Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Cuomo’s all-too-telling corruption defense
Gov. Cuomo is arguing that he’s been cleared of wrongdoing by the prosecution of his former right-hand man and “brother,” Joe Percoco. Seriously.
In fact, Cuomo tells New York magazine that the charges against Percoco, convicted of pocketing $300,000 in bribes in the Buffalo Billion bid-rigging scheme, constitute “the most credible exoneration in history.”
You see, then-US Attorney Preet Bharara was only “going after Percoco to get the governor,” but couldn’t “find a whisper on me.”
Bharara’s take: “I appreciate Andrew Cuomo’s need to spin,” but the gov has nothing “to be proud of” in his record on corruption.
Cuomo seems to realize voters will find his tortured logic hard to swallow. After all, Team Cuomo over the weekend sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations, demanding they refuse to run a new ad from GOP gov candidate Marc Molinaro that focuses on the federal probe of Crystal Run.
This, just weeks after Cuomo attacked a NY1 reporter who dared press him over his silence on the same investigation.
Crystal Run is the Hudson Valley health group that, though flush with cash, got $25.4 million in state subsidies for two new facilities after its CEO kicked in $25,000 to Cuomo’s campaign. Other company officials gave $375,000 more.
Molinaro’s ad notes that top Cuomo aides — Percoco, Alain Kaloyeros, Todd Howe — “are going to jail for stealing your tax dollars. And now he’s under investigation again for another pay-to-play scam.”
But because the news article used as a graphic doesn’t say the governor himself is being probed, Team Cuomo argues the ad is “defamatory” and should be silenced.
Meanwhile, the New York Times has published 350 pages of e-mails involving ex-aide Howe — e-mails that show Howe’s huge influence at the top levels of state government long after becoming a lobbyist.
The gov, incidentally, spent two years and $200,000 in taxpayer funds trying to keep those e-mails from becoming public.
Stonewall, repress, rationalize, deflect, lash out: These are the defenses of someone who knows he has a huge corruption problem — but refuses to fix it.
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