As a Queens city councilman allegedly plotted a $200,000 bribery scheme💎 to make Democratic state Sen. Malcolm Smith the GOP candidate for mayor, he want⭕ed assurances that Republicans would get half of City Hall’s appointments should he win — and that Smith would make him his deputy.
During the White Plains federal cor♛ruption trial of Smith, former Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens) and former Queens GOP Executive Vice Chair Vincent Tabone, jurors on Wednesday heard a secretly taped conversation where Halloran laid out the king-making plan.
Halloran could be heard telling a wired-up undercover agent and Moses Stern, a crooked developer-turned-federal-witness, that Republican🏅s should get at least half of the city’s high-paying commissioner posts and half the nonpaying, but influential, seats on city boards.
“It comes down to what is it that you need first?” says the agent, pretenꦡding he’s a king-making developer named “Raj” during the Feb. 8, 2013 sit-down at the Essex House in🧸 Manhattan.
“The first dep and a guarantee on the agency heads being split in the party,” says Halloran. “If he goes to City Hall and … cuts the baby in half so to speak, he plays Solomon, everything, everything works out.”
The now ex-councilman says the Republican Party learned the hard way a decade earlier when it gave Mik♏e Bloomberg its line for mayor, adding Bloomberg wound up making “certain prom𒀰ises he didn’t keep” while only honoring “the financial part of the agreement.”
Halloran did not elaborate on what the “financial part” meant⛎.
But he said Republicans should get half o🔯f the 115 mayor-appointed commissioner, deputy commissioner and first assistant posts — many o𒁃f which command six-figures.
He also demanded Raj convince Smith that half of his potential🐽 judicial appointments should he become mayor be Republican and that the party have heavy influence in branches of City Hall that could make “things happen” for politically friendly developers — such as the Board of Standards and A♕ppeals and the Buildings Department.
At one point, Halloran teღlls Raj that although Smith might want his own police commissioner, it’s best for “stability” that he retain then-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.
“While I’m not requiring, or we’re not saying he needs♒ to keep Ray Kelly forever, it would be a good idea to start with Ray Kelly,” he says.
Smith — one of the state’s top Democrats — made the failed bid to secure the 2013 Republican mayoral primary line by bribing Halloran, Tabone and then-Bronx Republican Chairman Joseph “Jay” Savino, prosecutors alleg൩e.