• A horse of a different angle

In 42 years as a newspaper journalist, I had one column of commentary killed. It was about Joe Bruno’s handmaidens.

Joe Bruno, for those outside New York State, reigned as the GOP’s State Senate Majority Leader for many years, wielding a Leno-jawed countenance, carefully barbered silver hair and Machiavellian turn of mind to become one of the three most powerful people in the Empire State. The other two were Sheldon Silver, the New York City Democrat who ruled, and still does, the Assembly as Speaker, and whoever happened to be occupying the Governor’s Mansion at the time, no matter which party was in power.

After one of my columns pointing out some Bruno scalawaggery prompted a series of letters to the editor from various of his supporters, I wrote another explaining to readers what the connections were between Bruno and the letter writers. The editor of the newspaper killed that column at the last possible minute, vaguely muttering something about “Let them have their say.” As if they hadn’t already, in several ways:

Their letters were printed quickly, rather than having to wait in line behind others on other topics as was the usual practice. But, don’t for a moment think anyone in the power structure had whispered in this editor’s ear. Heaven forbid such thoughts.

Bruno, Silver and the governor of the moment. They were the infamous “3 Men In a Room” who decided who would get how much money in each year’s state budget, wheeling and dealing in secrecy and presenting their budget as a fait accompli for the cowardly lions of the Senate and Assembly to dutifully approve in sheep-like lockstep, often without even reading the complete document. Included in the document was a slush fund, usually in the $200 million range, the 3 Profiteers divvied up to hand out to pet projects to garner votes for their next re-election bids.

This was the kind of governance that prompted the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law to annoint as the nation’s most dysfunctional legislature.

Bruno, whose monumental ego was massaged by people who understood the quid pro quo of having taxpayer money shoveled their way, was a regular on the pay-and-preen circuit, appearing at various edifices named for him for his generosity with my money.

Bruno’s ego and deal making may have come back to bite him squarely on his seat of power. Even though he retired from state government last year — and immediately registered as a lobbyist — a federal grand jury last week indicted him on an eight-count felony charge, alleging he used his elected position to extract $3.2 million in private consulting fees from clients who sought to use his influence. Bruno, 79, pleaded not guilty and vowed to fight the charges when taken to court.

The matters of ego and bad business decisions go hand-in-hand. Throughout the Capital Region of New York, Bruno’s home area, we have evidence of the cult of personality that thanked him for giving them my money by labeling such things as the Joseph L. Bruno Town Park in Hoosick Falls, Joseph L. Bruno Family Resource Center of the Commission on Economic Opportunity for the Greater Capital Region Inc., the Joseph L. Bruno Scholarship from the New York State Summer School of Orchestral Studies, the Joseph L. Bruno Theater in the Arts Center of the Capital Region, the Joseph L. Bruno Stadium at Hudson Valley Community College, the Joseph L. Bruno Pavilion at Saratoga Spa State Park, the Joseph L. Bruno Biotechnology Development Center at Albany Molecular Research, the Joseph L. Bruno Lobby in the Greenbush Area YMCA … . I can’t go on.

There were many instances of Bruno’s sloppiness in assembling facts to go along with his dreams and daydreams. One of the most egregious came when he tried to help pull the wool over the eyes of the people of Troy, NY, a small city of 40,000 or so nestled on the east side of the Hudson River near the state capitol.

It was in 2003 that Bruno called an open-air press conference in Troy to present us with something he oh-so-modestly called “A vision presented by Senator Joseph L. Bruno.” I called it a hallucination.

Two years later, stuck in a newspaper conference room for an editorial board meeting, the then State Senate majority leader finally conceded on the record that the vision had evaporated.

So, what really happened to the $470 million “Harbor at Troy” waterfront project he had hyped — the one that promised such components as a Hudson River Heritage Center, a Troy Festival Center, a waterfront park and greenway, a harbor and marina, entertainment/ dining/retail spaces, a hotel and conference center, structured parking, aquariums, replicas of historic ships, a campus for U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen, a Hudson River monitoring system and on and on and on?

It all sunk under the weight of its own hot air when some very basic reporting was done. The kind of verification you might expect a powerful politician to do before attaching himself to such a project.

At the time, Bruno told us a consortium called the Hudson River Group would take care of everything. He said the developers behind the proposal helped create the widely praised Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Faneuil Hall in Boston and a riverfront project under construction in Hartford. However, neither Bruno nor anyone on his staff had conducted the due diligence such an audacious plan called for before throwing his considerable political weight behind it.

The developers Bruno praised had not, as it turned out, personally worked on any of the cited projects; the U.S. Navy had neither pledged $50 million to the project nor had plans to decommission the USS Albany and anchor it here as we were told.

In that editorial board meeting, Bruno expressed disappointment that the project had dried up, but, incredibly, once again said the people behind it had done wonderful things in Baltimore, Boston and Hartford.

“Actually, they had not,” I reminded him. “That was precisely one of the fallacies in that presentation.”

Bruno paused, stuck out that jaw, then replied petulantly, “Well, anyone who saw all those great plans they laid out would have been absolutely convinced the project would work.”

If it had, we’d be seeing some signs of the 650 construction workers who were supposed to hammer it all together, or the 1.3 million visitors we were to expect every year according to the good senator’s projections. Instead, all we saw was a political leader reluctant to admit he had been jobbed by some fast-talking developers. Or, was he intentionally part of the misdirection?

Initial exaggerations and fibs aside, did the project have merit? Bruno’s office announced six months after the original plan unveiling that a consultant would be hired to re-evaluate the project. In this same meeting two years later, he grudgingly revealed under persistent questioning that, no, no one had ever been hired and, no, no one would be. In other words, all those months later we finally were told on the record that we had been served another heaping platter of baloney.

So, as the particulars of the current bill of indictment make their way into the court proceedings, we’ll see a clash of egos, a web of intrigue, a pattern of demagoguery and, perhaps, a lesson or two on equine anatomy.

How so? Bruno, who among many pursuits is a lover of race horses and has been involved in that field, once was asked what he thought about criminal charges against two organizations he had long supported with my tax dollars — the Institute for Entrepreneurship and the New York Racing Association. He gave this thoughtful, statesmanlike reply:

“It doesn’t make sense to look up a dead horse’s rectum. You want to look up a dead horse’s rectum, go ahead; it’s not something I’m going to do.”

Should he not fare well in court, he might prefer that view than having to look us in the eye.

• A world view? Don’t bank on it

See those two banknotes? The top one is a 10-pound British note, the bottom one a 10-pound Scottish note. They have been legitimate currency around the world since long before the United States was even an idea.

As of the close of business Friday, each of them was worth $19.7920 in U.S. currency. It took me less than 30 seconds online to ascertain that rate of exchange. It took me only a little more than that to thoroughly confuse three naive employees of the Pioneer Savings Bank’s Brunswick, NY, branch office where I do a lot of business.

Perhaps I should say “did” a lot of business. After the rank ineptitude and dismissive attitude I witnessed, I’m seriously considering taking my business elsewhere.

The situation was simply this. I had five 10-pound notes left over from a recent trip to Scotland. That means I had roughly $100 worth of U.S. money tied up in banknotes I couldn’t spend locally. So, I went to a bank to exchange the notes for good ol’ Yankee greenbacks.

The first teller literally pulled back her hand when I presented the UK notes, as if I had tossed her a red-hot charcoal briquette.

“I don’t know what to do with these,” she stammered.

“Simple,” I said. “Just look up the current rate of exchange and I’ll see if I want to trade the notes today or wait till the rate is a little more in my favor.”

Not a bad plan, I thought, since the exchange rate was 2.06 U.S. dollars for each British/Scottish pound last week when I got the notes in the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh — without the slightest problem, I should add.

“I don’t know how,” she said, gesturing in a panicky fashion to a young man I took to be an assistant manager of some sort, although throughout my visit he never introduced himself or his title.

“Oh, we can’t access that kind of information on these screens,” he said, gesturing to the teller’s screen and starting to walk away.

“May I suggest you try a computer with Internet access?” I said. “I know you have them here. It only takes a few seconds to get the current exchange rate.”

He hemmed and hawed, then pointed in the direction of someone at another window. “She’ll have to do this when she’s finished with what she’s doing,” he said rather brusquely, then made a success of retreating to a small office across the lobby. “I have another customer I’m taking care of.”

“She” was finished in about three minutes with whatever business she was transacting, then turned to me and asked how she could help.

“I merely want to exchange these five banknotes for U.S. currency. One is a 10-pound British note, and the other four are each 10-pound Scottish notes. But they’re all worth the same amount,” I explained, wondering why in the world I had to explain something so basic to supposed banking professionals.

She picked up the notes I’d spread on her little teller window ledge and walked to the office where the presumed manager of the moment had scurried. She waited at the doorway for about five minutes till he had completed his business with the other customer. I stood right behind her.

She walked in, put the notes on his desk and said to him, “I don’t know what to do with these things. Are they checks, or what?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We can’t do anything with these anyway.”

That was it for me. I walked in the office and, mustering up all the remaining patience I possessed, said, “They’re called money. They’re not checks, for heaven’s sake. Just look at them. All I want is to exchange them back into U.S. currency. And all you have to do is look on the Internet at the currency exchange rate to know how much to give me.”

“We can’t do that,” he said, beginning to sound more miffed than befuddled.

“Why not?” I replied. “This is a bank. You’re supposed to, among other things, change money. Any bank in Europe does it for any currency. It’s elementary banking.”

“Oh, sure,” he said with an “Aha!” look. “In Europe. But we’re not allowed to do that here. What would we do with the foreign money you gave us?”

“You’d send it to your main office, and they’d exchange it at a favorable rate with a central bank,” I said. “You mean to tell me you’ve never been taught how to make such a basic transaction?”

“Well, we just can’t do that,” he said, metaphorically — and perhaps actually, although I couldn’t see under his desk — digging in his heels. “You’ll have to go to some other bank.”

So, I went home, seething and marveling at just one more example of U.S. insulation from the rest of the real world and wondering if that ever will change.

It’s no wonder so many people in other countries think we’re such rubes. Many of us are. And Pioneer Savings Bank has a whole cluster of them.

• Great moments in governance

I can just picture the scene.

A concerned parent is out strolling with his/her offspring(s) through the park when, suddenly, a besotted pervert leaps out of the bushes and … starts mixing a cocktail right in front of them.

Oh, the horror!

Well, Utah state legislators are pushing to be sure that never happens without a legal penalty being attached. They’re actually trying to restrict restaurants from making mixed drinks in full view of minors.

Senate president Michael Waddoups says proposed legislation is necessary to protect the “safety and mental future of our children.”

If he and any like-minded colleagues have their way, restaurants that serve drinks will be forced to remodel if their bar isn’t screened off from the dining room.

Oh, the illustration above? One possible way to combat the phobia. Or, perhaps it’s a serving staff training exercise.

• Karma is a bitch

From the Wired.com news blog:

The 1,000-foot-long Saudi oil tanker Sirius Star has been released after a ransom was paid, two months after Somali pirates launched a shocking raid to capture the $150-million vessel and its $100 million cargo of crude oil. But, in a bizarre twist, five of the newly wealthy hijackers drowned while celebrating their windfall.

To secure the ship’s freedom, and that of her 25 crew, Vela International Marine, which operates two-dozen large oil tankers on behalf of the Saudi state oil company Aramco, apparently packed $3 million into a metal canister and air-dropped the canister from a low-flying plane, straight onto Sirius Star’s deck. …

Later, as the pirates were motoring back to shore in boats, “singing in colorful tone, and exchanging some ridiculous words,” one boat capsized and five pirates — who could not swim — drowned.

According to … Mohamed Omar Hussein, a reporter for Somali Weyn Radio in Mogadishu, other Somalis who were “great swimmers” dove to recover cash that the pirates had sealed in plastic bags. On shore, “pastoralists” collected money that washed up in the surf. Later the body of one drowned pirate was found on the beach with $153,000 on his person.