Legislator Points Finger at Former Councilwoman
Assemblywoman Diane M. Gordon, right, arriving at State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Thursday with an unidentified friend.
In a videotape played on Friday during her corruption trial, Assemblywoman Diane M. Gordon said she was not the only public official in her neighborhood interested in trading favors to a developer for a free house.
On the tape, Ms. Gordon and a developer who was wearing a hidden camera are seen driving around her district in East New York, Brooklyn. Ms. Gordon tells the developer that she wants a deal like the one former City Councilwoman Priscilla A. Wooten had had: a house for a dollar, in return for helping the developer acquire some city-owned land.
“She was good to them and they was good to her,” Ms. Gordon tells the informant, Ranjan Batheja, on the tape, made in 2004. “They gave her the house for one dollar.” She adds a few seconds later, “So that’s the same thing I’m doing.”
Swapping political favors for a free house amounts to the crime of bribe receiving, which is what Ms. Gordon, 57, is charged with. But Ms. Wooten, who left office in 2002, was never pursued by prosecutors, because, they said, she had committed no crime.
“We looked into the Wooten transaction and determined that there was no criminality,” Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said in a telephone interview.
Ms. Gordon, a four-term Democrat on trial in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, is a different story, prosecutors say. She has pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree bribe receiving, which carries a penalty of 5 to 15 years in jail upon conviction.
Ms. Gordon’s house, which was never built, was to have risen in a gated community on the Brooklyn-Queens border where Mr. Batheja had broken ground, prosecutors say. In return, they say, Ms. Gordon tried to use her influence with city officials to get Mr. Batheja named as the developer of a vacant city-owned tract in East New York worth $2 million. That arrangement, too, was never consummated.
On the witness stand on Friday, Mr. Batheja testified that the videotape was an accurate depiction of the events that took place. Ms. Gordon’s lawyers have said she is a victim of prosecutorial overreaching and entrapment.
For her part, Ms. Wooten, the former councilwoman, adamantly denied the allegation about her.
“I wish I got it for $1,” she said by phone on Friday, referring to her house. “Then I wouldn’t be so broke.” She said she had paid between $200,000 and $300,000 for her two-family house at the corner of Crescent Street and Cozine Avenue in East New York.
Property records do not show how much she paid when she bought the house in 2001. But they do show that Ms. Wooten took out a $267,000 mortgage the same day.
The seller, Infinity Homes East, could not be reached for comment on Friday.
The lender started foreclosure proceedings against Ms. Wooten in 2003 when she fell behind on the payments, and when Ms. Wooten sold the house in 2004 for $463,500, most of the proceeds went to pay off the mortgage, said B. Mitchell Alter, her lawyer for the sale.
Ms. Wooten, 73, said she had run into financial trouble when she and her husband, who has since died, both developed health problems.
Mr. Alter added that the fact that the mortgage and the purchase were executed on the same day showed that it was an arm’s-length transaction. “It’s a wholly legitimate deal, a clean-as-a-whistle deal,” he said.
Mr. Alter, a former lawyer for Ms. Gordon, says as much on another tape made by Mr. Batheja, who was cooperating with prosecutors because they had caught him trying to bribe an undercover investigator posing as a city building official.
On that tape, of a meeting with Ms. Gordon in a church basement in 2005 to discuss how she could acquire the house cheaply without arousing suspicion, the story about Ms. Wooten comes up again, and Mr. Alter, who is present, says it is a false rumor, prosecutors said in opening arguments on Thursday.
Prosecutors said that at the basement meeting, Mr. Alter recommended that Ms. Gordon put the house in her mother’s name to disguise the ownership. Mr. Alter was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a conspiracy indictment against Ms. Gordon that has since been dropped.
Ms. Gordon’s trial continues on Monday.
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