ANDREW CUOMO'S VENDETTA

...The report alleged that politics may have influenced which cities were selected for empowerment zones...

...His idea was to streamline operations, enhance customer service, and make use of new technologies, all while cutting the staff by 20 percent...

...As the saga played out, Gaffney repeatedly asked what information her office had illegally disseminated, but Cuomo told her the specifics were so negative she was better off not knowing them...

...As Gaffney would later testify, Cuomo's top aides, Glaser and Eisenman, placed a number of calls to the Office of Management and Budget and lobbied staffers there to give HUD's general counsel the authority to launch an exhaustive investigation of the anonymous charges...

...Cuomo said he didn't see anything wrong with the way the investigation was proceeding...

...Shortly thereafter, in June 1997, Gaffney met with one of HUD's deputy secretaries, Dwight Robinson, and top aides to Cuomo...

...Eisenman is a deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Housing and was previously an attorney at Cravath, Swain & Moore, an elite New York law firm...

...The next day, however, HUD's general counsel called the IG's counsel with an offer...

...In the ensuing months, HUD decided not to rule on the matter, and Newsome took his complaint to federal court...

...The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the creation of a public affairs office within the inspector general's office...

...As is standard practice, the matter was referred to HUD's equal employment opportunity office for investigation...

...Using the charge as leverage, the Cuomo team then asked Gaffney to sign a memorandum stating she would route all future contact with the media through the HUD public affairs office...

...The controversy forced her to put the investigation on hold, and it was eventually reoriented to look at suburban and rural areas...

...The consultants did conclude 2020 was sound, but their judgment could hardly be seen as independent, given Cuomo's involvement in the awarding of the contracts...

...But she is convinced that publicizing Cuomo's mischief is the right thing to do...

...Now, she said, she was prepared to do that...

...In the spring of 1997, Cuomo obtained an anonymous letter charging Gaffney with intimidation of minorities, racial discrimination, and ethical wrongdoing...

...The hiring of the law firms was significant in a number of ways...

...During these lengthy calls, he would occasionally ask her advice on policy and personnel matters...

...While her office has refused to endorse his proposed overhaul of HUD, the inspector general has no authority to block a secretary's proposals...

...The position carries with it a staff of over 500 and involves auditing and investigating every program that falls under HUD's $30 billion annual budget...

...Amidst the revelry, Gaffney never got a chance to speak with Cuomo, but she did speak with his father...

...But shortly after the probe began, one of Cuomo's aides abruptly terminated it and transferred responsibility to two private law firms...

...He turned out to be shedding crocodile tears...

...Such is the quality of her work that she's been the recipient of numerous performance-based awards, and in June 1993 President Clinton nominated her to be HUD's inspector general...

...Cuomo doesn't like people who stand between him and what he's trying to accomplish (the New York Times has observed that he "thrives on an almost militaristic devotion to strategy and detail...

...Congressional Democrats, including Henry Waxman, have joined Cuomo's crusade, and private-sector law firms have been awarded lucrative contracts to investigate Gaffney's conduct...

...Up to 40 members of Cuomo's staff would convene in the conference room of one of his top deputies, and the briefers would review every jot and tittle of the reforms...

...And in the ensuing eight months, she's stayed silent...

...It is very debilitating," the soft-spoken Gaffney told the senators...

...When she didn't budge, he told her if these conclusions became public they would be very damaging to other HUD reforms already being implemented...

...Of all those in attendance, no more than five would ever speak...

...So why would he wage such a vigorous campaign against a harmless civil servant...

...Gaffney now says resigning is no longer an option...

...This was the first Gaffney learned of the accusation...

...Conference of Mayors has passed formal resolutions on a pattern of racism by the IG and that Deval Patrick, the former associate attorney general for civil rights, is now investigating her on the most serious charges of racism in the department's history...

...When Gaffney questioned this, Cuomo told her his aides viewed her as "the embodiment of evil...

...Since she testified about Cuo-mo's campaign against her, the pressure on Gaffney has mounted...

...I'm not that important," she says, but "if I left, Andrew would put his own people in the inspector general's office...

...thus it can issue reports over which he has no authority...

...BUT SHE IS CONVINCED THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL IS AT STAKE Cuomo's relentlessness eventually convinced Gaffney she could no longer stay silent...

...The struggle over 2020 was not, however, the first instance of the secretary and his aides' putting the squeeze on Gaffney...

...Not long after he was installed as secretary, Cuomo began his Big Mamoo routine with Gaffney, communicating with her extensively and seeking her counsel on an array of problems facing HUD...

...GAFFNEY INSISTS SHE WOULD PREFER NOT TO AIR HUD'S DIRTY LINEN...

...Given Patrick's views, and the fact that he'd been handpicked by Cuomo's aides, it was no surprise he concluded Gaffney was guilty...

...A favored tactic of Cuomo and his aides has been to portray Gaffney as a racist...

...But the harassment has not only continued, it's intensified...

...The Cuomo team spelled out its objections to this idea, citing accusations the IG's office had shared confidential information with reporters...

...He also questioned her fitness to carry out a congressionally requested investigation of HUD's public affairs office, saying such an inquiry should be conducted by "an impartial investigator...

...Gaffney stood her ground...

...Early last September, she met with the secretary to spell out her objections to the way the discrimination complaint was being handled...

...This was deeply distressing to Cuomo, and he asked Gaffney to allow his staff to brief her and her staff on the plan's specifics...

...In addition to being a son of the former governor of New York, he's one of the Democratic party's rising stars...

...Gaffney refused the offer and six days later delivered her testimony to the Senate...

...And while Gaffney's IG office has highlighted areas where HUD has improved, it hasn't been shy about stating what's wrong with the department, to the never-ending frustration of Cuomo...

...As recently as January a federal watchdog agency labeled HUD "high risk" with respect to integrity and accountability, the only cabinet department so designated...

...Gaffney's refusal gave Cuomo's aides the opening PLANS TO INVESTIGATE THE HOUSING DEPARTMENTS IN BALTIMORE, SAN FRANCISCO, AND NEW ORLEANS WERE CALLED RACIST...

...His name was bandied about as a candidate for the Senate seat being vacated by Pat Moyni-han, and he's frequently mentioned as being in line for White House chief of staff in a Gore administration (Gore lobbied for him to be appointed HUD secretary...

...The goal is painfully obvious: to make life so miserable for Gaffney she'll resign...

...Recognizing the potential pitfalls in attacking an inspector general with no apparent political biases, Cuomo has tried to put the best spin on his Gaffney offensive, claiming to know nothing about it and maintaining that he has good relations with her...

...In February 1998, after the briefings, Cuomo met with Gaffney to talk about 2020...

...When the calls, and the criticism, continued, Gaffney got fed up...

...Moreover, the lead attorney selected to investigate the complaint was Deval Patrick, the former assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration...

...When Gaffney made this announcement, Cuomo's spokeswoman, Hinton, couldn't pass up the opportunity to kick her in the teeth...

...And if that happened, it would destroy an office that means a whole lot...

...One day he called to speak with Gaffney on an unrelated matter, but she wasn't available so he spoke with her deputy, John Connors...

...The problem...

...In one conversation, Cuomo told her all of the department's principal staff hated her and she was responsible for HUD's being "dysfunctional...

...And at a hearing in March, Democratic senators John Kerry and Jack Reed asked her questions reflecting Cuomo's viewpoint...

...Gaffney wasn't so easily cowed, and when she and her staff began to examine 2020, they didn't like what they saw...

...Gaffney once asked Cuomo whether his aides had to resort to public and, more often, private attacks like these, and Cuomo told her he was powerless to stop them...

...He'd told her Baltimore and New Orleans would be okay, though San Francisco might cause trouble given the city's hypersensitivity about race...

...What's more, the briefings, sometimes four hours long, never addressed Gaffney's overriding concern, which was that the proposed personnel reductions would damage the effectiveness of a department already burdened with bureaucratic inefficiencies...

...That tensions should exist between Cuomo and Gaffney is understandable, as one of the jobs of an IG is to uncover waste, fraud, and abuse in department operations...

...The letter's hysterical tone should have been a clue it was a fraud...

...But on the same day, another drama was playing out on the other side of Capitol Hill...

...Most revealing is the mobilization of Waxman, an important Clinton administration ally, who wouldn't have gotten involved unless Cuomo had been personally upset by Gaffney's refusal to resign...

...It would soon become clear this was an area where father and son disagreed...

...He was silent for a few seconds, and then changed the subject...

...The overtures came as a surprise to Gaffney, who was accustomed to less frequent, and more formal, contact with Cuomo's predecessor, Henry Cisneros...

...When I told him I needed to be able to attribute their comments to HUD officials, the offer was withdrawn, and Egner sent a statement saying, "I am, frankly, baffled as to why The Weekly Standard is devoting attention to this issue...

...OMB refused, and while a presidential council on integrity did look into the matter, it concluded the complaint didn't warrant investigation...

...The claim that Cuomo has a "fine relationship" with Gaffney is greatly at odds with the facts...

...Representative Henry Waxman sent her a letter in March quoting the Bucklin report's criticisms of her activities and said they "raise serious questions about your conduct...

...Even Cuomo acknowledged shortly after becoming secretary that the department was "known for inefficiency and ineffectiveness...

...Bucklin concluded the contracting out had been appropriate—and he heaped criticism on Gaffney...

...With this unfortunate situation resolved, we now want to get on with the good work of this department...

...Susan Gaffney, the inspector general at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was telling a Senate committee about "a truly extraordinary series of events" involving the HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo...

...Last year, black elected officials criticized her for proposing to investigate fraud in the municipal housing departments of three cities: San Francisco, Baltimore, and New Orleans...

...Cuomo and his aides have also tried to manipulate a racial-discrimination complaint filed against Gaffney...

...But he would also chastise her for issuing reports critical of HUD operations...

...After the group folded in 1995, Newsweek revealed it had inflated the membership figures by 90 percent and quoted Cowan saying, "Sometimes you have to be a butthead to get things done...

...He had nonetheless told her to proceed...

...Cuomo first lashed out at Gaffney in the fall of 1995...

...Gaffney has observed in congressional testimony that Cuomo "sees people like me who are . . . not under his direct control as threats, as problems...

...Cuomo and his aides also spoke with mayors and Democratic congressmen in hopes of stirring them up against Gaffney...

...Many people in this nation," he thundered to a Sun reporter, "are outraged at the possibility that taxpayer funds would be used for racially motivated or politically motivated hits...

...Cuomo's aides tried to shortcircuit the usual decision-making process and have the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issue a decision on the basis of Patrick's report...

...Before launching the investigation, Gaffney had asked Cuomo whether this would present a perception problem...

...Cuomo's use of HUD's public affairs office to undercut Gaffney is consistent with his attempts not to leave any fingerprints on the campaign against her...

...She eventually told Cuomo she would resign if he thought she was doing such a disservice to the department...

...The statement claimed that "many of the professional disputes between HUD and the Office of Inspector general . . . have been settled...

...In February 1998, Philip Newsome, a senior black official working in the office of the inspector general, charged that Gaffney had passed him over for a promotion because of his race...

...Glaser is counselor to Cuomo and worked in the New York state government while Mario Cuomo was governor...

...No announcement of the investigation was ever made, but the Baltimore Sun reported its existence, and shortly thereafter there were cries of racism from several black mayors...

...Susan Gaffney is a most unlikely person to be ensnared in such a bitter dispute...

...He then tried to use this as leverage with Gaffney, telling her she would be humiliated if she maintained her skeptical posture while the consul-tants—Booz-Allen and reinventing government guru David Osborne—reached favorable conclusions...

...Democratic congressman Harold Ford has also written to Gaffney with a number of pointed questions about the racial discrimination complaint...

...Nevertheless, the contracts so reeked that the General Accounting Office, a federal watchdog agency, has been investigating the matter for six months...

...Thus "HUD 2020," Cuomo's ambitious proposal to revamp the department...

...Her office had issued a report on empowerment zones, a program under his purview providing tax incentives for businesses in select low-income urban areas...

...He also told her, repeatedly, that he had serious reservations about the very idea of an independent inspector general...

...According to Gaffney, each was given a contract worth approximately $50,000, which is considerably more than the standard government rate for such matters...

...Among the claims in the letter was that Gaffney "spends millions of dollars of taxpayer money rounding up young African American boys in housing projects so she can get look tough [sic] on television while serious white collar abuses by her own staff and rich building owners go unin-vestigated...

...Gaffney...

...The truth is that Gaffney hasn't undermined him...

...Cuomo's first response was silence...

...Of all the cabinet-level agencies in the federal government, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has one of the worst reputations...

...All three had black mayors, although they had been selected on the basis of criteria ranging from FBI input to funding received from HUD...

...Most of the dirty work has been delegated to three of his aides: Jon Cowan, Gary Eisenman, and Howard Glaser...

...On a personal level," he told GQ last year, "I have had and do have a fine relationship with Susan...

...But the EEOC rejected this...

...Gaffney still didn't back down, and the meeting ended with an agreement to disagree...

...Cuomo's attitude toward Gaffney was never quite the same after this, but after he was nominated for the top job in the department, he tried to make amends...

...As for press coverage, the mainstream media still fawn over him—the New York Observer noted recently that "by all accounts, he has been a success at HUD"—and his only bad press has come from his quarrels with Gaffney...

...Before long, Cuomo's communications with Gaffney acquired a new dimension...

...That's put him on a collision course with Gaffney, whom he blames for undermining his two top priorities: overhauling HUD and getMatthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...So bullish was Cuomo about 2020 that when he first discussed it with Gaffney, he assured her it would be a "great victory" for the reformist instincts of the inspector general's office...

...If Gaffney would resign and agree to have the plaintiff, Newsome, installed in a senior position within the IG's office—perhaps Gaffney's post—the discrimination complaint would be dismissed...

...She later told him none of the assistant secretaries she'd queried had any complaints with her performance as inspector general, but Cuomo replied that they were lying to her...

...The day he was sworn in as secre-tary—by Al Gore—he invited her to a luncheon at Hickory Hill, the McLean, Virginia, estate of his mother-in-law, Ethel Kennedy...

...Gaffney refused, fearing it would undermine her office's freedom to disclose public reports on HUD operations and, more generally, that it would infringe on the independence of the inspector general...

...While working in state government in Albany, New York, Andrew Cuomo acquired the nickname "The Big Mamoo," a term of affection given to him by his father to connote both his status as a powerbroker and his penchant for using the force of his personality to cajole people into doing what he wanted...

...She also insists she would prefer not to have to air HUD's dirty linen and would have been content to go about her job in relative anonymity, leaving the politics to the political appointees...

...Cuomo mentioned the letter to Connors—neither Connors nor Gaffney knew of its exis-tence—and remarked, "These are terrible allegations...

...It's terrible people would say things like this...

...She also reminded him of her earlier promise that if he resurrected his campaign against her, she would fight back...

...Cabinet secretaries, Kennedy family members, and HUD senior staff were among the 100 guests...

...Cuomo, however, got personally involved...

...Asked to provide information about these three aides' experience in housing issues, the press office did not return repeated calls...

...He confronted her and questioned whether her office had the authority to raise such questions (it did...

...When the criticism continued, he let it be known he'd had no role in the selection process and that he thought black mayors were being unfairly singled out...

...For the past 29 years, she's held a variety of low profile, non-political government posts...

...She added that Gaffney "is under investigation by the FBI and members of Congress, that a dozen of her employees have made racial complaints against her, that the bipartisan U.S...

...There was speculation around HUD that the charges were bogus, and the final confirmation came when a Washington Post reporter called Cuomo's office in September 1997 to inquire about the treatment of Gaffney...

...In addition to the contact at work, he began calling her at home, usually on weekends...

...One never knows where the next attack is coming from or what it will be...

...Within a few days of the call, and facing the prospect of an unflattering article, Cuomo's aides withdrew not only the complaint but also the request that the IG's office route all contact with the media through HUD's public affairs office...

...Cuomo refused comment for this article, but one of his press aides, David Egner, told me Cowan and Glaser would speak with me off the record...

...Intent on winning endorsement of his reforms, Cuomo commissioned two consultants to review 2020...

...In late September 1997, the IG's office released a preliminary analysis of 2020, which said the proposed reforms could compound existing problems at HUD and create new ones...

...Following Gaffney's Senate testimony in September, Cuomo unleashed his then-director of public affairs, Karen Hinton, who told the Washington Post the testimony was "riddled with inaccuracies and false statements...

...Gaffney testified Cuomo and his top aides had been interfering with her work, smearing her as a racist and a cheat, and using dirty tricks against her...

...The calls, however, kept coming—about 10 in all—and Gaffney found them such a burden she stopped answering her phone on weekends...

...Extraordinary indeed...

...During an intense 90-minute meeting, she reiterated her reservations about the reforms...

...A presidential council on integrity cleared Gaffney of any wrongdoing earlier this year...

...But what really rankles is that the IG's office doesn't THE CALLS FROM CUOMO KEPT COMING—ABOUT 10 IN ALL—UNTIL GAFFNEY STOPPED ANSWERING HER TELEPHONE ON WEEKENDS...

...As for the contracts Cuomo gave to the law firms, when questions were raised about their propriety, Cuomo had HUD retain Washington attorney Donald Bucklin of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey to investigate...

...Not surprisingly, considering the day the testimony was delivered, Gaffney's charges received little coverage...

...Cuomo, who was hoping for an endorsement, told her she still misunderstood what he was trying to accomplish...

...The reversal, Hinton told the Washington Post, showed "the lack of legitimacy and fairness in the original targeting of the cities...

...He told her that while governor he had created the first IG office in the New York state government, and he emphasized how much he valued inspectors general...

...One of his deputies, Saul Ramirez, echoed this sentiment recently, telling a Senate committee that Cuomo "has had nothing but the utmost respect for Ms...

...ting good press coverage...

...they needed, and they promptly persuaded a career attorney in the general counsel's office, George Wei-denfeller, to approve a referral to a presidential council on integrity, charging Gaffney with insubordination and illegal dissemination of privileged information...

...Cowan, Cuomo's chief of staff, is best known for co-founding a now-defunct youth advocacy group called Lead . . . or Leave...

...More ominously, he also told her she should proclaim victory, forget about looking at the plan's details, and turn her attention elsewhere...

...Cuomo is not, of course, just any cabinet secretary...

...report exclusively to him...

...Cuomo, then an assistant secretary at HUD, was apoplectic when he learned of Gaffney's conclusions...