Unraveling the Cuomo enigma
Igot F-bombed by Andrew Cuomo. He called and went ballistic after an innocuous story I wrote on the governor’s New Year’s Day Executive Mansion open house in 2012. It ran with the headline “Sandy a hit, Andy a miss.”
“Cuomo was rescued from the awkwardness of producing chitchat with a stream of strangers by Sandra Lee’s high-wattage personality and natural
charm, which the cameras also loved,” I wrote. I described the governor as “almost dour in a gray business suit and graying hair, a tired air and forced joviality delivered through clenched teeth that approximated a smile.” I also noted that his daughter looked as wooden and bored as a stage prop.
The governor thundered and hurled expletives at me. I listened calmly. When the storm had passed, I said I would correct any factual inaccuracies and he could also speak to my editor or the publisher if he liked. He angrily ended the call.
I’ve written more than 8,000 articles for the Times Union since 1984 and Cuomo was just the third person who called to f-bomb me over a story (the others were a priest and a university president).
You may wonder why am I writing about our disgraced governor amid an avalanche of political obituaries after he resigned in disgrace on Aug. 10 and said he would leave office in 14 days. It was the staggering and historic denouement of a downfall of Shakespearean proportions in its velocity and drama. New York Attorney General Letitia James precipitated the implosion with her release of a damning report following a five-month investigation that found Cuomo, 63, had sexually harassed at least 11 women.
“I believe women, and I believe these 11 women,” James said in what amounted to the penultimate scene. Facing certain impeachment by the Assembly and lacking allies, with his most loyal aides castigating his behavior, there was no deus ex machina in Andrew Cuomo’s final act. I picture that March tabloid photo of Cuomo shuffling around the mansion, alone, broken and King Lear-like, wrapped in a blanket, as a rising chorus called for him to resign.
I have had a mezzanine-level seat from which to observe the Cuomo family since I came to Albany in 1981. I played basketball against Andrew’s father and brother, spent a full day with his mother for an in-depth profile, was invited to the mansion by the Cuomos for events and interviews. I’ve spoken with his sisters and interviewed Cuomo loyalists and rivals at length over the decades. I have a certain perspective that might help deconstruct the enigma.
I am left with an Impressionist painting of Andrew M. Cuomo, a series of slashes and shadows that reveal an image of his character when one steps back a few paces.
He was raised like a hothouse flower in the family business, politics. All he wanted was to please his father and to get the approval of Mario M. Cuomo — “Pop,” as he called him. They shared a deep, dark and complicated symbiosis as the only father-son governors in the history of New York state. They both played the blood sport of politics with a single aim: Win at all costs. The son, even when he won again and again, could never seem to come to terms with his own persona outside of his father’s long shadow.
At 16, Andrew sacrificed his summer vacation and afterschool hours to toil on his father’s unsuccessful 1974 Democratic primary for lieutenant governor. At 19, Andrew climbed utility poles at night and ripped down Ed Koch campaign posters during his father’s brutal 1977 New York City Democratic mayoral primary against Koch. Father and son repeatedly denied they had anything to do with signs that read, “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.”
Mario played aggressive oneon-one basketball against Andrew, to the point of knocking his son to the pavement and bloodying him. Mario had learned from his own stern father, Andrea, an Italian immigrant who ran a mom-andpop store in Jamaica, Queens (the family lived above it). The life lesson was this: “Puncha, puncha, puncha. Fighta, fighta, fighta.”
While a student at Albany Law School in the early 1980s, Andrew tinkered under the hood of his blue Corvette in the parking lot and earned money by driving a tow truck on weekends back home in Queens. He played on Albany Law’s rugby team and named his intramural basketball squad The Gonads. Andrew threw a television off the porch of a second-story apartment near the law school in a fit of rage, which a classmate witnessed.
Andrew roomed part of the time as a law student with his dad, then the lieutenant governor, at the shabby old Wellington Hotel downtown. When his father was inaugurated as governor on Jan. 1, 1983, he quickly appointed Andrew as a $1-a-year adviser. Andrew was dubbed “The Prince of Darkness” and played the role of his dad’s enforcer. He was widely feared and had a volcanic temper.
More than one close aide to Mario told me they never heard the father praise the son.
In hours of interviews with Mario over four decades, I never recall him once mentioning his son.
Andrew Cuomo made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine during the peak of the pandemic with a somber black-and-white portrait: “I saw my father’s face when I looked at that picture,” he said.
And, now, the fallen son will never taste victory in one category he craved, beating his father’s three-term gubernatorial tenure by winning a historic fourth term — Rockefeller territory.
Before a 2012 unveiling of his father’s official portrait in the Hall of Governors in the Capitol — a tradition Mario had long spurned by refusing to cooperate — his son presented it as a birthday gift for his father’s 80th birthday on June 15 at a small party at the Executive Mansion with a few close former aides. Someone who attended told me it was an awkward and uncomfortable moment in which the father said he did not want a portrait done. His son looked shamed.
Mario Cuomo died on Jan. 1, 2015, at his home in Manhattan at 82 of heart failure, just hours after his son took the oath of office across town to begin his second term as governor.
The last time I saw Andrew in person was on Feb. 14, 2020, at a ceremony at the governor’s mansion to announce the naming of the SUNY administration building in honor of H. Carl Mccall during the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Legislative Caucus. I was working with Mccall on his memoir, forthcoming from SUNY Press, in which he has plenty to say about his fraught relationship with the Cuomos, father and son.
As the governor was leaving the reception, I ran into him near the grand staircase and introduced myself. I figured he had forgotten who I was.
“Oh, I know who you are,” he said, with a snarl, the same angry tone I recalled from that profane phone call eight years earlier. Nobody held a grudge longer or more aggressively in Albany than Andrew Cuomo.
It took the women, The Albany 11, to stand up to a bully, a tyrant who had spent his entire adult life in a political bubble of sycophants and enablers and those who feared his wrath.
We should not only believe the women; we should thank them. They spoke truth to power.