A Political Manager Who Now Faces Scrutiny
By DANNY HAKIM and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Published: September 13, 2007
ALBANY, Sept. 12 — Few political partners have been closer than Hank Morris and Alan G. Hevesi.
Skip to next paragraph
City Room Blog
The latest news and reader discussions from around the five boroughs and the region.
Go to City Room » Mr. Morris ran Mr. Hevesi’s breakthrough political campaign, an upset of City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman in 1993. He was the guiding force behind Mr. Hevesi’s combative last race, when he won re-election as state comptroller amid scandal last November. And he was Mr. Hevesi’s main adviser when he resigned a month later after pleading guilty to using state workers to chauffeur his wife.
Chief strategist, image maker and personal confidant, Mr. Morris, 54, has been far more than just a consultant to Mr. Hevesi. And it now appears that he earned much more than just political consulting fees from their relationship.
Since Mr. Hevesi took office in 2003, Mr. Morris created or was employed by half a dozen companies whose main purpose was to help hedge funds, private equity firms and others handle some of the investments of New York State’s $154 billion pension fund.
As comptroller, Mr. Hevesi had sole authority over the fund, and Mr. Morris appears to have been paid handsomely for making introductions: state investigators believe that at least $25 million in fees were paid to Mr. Morris’s business interests during Mr. Hevesi’s four-year tenure.
Mr. Morris’s earnings from pension fund work, along with those of other friends and political allies of Mr. Hevesi, a Democrat, are now the focus of criminal investigations by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, also a Democrat, and P. David Soares, the Albany County district attorney.
On Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo’s office said he had invoked sweeping powers under a decades-old state securities law, the Martin Act, to broadly expand his investigation of the comptroller’s office. Among the investigators’ discoveries is that a list of fees paid by investment firms to intermediaries like Mr. Morris had disappeared. Those intermediaries, known as placement agencies, helped investment firms win business from the pension fund.
Mr. Hevesi, 67, has denied wrongdoing beyond the chauffeur matter and cited the pension fund’s strong returns during his four-year tenure as evidence of sound management. Asked if Mr. Hevesi had been aware of Mr. Morris’s outside businesses, his lawyer, Bradley D. Simon, answered, “Mr. Hevesi was not aware of the alleged activities of outside third parties with respect to management of the pension fund.”
Legal experts say that it could be difficult to make a case against a political consultant moonlighting as a consultant to financial companies. But the investigation has cast a harsh spotlight on Mr. Morris, who declined to comment for this article.
Known for his nervous Woody Allen-like speaking mannerisms and penchant for wearing sweaters in all seasons, Mr. Morris has acquired a long list of enemies and former friends who are basking in schadenfreude.
But others praised his acumen; Senator Charles E. Schumer, who hired Mr. Morris to direct his 1998 Senate campaign, said in a statement, “Hank is one of the brightest people around and has done a great job for me.”
A native of Long Island who began his career battling the Nassau County Republican machine that gave birth to former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, Mr. Morris met Mr. Hevesi in the early 1970s when Mr. Hevesi was a young Queens assemblyman. By the mid-1970s, the two were socializing when Mr. Morris worked in the office of Speaker Stanley Steingut.
“They’re pages in a book, back to back, very close,” said Arthur J. Kremer, a Democratic assemblyman from Nassau County in that era.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Morris apprenticed with the political consultant David Garth, but the two had a bitter falling out, and Mr. Morris opened his own soup-to-nuts firm.
“It’s very rare that you find somebody in this business that does everything,” said Norman Adler, a consultant and lobbyist who has worked with Mr. Morris. “With Hank, he was the campaign manager, the media guy, the fund-raising guy. He did everything. If there were any arguments, they were all in his head.” |
