BEASTLY
Animal rights bigs’ notes to Bill
THE AFTERNOON of Aug. 6, 2015, Wendy Neu — co-founder of a group pushing City Hall to ban carriage horses — sent an impassioned message to the personal email of a politician she believed was her ally: Mayor de Blasio.
Neu and others with New Yorkers for Clean Livable & Safe Streets (NYCLASS) had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the mayor’s 2013 campaign and his nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York.
Now the donor was letting the mayor know that she expected something in return for all she and her group had done.
“We need to reconvene with you and have a productive meeting about what the future will be for the horses,” she wrote in emails obtained by the Daily News. “Mayor, you were there for us all along and we were there for you.”
Two months earlier, NYCLASS co-founder Stephen Nislick had emailed de Blasio personally to complain that he wasn’t getting a bang for the bucks he was spending and blasting City Hall’s anemic effort to push the City Council to enact a carriage ban. “To tell this now after we just spent 500K is totally ridiculous and puts us in an impossible situation,” he wrote in the June 24 email. “We are very very upset!”
In November 2015, de Blasio threw in the towel, announcing he was no longer pushing the horse carriage ban because he didn’t have the City Council votes.
The emails show Neu and Nislick, like other big donors, had remarkable access to the city’s highest office holder. They’d been given his personal email and were in frequent communication with him — a perk few ordinary New Yorkers could enjoy.
Often the mayor responded quickly, and always he made sure a top aide was quickly assigned to help out.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon Kim announced in March — after a yearlong probe — that he’d found that de Blasio had intervened on behalf of several donors seeking favors from City Hall.
But Kim declined to bring charges, noting “recent changes in the law” and “the particular difficulty in proving criminal intent in corruption schemes where there is not evidence of personal profit.”
Attorney Norman Siegel, a longtime civil liberties advocate, noted the Supreme Court last year made prosecuting public corruption cases more difficult when it threw out charges against Virginia’s former governor.
The court ruled that actions the governor took on behalf of a businessman who’d plied him and his wife with gifts did not prove corruption.
Nevertheless, Siegel dubbed the pattern of de Blasio helping out big donors portrayed in the emails as “sickening.”
“It’s a quid pro quo,” Siegel said. “You have to pay to get a favor when you need it. It’s part of the reasoning why people in New York and around the country see corruption in government.”
With NYCLASS, the mayor personally emailed Neu a first-name-basis response, “Thanks for your message, Wendy. I believe we have the same goal and that we will achieve it, even if not in one jump. But let’s definitely meet to think together.”
He ordered his scheduler to “set up the mtg for this coming week or next,” and copied another top City Hall aide, Elana Leopold, who’d worked on his 2013 campaign handling donors.
In that campaign, Neu and NYCLASS had steered hundreds of thousands of dollars to a group attacking former Speaker Christine Quinn, then de Blasio’s top rival for City Hall.
Two de Blasio backers — including his cousin — used NYCLASS to steer $225,000 in donations to an anti-Quinn group without disclosing de Blasio’s fingerprints. Because the checks went through NYCLASS, they remained secret until after the primary.
Neu and Nislick also coughed up $150,000 to Campaign for One New York.
On Sunday de Blasio’s press secretary, Eric Phillips, again dubbed the emails with donors “boring” and said “I