SUMMARY: Congressional Democrats are expected to decide Thursday whether to go to court to obtain President Trump’s recent tax returns. Though there has long been curiosity over Trump’s taxes, which he declined to release in 2016, interest in them resurfaced after a New York Times investigation uncovered past tax records and large business losses. William Brangham talks to Times reporter Ross Buettner.
SUMMARY: Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was sentenced Wednesday to three-and-a-half more years in prison for federal crimes related to foreign lobbying and witness tampering. After the hearing, a New York prosecutor revealed new state-level charges for Manafort, too. William Brangham, who was in the courthouse, reports, and Amna Nawaz talks to former Federal Prosecutor Jessica Roth for analysis.
SUMMARY: Health care continues to be a top political issue. While some congressional Democrats consider universal health coverage, state and local governments are already pushing ahead with proposals to corral costs and broaden access to care, including for the undocumented. Special correspondent Sarah Varney shares stories from California and New York, two states pursuing ambitious health care agendas.
Gov. California Gavin Newsom (D-Calif): You look around the rest of the world, they're just rolling their eyes, higher life expectancy. They do chronic disease management better than the United States for roughly half the price. You look at quality indexes, we dropped to 37 in the world in our quality index last year, below Cuba and Costa Rica.
This is ludicrous, and so it's incumbent upon governors, mayors, to take the lead, in the absence of the federal government doing its job.
SUMMARY: After decades of decline, the city of Utica, New York, is growing again, thanks in part to its reputation as "the town that loves refugees." And their basic reason for loving refugees is simple: An influx of new residents and workers have helped keep its economy afloat. But are there also downsides to an refugee-driven recovery? Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
SUMMARY: In September 1971, Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York became the site of a bloody uprising that would shock the nation. Over several days, some 1,300 inmates seized parts of the prison, demanding better living conditions. Heather Ann Thompson documents the untold story in her new book, “Blood in the Water,” and joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss the truth about the riot's violent end.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): September, 1971, Attica Prison in Upstate New York became the site of a bloody prison clash that would shock the nation. Over several chaotic days, some 1,300 inmates seized parts of the prison and demanded better living conditions.
ELLIOT ‘L.D.' BARKLEY (prisoner): We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be driven or beaten as such!
JEFFREY BROWN: In the initial takeover a guard was killed. Inmates held about 40 prison employees as hostages, negotiating with the state of New York, and bringing in outside counsel including Attorney William Kunstler. Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused a face to face visit, talks soon disintegrated. And on September 13th, hundreds of armed troopers stormed the prison to retake control.
MAN: The instructions is your weapon is not to be taken or you to be taken.
JEFFREY BROWN: Twenty-nine inmates and ten hostages were killed in the takeover, scores more injured.
The story, much of it long kept hidden from view, is told in the new book “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising o f 1971 and Its Legacy.”
Author Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan.
Now, you argue there are two stories to tell. One is the “what happened”, one is the aftermath. Start with the “what happened.” What did the period leading up to the riot, what led to it?
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON, Author, “Blood in the Water”: Well, prisons in 1971, much like today, were these out of sight, out of mind places where people were treated very badly, and the guys inside worked through the system first to try get their conditions improved — again, very basic things, enough food to eat, sufficient sanitary supplies — and when that really fails, frustration mounts.
Ultimately, they erupt in a protest, and the book tells that story. It's a remarkable story of men from very different backgrounds who stand together, negotiate with the state of New York, with the help of observers.
JEFFREY BROWN: The riots were not planned.
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: No, not at all. It actually begins in a quite unexpected clash between prisoners and guards that morphed into something much more organized. The guys elect representatives from the cell block to speak for them, they begin negotiating to the state for better conditions and, for four days, the world watches as the media is there to see how this thing is going to unfold.
SUMMARY: Refugees arriving in upstate New York in recent years have increasingly come from active conflict zones, including Syria and Iraq -- many fleeing with injuries of war and deep emotional scars. As the refugee populations in places like Buffalo change, the health care systems and cultures of these cities have been changing, too. Special correspondent Sarah Varney reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): President Obama has pledged to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees by October, despite resistance playing out in many communities.
Refugees, many of them rootless for years, often arrive with significant medical problems and psychological trauma.
Special correspondent Sarah Varney brings us this report about how one city — Buffalo, New York — is adapting. Her story was produced in collaboration with our partner Kaiser Health News.
SARAH VARNEY, Kaiser Health News: Since Murhaf, Ghenwa, and their children moved here from Syria, even mundane tasks like cooking and homework have become more complicated.
MAN: They have 10 airplanes.
SARAH VARNEY: Unaccustomed to this new life, the family relies on help from Hassan Alishaqi, from a local resettlement agency called Journey's End.
Refugee agencies help families like this one find housing and jobs, get medical care and health insurance and enroll in English classes and schools.
They fled Syria after civil war erupted there in 2011, unleashing an exodus of more than four million refugees. The destruction and violence came close to Murhaf's family during one of their last nights in the city of Homs.
MURHAF, Syrian Refugee (through translator): Some bullets came to my house through the window. And I was afraid for the safety of my kids. They never sleep because of — it's just very hard for them to sleep.
SARAH VARNEY: After a year in Cairo and exhaustive security checks, the family arrived in Buffalo, a quiet city on the edge of Lake Erie. And like many new arrivals here, they're struggling with the aftermath of their horrific journey as they attempt to build healthier lives in their new home.
More than 90 percent of the refugees who resettle to New York live in upstate New York. The city of Buffalo has become a welcoming haven for many of them. But over the last 15 years, the countries and conflicts they come from have changed. And the health care needs of refugees are changing, too.
Jericho Road is a community health center in Buffalo that has long treated refugees from some of the world's poorest countries, including Myanmar, Bhutan, Sudan and Somalia. The clinic is a crossroads of languages and customs.
New refugees receive free medical assistance from the federal government for eight months. Then they can buy private insurance or enroll in Medicaid.
SUMMARY: In upstate New York, two prisoners from the state's largest maximum security prison were discovered missing Saturday. Since then, police have swept the town and countryside, searching for the two convicted murdered who cut through cement walls and steel gratings to emerge from a manhole outside the prison's walls. William Brangham talks to Jesse McKinley of The New York Times.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): An intensive manhunt continued in Upstate New York today, after two prisoners were discovered missing Saturday from the state’s largest maximum security prison, following a remarkable escape that stunned the authorities.
William is back with that story.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Police continue to sweep the town and countryside surrounding Dannemora Prison, searching for two convicted murders who cut through cement walls and steel pipes, then eventually emerged through a manhole outside the prison’s walls, about a block away.
Richard Matt kidnapped, killed and dismembered a man in 1997. David Sweat killed a sheriff’s deputy in 2002, shooting him more than a dozen times. Over the weekend, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo toured the prison and talked about the breakout.
GOV. ANDREW CUOMO, New York: This is the first escape from the maximum security portion of the institution ever since 1865. So, by definition, it was an extraordinary act.
And when you look at how it was done, it was extraordinary. I mean, we went through the tunnels. You look at the precision of the operation, it was truly extraordinary.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: For the latest, we’re joined by Jesse McKinley, who has been reporting on the break for The New York Times, and joins me from Dannemora, New York.
Jesse, thank you very much for being here.
We have this enormous manhunt under way. Tell us where this latest — where it stands right now. Given how long ago these men broke out, this has got to be a huge search area.
JESSE MCKINLEY, The New York Times: Yes, this is day three of this.
And according to the state authorities, at this point, there are about 300 officers involved. And according to the governor of the state of New York, Andrew Cuomo, this could be a national — nationwide search.
Initially, of course, they were interested in the area around this prison, which is just to my right here, but at this point, it’s expanded beyond the borders of the state, potentially to Canada. Mexican authorities have been alerted, as have officials in the Southwest, where one of the suspects, Richard Matt, was believed to have taken refuge at one point.
When natural gas companies first pressed into New York in 2008, state environmental regulators barely understood the process of "hydraulic fracturing." Today, six and a half years after ProPublica first raised concerns that the drilling could threaten both the state's water supply and its residents' health, Gov. Andrew Cuomo banned the process across the state.
The ban makes New York, which holds large natural gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale, the largest and most significant region to bow out of the nation's energy boom because of concerns that its benefits may be outweighed by the risk.
The decision comes after a long-awaited report from the state's Health Department this week concluded that the fracking would pose health risks to New Yorkers. It also follows an exhaustive state environmental review effort that began the day after ProPublica's first story in July 2008.
Since then, New York has walked an indecisive line on drilling, while an energy boom provoked by advances in fracking technology took much of the rest of the country by storm. Today's lower oil prices are due, in part, to an oil bonanza in North Dakota's Bakken Shale that had barely begun when New York first put a temporary halt to new drilling in the state. Likewise, the gas drilling waves that have rippled through states from Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Michigan, North Carolina, Maryland, Texas and Wyoming had yet to run their course.
But by delaying a decision on drilling for so many years, Cuomo also allowed a clearer picture of the impacts and changes that drilling activity would bring to emerge. That clearer picture ultimately dampened the enthusiasm for drilling in New York and validated many of the environmental and health concerns that anti-drilling groups have raised across the country.
Just across the state line from New York's Southern Tier, where the richest Marcellus gas deposits lie, Pennsylvania landowners dealt with one incident of water contamination after another. They complained of illnesses caused by both the water and new air pollution brought by the drilling. State regulators in Pennsylvania – once enthusiastic boosters of the process – wound up cracking down on drilling companies' messy practices and strengthening their own environmental laws as a result.
Across the country, similar stories emerged, many of them reported as part of a four-year-long investigation by ProPublica. From Texas and Louisiana to California, drilling waste was being spilled or leaking into drinking water aquifers and high pressures caused by fracking activities were causing wells to leak. Methane gushed from wells and pipelines. And residents' allegations that the drilling was causing symptoms from nerve disorders to skin lesions and birth defects began to be substantiated through peer-reviewed scientific research.
The potential payoff for such risks – which the drilling industry long maintained were minimal – was that drilling would bring huge economic benefits to rural regions long desperate for new jobs and an injection of economic vigor. That economic promise has been born out across many parts of the country, but in some instances, those who needed the financial benefits most have been denied them.
An investigation by ProPublica earlier this year found that landowners in Pennsylvania who supported drilling and signed leases with drilling companies in order to earn a share of the profits were instead being cheated out their payments, called royalties. In fact, the stories showed, energy companies had withheld royalty payments worth billions of dollars from both landowners and the federal government across states from Texas and Wyoming to Louisiana and Colorado, substantially blunting the prosperity that could come from allowing drilling to proceed.
All of this, it now seems, must have made Cuomo's decision this week a lot easier. But the ban also reflects the conclusion of a lengthy learning curve for New York State.
When ProPublica reporters, in a joint project with WNYC, first went to Albany to talk with the state's environment regulators, those officials couldn't answer basic questions about the process they were poised to permit: What chemicals would be pumped underground near drinking water supplies? Where would the waste be disposed of and did New York have facilities capable of handling it? State officials told ProPublica then that fracking had never once caused pollution to water supplies, and said they were unaware of the hundreds of cases brought to their attention by ProPublica where such damage had indeed taken place.
On the morning of July 23, 2008, then Gov. David Paterson called for those state environment officials to go back to the drawing board in their assessment of the risks of fracking before the state issued any new permits, effectively placing a moratorium on drilling that lasted until now.
As they met at The Shamus, a favorite local lunch spot, on a September day a year ago, Niagara County officials considered some good news. Thanks to low interest rates, they might be able to refinance a big chunk of Niagara's tobacco bonds – debts payable from the county's share of a massive 1998 legal settlement with Big Tobacco.
Eager to lower costs by replacing the bonds with less-expensive debt, they decided to move ahead. As a bonus, they figured the county could raise some new money for projects like fixing up Niagara's jail.
But when details of the transaction became public last month, the biggest winner wasn't Niagara County, which received $2 million from the deal, but investors of Oppenheimer Funds, a large mutual fund manager that held deeply distressed Niagara tobacco bonds that were last in line for repayment.
Oppenheimer investors got $6.9 million for the bonds, which had been expected to default. That's more than triple the county's take and $5.1 million more than the value Oppenheimer carried on its books, according to data from Morningstar, which tracks mutual fund holdings.
Why did the last-in-line investors get a $5.1 million windfall while the county got a mere $2 million?
The answer lies in the shifting world of tobacco bonds, where big investors are pressing governments like Niagara to bail out bets that have turned bad, owing to a drop in smoking and a parallel decline in the settlement payments that underpin the bonds.
ProPublica reported earlier how states, territories and counties have exposed themselves to $64 billion in tobacco debt by selling $3 billion in high-risk securities called capital appreciation bonds, or CABs, as part of "securitization" deals that mortgaged their annual tobacco payments for immediate cash.
The CABs are particularly toxic because no payments are required until the bonds mature, usually in 40 or 50 years. In the meantime, they pile up huge sums of interest owed – so much that Niagara and several other counties were told last year that some of their CABs would never pay off.
Niagara is the first county to engineer a bailout. In March, New Jersey pledged $406 million from future tobacco settlement income to rescue CABs. Oppenheimer has sued to block a refinancing plan in Rhode Island, and New York's Chautauqua County is pursuing a $34 million deal similar to Niagara's.
Wall Street has taken to calling these deals "investor-led refinancings," a label that invites questions about who's getting the most benefit — taxpayers or bondholders.
As Niagara's case demonstrates, money for the bailouts isn't free. It comes from new debt deals, like refinancings, or from future tobacco payments that otherwise would flow to the governments. That means taxpayers benefit less than they otherwise might, even when some upfront cash is thrown in.
"The banker who sold this deal to Niagara should be canonized," said Sylvain Raynes, co-head of credit research firm R&R Consulting, who reviewed the transaction at ProPublica's request. Raynes was one of six experts who questioned the size of the payout to Oppenheimer given the firm's own low valuation of the bonds.
Niagara's banker, Susan Schmelzer of the investment firm Raymond James, declined to comment. Oppenheimer also declined to comment or answer written questions.
Deals like Niagara's also challenge a major selling point for tobacco securitizations, which in the years following the legal settlement were pitched as a type of insurance to protect taxpayers. The idea was that governments would secure money upfront while investors took the risk of payments shrinking over time.
Bailouts flip the calculus. "There really wasn't any kind of a risk transfer," said Edward Grebeck, a Connecticut debt consultant. At the end of the day, he said, bondholders "are coming to the party to take money which you would think the taxpayers of Niagara County would be entitled to."
Governments have no legal obligation to cut investors' losses. The bonds are what's called "non-recourse" debt, meaning taxpayers aren't on the hook to repay them. Bondholders are owed money only from the settlement, which is supposed to flow in perpetuity and so far has paid out $101 billion.
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| In this Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013, photo, Melissa Grothues and her fiance John Steele pose at a spot on San Diego Bay Tuesday, in San Diego. The couple left the Buffalo, New York suburb of Amherst seeking a new life with a new environment and landed in San Diego. |
Melissa Grothues and John Steele bailed from Buffalo last year.
Dissatisfied with their bank jobs, the 25-year-old college graduates sold the house in suburban Amherst, posted ads for possessions on Craigslist and drove cross country to San Diego for a fresh start.
"We were ready for a bigger city and to move on. There just weren’t many opportunities in Buffalo, job-wise," Grothues said. "It just seemed like day-to-day there, every single person that I worked with would be miserable."
The young couple is hardly alone in exiting upstate New York. More people are leaving the region than moving into it, contributing to a largely stagnant population. The trend has helped lead to New York losing four congressional seats in the last two Census counts and is about to cost the state some prestige. At some point early this year, Florida is expected to surpass New York as the third most populous state, according to projections by The Associated Press.
New York is home to about 19.65 million people, but the state’s slow growth is largely fueled by New York City, which has long attracted a large share of international immigrants and young adults, including many from upstate.
The story is different north of the Westchester-Rockland county line. The population of the 53 counties of upstate New York was essentially flat, decreasing by 0.1 percent from 2011 to 2012, according to the latest county-level Census estimates available.
Though there have been pockets of growth in the Hudson Valley and some other areas, many upstate areas grapple with a slow but steady loss of people.
Why are people leaving upstate New York?
Some complain that taxes in New York are too high. Others, like Grotheus, say there are better job opportunities elsewhere. State and local officials have had mixed success in luring high-tech companies and other new businesses to make up for jobs lost when large employers like Eastman Kodak Co. and Carrier Corp. scaled back or shifted operations elsewhere.
"Part of it is probably due to job loss in the major metropolitan areas like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Binghamton. They all had large employers that had to lay off a lot of people," said Jan Vink of Cornell University’s Program on Applied Demographics.
Others blame the weather in upstate New York, where winters can be a trying mix of heavy snow and little sun.
Kyle Songer moved to Tampa from the Saratoga Springs area in early 2013, becoming yet another New Yorker to leave behind cold and snow for sun and sand. The 45-year-old instructional designer says moving south was his goal since he fell in love with the beach and surfing while growing up and being a life guard on Long Island.
"I needed to get out to a more relaxing environment and sunshine almost every day," said Songer, who now lives in Clearwater, Fla. "And that’s what it’s been. It’s wonderful."
In recent years, Florida has been the No. 1 destination for people aged 45 and up leaving upstate New York. The top destination for people aged 20 to 44 is New York City and the surrounding downstate region, according to researchers at Cornell who looked at census data from 2006 through 2010. The loss of young college graduates — like Grothues and Steele — is especially worrisome to local politicians because it can contribute to a so-called brain drain. The fear is that the loss of educated workers in an area can make it less attractive to new businesses, creating a cycle of decline.
Politicians in both parties have tried for decades to reverse the migration trend, but the latest county figures show only 10 of 53 upstate counties had positive migration numbers over the year period. Top-growing Jefferson County is home to the Army’s busy Fort Drum. No. 2 is Saratoga County, where a state-of-the-art computer chip plant that currently employs 2,100 people is still growing.
New York committed $1.2 billion in aid to land the Saratoga County chip plant, where ground was broken in 2009. The aid package illustrates the extraordinary lengths state officials have gone to bring jobs into the region. Supporters of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s policy to create "tax free" zones near college campuses argue they will help stop the brain drain in other parts of the state.
But they also are battling long-term trends that reach beyond upstate New York. Vink, of Cornell University, notes that young people are especially hard to retain.
"It’s a hard population to keep around," he said. "They are very mobile."
Here at ProPublica, we’re great believers in the idea that public revelation of scandal leads to reforms. Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that sunshine is a disinfectant, from the New Orleans police department to California’s nursing board.
But I have to admit that there may be one pestilent corner of the body politic where such cause and effect physics don’t yet seem to apply, a black hole within which the forces of greed have to date overwhelmed all good sense and every call for redemption.
You’ve already guessed, of course, that we’re talking about Albany, New York.
Like many of the notorious outposts on America’s map of graft, Albany has a storied history of dishonest behavior. When Abraham Lincoln wanted to push the 13th Amendment through a recalcitrant Congress, his Secretary of State, William Seward, told the president he’d need to make some ethically dicey promises, work best left to an operative skilled in the darkest arts of politics.
“I’ll fetch a friend from Albany,” Seward, a former New York governor, is quoted as saying in the movie "Lincoln." “Spare you the exposure and liability.”
It doesn’t appear much has changed. This week alone, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York went before the cameras twice to announce indictments of state legislators. Thursday’s announcement – Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson was arraigned on bribery charges – came with a twist; a legislator had been wearing a wire for the Feds for months, maybe years.
The collective shiver in the Capitol scored pretty well on the Richter scale.
But evidently, there was more to fear than future indictments. Stevenson, on a recording, seems to have given some thought to the idea he might one day be busted.
Were he to be caught, he threatened, “somebody’s going to the cemetery.”
Murder. Now, that would still rate as a pretty unusual Albany crime, at least outside the novels of William Kennedy.
Anyway, as a lifelong New Yorker, I went searching for a novel insight into all the wrongdoing. I took the handy guide offered on Wednesday by The New York Times after the week’s first round of indictments.
I started at the array of photos and applicable misdeeds – really, it resembled a yearbook layout former State Comptroller Alan Hevesi might have put together in the prison library – and re-read the news accounts behind the lineup of photos: the indictments and the plea deals, the teary allocutions and the withering remarks from federal judges; the repeated, and ultimately erroneous declarations that Albany had hit rock bottom, the pledges of reform, the terms of the jail sentences and the hours of community service assigned.
The cases pretty well run the gamut. Veterans, freshmen, members of the State Senate and State Assembly. Democrats. Republicans. Payoffs and paybacks, sex and drugs.
Not all the names will be familiar to people outside New York. Not all the names, in fact, will be familiar to New Yorkers. The relative anonymity of our representatives in Albany might have something to do with their proclivities. I’ll do my best to help everyone keep things straight.
First off, I can’t say I found any magical thread linking them all. But a few noteworthy patterns did emerge that suggested that, for whatever reason, these folks have a powerful belief that they enjoy impunity.
One consistent problematic habit: They love to shop. Really love to shop. We’re talking Buzz Bissinger style shopping. Big ticket items.
A Bentley, for instance, for Carl Kruger, a powerful state senator who, among other noteworthy achievements, had taken a stand against gay marriage. Parking certainly wasn’t a problem. He and his boyfriend lived, along with the boyfriend’s mother, in a house originally built for a mobster. The architect for the house, prior to being slain on orders of the mobster, had thought to include a driveway.
Diane Gordon, a fairly undistinguished lawmaker from Brooklyn, got rung up on some fairly non-routine bribery counts. She was looking for more than a car. She wanted a house. Maybe more than one. But however many, they had to have, among other amenities, walk-in closets.
“One hand washes another,” she once told her co-conspirator. Right, and then, hands washed, Gordon needed to get back to that ample closet and pick out the day’s outfit for Albany.
Pedro Espada might be one Albany felon known outside New York. The state senator’s exploits – using a health care operation in a disadvantaged part of the Bronx to line his impeccably tailored pockets – made Page 1 of the Times with some frequency.
Part of his front page appeal was his famously expensive taste for sushi and lobster. Turns out, though, his crowning food shopping achievement was the $5,000 he and others spent eating at Yonkers Raceway. I repeat – 5 grand spent at Yonkers. For crimes that boggle the mind that one’s hard to beat.
Then, of course, there was Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin. He’s the guy who was simultaneously a legislative leader and the boss of the nation’s largest municipal labor council. Even in Albany, you’d think that might have constituted a red flag. Conflict? What conflict?
In the end, McLaughlin wasn’t that conflicted. He stole from both the state and his union – and, yes, a Little League team, too – and had to forfeit some $3 million to the court.
I actually don’t know what he shopped for. But suffice it to say the man had options.
At his sentencing, McLaughlin made a bid for leniency. He’d turned things around. He was in Alcoholics Anonymous, though that might not have been the addiction he needed to address first.
The judge wasn’t much moved. He noted that the size and variety of McLaughlin’s thefts – “brazen and perversely creative” were his precise words – “staggers the mind.”
McLaughlin got a decade in a federal lockup.
Which leads me to what turned out to be both my funniest and most dispiriting moment – hey, like I said, this is an Albany story – as I worked my way through The Times’s presentation of perps.
While, sure, I chuckled darkly at recalling that Hiram Monserrate, prior to taking up his Assembly seat in Albany, had retired from the New York City Police Department on a psychiatric disability. Worrying that he might be a danger to himself or others, news reports asserted, the department moved quickly to strip him of his guns.
Great. Take away his guns, but give him a gavel, and a member item budget. Alas, physical violence was Monserrate’s undoing, his assault of his girlfriend hastening his departure from the Capitol.
And yes, it was charming to revisit Mike Cole’s night out with interns. He got so drunk with them he wound up spending the night on the floor on an intern’s bedroom. His punishment was the loss of $9,000 and a helping of Albany irony: He no longer would serve as the ranking member of the Assembly Committee on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse.
No, my favorite revelation was learning of the posh trappings at one of the federal prisons that wound up housing several of Albany’s malefactors.
This was The Daily News’s portrait of the federal facility in Otisville, N.Y.
“The prison’s store doubles as a delicatessen, serving up such favorites as rib steak, gefilte fish, kugel, salmon, chorizo and smoked oysters. It’s only a 90-minute drive for visitors from the city, and it has bocce courts, horseshoe pits and enough room to play soccer. Convicts could stay up until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights watching HBO, Showtime and Cinemax … Memorial Day and the Fourth of July are celebrated with cookouts serving hamburgers, hot dogs, watermelon and potato salad.”
“The food is right. The commissary is right. The officers don’t bother you. There are a lot of courses you can take. You had weights inside and outside, free weights and machines,” one inmate told The News. “Food, activities, TV and movies, and visitations are the four things you judge a facility by. Things were good.”
The latest assortment of Albany’s finest might well then take heart. If things go badly at trial, ask for Otisville, a federal lockup that appears to be the next best thing to Albany.
Congress dodged the so-called fiscal cliff in part by raising taxes on high incomes. California voters addressed their state’s school budget troubles with a surcharge on big incomes. And now Albany has decided to raise revenue with a high income tax rate for people with seven-figure incomes.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislative leaders are finalizing a surprise deal to extend a high-tax bracket for the state’s top incomes. The bracket, first approved by lawmakers in late 2011 as a temporary response to disappointing revenues, does not expire until the end of 2014. But that year is an election year, and by deciding to renew the bracket now, Mr. Cuomo and lawmakers can avoid debating high tax rates while running for re-election.
Mr. Cuomo, who in 2011 described a new high tax bracket as a “short-term solution” to help the state weather a financial emergency, did not mention his desire to extend the new tax bracket when he publicly announced his budget proposal in January, or in the weeks since as he and his cabinet members have crisscrossed the state, promoting his spending plan to residents.
The Legislature has not held any hearings or debate about the tax proposal, and Mr. Cuomo’s office has declined to provide details while it is being negotiated. The State Democratic Party has even broadcast television advertisements praising the lack of any tax increases in the spending plan that Mr. Cuomo proposed.
But the emerging deal follows similar actions in Washington and in other states to improve shaky balance sheets by generating more revenue from those with top incomes. In its deal to resolve the so-called fiscal cliff, Congress agreed in January to raise taxes on individuals with incomes higher than $400,000 and couples with more than $450,000. And in November, at the urging of Gov. Jerry Brown, California voters approved a temporary income tax surcharge on the state’s highest incomes.
While some states are moving in the opposite direction — seeking to eliminate income taxes in an effort to spur growth — others like New York are embracing the idea of generating more revenue from those who make the most. Maryland raised income taxes on high incomes last year, and Minnesota is considering an increase this year.
An overwhelming majority of gun show operators in New York State have agreed to new procedures to ensure that criminal and mental health background checks are conducted on buyers.
The agreement was reached after undercover agents from the state attorney general’s office were able to buy weapons, including three AR-15 rifles, without any screening at half a dozen gun shows around the state.
“Our goal is to have 100 percent of the gun show operators on board, and then we have a good example for other states to follow,” said Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, who negotiated the agreement with the operators. “Once we demonstrate how easy this is and how it keeps people safe, it weakens the arguments on the federal level that guaranteeing background checks are overly burdensome or face meaningful opposition.”
The operators, with shows from White Plains to Cheektowaga, have also agreed to a broader system to track firearms at their shows and to guard against illegal sales in parking lots.
New York’s program comes as Congress debates whether to require universal background checks for gun sales, including private sales at gun shows. State law has required such checks since 2000, but Mr. Schneiderman said there was ample evidence they were not always done.
The 23 operators who have agreed to the protocols are responsible for more than 80 percent of the gun shows in the state.
The investigators, posing as buyers in 2011, were able to purchase firearms even after they told the sellers that they had orders of protection against them, in which case they would fail background checks. Among the weapons bought were AR-15 rifles, like the one that was used in the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., in December.
