SquarePegDem's Blog

Assemblyman Boyland guilty of soliciting bribes | NY Post

This time, he’s guilty.

A jury Thursday convicted Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. on corruption charges for soliciting bribes from undercover agents posing as businessmen.

The political scion — who faces up to 30 years in prison — buried his head in his hands after going down on all 21 counts he faced in Brooklyn federal court.

In a surprise, Judge Sandra Townes immediately remanded Boyland after the verdict, citing his texting of a witness earlier in the case and his history of lying about his whereabouts as her rationale.

Jurors found that he repeatedly and brazenly made payoff requests to a pair of undercover agents seeking to hasten development deals in his downtrodden Brooklyn district.

The youngest branch of a once-famed but now broken political family tree, Boyland Jr. was also found guilty of lying about performing legislative work in Albany to earn more than $70,000 in unearned per-diem payments and for steering nonprofit funds to his campaign coffers.

Prosecutors hammered away at Boyland as a brazen payola fiend during the monthlong trial and leaned heavily on the testimony of his former lover and chief of staff, Ry-Ann Hermon, who eagerly buried him on the stand.

Hermon — who was famously caught on tape telling an undercover agent that the bribe he handed her made her “hot” — blasted her former boss and beau as a reckless and inept politician who sought out cash in exchange for political favors.

She was arrested along with Boyland and quickly copped a plea with prosecutors in exchange for skewering him on the stand.

Boyland, 43, turned down a 9-year plea deal in a last-minute change of heart earlier this year — and now faces the grim prospect of decades behind bars after the conviction.

His attorneys tried to argue that he was simply trying to coax campaign contributions from the agents and never intended to follow through on his promises to deliver political favors.

But his chances of acquittal faded under the weight of hours of surveillance recordings captured by federal agents.

During one drive through Brooklyn with an undercover, Boyland characterized his Brookyln district as a personal fiefdom. “Everything you see here, I control,” he boasted on tape. “I’m the politician,” he said.

Prosecutors also presented bank records and other evidence that showed Boyland eating his way across the boroughs, enjoying a spa treatment, and even sunning himself in Turkey while claiming to be at work in the state capital.

Boyland Jr. managed to skate on corruption raps in a Manhattan federal court case in 2011, but wasn’t able to slip through the grasp of the Eastern District.

Prosecutors Lan Nguyen, Robert Capers and Christina Dugger did not comment as they exited.

Boyland is just the latest in a parade of New York politicos who’ve pleaded guilty to or been convicted of ugly corruption raps.

State Sens. Shirley Huntley, Hiram Monserrate, Pedro Espada and Carl Kruger have all faced serious criminal raps in recent years.

State Sens. Malcolm Smith and John Sampson have been charged with various acts of corruption, with their cases still pending.

In their closing arguments, prosecutors and the defense attorney for Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. agreed that he solicited more than $250,000 from undercover federal agents, but they disagree on why he did it, the Journal writes: http://goo.gl/THujie (subscription holders only)

federal prosecutor urged jurors to convict the Brooklyn Democrat of corruption charges backed by a mountain of evidence showing he put himself and his office up for sale to undercover FBI agents posing as shady businessmen.

“We’ve taken you into the underbelly of the defendant’s corrupt, secretive and deceitful schemes,” Assistant Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Lan Nguyen said Monday in her closing argument.

“Each one was designed to line his pockets with illegal money at the expense of his constituents, the elderly and taxpayers,” Nguyen said.

Boyland, 43, betrayed no emotion during the prosecutor’s three-hour summation of secretly recorded tapes and videos, text messages and documents detailing schemes to solicit bribes from the undercover agents who were seeking favors from the political scion.

In one damning video recorded by the FBI agent, Boyland accepted $7,000 in cash that he desperately needed after he was arrested in a separate corruption case by the feds in Manhattan.

His father, former Assemblyman William (Frank) Boyland, Sr., played bag man for his son by accepting another $3,000 payoff in the form of a check made out as campaign contribution.

Another video secretly shot on April Fool’s Day depicts Boyland Jr. taking the agents on a tour of his Brownsville district to show them properties that he would help them obtain through his city and state government contacts. Boyland wanted $250,000 from the agents to set up meetings with corrupt officials on land deals. “I control all this,” Boyland boasts on the tape.

“He wanted to be like a (Mafia) don,” Nguyen said of the boasts.

Defense lawyer Nancy Ennis argued he was stringing along the agents — “playing the players,” she said — during meetings at the Waldorf Astoria, Peter Luger steakhouse in Williamsburg and the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City.

Prosecutors took aim at that argument. “I can’t say I fully understand what Miss Ennis was saying, but listen to her explain how using the power of your office as a New York State assemblyman to ‘play the players’ and get money for the defendant is not attempted extortion,” Nguyen said.

Boyland did not have to carry out the extortion or bribery schemes to be found guilty — he merely had to commit acts to further their schemes, which the government said he did. But Ennis told the jury that after a 10-month investigation, FBI agents were left with “promises and no action.”

http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1709736Author:JOHN MARZULLI

Sent from my Samsung smartphone on AT&T

Here is the link to the Center for NYC (at The New School) panel discussion I participated in Tuesday morning, City & State: Conflict or Collaboration?

http://CorruptionCrusher.com/
@SquarePegDem
www.Facebook.com/SquarePegDem
www.YouTube.com/SquarePegDem
Skype: SquarePegDem

AM William Boyland Jr.’s lawyer says aide played large role in scheme

The attorney for Brooklyn Assemb. William Boyland Jr. portrayed his client as a placating and passive manager Thursday during cross-examination of the politician’s former top aide, suggesting she played a large role in the bribe scandal at the heart of her ex-boss’ corruption trial.

"Basically, Mr. Boyland had a tendency to ‘yes’ people? Tell them what they wanted to hear?" defense attorney Peter Enrique Quijano asked Boyland’s former chief of staff, Ryan Hermon, as a jury looked on in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

"I think he had a tendency to lie," Hermon replied.

The attorney suggested through his questions that Hermon had taken over some of Boyland’s duties in dealing with an undercover FBI agent.

"It’s you. There’s no Boyland," the attorney told her.

"Wrong," Hermon replied.

Hermon, who was cross-examined by Quijano after three days as a government witness, said she pleaded guilty to taking bribes and faced 30 years in prison, but was cooperating with the government in hopes of a reduced sentence.

Hermon, 35, had testified that she acted as a go-between for Boyland in his dealings with the agent. The assemblyman proved so unreliable that she became the agent’s "inside girl" and kept him informed of whether Boyland was keeping his promise to arrange a series of deals.

She said Boyland told her about a meeting he had with the agent at "a really nice" hotel suite in Atlantic City where, over bourbon and conversation about "different girls" they knew, he was promised $250,000 for his help in a real estate deal involving the former St. Mary’s Hospital in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

Boyland was broke at the time, she said. His SUV had been repossessed for the third time, his home was in foreclosure, he owed on legal bills for other court cases, he was pleading with his parents to mortgage their home to help him, and he had asked his ex-wife to get money from her friends, Hermon testified. "The defendant was in need of the $250,000 and I was going to make sure he would get it," she said.

Quijano attempted to show that Boyland had done little if anything to move the schemes along, and cited tape recordings in which the agent complained to Hermon about Boyland, saying at one point: "He hasn’t really come through with anything."

The defense attorney asked her whether she considered the two undercover FBI agents she dealt with "crooked businessmen" and she said they were like many people she dealt with.

"It just seemed like the same kind of people I’d met in the past," she said. "I did not understand them to be corrupt."

http://CorruptionCrusher.com/

@SquarePegDem
www.Facebook.com/SquarePegDem
www.YouTube.com/SquarePegDem
Skype: SquarePegDem

Haunting a Harlem Brownstone

The NY Post reports:

》Ry-Ann Hermon, the political scion’s ex-lover and chief of staff, told jurors at Boyland’s Brooklyn federal court trial that her ex-boss once used $500 in campaign contributions for them to attend two private yoga classes at the Atmananda studios in 2009.“

》He told me we need to clear our minds,” Hermon recalled. “Yoga can release stress and tension, so he wanted us to partake in yoga classes.”

》Prosecutors presented receipts from the high-end studio that showed Boyland’s cash payment for the stretch sessions.《

Read more:
http://nypost.com/2014/02/20/assemblyman-boyland-used-fund-raiser-cash-for-yoga-classes/

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>READ: How industry responded to Fukushima. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23NEIWSB&amp;src=hash">#NEIWSB</a> <a href="http://t.co/V64xv5xnU8">pic.twitter.com/V64xv5xnU8</a></p>&mdash; Nuclear Energy Inst. (@N_E_I) <a href="https://twitter.com/N_E_I/statuses/433962311959584769">February 13, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

http://CorruptionCrusher.com/
@SquarePegDem
www.Facebook.com/SquarePegDem
www.YouTube.com/SquarePegDem
Skype: SquarePegDem

The NY Post reports that a former Queens GOP operative wants his federal corruption trial put off from its scheduled June 2 start to December.

Former Queens Republican Vice Chairman Vincent Tabone — who is accused of pocketing $25,000 as part of a failed scheme to get state Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) on the 2012 GOP line for mayor — has filed papers asking White Plains federal Judge Kenneth Karas to delay a June 2 trial set for Tabone, Smith and other co-defendants until at least December.

http://nypost.com/2014/02/17/gop-operative-asks-judge-to-delay-trial-until-after-elections/