Gov. Mario Cuomo’s Checkered, Bullying Past (by Michael Shnayerson)

 

Michael Shnayerson, who has reported on Cuomo for years, knows where the bodies are buried. Here, he recounts the governor’s checkered, bullying, spiteful past—and brings to light a hushed allegation of physical abuse.

BY MICHAEL SHNAYERSON

Vanity Fair

Virtually everyone in New York politics—and New York media—has a favorite Andrew Cuomo story. Here’s mine.

In 2012, I began writing an unauthorized biography of the governor of New York, who’d been in office a year. I talked to his associates and enemies. I gathered a dossier on his bullying ways and confrontational tactics. I pored over court documents surrounding his nasty split, a decade before, from his wife, Kerry Kennedy, a member of another powerful Democratic dynasty. As I plunged into writing, I hoped he might even agree to sit for an interview—and he did agree, sort of.

By the time I was about to hand in my manuscript, the governor had a book of his own in the works. It was titled All Things Possible. And his intention was to beat me to market. But I was ahead. Back came word that if I would let his book appear first, he would grant me all the interview time I wanted. So I agreed. But the governor pulled a fast one. I never did get that interview; his book came out in October 2014, a full five months ahead of mine. And there was, after all, no longer anything he needed from me. It was a quintessential Cuomo move: underhanded, stealthy, self-serving, and hard-ass.

This week I decided to dip back into the pages of my 2015 Cuomo biography, The Contender—and to do some additional reporting, given the news swirling around the governor. And I discovered that much of Cuomo’s M.O. and many of his character flaws—some of which have resurfaced as he’s been upended by the nursing home scandal and claims of sexual harassment, workplace misconduct, and predatory behavior (currently under investigation by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and prompting an impeachment investigation by state legislators)—have been evident for years.

Here, then, are 12 hard truths I learned about Andrew Cuomo while writing The Contender.

He had to win at any cost.

The classic case came when Andrew Cuomo, at age 19, supposedly shimmied up outer-borough lampposts and festooned highway overpasses with posters for his father’s 1977 mayoral race against Ed Koch. The posters read: “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.” (Andrew always denied doing this.) Five years later Mario Cuomo was about to lose his race for governor—until Andrew, his 24-year-old manager, worked with little sleep, day after day, to help turn around his father’s fortunes.

He had a hard edge—and liked to play hardball.

He loved his younger brother, Christopher, but was tough on him too. Years later, as a television reporter, Christopher would leave his job at ABC coanchoring the show 20/20 to go to CNN—in part because Andrew, friends said, had mocked him for being a lightweight. But merely switching to CNN wouldn’t do the trick: One colleague recalled being shocked after an on-air story Christopher had done, when he took a cell phone call from his brother and started cringing under Andrew’s withering review. 

As the henchman in his father Mario’s first races for political office, Andrew was, as one New York journalist put it, “a nasty piece of work who took delight in firing and cutting down to size people decades older.”

Periodically, when Andrew would be eyeing an upcoming election or position, reporters would hear about the new and improved Andrew, a man said to have somehow become thoughtful and considerate. Alas, the retooled Andrew never lasted for long.

He had a harsh management style.

From the start of Mario’s governorship in 1983, the Cuomos had a clan, and not always a classy one. They operated with the tough and insular intensity of Joe Percoco, a thuggish aide to the senior Cuomo (and Andrew’s so-called right-hand man) who ended up in jail for accepting bribes. Andrew was also known—just as his dad had been—to set his top aides against each other, a management style the younger Cuomo would deploy throughout his career. Andrew inspired both loyalty and fear. And despite his skill at mentoring and advancing a series of talented lieutenants, many of them found that their wings were clipped. Cuomo, in the end, made most of the major decisions himself. He still does.

The press was the enemy.

During his father’s time as governor, unsanctioned contact with the press could result in severe retribution. Journalists got stiff-amed, staffers and aides sometimes banished. One New York Daily News reporter, Adam Nagourney, took a morning phone call from Mario Cuomo, only to have the governor yell at him, complaining about some slight in the paper: “You cut off my testicle!” Andrew, at the time a close adviser to his father, later remarked, “He used the singular?”  

Such behavior presaged the current governor’s recent call to New York assemblyman Ron Kim for having the gall to talk publicly about the COVID-19 nursing home scandal. Andrew’s agita—and his telephone rage—has been standard fare for lawmakers and the Albany press corps that cover them.

He treated me—a member of the press—as someone to be sidelined or co-opted. In the three years I worked on The Contender, I had to get permission from the second floor— meaning the governor himself—to interview childhood friends who hadn’t seen him in years. While these conversations were helpful, the person I really wanted to interrogate was the governor. One day I was finally invited to meet him over lunch at Docks Oyster Bar & Seafood Grill in Midtown—but it was all off the record. The gist of the meeting with Cuomo, along with my agent, Esther Newberg, and attorney Steve Cohen, a sometime Cuomo helpmate: The governor wanted me not to publish my book but to work on his book—under his control.

At times, he followed the money.

A family friend in real estate bought hundreds of wooded acres called Sterling Forest, an hour north of New York City. As governor, Mario called for a highway interchange where none was needed; Andrew then worked as Sheldon Goldstein’s lawyer to turn the forest into thousands of homes. Very Chinatown. When that plan fell through, he and Goldstein, along with other investors, bought a savings and loan bank called Oceanmark, in Florida, and tried to squeeze a fortune from it. This was the mid-’80s, and the gambit failed too.

He hated what he couldn’t control.

At Hickory Hill, the Kennedy estate near Washington, D.C., his wife’s family tried to tease him into letting down his guard. “So what did you do with that bank in Florida?” one of the Kennedys said one day—a jocular taunt intended to bring up a sore spot about Oceanmark Federal Savings & Loan. Andrew gave a long, meandering rationale. There was silence. Then came a rejoinder: “So…what did you do with that bank in Florida?” The Kennedys cracked up, but not Cuomo.

Andrew loved the status of Hickory Hill, but he hated the joshing around. He simply had no idea how to do it—because it meant letting himself go. “Andrew refused to do anything fun,” said one Kennedy sibling, “anything without a clear benefit to his career.”

Eventually, several of the Kennedys, according to the sibling, just gave up on Andrew Cuomo. “We tried to be gracious, but…it turned on his lack of humanity. That’s where I started to think, This is a bad guy. He’s just a bully.”

He demeaned his subordinates.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo—serving as HUD’s assistant secretary and then as the youngest-ever head of the agency—did what he’d done as his father’s go-to guy in the governor’s mansion. He stuck close to his tight circle of insiders—and hammered a goodly number of underlings. He called older civil service staffers “white heads” (deriding their hair color as a sign of their advanced age) or “fuckheads” or “dumb fucks.” He frequently threatened to fire outsiders. HUD’s inspector general, Susan Gaffney, was a woman who dared to speak up, so she became a target. In 1998 she would testify that Cuomo and his aides tried to smear her as a racist. (A Cuomo staffer at the time claimed her testimony to be “riddled with inaccuracies.”) Cuomo’s accusations against her grew only more pronounced as Gaffney produced management audits critical of his department, The Washington Post noted. He called her at home on weekends and lambasted her. “Tell me what it would take me to get you out,” he thundered. Gaffney also testified that Cuomo’s hostility had “led to a series of attacks and dirty tricks…. Someone needs to convince the secretary that I am not an adversary. I am trying to do my job.” 

Andrew ruled with a sort of swagger. “I’ve dealt with a lot of macho guys in my family,” said one staffer. “I can spot them a million miles away. I was just surprised that someone like that had gotten to be secretary.” Another staffer saw his wrath, as she put it. “I would sit in a meeting and put my head down, and I’d say, ‘Not here.’” But Andrew wouldn’t relent.

His personal life could get messy.

Around the end of his time at HUD, in 2001, his wife, Kerry, wanted out. Her problems with her husband were strictly personal. He hadn’t done the modest things she had asked of him as the father of their daughters: visiting their schools, for one; reading a book on parenting, for another. “Kerry was done being ridiculed and belittled,” said someone close to the couple. “Either Andrew would work on the marriage or he wouldn’t, and the two would divorce.”

The next year Cuomo ran for governor. He was unsuccessful. And immediately after he dropped out of the primary, Kerry demanded a divorce.They were living separate lives, but for six months Andrew refused to leave the house or respond to her lawyers. On more than one night during that period, Kerry slept in a locked bathroom, according to a source close to the family, who recounted instances of physical abuse. “I’ve been a human rights activist, and for women who have abusive husbands,” Kerry told a friend, “and here I am enduring this abuse.”

In June, Kerry announced they were seeking an amicable divorce. Fearing the public would blame him, harming his political career, and to punish her, this same source contends, Andrew leaked to the press that she had had an affair. “With a polo player,” Andrew raged to one journalist. “A Republican polo player.”

“He [was] constantly sticking it to her,” the source declared later, “telling her he can’t make Christmas plans until December, so she can’t make hers. There’s a million ways for a single parent to make the other parent’s life miserable, and he played that game.”

When asked to comment on the above assertions, a spokesman for the governor responded: “The divorce was over 15 years ago and was tabloid fodder for weeks with all sorts of untrue rumors circulating. Time has proven them all false. Andrew is a great father, and his daughters will be the first to say that Kerry and Andrew have been great co-parents—and time showed those who spread the rumors‎ were actually the problem.​”

As attorney general and governor, he grew more demanding with those around him.

“If you were unprepared, if you could not answer his questions, he looked at you like you were a moron,” recalled one staffer from Cuomo’s attorney general days. “He might not criticize you to your face...but he would rap you when you left the room. When you’re a bully, you insult people to their faces. This was to the back.”

In both jobs, as A.G. and governor, Cuomo pitted key advisers in direct competition. “Every day it was a different person,” one staffer later said. “That’s a thread—a subtext. The story is how they were all cowed by Cuomo.”

Like Trump, he belittled and mistrusted his political rivals.

Cuomo had a nickname for Comptroller Tom DiNapoli: Chipmunk Balls, an epithet Cuomo used a lot. After he became governor, he snickered at his new attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, for wearing what to some looked like eyeliner, making his eyelashes look glossy and thick. For months whispers wafted around the second floor, until Schneiderman was asked about it at a news conference. It turned out that the A.G. had an eye condition for which he used drops. 

At one point one of the state’s four top Democrats was said to have remarked about Cuomo: “I’ve never met someone so mistrustful of people. How can anyone who feels that way get into politics?” So equally shared was that view that no one could say which of the four—Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator Chuck Schumer, Attorney General Schneiderman, or Comptroller DiNapoli—had articulated it.

It all went back to the family.

Andrew Cuomo’s grandfather Andrea liked to use one word in English: punch. He pronounced it puncha, puncha, puncha. Translation: Fight hard, trust no one, go it alone. He passed that attitude on to Mario, who passed it along to his sons. Mario would say he never got a hug or kiss from his mother, not once. Andrew didn’t get much more—from his father, at least—which might have helped make him the brute force that he is.

The irony is that Andrew would wrap himself so tightly in the cocoon of power that he often found himself alone, with few real friends, sometimes ill at ease when trying to reach beyond his attenuated world. This may account for the intimidating, discomfiting manner that has been described by some of Cuomo’s accusers in recent weeks: an old-world, macho form of power dynamics that combines flirtation, creepy physicality, and purported harassment—underscored by an alleged incident of groping that has been referred to the Albany police. (Cuomo has denied the allegations, though he issued a quasi apology for making “people feel uncomfortable,” adding, “I feel awful about it, and frankly, I am embarrassed by it.”)

One last hard truth.

The governor may not survive this double-barreled blast, but there is this one other truth to keep in mind. In the overall drama that is Andrew Cuomo’s political life, he goes down, he goes up, he goes down, he goes up. Always the downswings are his own fault. Never can it be said—both his cronies and detractors concur—that, as a result, he changes his stripes.

Even so, after each of Cuomo’s struggles, he has ultimately prevailed. He prevailed in 2006 as attorney general. He prevailed again as governor in 2011. He was widely lauded—even revered—for his command of New York’s early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And until he was rocked by a cascade of scandals, Cuomo looked ready to win a fourth term as governor: the race his father had tried, and failed, to win.

Mario, old and tired, had seemed relieved to lose. Andrew, all along, has seemed set on winning yet again. With that hard-earned political acumen and hardwired ruthlessness, he may just survive—as the same old Andrew Cuomo we’ve known from the beginning.

But it’s hard to see how.