Winners & Losers 12/4/15

Last week we dined on turkey, cranberry and stuffing as we skipped our weekly winners and losers segment. This week, justice, corruption and courtroom antics are on the menu. Read on to see who made the list.

WINNERS

Preet Bharara – Few if anyone deserved to pop a bottle of champagne this week more than the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara vowed to clean up Albany and he has backed up that statement by successfully convicting Sheldon Silver. Plus, being described as a “white knight” and the “Sheriff of Albany” never hurts one's ego.

Janet DiFiore – The Westchester County district attorney drew praise from many corners of the legal world after fellow county resident Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced he would push DiFiore as the replacement for retiring state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman. DiFiore has been in the governor’s favor for years, serving on the Joint Commission on Public Ethics and a commission that studies juvenile justice at the behest of Cuomo. Should she be confirmed, DiFiore would not only be the state’s highest ranking judge, she’d be just the second woman to ever hold the position.

Bill Bratton - “Safest big city in the United States” doesn’t sell any tabloids, but it’s a new feather in the cap of  the city’s top cop after an independent report by the Brennan Center - a group that hasn’t been afraid to criticize the administration - showed New York as having the lowest crime rate among the nation’s 30 largest cities. Sure, progressives are telling him to watch his mouth, but in the realm of public safety, numbers are king.

Patricia Groeber -  This trooper has written herself a ticket to the top of the State Police, being appointed second-in-command this week. Nobody can cite the state for speeding on this issue - she’s the first woman to hold such a high position in the agency’s 98-year history. Still, she makes a fitting deputy superintendent of the State Police, founded the same year that New York women became the first in the nation to gain the right to vote.

Peter Iwanowicz – The executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York served as a top environmental official in the Spitzer and Paterson administrations, but his biggest policy victory may have finally come under the current governor. Iwanowicz had been outspoken in his years-long push to get the state to make its clean energy goals more than goals and actually codify them, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo just took that step.

LOSERS

G. Robert Gage – The attorney for former state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos certainly has a lot on his plate while trying to defend his client in a major corruption trial, but putting a dead lawmaker on his witness list can’t help his case. Former state Sen. Owen Johnson, who served in the Republican conference alongside Skelos, did pass away less than a year ago, but the prosecution wasn’t pleased with the error.

Letitia James – James’ advocating didn’t get too far in the appellate courts. The state’s highest court opted not to hear a case James and others brought seeking public access to transcripts from the grand jury that declined to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner. As a result, a lower court’s decision not to release the records stands.

Welquis “Ray” Lopez – If you’re going to coach a witness in a trial, it’s probably not a good idea to have a close advisor of the defendant do it in plain view of the judge. But that’s what Lopez, a close advisor to Skelos, allegedly did during the trial of the former Senate majority leader and his son. All was going to plan until Judge Kimba Wood called out Lopez for nodding at ex-North Hempstead Councilman Tom Dwyer during his testimony. Wood threatened to throw Lopez out of the courtroom if she caught him nodding one more time, but it never got to that because Lopez quickly left the trial after being found out.

Amy Paulin – The assemblywoman was caught off guard when one of Silver’s lawyers asked her about a bill she has sponsored that would require millions of children in the state to be vaccinated with a Merck vaccine. An innocuous question, unless one knows she also owns about $150,000 in Merck stock. This week Paulin sold off her stock amid increased scrutiny of Albany’s “business as usual.” An admirable move, but no one wants to be the prime example of Albany’s changing ways in a New York Times story.   

Sheldon Silver – “It is what it is.”