State Sen. Dean Skelos had to tell his hotheaded son to cool it after the younger man got angry because his cushy, $10,000-a-month consulting gig was drying up, according to testimony Tuesday.
Adam Skelos, 33, ran straight to his powerful Long Island dad for advice after losing his job at AbTech Industries — which he landed allegedly in exchange for his dad’s influence in Albany.
“So don’t burn any bridges and tell them to go F themselves?” Adam asks his dad — the then-Republican Senate majority leader — in the taped, March 26 phone call.
Dean, 67, eventually tells his son, “Don’t panic over this, all right? Just don’t burn any bridges . . . hopefully we can, you know, get it all going again and that’s it.”
The new recordings were played as AbTech founder and CEO Glenn Rink testified against the father and son in their ongoing corruption trial in Manhattan federal court.
AbTech had agreed to increase Adam’s monthly paycheck from $4,000 to $10,000 in April 2013 after he threatened to use his father’s influence to block a $12 million contract for the environmental company — whining that project engineers were going to earn more than he was.
“We probably spent more, at that point, on paying Adam than what we brought in from the New York market,” Rink testified.
But AbTech kicked Adam to the curb after its storm-water-treatment contract with Nassau County stalled for nearly a year, which the younger Skelos blamed on politics as usual.
“Everything [in Albany] is so tied up with these ethic-reform conversations,” Adam told Rink in a March 2015 phone call that was recorded by the feds. “That’s overshadowing every other issue.”
Earlier Tuesday, Rink testified that he and AbTech exec Bjornulf White had “no choice” but to give Adam the raise because they didn’t want to risk losing the lucrative government contract.
“I saw this as a threat to the project. I saw this as a death threat,” Rink testified.
White was equally upset.
“I can’t believe he’s going to try to hold us hostage to renegotiate the contract,” he wrote to Rink in an April 10, 2013, e-mail.
Adam had nabbed the AbTech gig — and a separate $20,000 check for no-show work — through Charles Dorego, the general counsel for real-estate developer Glenwood Management, a major donor to Senate Republicans.
Dorego, Rink recalled, pushed hard for Adam’s raise because he didn’t want to “risk Glenwood’s relationship” with Sen. Skelos.
Rink also testified that he didn’t believe Adam was doing anything “illegal or improper” while he worked for AbTech.