Back in 1994, when Spitzer made his first, unsuccessful run for Attorney General, his dad loaned him $4.3 million for the campaign; during his 1998 run, Spitzer admitted that he had lied about repaying the loan. Cut to the present: Senate Republicans, seeking to damage the governor, are investigating the loans. Stone's phone message to the elder Spitzer, using the kind of language one usually expects from the governor, went like this:

You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Committee on Investigations on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms. If you resist the subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany. And there is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son's a pathological liar will be known to all.

Stone tells the Times that:

[H]is apartment building on Central Park South is owned by H. Dale Hemmerdinger, a fund-raiser for Mr. Spitzer who is the governor's nominee to be chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and suggested that allies of the governor might have given access to his apartment to someone who made the threatening call. An official at Mr. Hemmerdinger's company said she was not prepared to comment.

Mr. Stone said: "They have unfettered access to my apartment. I am on television constantly. As Gore Vidal said, never pass up the chance to have sex or be on television. Putting together a voice tape that sounds like me wouldn't be hard to do."

Mr. Stone said he could not remember where he was on the date of the call and had no specific evidence that his apartment had been entered without authorization. But he said he believed that things have been missing from his apartment recently.

He's not the only one. Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf also thinks there might be a cunning strategy at play, but on the part of the Republicans: "The loan story is revived and Stone gets a black eye. Stone can live with a black eye but the governor doesn't need another bad story. Some people say bad things about Roger Stone, but he doesn't care. Stone can't be hurt, but the governor can. It's not the wackiest theory I ever heard."

And that pretty much sums up Albany for you: Everyone is so crooked and corrupt and looking to screw everyone else that it's not only believable that the governor might orchestrate an angry call to his father in an attempt to gin up sympathy, but it's equally credible that the opposition may have committed the act simply to keep the governor's tarnished image at the top of the news. If we're Andrew Cuomo we're going to sit back very quietly for the next three years and wait for our shot at the mansion.

Also, if you're scoring at home, the Times was the only paper out of the three major dailies and The Sun to spell out the word "shit." Good for them.

Gov's dad threatened [NYDN]
The Phone Call That's Rocked the Capital [NYS]
Politics Seen in Nasty Call to Spitzer's Father [NYT]
PSYCHO RANT AT GOV DAD [NYP]
[Image: NYP]

Attorney General Cuomo relied on a phantom ethics opinion to exonerate the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, of charges that he misused state aircraft.

In absolving the Republican state Senate majority leader of any wrongdoing, a report issued last month by the attorney general's office cited what it described as an "opinion" issued by the New York State Ethics Commission in 1995.

The opinion cited by the report does not exist in writing and never did. No formal opinion on the use of state aircraft has ever been issued by the ethics commission.

Bruno is clearly starting to overplay his hand. It's not hard to hear the desperation in this:

"He doesn't appear to have the temperament to govern, to negotiate in good faith, to compromise," Bruno said. Referring to Spitzer's now infamous steamroller he added, "most people would be kidding. He meant it."

Bruno has questioned whether Spitzer belongs in politics, and he has come to a conclusion.

"No," he said. "I don't think he does. He probably would have been great in real estate, where some people handle themselves differently than others. But real estate, you know, you're a hard driver, you drive a hard bargain for some people. That's probably where he belongs."

"We were discriminated against because we were the poorest people in town, immigrants, called every name in the book. Irish were at one end, we were at the other. And it was kid's stuff then, but it was very hurtful. In Catholic school, they discriminated. If you were from a wealthy family, you got treated differently than from a poor family, and that's kind of sad."

Steamroller Joe [City Hall News]
Cuomo Cites Phantom Policy [NYS]

ELSEWHERE: The Spitzer-controlled State Ethics Commission will launch an inquiry into the Bruno affair, possibly blunting the Senate's ability to do the same. Post bulldog Fred U. Dicker badgered (and battered) the governor at a press conference yesterday (watch the tremendously entertaining video here). And Wall Street enjoys a moment of shadenfreude.

Spitzer himself sat down with the Daily News and repeated his claims that he knew nothing about his staff's investigation of Bruno: he didn't know they were doing it, he didn't know people were asking about it, he wasn't even sure who "Joe Bruno" was until just a couple of weeks ago, etc. The best analysis of the entire saga so far comes from a "smart friend" of Ben Smith's: "It seems to me the unspoken story here is that if the Spitzer people had given the records to [New York Post State Editor Fred U.] Dicker instead of the Times Union, the stories would all be about Bruno and he wouldn't be in this self-created mess. The real story is that once again Dicker has been shown to be the real power in Albany."