D’Amato ex‘posé’
Buttered up judge at eatery: wife
Former Sen. Al D’Amato’s estranged wife claims he tried to “fix” their divorce case by dining with the state’s chief judge — and she’s got the photo to prove it.
The onetime pol huddled with Judge Janet DiFiore at Pershing Square in Manhattan on Oct. 19.
“My husband bragged to me and others that he used his influence with Gov. Cuomo and his sinceindicted chief of staff, Mr. Joseph Percoco, to put Janet DiFiore on the bench,” D’Amato’s soonto-be ex, Katuria Smith, alleged. “He said that she owes him. In his mind, it’s time for her to pay back by helping him to win his divorce and custody case.”
Smith filed for divorce from D’Amato last October. He then sued her for custody of their two young children.
She released the Pershing Square photo to the press Monday — just days after a different judge overseeing her Nassau County Supreme Court case removed her lawyer for trying to improperly influence the former couple’s kids.
D’Amato’s attorney, Stephen Gassman, called the allegations “unfounded and scandalous.”
He said D’Amato and DiFiore are “old friends who met for breakfast and talked about old times.”
They did not discuss the pending divorce case, Gassman said.
A spokesman for DiFiore added, “The chief judge and Al D’Amato have been personal friends going back a quarter-century, to when he was a senator from New York.
“Their relationship has nothing to do with the chief judge’s current position, and to suggest that she insinuated herself in a pending matter on behalf of a friend is both outrageous and completely false.”
The couple’s divorce has been particularly acrimonious. At one point, a judge in the case ordered Smith and D’Amato to stop making disparaging remarks about one another in front of their kids.