WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?

When the stock option scandal started to break recently, I predicted to my girlfriend, Magpie, that every single large company in the country would be affected by it. After all, I reasoned, who in his right mind would be able to resist looting the treasury of his company with virtual impunity?

Oh sure, defenders of this peachy state of affairs point out that any executive who gets caught forging false dates on stock options is still subject to civil suits by enraged shareholders and dismissed from his job. But all that means is that the ones unlucky enough to get caught might have to give back some of the money he looted. Try giving back a stolen television and see if that gets you off the hook.

Though lately the emphasis has shifted slightly toward a tougher approach toward white-collar crime, notably through the efforts of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the weight of justice still falls more heavily on the activity of low-end criminals, who can’t afford armies of accountants to smooth out their nefarious dealings. Nevertheless, there’s still plenty of criminal activity at the top end to go around, particularly in New York, where the fertile soil of Wall Street pushes up a new crop of high-end wiseguys with the regularity of winter wheat. Indeed, the criminality is so ingrained in the system that people are accusing Spitzer of trying to destroy capitalism. If you lock up all the thieves, they scream, there won’t be anybody left to run the system.

I tend to concur. If you locked up all the deserving New Yorkers, the streets of New York would resemble one of those post-apocalyptic black and white episodes from The Twilight Zone. The devotion of New Yorkers to stealing is famous worldwide. I have often written that the national animal of New York City (and I support giving independent national status to New York, like Singapore or Hong Kong, with our own passports) should be the seagull, who prefers to steal the food out of another seagull’s mouth rather than work for it.

Stealing is a team sport. When I was a kid I used to enjoy the Sgt. Rock comic books. Sgt. Rock was a tough master sergeant in World War II, fighting the Germans or the Japs, I forget which, and his squad was a cross-section of American stereotypes: one black guy, one Italian, one Jew and so on. Of course, these guys were real macho, not like the fruits who work on Wall Street. Together they vanquished the soulless axis enemy.

In New York we got the All-American Dream Team of Stealing: Dick Grasso, Dennis Koslowski, Robert Trosten and Phillip Bennet who stole $500 million from Refco and Kobi Alexander. If they put together an Olympics for white-collar theft, we should send over these bozos to defend our national honor as felonious swine. That would certainly burst my heart with pride!

I’m not going to be a hypocrite and pin all the stealing and asshole behavior on Republicans, though they do it with sanctimonious zeal that is almost religious in its devotion. As the great American philosopher Robert Hicks, whom I met while he was working as a leather cutter at Calderon Belts and Bags, put it, “Republicans don’t leave nothin’ for anybody else.”

Nevertheless, stealing in New York is a bi-partisan effort, predominantly dominated by Democrats. Witness the inelegant behavior exhibited by Brian McLaughlin of the Electrical Workers Union, who stole from everybody in sight, including the Little League. One of his partners in crime, the son of former New York mayor Abe Beame, who decided to go into the traffic light business, though my instinct tells me he doesn’t know the difference between AC and DC, paid McLaughlin a half-million dollar bribe to keep the lights flashing. One of McLaughlin’s girlfriends, justifying her acceptance of an $8,000 check that had been traced to her by The New York Post, justified it by saying, “I thought it had something to do with the bookkeeping.”

Then we have the case of Andrew Cuomo, who is running for New York State Attorney General on the strength of being the son of former Governor Mario Cuomo. Big freakin’ deal! If all it takes to get elected is a historical name to get elected I think I’ll change my name to Washington Lincoln Jefferson. Or how about Napoleon Bonaparte Junior? That has a nice ring to it!

Andrew Cuomo was Clinton’s Secretary of Housing Urban Development for eight years, and I defy you to explain to me what he did during that time, except that rent went up. This guy is a perfect example of displacing volume for no known purpose except to bring joy to a father’s heart. I still puke when I remember the useless little moralistic homilies Mario Cuomo used to inflict upon the electorate, which were in no small measure responsible for his replacement by the mentally vacant Pataki who, while he accomplished nothing, at least had the presence of mind not to open his mouth and thereby focus attention on his total lack of a brain.

I have a cousin who, having nothing more to offer, wrote a whole book on the joys of being related to someone, called “In Praise of Nepotism.” This book immediately sank like an Estonian ferryboat, its only contribution to world culture being as an infinitely rich vein of material for ridicule generated by me. If Andrew Cuomo gets elected Attorney General, he will immediately join that pantheon of useless progeny who act as a permanent brake on human progress.

At least the reader doesn’t have to lose any sleep worrying about me getting hoist on my own petard in this regard, nobody on either side of my family even being able to bear the thought of me, with my ungainly propensity for trumpeting ugly realities from every hillside like a demented Riccola yodeler. In fact, this opinion is unlikely to reach more than a handful of insomniac web surfers, who, if they haven’t already passed out from boredom, are only bothering to read it at all because it’s less strenuous than masturbation.

But if Andrew Cuomo is totally without interest, his charming wife, Whatzername, is even less interesting. If that’s possible. So it was quite shocking when I read in that bible of sobriety and erudition, The New York Post, that during Cuomo’s tenure as HUD Secretary she was doing speaking tours and getting paid $2,000 a lecture! Now, what would Andrew Cuomo’s wife have to say that was worth paying $2,000 to hear?

Now, I’m sure that Whatzername went to a fantastic Ivy League college, one where I couldn’t even get a job scraping food off the plates in the employees’ cafeteria. And I know from seeing her photo in The Post that she is vastly more lovely and charming than I, ‘cause I ain’t that hot.

So I was racking my brain trying to figure out why Andrew Cuomo’s wife was getting paid two thousand bucks a speech to talk about….what?!!, and nobody was paying me shit, even though I have a very funny stand-up act, when I finally got to the end of the article and it explained that each time an organization paid her an honorarium of two thousand dollars, HUD would allot it a grant of two hundred thousand dollars!!!

Now it all came clear, if you want your wife to be a successful, highly paid speaker, all you have to do is arrange to pay back the money from the public coffers at a rate of 100-1. That’s what you learn when you go to an Ivy League university.

But we’ll have time to get back to Andrew Cuomo at a later date, because given the nature of his competition he’s sure to win big even though he is totally useless and boring. Whereas his opponent, the flamboyantly corrupt and incompetent Jeanine Pirro is certainly destined to fade into obscurity in a couple of weeks, and then I will forever lose my chance to kick her while she’s down.

Which would be a terrible waste of a buffoon, because if ever there existed a vile, grasping, treacherous loudmouth cunt from the suburbs, who stole and clawed her way to the top of Westchester’s seamy, tacky, greasy pole of municipal politics, the embodiment of all that is sleazy, maggot-ridden and putrid in Republican politics, then that animal is Jeanine Pirro, who threw her hard-stealing husband to the wolves so that she could continue to graft and steal as part of the rotten-to-the-core Republican political machine of backstabbing pricks like her colleague John Spencer, who wrote the letter that got the U.S. Attorney interested in investigating her in the first place.

This Jeanine Pirro would be dangerous if she weren’t so inept. If I were to write the scenario for a black comedy about her, I would say that she sold her soul to the devil, but he let the bargain lapse for lack of interest.

Not that she isn’t capable of causing great personal damage. Witness the guy who she sent up for 20 years for a rape he didn’t commit, who continually sent her letters from prison pleading with her to run a DNA test that he knew would exonerate him, to which she responded (admittedly, paraphrased by me), “Why don’t you shut up and serve your sentence? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

The fact that the innocent guy was sprung from jail in the middle of Pirro’s campaign proves to me that there is still justice in this life, and that people’s evil actions will be sprung upon them at the most inopportune moment.

The problem is that Pirro is made of such brass that it’s impossible for anything less than a baseball bat to make an impact on her. Maybe if the guy were to confront her personally the world could see what an impossibly cold person she is.

Not that it would have any impact on Pirro. She’s always in attack mode, totally focused on the money.

And busy she was! Plotting with Bernard Kerik, Giulani’s former right-hand man, to follow the hapless Al Pirro and plant a bug on his cabin cruiser so she could catch him in fragrante delicto with the wife of his attorney and confront him with audible proof of hanky-panky with the wife of his attorney.

Not that she ever had the intention to divorce the sucker, but just to cut his balls off and dominate him completely. No way was she going to let go of him, especially since he was still breaking his back to pay her $15,000 a month cash.

Jeanine Pirro met her husband Al in law school, although it wasn’t like Bill and Hillary Clinton meeting at Yale, all burning up with inspiration from President Kennedy to do good for the world. Rather, like 99% of the scumbag attorneys in the world, they were killing themselves to get closer to the money. They worked both sides of the street in tandem, he with the mob and she in Republican politics to provide him with political cover.

She may well have signed the joint return that got Al Pirro sent away without reading it line by line, but she for sure knew every detail of every larcenous deal he was ever involved in. To believe differently would be to completely miss the point of Jeanine Pirro, which is an infinitely grasping avarice of bottomless depth

He took the dive, and while he was in jail his attorney threw a fundraising benefit for him at Rao’s, where wiseguys have been known to get iced right in the middle of their linguini. Her office let it be known that offenders who engaged Al Pirro’s attorney would benefit from preferential treatment. Presumably, they met later to split the fees.

She engaged in sweetheart treatment with Giuliani Associates and Giulaini’s discredited former right-hand man, Bernard Kerik, steering high cost non-compete consulting contracts to Kerik on behalf of parties her office was supposed to be prosecuting, and when she decided to engage in a bit of domestic skullduggery against her own husband she had Kerik’s “operatives” follow Al around. When Kerik, already having problems of his own, declined to plant a listening device on Al’s boat at her insistence, the Westchester District Attorney threatened to plant the device herself personally.

And all the time that the Pirro Gang was running wild, the hapless guy whom she railroaded to a 20 year term for a crime he never committed, along with who know how many other hapless schlemiels sent up because they fit the bill for pathetic scapegoats, rotted in rat-infested dungeons run by prison corporations that were probably kicking back payments to her for steering prisoners to them. Oh Yeah!

Fortunately, this emerging Republican kleptocracy is crumbling under the weight of its own arrogance, greed and incompetence, so we’ll probably be spared the full brunt of their instinctual criminality at least until the next group of grasping scumbags emerges.

In the meantime, just to remind us of how we barely dodged the bullet of having this country transformed into a third-rate banana republic, we still have Giuliani to kick around, assuming he’s stupid enough to try to run for president in 2008, which would definitely require a voluminous airing of senseless police shootings, precinct plunger parties, criminal police commissioners, mayoral wives starring in Vaginal theatrics off-Broadway while the mayor lines his pockets, and whatever other ghastly abominations this writer can dig up with a stick.

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Posted on 10/25/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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