Anthony Weiner’s chef brother turned up the heat on the mayoral wannabe’s secret online paramour just weeks before the sexting pol announced his mayoral bid, according to a longtime confidante of the scorned beauty.
Jason Weiner, who owns Manhattan bistro Almond, reached out to Anthony’s sexting partner, Sydney Leathers, on April 12 — just two days after Weiner’s strategic comeback interview ran in The New York Times Magazine — and grilled her on intentions, Lou Colagiovanni, a Vegas-based political activist, told The Post.
“He was trying to see if she was going to be a problem,” Colagiovanni said. “She said Jason was trying to take her temperature.”
Leathers confessed her illicit six month cyber affair with Weiner to Colagiovanni the same day, he said.
Colagiovanni had known Leathers since 2010, when the Indiana-bred political junkie started working for him as a contact creator for his liberal Facebook site, “We Survived Bush. You’ll Survive Obama (WSBYSO.)” Leathers worked for him until the scandal broke.
“She was scared, and very shaken. She got freaked out,” Colagiovanni said about Jason Weiner’s efforts. “She had never met the brother, and here he was contacting her. She had never spoken with him before. She told me about her affair, and that she thought they were trying to find out who they needed to keep quiet.”
“He was trying to do damage control.”
“My impression was that he was trying to smooth her out, make sure there weren’t going to be any issues. I got the impression that Weiner and his brother were going around trying to find out if there was anyone who needed to be neutralized.”
It was clear, Colagiovanni said, that Jason Weiner was acting as his brother’s wingman, contacting Leathers at Anthony’s request.
“It seemed pretty clear what Weiner was having his brother do. They were figuring out how to protect Weiner. I’m sure they knew there were other women out there.”
Colagiovanni noted that Weiner mentioned his brother in a Facebook post to Leathers. A screenshot of the post was released by thedirty.com.
“Are we ok?” Weiner asks Leathers in the post. “,,,my brother emailed me asking about you and whether I pissed you off. he told me to look at your feed, but nothing seems about me. maybe he was just tallying up pro and con comments and took one of your pithy posts as being something bad about me.”
“I’ll call back, but just checking. like I said, odd.”
Jason Weiner blasted Colagiovanni’s claim as “a complete and utter falsehood.”
“I don’t know how to be more clear about it,” he said. “I never contacted her, by Facebook, email, text, phone call – anything. My involvement with her is nothing. It’s categorically false.”
“I heard the name Sydney Leathers two or three days ago for the first time,” he added. “I have no involvement whatsoever in regard to Sydney Leathers.”
Colagiovanni said Leather never mentioned anything about a payout from Jason Weiner.
“During that initial conversation, and it only came up one time, there was no conversation of money. He was just trying to see if she was a threat.”
After Leathers calmed down, she realized she might be able to profit from the secret cyber liaison.
“I’m not going to lie, my initial response, as a business person, was ‘this is a business opportunity.’ And she, from the very beginning, said, ‘I’d like to get something out of this.’” He thought Leathers could sell her story for “$100,000 or so.”
Leathers told Colagiovanni all the down-and-dirty details of her hookup with the horny politician, he said.
“She told me about his shoe fetish. The explicit, sexual things he wanted to do. I saw the messages they sent each other.”
“He talked about getting Sydney a condo in Chicago,” he said, noting that Leathers had friends in the Windy City and wanted to try modeling.
“He offered to help her pay for the condo. He even joked about helping her move in, saying ‘I’m really huge” – apparently in reference to his muscles.”
Colagiovanni, who said he has not been paid for any information regarding Leathers, was genuinely crushed when Weiner called it off with her.
“She was in love with him,” he said.
“But I’ve known Sydney three years and in that time she’s fallen in and out of love two dozen times.”
Once it was over, Leathers was hellbent on making Weiner miserable.
“She certainly was an unhappy woman, a woman scorned. She was pretty intent on burning the ground underneath him,” Colagiovanni said.
He said Leathers probably knew she wasn’t Weiner’s Internet one and only.
“She’s intuitive, brilliant. Being as intelligent as she is, she couldn’t think she was the only one.”
Additional reporting by Joe Tacopino