OPINION: Rob's Rookie Mistake

Consider Rob Ortt, the freshman Republican senator from Niagara County who was among the first in his caucus to call for Dean Skelos’s resignation as majority leader of the New York State Senate. 

Retribution for the apostasy followed the very next day: A fellow Republican—no doubt one of the 16 senators who signed a letter of support for Skelos last Wednesday—leaked to the press that, in a closed-door GOP conference meeting the week before, Ortt called former Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver a member of “the Jewish Mafia.”

No one on Long Island or Manhattan will think much of the newcomer from North Tonawanda squeaking about Skelos’s obligation to resign. Apart from a handful of local GOP and tea party activists determined to break the Albany power structure, his constituents won’t care, either. 

Lots of folks, on the other hand, will remember his apparent anti-Semitism and use it against him. The stain may not damage Ortt in his own district—and it’s not as if incumbents face an uphill battle for reelection anyway—but it may disqualify him from accumulating real influence in Albany. Soon enough, Skelos will be replaced, by a senator unlikely to admire Ortt’s disobedience to leadership and his frequent references to combat service in Afghanistan to justify it. And the big downstate interests on whom the more ambitious Western New York elected officials rely for donations will think twice about supporting him. 

This is the price you pay for swimming out of your political depth: You get sent back to the shallow end.

Here on New York State’s west coast, we often feel a great remove from the storms and tides that move the greater waters of Albany and New York City politics. We do not produce Senate majority leaders or Assembly speakers; from time to time a member of Western New York’s delegation rises to a level of significant symbolic influence—Arthur O. Eve, Sr. was deputy speaker, for example, and the woman who succeeded him and heralded the diminution of his political machine here, Crystal Peoples-Stokes, is rising through the ranks of the Assembly now—but we haven’t fielded one of the three men in the fabled room since Walter J. Mahoney. That was 50 years ago.

The man Ortt succeeded this year, George Maziarz, was one of those few Western New Yorkers who managed to accumulate seniority and power over the course of nearly 20 years in the Senate. And he was arguably the first victim of the Moreland Commission’s inquiries into public corruption among state officials. Last year, Maziarz announced that he would not to run for reelection. He claimed at the time that he was leaving for personal reasons, but no one bought that: Federal investigators, working on the orders of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and following leads developed by the commission, were examining Maziarz’s apparent misuse of campaign funds. Maziarz hoped to shake the trouble he’d made for himself by leaving public office and thus decreasing his value as a target. (His “spend more time with my family” narrative was not helped by the revelation that he’d ordered his staff to shred campaign-related bills and receipts last spring, just as the feds were honing in on him.  

Now the word around Western New York is that he’s been talking a blue streak about Albany corruption to investigators, who continue to hold a sword over his head. That has politicians and political operatives in the region, Republicans and Democrats alike, very nervous. He had a famous talent for finding jobs and appointments for family and political friends, particularly with the New York Power Authority. He was a dealmaker who preferred the intrigues of power and politics to the fine points of policymaking. He and Skelos were bound politically, even if neither liked the other personally. He operated out of Niagara County, where corruption and politics are considered synonymous. The U.S. Attorney on this end of the state, Bill Hochul, has nothing in common with Bharara: Despite a target-rich environment, he has largely avoided public corruption cases. 

Now Maziarz and his former staffers are fighting to stay out of jail, and they know too much. They may well help Bharara add a few more heads to his pike. That should (but probably won’t) embarrass Hochul. It might earn Maziarz a sordid footnote in the political history of New York State, which is perhaps better than Ortt can hope for right now. Ortt probably believes that he was seizing political opportunity by casting himself against the party leadership structure. That is a misapprehension Maziarz never would have made.

Geoff Kelly is the editor of The Public, a weekly Western New York newspaper. (dailypublic.com)