Blas’ Sleaze Never Ends

Even during the pandemic, it seems Mayor de Blasio couldn’t resist rewarding his donors at the public’s risk and expense. That’s the clear bottom line of his scandalous favors for Charlie Tebele, the CEO of the New Jersey firm Digital Gadgets.

Tebele and his family gave $32,000 to de Blasio’s hopeless 2020 presidential run and $12,750 to his 2017 re-election campaign. This year, his firm won $91 million in lucrative “emergency” contracts to provide the city with much-needed personal protective equipment and ventilators.

Yet it proved unable to deliver: City Hall had to cancel the main contracts after shelling out $9.1 million. (The firm did deliver on contracts to provide $28 million in surgical and N95 masks.)

Kudos to The City for breaking the story. “This raises big and bad questions about pay-to-play. It smells bad,” said John Kaehny, executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany.

Digital Gadgets had never before sold goods to New York City — and the emergency order let the deal skip the standard review by city Comptroller Scott Stringer.

Let’s hope Stringer can at least offer an after-the-fact public accounting of all de Blasio’s emergency outlays — including via the city-run Economic Development Corp., where Tebele sits on the board.

Other agencies that should review these deals, like the Department of Investigation, are under de Blasio’s thumb.

A decade ago, the mayor’s pattern of rewarding donors would have seen him indicted by federal prosecutors. But a US Supreme Court ruling means pols are safe unless they personally profit off such deals or are caught in an explicit quid pro quo.

But de Blasio’s routine practices still fail the smell test. The sooner that stink leaves City Hall, the better.