IT WAS a warm and beautiful midsummer’s day in City Hall Park, but Comptroller Alan Hevesi looked distinctly uncomfortable.
Hevesi, one of the city’s highest-ranking Democrats, had just endorsed Ruth Messinger in her 1997 mayoral bid and was asked why voters should oust Rudy Giuliani.
Handed the perfect sound-bite opportunity, Hevesi hedged: “Rudy Giuliani has had some successes and some failures, and it is not necessary in a campaign … to bash anybody.”
Flash forward three years. The bashing has begun, suddenly and unexpectedly.
The once-cordial relationship between Hevesi and Giuliani exploded into a nasty battle of increasingly venomous attacks after each accused the other of the world’s oldest political perk: Snagging a sweet deal for friends.
“How did Ed Koch say it? ‘[Giuliani] fabricates, he makes it up, he doesn’t tell the truth. Some people call that lying,'” Hevesi said late last month. “Yeah, he’s a liar.”
Then the mayor all but branded Hevesi a thief, shooting back: “He’s doing it because he got caught with his hands in the cookie jar.”
Hevesi charged the mayor with “cronyism” and breaking the law.
Deputy Mayor Tony Coles suggested the comptroller has gone off his rocker, calling him “irrational” and saying he’s throwing a “tantrum.”
AS HEVESI gears up for a run for mayor next year, the integrity-shredding looks as if it’s going to get worse.
Hevesi, the policy-wonk yin to Giuliani’s street-fighter yang, is the last person most would expect to take on the mayor in a bitter personal feud.
A state assemblyman from Queens before he was elected comptroller in 1994, Hevesi is privately witty but publicly low-key and cautious with his words. He often starts a sentence, changes his mind and then says “strike that” — as if he were a lawyer in the middle of a delicate cross-examination.
An ambitious comptroller has at his disposal the perfect troublemaking tools: He sees every major contract, signs every check, and can audit any city agency.
“Mayors tend to regard comptrollers as nuisances,” said Harrison Goldin, the city comptroller from 1974 to 1990.
But there’s a big difference between a private and public nuisance.
Ever since Giuliani’s re-election in 1997, Hevesi has kept his public nit-picking to a minimum, preferring behind-the-scenes negotiations — such as holding off a damaging report on the city’s domestic-abuse hot line until the mayor could find more beds for victims and better training for counselors.
Hevesi calls that good government.
“I could have a much more affirmative impact on policy because I wasn’t looking for a fight or a slow-news-day headline,” he said.
City Hall insiders claim it’s smart politics. Hevesi was counting on support from Giuliani in a tough open-field fight in the 2001 mayoral race, they claim.
The Liberal Party, led by key Giuliani ally Ray Harding, gave Hevesi its stamp of approval for his re-election bid in 1997.
“I would say before this, Hevesi would have gotten a lot of us,” one City Hall source said. “He was on course to have a lot of us give him a hand.”
It couldn’t have hurt him that Suri Kasirer, the Democratic wife of Giuliani’s Senate campaign manager, Bruce Teitelbaum, was voluntarily raising money for Hevesi, or that Guy Molinari, the Republican Staten Island borough president who endorsed Hevesi last year, went so far as to say the moderate comptroller was planning to run as “the nice Rudy.”
But now — on the advice of his political consultant, Hank Morris — Hevesi wants to distance himself from the mayor’s falling approval ratings and right-wing ties, Molinari said, although he admitted he hasn’t spoken to the comptroller in months.
“It’s a calculated risk on his part,” Molinari said, adding he is “re-evaluating” his endorsement. Hevesi “could alienate the so-called Giuliani vote.”
Hevesi angrily denied he was ever trying to win Giuliani’s backing.
“I am not his friend. I’ve never had a meal with the mayor. I’m not his political ally. I’ve never endorsed him. I support Hillary Clinton,” he said.
He also balked at a suggestion he was trying to boost his low name recognition among voters, who he said will respect his high-road approach.
THE comptroller says the reason for the battle is simple: Giuliani tried to muscle past him two welfare-to-work contracts that would have funneled as much as $30 million to a former mayoral adviser.
The contracts for a Virginia company called Maximus — which had a side deal with a firm owned by ex-Giuliani adviser Richard Schwartz — were part of a package of 17 worth nearly $500 million that Hevesi says weren’t competitively bid upon.
He says paperwork shows Maximus had a head start over other groups in negotiations with top city officials for the contracts to train and find jobs for welfare recipients.
Hevesi said that in late February, when his office informed the mayor’s staffers he wasn’t going to approve all 17 contracts because of the bidding process, they threatened to publicly denounce him as against welfare-to-work programs.
The strong-arm tactics were a shock, Hevesi said, because the other 350 times he had a problem with a contract, City Hall either tossed it or fixed it.
So Hevesi went public first — launching a sling-and-arrows fight that got bloodier and bloodier.
“They wanted to go into combat, so I had to accommodate them,” Hevesi said. “I will not be complicit in a deal whose primary motive is to provide taxpayer funds to reward the mayor’s friends and cronies.”
The mayor eventually used his power to override Hevesi’s decision, but the comptroller is still holding out on two Maximus contracts in a dispute that last week headed into court for a showdown.
Deputy Mayor Coles denied there were any threats.
Instead, the mayor insists, the contracts are on the level — even “brilliant” — and Hevesi is carrying out a personal vendetta.
“We publicly questioned Alan’s integrity, and his brain went tilt in the process,” one City Hall insider said.
IN LATE January, City Hall scuttled a plan to invest $875 million of city employees’ pension money in real-estate deals — a proposal put together by the prominent Fisher family developers.
City Hall insiders told The New York Times that Hevesi supported the deal — and a quote from Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota suggested Hevesi’s enthusiasm stemmed from the $92,500 in contributions the Fisher family had made to his campaign.
The Fishers also gave $76,000 to Giuliani’s campaign.
Hevesi had already approved one of the welfare-to-work contracts — but yanked as he grew more enraged, Coles said.
“It explains the whole overnight change in his tone and his dealing with the mayor’s office,” Coles said.
The comptroller, who claims the contract approval was a computer glitch, said he was “annoyed” by Lhota’s slap.
“While I’m annoyed that Joe Lhota would lie about this particular process, it didn’t surprise me because … Joe Lhota [is] famous for this,” Hevesi said.
That biting attack drew another from Lhota: “How my opinion elicited this emotionally charged response raises questions about Alan’s hypersensitivity about the apparent conflicts [in the Fisher deal].”
The comptroller denies he tried to hustle the Fisher deal through the city’s five pension boards — or even backed it in the first place. “This was a self-inflicted wound by the mayor. He did it to himself. He decided when to send the contracts, he decided to act illegally, he decided to favor his friends,” Hevesi said.
Hevesi won’t say it — but others suggest that the mayor wanted to scare the Fishers away from a separate deal to buy a Con Ed property so Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman could develop it. City Hall denies that was their plan.
Despite the nasty rhetoric, Hevesi’s staffers still have a decent working relationship with City Hall, he said.
But perhaps in an indication of things to come, Lhota wasn’t as generous, saying: “The comptroller’s sanctimonious outlook on life has always made the administration’s relationship with him very tenuous.”