Former Mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t trust his NYPD security detail to keep secrets, former campaign aide Lis Smith claims in her tell-all book.
The political consultant unloaded a heap of criticism on de Blasio, who declined to hire her as his City Hall press secretary after a media frenz𒀰y exploded over her affair with former Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2013♏.
“He seemed obsessively paranoid; one morning as I sat in the seat behind him in the car with our NYPD detail, I received an email from him. `Watch what you say. This is not a secure space,'” Smith wrote of the ex-mayor in her memoir.
The Post reported Sunday that de Blasio — who is now running for Congress in the 10th district covering parts of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan — has just given up his NYPD bodyguards.
Smith was supposed to become de Blasio’s press secretary until The Post revealed that she Spitzer, who infamously resigned as the state’s chief executive in 2008 amid a prostitution scandal.
The spinmeister had worked on Spitzer’s failed comeback bid to become the city comptroller in 2013, before joining de Blasio’s general election campaign for mayor.
She dished about the former mayor’s temper in her 304-page tome, writing how staffers learned they better deliver de Blasio’s double espresso “piping hot” — or face a blowup.
“I was horrified by de Blasio’s behavior that I saw behind closed doors. He reamed out staffers for daring to speak within his earshot, humiliated his campaign body person for a small error in a briefing, and made a scene when he returned to his car from a press conference and found that his preferred coffee shop order—a double shot of espresso—was not piping hot,” she wrote.
“‘We have an espresso situation,’ he declared,” Smith recalled.
De Blasio, she said, “had a thing about his height” — rounding it down from six-foot-six to six-foot-five –“but still, he demanded that any podium at an event was tailored to his needs—no matter how humiliating it was to shorter speakers, including then-mayor Mike
Bloomberg, another prideful guy who was experienced at lying about his height.”
He needed his newspaper clips read to him every morning by a young staffer “because, apparently, the task of reading them himself was too taxing,” Smith wrote.
She also complained that the then mayor-elect was “routinely and obscenely late.”
“Many Sunday mornings, I’d wait outside his home in Park Slope for over an hour past our planned departure time … On the day of the election, we scuttled a visit to a home for domestic violence victims because de Blasio had `heavy things’ on his mind—as if the women expecting his visit didn’t.”
“None of that mattered,” she said. “Few voters were personally subjected to
his behavior.”
Smith described telling her mom and friends following her job interview with de Blasio, “I was terrified that someone like de Blasio could be tasked with running New York City in the middle of a crisis.
“‘This guy can’t handle a 9/11.’”
De Blasio dismissed the sour grapes from Smith.
“In baseball terms, she was on the team for about a third of an inning. She was in and out in less than 90 days,” de Blasio said in a statement to The Post.
“After she was long gone, we passed a nationally impactful Pre-K for All program, a $15 minimum wage, paid sick days and and took action against climate change,” the two-term ex-mayor added.
Smith previously released other excerpts of her book slamming de Blasio as a “gross unshowered guy” who sought Spitzer’s endorsement.
“Both of us had tried ✃to get in bed with Eliot, but only one of us had been successful,” Smith quipped in the book.
She also rapped another former client — ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo-– for turning into a Nicorette-chomping “a–hole”, who ruined the lives of his staffers after letting national fame get to his head during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. Cuomo would later resign amid accusatio🌞ns of sexual harassment and misconduct leveleꦜd against him by former staffers.
