EVEN ALLIES RIP BLA$IO ‘FAVORS’
Mayor de Blasio’s attempt to pressure a city agency to give favorable treatment to a major campaign donor was condemned by his Republican and Democratic challengers Monday — and even by Democratic insiders who routinely take the mayor’s side.
“It’s outrageous . . . There’s enough here to warrant another investigation,” said Nicole Malliotakis, the presumptive GOP nominee for mayor.
“This screams of pay-to-play corruption,” agreed Democratic candidate Sal Albanese.
Even Democrats who usually defend the administration were taken aback by the claims of former Deputy Commissioner Ricardo Morales and former Citywide Administrative Services Commissioner Stacey Cumberbatch that the mayor and his staff pressured them to give a break to a restaurant owner who owed the city back rent but was a big campaign donor.
“This is insane,” said one Democratic pol. “It’s certainly not normal procedure, and you have to wonder how the investigations would’ve played out if this was known earlier.”
De Blasio personally tried helping Harendra Singh cut a deal on nearly $750,000 in rent owed on the now-defunct Water’s Edge restaurant in Queens, which sits on city property, according to The New York Times.
In an extraordinary move, the mayor asked his top political aide, Emma Wolfe, to intervene with the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which was run by Cumberbatch before her abrupt departure.
Morales, who was fired suddenly, filed a $5 million notice of claim filed against the city — a precursor to a lawsuit.
Reps for both the US Attorney’s Office and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. declined to comment.
De Blasio spokesman Eric Phillips claimed the allegations are old news and that they had been reviewed by authorities who decided not to pursue cases when they dropped their investigations in March.
The mayor reiterated the old-news line on NY1 Monday night, saying “It’s been looked at and there is just nothing there.”
He also denied Morales was fired because he didn’t do what City Hall asked.
“Exactly false,” de Blasio said. “There were real issues with his performance.”
He added, “I know what I did and what everyone around me did is we were trying to follow the spirit of the law. . . What is the alternative? That we are not supposed to send something over to an agency? That’s crazy.”
Meanwhile, Morales’ lawyer, Robert Morales, told The Post, “It is clear that City Hall actively hindered the [Department of Investigation’s] past investigation into [the sale of ] Rivington [nursing home] . . . It is also clear that Ricardo objected to the bla- tant conflict of interest violations surrounding City Hall’s involvement with Singh.”
Singh cooperated with the feds in their investigation of de Blasio’s fund-raising after being slapped with unrelated bribery and tax-evasion charges.
He and his relatives donated more than $27,000 to de Blasio’s 2013 campaign. Singh was later named to the advisory board of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York.
Critics say the Water’s Edge case is the latest evidence of the favored treatment campaign donors get at City Hall.
The Post previously reported that in January 2014, a watermain break knocked out utilities at a Greenwich Village building owned by donor Roberta Kaplan.
She contacted Berlin-Rosen, the mayor’s public-relations firm, and inspectors showed up the next day.