what they have to say.

Asked what he would say to the speculation about him running for another office, he turns the question around.

“What would I say? You know what I’d say,” he says, then says nothing more.

He defers a question on whether he might like to be a multiple-term attorney general, in the tradition of Louis Lefkowitz and Robert Abrams. He will keep running for attorney general so long as he believes he can make a difference in the office

“If I don’t feel that way,” he says, “I’ll do something else.”

Whatever he runs for, and whenever he does, there will likely be political benefits to putting himself on the frontlines of so many issues near and dear to New Yorkers, and perhaps, by positioning himself as the man who helped restore state government. He knows this. But aside from a passing comment about Republicans fostering an entity apart from the people, Cuomo is very careful to avoid partisan politics.
Cuomo went to law school, but aside from a brief stint at the Manhattan district attorney’s office and a few private law firms, never practiced much. Back then, prosecuting seemed a political necessity, an experience for the bio to leave behind as soon as the real ascent of his career began.

Once that career was in ruins, prosecuting became a political necessity again. Twenty-five years after getting his JD, he seems to now be thinking about politics like a prosecutor, about elections as cases to be made in a larger effort.

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” he says. “We tend to teach our young people that success is a constant upward trajectory. That’s normally not the way it happens.”   

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Public Financing Is Good, Cuomo Says, But Self-Imposed Restrictions Are Not

An important step in reforming state government, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo believes, is creating stricter campaign finance laws with lower donation caps and taxpayer-supported matching funds. The model, he said, should be the system currently used in elections in New York City.

“We desperately need a change in campaign finance laws,” he said, cautioning that whatever new laws are passed need to both protect the First Amendment and prevent the political system from being restricted to rich candidates who can self-finance.

He does not, however, believe in the approach put forward by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli (D), who in early June issued a press release declaring that he would self-impose $10,000-per-donor limits on his campaign.

“The public is expecting reform,” he said in a statement released with the outline of his new limits. “The influence of money in our political system should be addressed legislatively and comprehensively. However, in the absence of new legislation, I’m taking this step to send a message.”
Cuomo, who had $1.1 million in the bank as of January and has been fundraising prodigiously for his 2010 campaign, said he would not self-impose limits.

“I support public finance,” Cuomo said, but “you can’t have unilateral public finance. You would have to have the other person agree.”
Cuomo spent $10 million on his 2006 campaign. He says restrictions are good, but they only work if all candidates agree to them, or are made to agree to them.

He called DiNapoli’s approach risky, especially with the prospect of self-financed candidates.

“What if someone wakes up one morning and decides he wants to be comptroller?” Cuomo said. “He can spend 10 million dollars.”   

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Choosing Words Carefully, Cuomo Indicates Support for Gay Marriage Order

Technically as the attorney general, Andrew Cuomo (D) cannot discuss any case he may need to litigate. Though he has made his views in favor of legalizing gay marriage known over the years, he stops himself from praising, defending or commenting much at all on Gov. David Paterson’s (D) executive order to state agencies demanding they recognize out-of-state same-sex unions.

Paterson’s decision followed a ruling by the Court of Appeals that a lesbian couple who had married in Canada must be afforded the same access to shared health benefits, as spouses, by Monroe Community College.

“I did a brief on the case which actually established the law, so I support the law,” he says. “This office, I think, was part of the victory.”
People inside and outside of New York have threatened lawsuits against Paterson’s order. Cuomo interrupts a question to about whether he would be willing to defend the order.

“That’s exactly right,” he says, before an aide interrupts him and points out his legal need to tread carefully a case which the office may soon have to litigate.

Cuomo relents.

“I can’t compromise the office by making a political statement. You can go back and do a Google search and find out that during the campaign, I favored marriage equality,” he says. “That you can go back and search without me saying anything.”