10

The Handshake Deal

“In its essence, the contemporary process of redistricting in New York boils down to this,” wrote Edward Schneier and Brian Murtaugh in their book, New York Politics: A Tale of Two States: “The Democrats, who control the assembly, draw the assembly district lines; the Republicans draw the state senate lines.” Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit—thus has it always been, and thus shall it ever be. Or so everybody thought.

The Empire State’s politics have long been defined by an inherent tension. Between the interests of the New York City metropolitan area, which contains almost two-thirds of the state’s residents and tends to vote for Democrats, and the geographically larger upstate regions, where Republicans, at least outside other major urban centers like Buffalo, usually dominate. These types of regional and cultural cleavages are, after all, not unusual, conflict between urban and rural interests being a staple of political debates for time immemorial. But the state’s geographic divide also obscures another, far more pernicious one. Since the mid-1970s, the Republican Party has consistently controlled the state senate, while the Democrats have maintained a stranglehold over the state assembly.

For fully thirty-four years, this pattern held, weathering every wave, every cyclone, every short-term shift in the direction of the political climate. Even when the election of Barack Obama in 2008 temporarily broke the logjam, carrying the Democrats to a narrow majority in the senate, the respite was only temporary. Scandals have come and gone, politicians have been indicted, convicted, and jailed, while others have resigned in disgrace. What was once a swing state became a Democratic stronghold, and yet still the streak remained unbroken.

At no other time in U.S. history has a state experienced such a prolonged period of divided party control of its legislative branch. New York has voted for both Republicans and Democrats for president, U.S. Senate, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and comptroller. In both the best of times and the worst, the cycle has continued. Every decade, the needle returns to the start of the song, and the band plays along like before. “New York State is governed, in effect, by a single Incumbency Party,” wrote the City Journal in 1995, “dedicated above all to preserving its own power and privileges. The policy stasis, in other words, is part and parcel of a profound entrenchment of power. The Legislature has striven to keep its membership as unchanging as its policies.”

But how could this possibly be? How could the voters of one of the nation’s largest and most diverse states consistently place two opposing political parties in control of its legislature? The answer to this political riddle lies in a variety of gerrymandering that has so far not been discussed. But its undemocratic effects rival, or perhaps even exceed, those of the modern partisan gerrymander. I’m referring to what political scientists have termed the “incumbent gerrymander,” the “bipartisan gerrymander,” or alternatively, as is befitting of the backroom negotiations that often produce it, “the handshake deal.”

Such gerrymanders reflect a situation, in the words of the political scientists Peter Miller and Bernard Grofman, “in which the existing balance of party seat share in the legislature (or in a state’s congressional delegation) is ‘glued’ into place by creating districts that are ‘safe’ for the incumbents of both parties.” “A special case of such a sweetheart deal,” they continue, “is when each of the two chambers of a legislature is controlled by a different party, and a deal is cut between the chambers that allows each branch to draw its own map.”

And that, of course, is what happened in New York. Since 1981, when the first handshake deal was put in place, the state has experienced some of the least competitive legislative elections in the nation. According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, over one ten-year period as many members of the state legislature died in office as were defeated at the polls. More than 99 percent of the incumbents who contested either a primary or a general election during that time ended up winning their races, the vast majority by lopsided margins.

Such a lack of accountability to the will of the voters is a recipe for corruption, dysfunction, and gridlock. And New York has certainly experienced more than its fair share of these evils. The Albany press corps devised their own nickname for the scheme: “The Redistricting Cartel.” This chapter is the story of how a handshake deal on gerrymandering turned the state of New York into a criminal oligarchy.

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“Constitutionally Republican.” That was how Al Smith, first elected as the governor of New York in 1918, and later the Democratic nominee for president against Herbert Hoover in 1928, described the politics of the Empire State’s legislature. New York had been gerrymandered by design. The disproportional allocation of power to the heavily Republican upstate regions, at the expense of Tammany Hall’s Democratic political machine in New York City, had been written into the very text of the state’s constitution.

In 1894, the Republicans who controlled the constitutional convention were acutely aware of the threat that the growing population of the Big Apple—and in particular the seemingly never-ending flow of immigrants through Ellis Island—might have on their ability to continue to control the state’s democratic institutions. So, they wrote into Article III a heavily convoluted system of reapportionment provisions designed to ensure that it could never happen.

Districts in the state legislature would be allocated among the individual counties based not on their total populations but on their citizen populations, thus excluding recently arrived immigrants from the count. And the deck was further stacked, in the form of a complex seat allocation formula, so that no matter how the cards were dealt by any particular census, upstate areas would always emerge with a number of assembly and senate districts far in excess of their share of the overall population.

“The more sparsely populated portions of the state have diverse interests and, therefore, should have relatively more legislators to represent those varied interests,” helpfully explained the Republican delegate Elihu Root. “Although a great city may have more inhabitants, it has a unified interest and, consequently, requires fewer legislators to represent that interest in Albany.” Though the formula itself is too complicated to summarize here, it was described in one study as “a graphic illustration of how to use apportionment to resist the passage of time.” And it worked like a charm.

Al Smith’s frustration with this system was certainly understandable. Despite being elected to serve four terms as the Democratic governor of New York—even defeating Teddy Roosevelt Jr., the eldest son of the former president, in one of those races—his party never controlled the senate during his tenure, and held a narrow one-seat majority in the assembly for only two years of his second term. He was not the only Democratic governor to meet a similar fate. In the seventy years that these 1894 constitutional provisions were in effect, before the Supreme Court’s reapportionment revolution changed everything, the Republican Party controlled the state assembly for sixty-six years and the state senate for fifty-seven. It was a virtually unbroken streak of single-party rule that many a dictator would have been proud of. And in the early 1960s, with their control of the state legislature securely entrenched by the 1894 constitution, or so they thought, the Republicans set their sights on the state’s congressional districts as well.

In November 1961, the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, called a special session of the state legislature. Because New York had lost two seats in Congress after the 1960 census, redistricting was required, even without the mandate of “one person, one vote.” And the Republicans were in no mood to compromise. The session lasted a mere two days, leading more than one observer to wonder whether a fait accompli was in progress. “On November 10, in broad daylight,” wrote The New Republic, in an article somewhat cryptically titled “Camel Bites Dachshund” (more on that in a moment), “the New York State Legislature, meeting in a special session called by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, stole away enough Democratic congressional districts to give the GOP an added margin of 10 to 12 seats from New York in the next Congress.”

The line drawing itself had been done beforehand, entirely in secret. The results were not released either to the public or to the legislators themselves until the day the bill was introduced. It passed the very next day. The state senator Robert C. McEwen, who had chaired the redistricting committee, explained the lack of transparency by framing it as “strictly a technical subject.” “No argument offered at a public hearing,” he claimed, “no matter how emotional, political, or impassioned it might be, can change a census statistic.”

Thomas Hofeller would have been proud. After all, his PowerPoint presentation to GOP redistricting officials, appropriately titled “What I’ve Learned About Redistricting—the Hard Way!,” contains frequent warnings about the need for confidentiality and secrecy. He cautions his charges: “Treat every statement and document as if it was going to appear on the FRONT PAGE of your local newspaper”; “Trust but verify”; “Emails are the tool of the devil”; “Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law”; and “Loose Lips, Sink Ships.”

“After the outlines of the gerrymander were made public,” the article continued, “it was easy to understand the Senator’s reluctance to face a public hearing over the projected larceny.” The plan collapsed three Democratic districts entirely, injected four marginal ones with a transfusion of Republican voters, drew two new Republican districts on Long Island, and made an additional three New York City seats more hospitable to Republican challengers. Rockefeller himself, apparently attempting to wash his hands of the entire enterprise in a manner eerily reminiscent of Elbridge Gerry, never openly associated himself with the process. His sole formal actions were to call the special legislative session and then sign the resulting legislation into law. He refused to even be photographed at the bill signing. But in the plan that bore his signature, all of the now-familiar tropes in the gerrymandering handbook were on display. Including a throwback to the Midwest Menagerie of 1840s Ohio.

“A brief glance at the shapes of some of the new districts is enough to make a drinker go on the wagon,” The New Republic reported soberly. “The map on page 10 reveals a zoo-full of fantastically shaped creatures slithering through the streets of New York City.” “Among the Brooklyn fauna,” the article notes, “are a camel biting the tail of a barking dachshund (the 14th CD), a mechanical dinosaur with key attached (the 15th CD), and a vulture (the 16th CD).” But, as the attached maps make clear, an almost Richland Roarer–sized leap of the imagination is required to see any such resemblance. “The vulture is flying towards its new laid egg,” they explain: “Staten Island.” No word on why the vulture appears to be separated from her egg by the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fifteenth Districts, but that particular burning question may be, in the words of Senator McEwen, “strictly a technical subject.”

“Also in Brooklyn one finds an X-ray of a badly-shattered elbow (the 10th CD), an accusing finger (the 12th CD), and silhouette of General Washington in uniform (the 11th CD).” At exactly what or whom the finger is pointing accusingly, no further information is given. But it’s probably safe to assume that it’s not General Washington, given that his district is safely located behind the knuckle. The general certainly has some questions to answer about the shattered elbow, however. Visual cues would seem to suggest that the finger is pointing at either the camel or the dachshund, or possibly even at the dinosaur’s key, but the true identity of the guilty party remains frustratingly elusive.

The 1961 New York gerrymander.

Moving into the outer boroughs, the assortment of beasts become even more bizarre, and the imaginations of the article’s authors ever more questionable. They are Gus Tyler and David Wells, who according to the somewhat baffling byline, are writing in their capacities as the director and assistant director of the Political Department of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. “Up in The Bronx,” they continue, “the Legislature has carved out a fiery dragon (the 24th GD) and a snake suffering from indigestion after having swallowed a giraffe (the 23rd CD).” The latter of these is particularly difficult to infer from the attached map, leaving one to wonder whether at this point the garment factory fumes might have started going to their heads. The dragon, though, really does look like a dragon.

“In the Queens cages are a chicken with its head being cut off (the 6th CD), a shmoo (the 7th CD) and an upside-down pregnant crocodile (the 8th CD).” A “shmoo,” according to the frantic Google search I just performed, is either a fictional cartoon character created by Al Capp in 1948 or an electrical engineering chart designed to graphically display the response of a component over a range of conditions or inputs—choose your own adventure. And as for the alleged upside-down pregnant crocodile? I’ve got nothing. “Upstate New York has been spared from the beasts,” they conclude, which I’m sure comes as a great relief to its inhabitants. “But the 55th CD is clearly a submarine extending from Schenectady to Rochester, with a periscope poked into Lake Ontario—apparently about to torpedo Toronto.” Clearly.

Unfortunately, while they did endure somewhat longer than the mythical beasts of the Midwest Menagerie—which, you’ll recall from chapter 3, were never used for even a single election—the New York City Congressional Menagerie did not last the full decade. Nor was the gerrymander even particularly successful. In the 1962 elections, the Republicans won only twenty-one of the state’s forty-one seats in Congress. Then, in 1964, LBJ’s coattails carried the Democrats to an improbable victory. They woke up the morning after to find themselves in control of both houses of the legislature, and with a twenty-seven-to-fourteen-seat edge in the U.S. House delegation. “They were so stunned by this development,” wrote the former assemblyman Alan Hevesi, “that they divided into bitterly competing political factions and failed to elect party leaders for five weeks.”

Then came “one person, one vote.” Suddenly the entire electoral map of the nation’s most populous state, not to mention the key provisions of its constitution that had institutionalized the widespread malapportionment, had been rendered unconstitutional. In 1967, a federal court also ruled, in the case of Wells v. Rockefeller, that the gerrymandered congressional districts would have to be redrawn, containing as they did significant discrepancies in population. The largest district contained 470,000 people, while the smallest contained 350,000. And not surprisingly, the average population of the Democratic seats that made up the menagerie (439,000) was considerably higher than those held by Republicans (382,000).

But the GOP was undeterred. Under the continuing leadership of Governor Rockefeller, they set out to replace their constitutionally mandated gerrymander with what they hoped would be an equally effective legislatively created version. No longer under the state constitutional mandate to allocate seats among counties according to the 1894 formula, the legislature’s plan represented “a wholesale abandonment of county and township lines as district boundaries.” As was the case in California, the New York Republicans concluded that so long as they produced districts that were equal enough in terms of population to satisfy “one person, one vote,” everything else was chopped liver.

But any gerrymander, no matter how well constructed, can only hold up for so long in the face of a sufficiently large electoral wave. And the Republicans were about to get hit with a deluge. Though they maintained their comfortable control of the legislature through the 1972 elections, the fallout from the Watergate scandal left them frantically attempting to bail out their sinking ship. And at least in the assembly, Democrats were prepared to capitalize. Through diligent recruitment efforts, they put together a lineup of young, well-qualified, aggressive candidates to run in upstate and suburban districts currently held by vulnerable Republican incumbents.

It paid off, to spectacular effect. The previous eighty-four-to-sixty-six Republican majority was flipped on its head, and the Democrats emerged with a resounding eighty-eight-to-sixty-two victory. They would never find themselves in the minority again. On the senate side, the Republican gerrymander held up better. Though three GOP incumbents were ousted, narrowing their majority to eight seats, the damage had been done. Their seventy-year mortal lock on control of the state legislature had finally been broken, once and for all. But the 1970s did not mark the end of the modern gerrymander’s sordid influence over the Empire State’s democratic institutions. In fact, it was only the beginning.

The First Handshake: Stanley Fink, Warren Anderson, and Hugh Carey

“You don’t quarrel with the way that I draw the Assembly and I won’t quarrel with the way that you draw the Senate,” the Democratic Speaker Stanley Fink told his Republican counterpart, the senate majority leader, Warren Anderson. “I will pass a bill that has your version of the Senate if you will pass the same bill that has my version of the Assembly.” It was 1981, and New York was about to embark on its first adventure in bipartisan redistricting. Things were not going well. For most of the year, talks between the chambers, and inside the bipartisan Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment (for some reason abbreviated as LATFOR), had stalled. The two sides were unable to agree on a redistricting plan for the state legislature that would satisfy both their own caucuses and the courts.

To be fair, there were a lot of balls in the air that needed to be juggled. For the first time since the 1940s, when the Democratic governor Herbert Lehman had stared down Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature, the state had divided government during redistricting. The Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” jurisprudence had progressively narrowed the range of population deviations that were permitted between the most and the least populous districts, and the inherent tension between these rulings and the county mandate contained in the 1894 state constitution was very much on the minds of the powers that be in Albany.

Fink was a mere two years into his tenure as Speaker and was attempting to corral a Democratic caucus that was restless to capitalize on their hard-won control after so many decades in the wilderness. Anderson, meanwhile, was the old hand, almost a full decade into his own stewardship of the Republican senate majority. Neither man wanted to be the one who would blink first.

There’s a saying in New York politics that all of the deal-brokering, horse-trading, and sausage-making machinations of the state’s dysfunctional government can be boiled down into one simple phrase: “three men in a room.” Everything from the budget to redistricting is hashed out through informal negotiations in the back rooms of Albany, whether smoke filled or not, between the governor, the assembly Speaker, and the senate majority leader.

By now, the special legislative session of 1981 had expired without a solution to the impasse. Nineteen eighty-one swiftly turned into 1982, and still no real progress had been made. Court-imposed deadlines came and went, and the specter of the judiciary stepping in to relieve the legislature of its responsibilities was looming large on the horizon. If a deal were to be struck to reach a compromise between the opposing factions in time for the 1982 elections to be held, these three men were going to have to be the ones who would strike it.

Before he became the first Democratic governor of the Empire State to successfully win reelection since the 1930s, the Brooklyn native Hugh Carey was also known as “the man who saved New York City.” In 1975, the nation’s largest and wealthiest metropolis found itself on the brink of financial collapse. On the night of October 16, more than seventeen hundred politicians, philanthropists, celebrities, and other dignitaries gathered at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in midtown Manhattan for the annual Al Smith Dinner, a white-tie Catholic fundraiser named for the former governor and the first Catholic candidate to appear on a major-party ticket for president. The mood was somber.

The Teachers’ Retirement Association, by this point the only organization seemingly willing to purchase New York’s municipal bonds, had just announced that it was reneging on that promise. At 4:00 p.m. the next day, more than $450 million of the city’s mounting debt was scheduled to come due. And with only $34 million on hand in the coffers, the embarrassing prospect of insolvency appeared to be almost inevitable. The lawyers at city hall were already preparing for such an eventuality. In the middle of the night, they had drawn up a bankruptcy petition to be filed in court the next day. It began with an ominous statement of the grim nature of the circumstances: “The City of New York is unable to pay its debts or obligations as they mature.”

There was still hope that the federal government would step in and provide a loan to safeguard their long-term financial future. But President Gerald Ford proved to be in no mood for handouts. “This is not a natural disaster or an act of God,” argued his press secretary, Ron Nessen, the morning after the dinner. “It is a self-inflicted act by the people who have been running New York City.” Days later, Ford delivered his infamous speech, immortalized by the headline that blazed across the front page of the Daily News the next day: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

“I can tell you, and tell you now,” he informed the American people, “that I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.” Eventually, though, he did sign legislation to provide $2.3 billion in federal loans, in return for massive cuts in the city’s budget, widespread layoffs of public employees, and a substantial increase in charges for city services. But the damage was done. A year later, Ford would narrowly lose the state, and with it the presidential election, to his Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter. He later claimed that the Daily News headline had cost him the presidency.

In truth, the Big Apple’s financial wounds had not been entirely self-inflicted. The economic stagnation of the early 1970s stretched the city’s pension, welfare, and other fiscal obligations to the brink. Rates of violent crime were soaring, manufacturing and industry were in decline, and the flight of many middle-class white residents to the suburbs left a gaping hole in tax revenues, forcing the government to borrow more and more to make up its shortfalls. Mayor Abraham Beame had spent much of his time in office since being elected in 1973 attempting to ward off the looming financial catastrophe. He slashed city workforces, froze salaries, cut funding to hospitals, and hiked public transportation rates, but all to no avail.

Hugh Carey had already ridden to the city’s rescue on one occasion. In April, the first time that bankruptcy appeared imminent, he agreed to advance funds to keep the lights on, in return for an agreement that the city would turn over the running of its financial affairs to the state. But this was little more than a Band-Aid on the gaping fiscal wound. And as banks began declining to make any more loans as the risk of default skyrocketed, things once again reached a crisis point.

Then, only two hours before the 4:00 p.m. deadline, the Teachers’ Retirement Association had a change of heart. Amid frantic negotiations with Beame and Carey, they agreed to purchase the bonds. “No one else was coming forward to save the city,” explained Al Shanker, the head of the teachers’ union. But less than six years after saving the city from bankruptcy, Carey would find himself in the middle of yet another political crisis, once again frantically attempting to broker a deal between opposing political factions while the clock was ticking.

Stanley Fink also hailed from Brooklyn. The forty-five-year-old Speaker, a graduate of New York University Law School who had served with distinction in the U.S. Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Office during the early 1960s, had first been elected to the assembly in 1968. Anderson, as befitting the Republican Party’s upstate electoral base, was born in the tiny village of Bainbridge, halfway between Binghamton and Oneonta in the state’s rural Southern Tier. Two decades Fink’s senior, he was also a JAG veteran, this time on the army side, and had been an attorney in private practice before seeking election to the state senate in 1952. He had already partnered with Carey once, helping to negotiate the first rescue package for New York City in April 1975.

Now the three men in the room faced the prospect of hammering out a deal to redraw the state’s districts in time for the 1982 elections. Tensions were running high. “For 88 years, the Republicans drew the district lines, cutting up cities,” complained Mel Miller, the Democratic co-chair of the Legislative Task Force. “This is the first time in almost a century that the Democrats have a real role.” “I go into this with the idea of extracting fair representation for minorities,” countered Donald Zimmerman, the Republican attorney who had been drawing districts for the party since the 1960s. “And in New York City one of those minorities is Republicans.”

The Big Apple’s districts were a major sticking point in the negotiations. The city’s white flight had caused it to grow more slowly than the rest of the state, necessitating a reduction in assembly seats from sixty-five to sixty. On the senate side, that problem could be fixed by increasing the number of seats, something that the 1894 constitution permitted the legislature to do. The Republicans produced maps that boosted the number of districts located outside the city, hoping to safeguard their majority should the downstate political tides continue to turn against them.

The Democrats in the assembly did the opposite, drawing safe new city districts to lock up their control there for the foreseeable future and gerrymandering upstate boundaries to at least create battlegrounds on which they had a reasonable chance of being able to compete. The division of labor that allowed the senate Republicans free rein to redraw the senate districts while conceding hegemony to the Democrats in the assembly finally produced a workable compromise. On July 2, 1982, the final plans passed the legislature, and Governor Carey had already pledged to sign them into law. The first handshake deal had been completed.

It must be emphasized that the mere fact that the redistricting process was bipartisan did not in any way, shape, or form make what emerged from the special legislative session in Albany any less of a gerrymander. The maps embodied all of the same underhanded tactics that had characterized the 1960s Republican gerrymander: irregular shapes, crossing of county and township boundaries, and targeting of opposing incumbents. The difference was merely one of responsibility, rather than of kind. And the results spoke for themselves. The Republicans held on to control of the senate for the remainder of the decade, their majority never dipping below a seven-seat margin. Meanwhile, the Democrats in the assembly cleaned up, turning the eighty-eight-to-sixty-two majority they had enjoyed prior to redistricting into a ninety-eight-to-fifty-two landslide.

Things were working exactly as intended. The blueprint for how to turn a bitterly divisive fight over redistricting between two diametrically opposed chambers into a mutually beneficial black eye on the face of representative government and democratic accountability was established. The winners congratulated themselves on a job well done, a negotiated peace that had averted any further extension of hostilities. The losers, as is seemingly always the case in the redistricting wars, were the voters.

The Second Handshake: Saul Weprin, Ralph Marino, and Mario Cuomo

Mel Miller believed that he would be the one to shepherd the Democrats through the 1991 redistricting process. After all, the Brooklyn assemblyman had the experience. He’d played a key role a decade earlier as the co-chair of LATFOR, helping to draw the assembly lines during the first handshake deal. And now he also held the reins of power. When Stanley Fink had declined to run for reelection in 1986—citing a desire to spend both more time with his family and more money than his state salary would allow for—Miller had been his natural successor. Known as a strong voice for liberal and progressive causes, the son of a milk truck driver assumed the speakership in January 1987 and quickly carved out a role as an independent voice among the state’s political leadership.

As negotiations ramped up following the release of the 1990 census data, a repeat screening of the prior decade’s feature presentation appeared to be firmly enshrined on the marquee. Politicians pontificated, mapmakers map made, and lawyers geared up to litigate the inevitable lawsuits that would surely follow. But the redistricting sideshow would be forced to take a backseat to another three-ring circus that was playing out elsewhere, in the not-so-friendly confines of a Brooklyn courtroom. Before the year was over, Mel Miller became the first in a long line of Albany legislative leaders to be convicted on federal felony charges.

Unlike most of the politicians who followed him through the revolving doors between the Albany establishment and the criminal justice system, Miller was not corrupt. In fact, the nineteen-count indictment that was issued against him in December 1990 by the Republican prosecutor Andrew J. Maloney had nothing whatsoever to do with his work in the state government, at least directly. Along with his business partner and top legislative aide, Jay Adolf, Miller stood accused of defrauding numerous clients, part of a real estate scheme they concocted to enrich themselves on the side.

While purportedly representing the purchasers, the pair had been secretly buying up apartments themselves and then selling them later, collecting some $300,000 in profits on top of the $238,000 the clients had paid them in legal fees. This violation of their fiduciary duty, according to the prosecutor, amounted to criminal fraud and conspiracy. Miller denied all wrongdoing. But the trial kept his attention away from Albany for most of 1991. And with New York law requiring mandatory expulsion from the legislature upon conviction for a felony, the prospect of a second handshake deal being reached while the charges hung over him were remote. Once again, negotiations on redistricting stalled.

In December, the jury convicted Miller on eight of the nineteen felony counts, ending his career as assembly Speaker and throwing the redistricting process into further chaos. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said of his prosecution. “I think it was a political witch hunt.” Maloney denied that political motivations were involved, citing the fact that the investigation had originated with the Democrats in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Miller also mounted a spirited legal fight to complement the PR battle, hiring the big-time criminal defense attorney Gerald Lefcourt to pursue an appeal.

Two years later, a federal appellate court unanimously sided with Miller, overturning his conviction on the theory that his actions did not constitute a crime under the relevant federal statutes. “Miller and Adolf’s dealings with the Group may not have been a model of candor and disclosure,” the court conceded, “but they did not constitute felonies. The judgments of conviction are reversed.” Miller never served a single day in jail. But the damage to his political career and reputation was already done. Someone else would have to lead the assembly Democrats through the remainder of the negotiations, and once again the clock was ticking.

Whoever succeeded Miller as Speaker would have to deal with Ralph Marino. The sixty-four-year-old Republican senate majority leader was something of a rarity in his own caucus; he represented a district in the New York metro area, rather than upstate. A native of Long Island, Marino was also considerably more moderate than many of his colleagues and was branded a Rockefeller Republican when he replaced Anderson as majority leader in 1989. Now he was facing pressure from high places to prevent the assembly Democrats from targeting more GOP incumbents, further entrenching their rapidly expanding majority.

At a 1990 Republican fundraiser in New York, President George H. W. Bush had singled out Marino in his remarks, emphasizing both the “importance of keeping control of this senate” and “the tremendous opportunity to fight the Democrat gerrymander” in the assembly. And there would now be a new Democrat sitting on the opposite side of the negotiating table. On December 16, Saul Weprin, the Queens Democrat who had campaigned for the speakership in 1986 but lost out to Miller, took over the leadership of the assembly. “This is not the way I wanted to become Speaker,” he told his colleagues.

He was a very different species of political animal from the man he replaced. “The tenure of the brash, loquacious, often combative Mr. Miller is expected to give way to a markedly different Weprin era,” wrote The New York Times, “led by a man who is understated, taciturn and who appears to place conciliation high in the pantheon of political virtues.” But just as Marino and Weprin appeared poised to shake hands on another bipartisan redistricting deal, the other man in the room stepped up and demanded a seat at the table.

“This year you’ve got a third player in reapportionment and that’s yours truly, and I’m not signing off in advance on anything,” Mario Cuomo told reporters at a press conference in December 1991. “I’m going to insist that it be constitutional, and I’m going to insist that it be fair.” Cuomo was not a fan of gerrymandering. The gregarious fifty-nine-year-old Democratic governor had been elected to succeed Hugh Carey in 1982 on a platform of progressive reforms. He later called for the establishment of an independent commission to take over the state’s redistricting responsibilities. But like generations of politicians before him, all the way back to the unfortunate Elbridge Gerry, for whom grand declarations of fair play inevitably gave way to the grim reality of winning elections, he would learn to tolerate the gerrymander’s political necessity, if not love its misshapen contours. In the meantime, though, he used the looming deadline as a bargaining chip, threatening to veto the legislature’s redistricting bills unless he received both budgetary concessions and sweeping changes to the state’s electoral laws. Neither Weprin nor Marino, however, was prepared to play ball.

Each chamber set about diligently crafting maps that would preserve their own incumbents while undermining those on the other side of the aisle. Marino’s senate plan drew ten Democratic incumbent senators into five districts, ensuring that at least five of them would be forced to either retire, move, or face the prospect of defeat in a primary election against a member of their own caucus. The state constitutional requirements that districts be compact, be regularly shaped, and avoid crossing county lines were entirely ignored.

Under Weprin’s assembly plan, for example, District 147, located outside the city of Buffalo, contained parts of six different counties, far in excess of what was necessary to comply with the federal constitutional requirements that the task force used to justify it. On the senate side, fully 46 percent of the districts crossed county lines, dividing twenty-three of the state’s sixty-two counties among multiple seats. And not to be outdone by their senate brethren, the assembly plan also paired eight Republican incumbents in four districts. No norms were left unbroken, no unwritten rules too sacrosanct that they could not be jettisoned in service of preserving the status quo. As Marino later described the process, “You take care of your house, and you leave us alone.”

By early March 1992, both chambers had voted to adopt their new plans. And those minority members whose seats had been preserved in the shuffle were falling over one another to throw their less fortunate colleagues under the bus. Seven Democrats crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans in the senate, while in excess of twenty Republicans did likewise in the assembly. Cuomo dragged out the negotiations for another two months, complaining bitterly about Marino’s senate plan in particular, while largely sparing Weprin’s equally egregious assembly gerrymander from similar criticism. But time was his enemy. With little prospect of forcing changes to the bills, and the filing deadline for the state’s primary elections rapidly approaching, he grudgingly signed them into law on May 4. He would not be the last governor named Cuomo to threaten such a veto, only to back down and accede to the legislature’s handshake deal.

Cuomo’s justification for the capitulation was weak, at best. A less charitable observer might have described it as self-serving twaddle. In a highly unusual “memorandum of explanation” accompanying his signature, he framed the decision as a kind of Sophie’s choice, between signing a defective bill into law and allowing the elections to proceed under either the old boundaries or a court-ordered plan. “If our Legislature does not draw them, they will be drawn by strangers whom we did not elect and who are not directly accountable to the citizens of the State for their judgments,” he lamented. “On that basis alone, I am signing these bills.”

In return, the senate passed a watered-down version of his electoral reform bill that had already passed the assembly earlier in the year. Cuomo, of course, claimed the credit. “Why did they do it this year?” he mused, tongue firmly planted in cheek. “My guess? They somehow got the impression it would help them with the redistricting bill. That’s only a guess.” Handshake deal number two was officially in the books.

The majorities in the New York State Assembly and Senate proved remarkably resilient in the face of the turbulent national electoral climate of the 1990s. Perhaps the best illustration of the perniciousness of the bipartisan gerrymander can be gained by zooming in on one particular county. According to 1994 registration figures, the electorate of Westchester County, situated along the banks of the Hudson River north of New York City, consisted of 39 percent Democrats, 33 percent Republicans, and 25 percent independents, making it one of the most evenly divided in the state. One might expect, therefore, that it would return a roughly balanced slate of Democrats and Republicans to the state legislature. This was not the case.

Saul Weprin’s assembly gerrymander packed as many Republican voters as possible into the supermajority Eighty-Seventh District, in which the GOP incumbent, Michael Spano, consistently ran unopposed. The remaining Republican populations in the county were cracked among the other six districts, all of which the Democrats won, although one of those seats would revert to Republican control in 1994. On the senate side, things were equally egregious. “By connecting the heavily Democratic areas of Mt. Vernon to the South Bronx; building a donut-shaped, largely white, North Bronx/Westchester district around it; and by extending part of another district into heavily Republican areas of Putnam and Dutchess counties,” one study concluded, “the Republicans are nearly as solid in their control of the Westchester senate delegation as are Democrats in the assembly.” The same voters returned a slate of candidates to Albany that was 86 percent Democratic for the assembly and 75 percent Republican for the senate. And the band played on.

The Third Handshake: Sheldon Silver, Joseph Bruno, and George Pataki

Before he was known as Inmate 71915-054, Sheldon Silver also answered to Mr. Speaker. An Orthodox Jew born into a family of Russian immigrants in 1944, Silver lived his entire life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His father ran a successful chain of wholesale hardware stores, allowing the family to move from the tenements of Henry Street to the somewhat more upscale Hillman development on Grand Street by the time of his fifth birthday. Politics had been a dream of his from a young age. “He’d always say that he wanted to be president of the United States, even at 10, 11 years old,” recalled Lenny Greher, a childhood friend, in a 2008 New York magazine profile. “If he wasn’t an Orthodox Jew, who knows? Maybe it could have happened.”

The knowledge of the art of the deal that would later facilitate his rise through the ranks of the Albany power-broking establishment had been instilled in Silver from the earliest stages of his upbringing. “My father taught us the value of a dollar,” he said, “and the rules of the game.” Those rules were elegant and above all simple: “Never negotiate against yourself,” and “You have to be able to walk away.” He also liked to play his cards close to the vest, developing the signature tic of lowering his voice to a largely unintelligible mumble at critical stages of conversations to conceal his intentions and allow himself to formulate a counterstrategy. “Some people call it playing games or telling you half of the story,” recounted a former legislative aide. “Really, all the low talk, it’s just a way to buy time, so he can figure out the best possible deal.”

Silver’s first love was the law. He enrolled initially at Yeshiva University, earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1965, before pursuing a law degree at Brooklyn Law School. His intention, spurred on by the encouragement of his father, was to pursue a career as a judge, but the appointments to New York City’s judgeships were controlled by the political machine. He would have to forge those connections first before even being considered a candidate. Silver’s initial foray into electoral politics came when he ran for the city council in 1974, losing by the agonizingly slim margin of ninety-five votes. Undeterred, and buoyed by the strong support he received from his Lower East Side community, he turned around and ran for the state assembly three years later. This time he won.

“I figured I’d spend a few years in public service, then become a judge,” he explained. But the inside baseball of the Albany sausage factory proved far more compelling than the siren song of the judiciary. Silver ended up spending the next thirty-eight years as a member of the assembly, twenty-one of them as Speaker. He did, however, find time to moonlight as a personal injury lawyer at the Manhattan firm of Weitz & Luxenberg, much to the consternation of his critics, of whom there have been many over the years. Under New York’s criminally lax governmental ethics laws, he never had to publicly disclose how much he earned from this side gig. Put a pin in that one.

A protégé of Saul Weprin, who took him under his wing when he assumed the speakership after Mel Miller’s expulsion in 1991, Silver proved himself adept at greasing palms, trading favors, and negotiating his way through the high-stakes games of no-limit political hold ’em that frequently played out in the corridors of the state capitol. Weprin, seeking to consolidate his own power base, swiftly named him the chairman of the influential Ways and Means Committee. That committee oversees the state’s budget negotiations, making him the second most powerful member of the chamber.

“My father saw a lot of himself in Shelly,” explained David Weprin, son of Saul and today a member of the state assembly himself. “My father was a low-key guy, not flamboyant, not looking for higher office, always trying to protect the members and protect the institution of the Assembly.” But two years into Saul Weprin’s term as Speaker, tragedy struck. He suffered a debilitating stroke and died suddenly at the age of sixty-six, creating yet another power vacuum at the center of the Democratic caucus. Sheldon Silver sensed his opportunity. On February 11, 1994, he was elected the 119th Speaker of the New York State Assembly.

That same year produced a changing of the guard for all three of the men in the room. Nine months after Weprin’s death, both Mario Cuomo and Ralph Marino also found themselves out of a job, one by virtue of a palace coup and the other at the hands of the voters. The instigator of both of their demises was George Pataki.

Pataki entered the decade as a relative unknown (“I prefer the chicken pataki to the beef pataki,” David Letterman later quipped on the Late Show). But the Yale- and Columbia-educated lawyer’s spectacular ambition, not to mention unbelievable chutzpah, would quickly catapult him to the very top of the state’s political hierarchy, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

In 1980, at the age of thirty-five, Pataki was elected as the youngest ever mayor of the small town of Peekskill in Westchester County, unseating the incumbent Democrat Fred Bianco in a 70–30 landslide. He then challenged another Democratic incumbent, Assemblyman William Ryan in 1985, and beat him too, becoming one of the few Republicans to represent a district in the New York metro area. But the 1991 Weprin-Marino handshake deal was not kind to him. His district, which had reelected him with more than 90 percent of the vote in 1990, found itself on the gerrymandering chopping block. Choice GOP precincts in Orange, Rockland, and Putnam Counties were drawn into surrounding Democratic seats in service of Weprin’s assembly gerrymander and replaced with more liberal enclaves in Westchester.

Pataki was unfazed. Rather than running for reelection in the newly redrawn district, and already harboring ambitions for a run for governor, he decided to jump ship to the senate to better position himself. There was one problem, though. His home district already had a Republican candidate in it—the seven-term incumbent Mary B. Goodhue. To complicate things further, Pataki had worked for Goodhue as a senate staffer in the early 1980s and considered her a friend. She was also the only woman in the entire GOP senate caucus. Marino discouraged him from challenging her, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Pataki was going places, and neither Marino nor the Republican U.S. senator Al D’Amato, who would later attempt to derail his campaign for governor, was going to stand in his way.

“If George Pataki had been scared of Ralph Marino, and the Republican establishment,” gushed the Albany GOP lobbyist James Featherstonhaugh, “there wouldn’t be a Governor Pataki. By and large you don’t get to be governor unless you’ve got some starch in your spine.” Opponents saw him somewhat differently. “George Pataki is whatever you want him to be at the moment,” said William Ryan, his former assembly opponent. “He’s an empty vessel.” “He did nothing,” echoed Fred Bianco, now the former mayor of Peekskill. “Absolutely nothing. That’s why he has to keep running for new offices so people won’t catch on.” “George uses people, and when they’re no longer useful to him, he sticks in the knife,” complained Mary Goodhue. “He made me look like a felon. He told everybody I was sick and old, I was dotty. Smearing is what he does.”

And it kept working. Pataki defeated Goodhue 52–48 percent in the 1992 Republican primary, then cruised to victory in the general election. Chalk these critiques up to sour grapes if you will, but even the plucky underdog account of Pataki’s very first electoral triumph, in the race for Peekskill High School senior class president, generated similar allegations of revisionist self-promoting puffery. “That’s pure Pataki mythology,” claimed Chris Stewart, a local journalist, when hearing his account of the events. “It was the start of a career-long political calculation,” wrote the Times Herald-Record. “He was the insider who ran as an outsider.”

While he would serve in the senate for less than a year, there was still time for Pataki to attempt another audacious act of political backstabbing. In cahoots with Joseph Bruno, the veteran upstate Republican senator, he mounted a challenge to Marino’s senate leadership. And though the attempted coup resulted in abject failure, both Pataki and Bruno would end up having the last laugh.

Next on the agenda was the scalp of the most famous and powerful politician in the state, and things had not been going well for Mario Cuomo. After he reneged on his threat to veto the 1991 redistricting bill, both his ability to influence the legislature and his approval ratings began to drop precipitously. During his 1992 state of the state address, Anthony Seminerio, a fellow Democrat, actually heckled him from the floor of the assembly. Cuomo’s almost comical vacillations over whether to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 1992 also earned him the nickname Hamlet on the Hudson.

Meanwhile, rising unemployment and the anemic economic recovery from the early 1990s recession began to stretch the pocketbooks of the Empire State’s residents. But it was perhaps Cuomo’s continued opposition to the death penalty in the face of unprecedented rates of violent crime (more homicides occurred during his third term than in any other four-year period in New York’s history) that made him uniquely vulnerable to challenge. When combined with the disastrous decision by state officials to parole the convicted child killer Arthur Shawcross—who went on to murder twelve more people in a two-year rampage that earned him the nickname the Genesee River Killer—Cuomo was courting a dangerous reputation as being soft on crime.

Still, Marino and D’Amato did not want George Pataki to be the one who challenged him. “Marino doesn’t want you,” D’Amato told Pataki, according to reporting from New York magazine, “and I don’t want a feud.” “Fine,” Pataki replied, “I’m running for governor.” In truth, it was Marino who was leading the crusade against the junior senator from Westchester County, with D’Amato along for the ride by virtue of the stark discrepancy in power between the two men in Albany. That discrepancy was about to be reversed. Though Marino tried in vain to find an alternative candidate to challenge Pataki in the Republican primary—with names like Donald Trump, the jewelry and telemarketing magnate David Cornstein, and the insurance CEO Frank Zarb all floated as possibilities in what Pataki derisively called his game of “millionaire of the week”—none of them stuck.

The Republican assembly leader Clarence Rappleyea eventually called Pataki and told him, “You’re going to be the candidate.” “But they’re floating Zarb now,” Pataki replied. “Think about it,” came the response. “They’ve gone through the Rolodexes, and they’re already up to Z. You’ve got it.” Pataki won the Republican primary with more than 75 percent of the vote, and D’Amato quickly threw his support behind him. Marino, still bitter about the unseating of Mary Goodhue, refused to endorse him. It was a decision he would pay for with his career.

Pataki’s timing could not have been more fortuitous. The state as a whole had been trending Democratic for some time, and would continue to do so. When Al D’Amato lost his 1998 Senate election to the Democrat Chuck Schumer, Pataki became the only Republican to occupy an elected statewide office, and the last one to do so to this day. But 1994 was a good year to be running as a Republican, even in New York. The party swept into power in Washington, and the crest of the national GOP wave proved sufficiently high to carry Pataki into the governor’s mansion. He defeated Cuomo 49–45 percent in the general election, largely on the basis of his upstate support. While Cuomo ran up huge margins in New York City, he won only one county outside the five boroughs, and that was Albany County, home to the state government. The entire race was amply summed up by Pataki’s campaign slogan: “It’s Mario’s Fault.”

On Thanksgiving, less than a month after the election, Pataki exacted his revenge on Marino. A group of GOP senators loyal to the new governor launched a coup against Marino’s leadership, the second attempt to unseat him in less than a year. This time, though, it was successful. With twenty-four of the thirty-six members of the Republican senate caucus—led by Dean Skelos, who convinced his fellow Long Island Republicans that Marino was expendable—signaling that they no longer supported him, Marino stepped aside. His lieutenant, Tony Colavita, was also delivered a welcome message from Pataki, courtesy of Senator Nick Spano, another one of the ringleaders of the coup: “Tony, I’m here to offer you the chance to chair your retirement party.” Pataki’s ally Joseph Bruno, who had joined him in the earlier revolt and was an early endorser of his gubernatorial campaign, was installed as majority leader. Three entirely different men from those who had been there at the start of 1994 now occupied the room.

As redistricting approached, Sheldon Silver was facing his own set of problems. Now six years into his speakership, his brash, insular leadership style had ruffled quite a few feathers among his Democratic colleagues in the assembly. One of his first moves had been to narrow the Speaker’s inner circle, declining to appoint a chief counsel—“Apparently, he fancied himself as his own best lawyer,” speculated Kenneth Shapiro, an Albany lobbyist and former chief counsel to the then Speaker, Stanley Steingut—and installing his protégé, the county boss Herman “Denny” Farrell Jr., as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

He also paid close attention to history, cognizant of how the trappings of leadership could distract a Speaker from the needs of his constituents. “Stanley forgot about home,” recalled Shapiro, referencing Steingut’s shocking 1978 primary defeat to the then-unknown challenger Murray Weinstein. “Shelly paid special attention to that lesson: Never forget about home.” Silver’s later downfall, though, would come from failing to learn the lesson of another former Speaker, Mel Miller, not to let his shady business dealings provide grist for his political opponents and eager prosecutors sniffing around for a trophy scalp. That particular story, however, will have to wait.

Before he could turn his attention to the post-2000 census line drawing, though, Silver would have to fend off his own attempted palace coup. Disgruntled elements within the Democratic caucus, frustrated by the perception that their needs were being neglected, launched an effort in May 2000 to unseat him. “You could not get five minutes with him, it was that bad,” complained Nelson Denis, who represented East Harlem. “My constituents were some of the poorest people in this city. We needed his help.” The coup was led by Silver’s own deputy, Majority Leader Michael Bragman, who on May 17 announced that he had the votes to remove the Speaker. “This is not going to fail, I’m absolutely confident,” he told reporters. The plot had been hatched at a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden earlier in the year, attended by Bragman and about a dozen Democratic colleagues.

“I knew it was coming, but I didn’t think he would do it so soon. I figured he would wait until after the elections,” Silver recalled. But even caught by surprise, he was not about to allow his upstart lieutenant to scuttle his career. It turned out that Bragman’s vote count was not quite as secure as he had thought. Diligently working the ears of his disgruntled charges, Silver fought back hard, stripping Bragman and his allies of their committee chairs, and even locking him out of his assembly office. His efforts were successful; thirty-three Democrats who had previously expressed support for Bragman jumped ship. The speakership was safe. Silver denied allegations that he had threatened the districts of the coup participants in order to bring them back in line. But it’s hard not to surmise that the upcoming redistricting effort, and Silver’s virtually unfettered control of it, played a role in heading off the uprising. As will soon be clear, he was not above using redistricting as a vehicle for exacting retribution against his enemies.

The third handshake deal, between Silver, Bruno, and Pataki, proceeded much more smoothly than the previous two had done. Pataki, unlike Cuomo, had no interest in rocking the boat, effectively giving the two legislative leaders free rein to draw their own maps. And while the growing Democratic strength in the state made Silver’s job straightforward, Bruno would have to work a lot harder to preserve his own majority. Doing so would require a far more audacious gerrymander than had previously been attempted.

“Because there are so many more Democrats than Republicans in New York State,” wrote Daniel Feldman and Gerald Benjamin in their book, Tales from the Sausage Factory, “the task of producing comfortable majorities without wasting supportive votes was particularly challenging for the Senate.” Bruno was more than up to the task. First on the agenda was to stretch the population deviation safe harbor allowed by the Supreme Court under its “one person, one vote” jurisprudence to the very limit. The senate districts drawn after the 1970 census had had an average population difference of 1.8 percent. To make his map work, Bruno was forced to push that to almost 10 percent, systematically shrinking the upstate Republican districts while enlarging the Democratic ones around New York City. But even that wasn’t enough.

“Abraham Lincoln riding a vacuum cleaner.”

To crack and pack the growing populations of Democratic voters, he was forced to resort to some truly outrageous distortions of the district boundaries. District 51, said to resemble “Abraham Lincoln riding a vacuum cleaner,” stretched half as tall and a third as long as the entire state, including all or part of seven different upstate counties. District 60, designed to capture every Democratic area in and around the city of Buffalo, consisted of two disconnected parts, one to the north that included Niagara Falls and a bifurcated segment of the city of Tonawanda, and the other to the south that shoehorned in Buffalo’s heavily African American precincts, creating a monstrosity in which Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a five-to-one ratio. The two sections were connected only by a one-mile stretch of the Niagara River, in a manner reminiscent of Phil Burton’s bay-hopping creation in Northern California.

District 49, centered on Syracuse, contained a meandering spiral arm that reached all the way to Lake Ontario, along with an added appendage to connect the city of Rome. It divided three counties and three towns. Twenty-seven of the sixty-two districts contained in excess of forty thousand more Democrats than Republicans, while none had a similar imbalance in the other direction. The map was described by The New York Times as “an inkblot that would confuse even Hermann Rorschach.”

On the assembly side, Sheldon Silver had two goals. The first was to bolster his already ample majority. This he achieved by shoring up the districts that were already held by Democratic incumbents while undermining those held by Republicans. The 131st District, for example, outside Rochester, was currently held by the Democratic assemblywoman Susan John. But the suburban and rural areas of her district had become increasingly Republican. So Silver added a hook-shaped protuberance to draw in some of the heavily Democratic precincts in the city itself, turning her marginal district into a safe Democratic seat. Problem solved. Silver’s map included sixty-eight districts where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than twenty thousand; there were only four such seats in which the reverse was true. It was essentially the opposite of what Bruno had done in the senate, where enough competitive districts, more than 20 percent of the total, had to be drawn to give the GOP a path to victory. Silver created only six competitive assembly districts, representing a mere 4 percent of the overall seats. He didn’t need to: there were already more than enough Democratic incumbents, and registered Democratic voters, to preserve his majority.

His second goal was to eliminate potential challengers to some of his assembly cronies. One of these was Roger Green, who had faced a significant primary challenge for his Brooklyn seat in 2000 from the attorney Hakeem Jeffries. The race had been a contentious one. At a debate between the candidates, Jeffries drew the ire of Green by referring to his opponent’s religion. “The issue in this race is not age—yes, the assemblyman is older, I’m younger,” Jeffries began. “It’s not religion—yes, the assemblyman is a practicing Muslim and I grew up in the Cornerstone Baptist Church.” Green interjected heatedly, “Practicing Muslim? Where’d that come from? I’m absolutely offended, are you trying to polarize our community?” Green then walked out of the debate.

Though Green won the primary with 59 percent of the vote, when Silver’s assembly map was unveiled, it turned out that Jeffries’s residence had been drawn out of the district. By one block. Green later claimed that he didn’t even know where Jeffries lived. Whether intentional or not, the fix was in. Both the assembly and the senate plans passed the legislature by comfortable margins in April 2002, and Governor Pataki dutifully signed them into law. Handshake deal number three was a go.

The Fourth Handshake: Sheldon Silver, Dean Skelos, and Andrew Cuomo

Joe Bruno’s senate gerrymander held up for about as long as Joe Bruno’s own career as majority leader. By the time of the 2008 election, the thirty-seven-to-twenty-five majority that the Republicans had enjoyed in his chamber after 2002 had been whittled down to a narrow thirty-two-to-thirty edge. As GOP incumbents retired, or sought higher office, the Democrats gradually won back some of the seats where they enjoyed a voter registration advantage. In a February special election, they had flipped an upstate seat along Lake Ontario in an area that the GOP had dominated for 120 years. But the process was slow. As the general election approached, Bruno’s anxiety was rising.

“If a cat has nine lives, Joe’s had 30,” one Democratic operative remarked. “Eventually, it’s up.” The historical fundraising advantage that had allowed Republican candidates to hold on in Democratic districts also appeared to be breaking. The upstate billionaire Tom Golisano, the owner of the Buffalo Sabres NHL team, had pledged $5 million to help Democrats win back control of the senate. The signs looked ominous. Bruno, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, announced that he would not seek reelection, and resigned the position of majority leader in June. His troubles, though, were only beginning.

Sheldon Silver had no such issues in the assembly, where the Democrats never dipped below the 102 seats they had held coming out of the 2002 midterms. By 2008, they controlled more than 70 percent of the chamber. Their advantage, cemented by the 2001 gerrymander, appeared unassailable, particularly given the party’s growing statewide registration advantage and the unpopularity of the Bush administration in Washington. That unpopularity deepened even further as the 2008 financial crisis played out, scuttling the campaign of the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain. Bush’s approval numbers sank into the mid-20s, a low matched only by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon. It was not a good year to be running for political office as a Republican.

Barack Obama won 63 percent of the vote in New York that November, the largest margin of victory since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Even the resignation earlier in the year of the state’s Democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer, in the wake of a prostitution scandal, could not stand in the way of the party’s relentless march toward victory. Obama’s coattails were just long enough to finally crack the GOP’s stranglehold on the senate after forty-four years of unbroken control, to the tune of a narrow thirty-two-to-thirty majority. Then things really kicked off.

On January 23, 2009, a mere two weeks after the Democrat Malcolm Smith had assumed the position of senate majority leader, Bruno was indicted by a federal grand jury on eight felony corruption charges. The indictment alleged that for more than fifteen years Bruno had been running a consultancy business out of his Albany office, racking up $3.2 million in fees to grease the wheels for businesses that were competing for state contracts. None of the payments had been reported on his ethics disclosure forms. Such financial arrangements were apparently commonplace among state politicians, part and parcel of a system where the will of the voters was largely irrelevant to who got to control the levers of power.

Then, on June 10, two Democratic senators, Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada, announced that they would join with the Republicans in voting to remove Smith as majority leader. Chaos broke out on the senate floor. The remaining twenty-eight Democrats frantically attempted to adjourn the session to head off the coup, at one point walking out of the chamber en masse, turning out the lights, and ending the television broadcast. Now sitting in the dark, the thirty Republicans and two Democratic defectors purported to pass a resolution naming Dean Skelos, one of the ringleaders of the coup that had ousted Ralph Marino, the new majority leader. Democrats claimed the vote was invalid, because the session had already adjourned. In a farce befitting a Marx Brothers movie, two competing factions both claimed to be in control of the senate.

Allies of Malcolm Smith’s withheld the keys to the senate chamber, locked away the copies of pending bills, and directed the stenographer, journal clerk, and sergeant at arms to ignore any directive from Skelos’s office. Governor David Paterson announced that he would cancel all out-of-state travel until the crisis was resolved, amid uncertainty about who would serve as acting governor in his absence. This role was usually fulfilled by the lieutenant governor, but that office had been vacant since Spitzer’s resignation. Lawsuits proliferated from both sides, but the courts refused to issue relief for either, essentially telling the senators to figure it out themselves.

Things dragged on for a month as the business of the state government effectively ground to a halt. Monserrate eventually had a change of heart, returning to the Democratic caucus on June 15, creating a thirty-one-to-thirty-one tie in the senate. This only created additional confusion, because under state law tied votes in the senate are broken by, you guessed it, the lieutenant governor. On July 8, Paterson attempted to appoint the former Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman Richard Ravitch to the position, a move that had never before been attempted in the history of the state. The Democratic attorney general Andrew Cuomo opined that the appointment was more than likely illegal. More lawsuits ensued.

Finally, on July 9, Espada announced that he too would be rejoining the Democrats, in return for a deal that would install him as the new majority leader, making him the fourth man to occupy that position in a little over a year. The next day, the senate passed 135 separate bills that had been held in abeyance since the crisis began. Paterson later estimated that the entire debacle had cost taxpayers almost $150 million. It was, suffice to say, not a good look for anyone involved.

The implications of the crisis for redistricting would be determined by what happened in the 2010 elections. Neither Monserrate nor Espada was around to see it. Monserrate had been expelled from the senate in February after a misdemeanor conviction for domestic assault, while Espada, now under criminal investigation by the FBI, IRS, and Attorney General Cuomo, was defeated by a landslide in his September primary election. And, amid the Republican wave that proved crucial to the subsequent implementation of REDMAP, the GOP won back the senate, returning Dean Skelos to his leadership position with a narrow thirty-two-to-thirty majority.

The state would also have a new occupant of the governor’s mansion, because the embattled Paterson withdrew his candidacy amid a challenge from Andrew Cuomo, who then ran riot over his Republican opponent, Carl Paladino, in the general election. Just as it had appeared that the three-decade handshake deal streak might be broken, things were back to business as usual in Albany. And that included yet more criminal prosecutions.

In October, Monserrate had been indicted on federal corruption charges after allegedly funneling $300,000 in state funds to a nonprofit that he ran, portions of which were then used to pay his campaign expenses. He pleaded guilty and spent twenty-one months in federal prison. Then, in December, Espada was also indicted, this time on six counts of embezzlement and theft, after using public money to, among other things, purchase tickets to Broadway shows and take care of the down payment on a Bentley. He was found guilty on all counts and served five years in a federal penitentiary. Bruno was also convicted, although an appeals court later overturned the verdict. At his second trial, he was acquitted by the jury.

Across the capitol, Sheldon Silver watched the chaos as it played out. His own legal reckoning was still several years away, as was that of Dean Skelos, now once again his opposite number in the senate. But the incoming governor, Andrew Cuomo, like his father two decades before, promised to be more of an adversary to the continuation of the handshake deals than George Pataki had been.

Cuomo’s 2010 campaign had come at a time when redistricting reform was front and center on the state’s political agenda. Bill Samuels, described by the New York Observer as a “liberal activist and gadfly,” had launched a campaign, in conjunction with the former New York City mayor Ed Koch, to encourage candidates to sign a pledge to pass legislation creating an independent redistricting commission. The hope was to finally break the logjam in Albany and return to the voters the power to rein in the rampant corruption in the legislature.

More than 350 candidates, including Cuomo, had signed the pledge. A hundred and thirty-eight of them were subsequently elected. Cuomo also placed redistricting reform front and center during his run, devoting as much page space to the issue in his campaign policy book as he had to that of education. And as the legislative task force convened in the wake of the 2010 census to begin drawing up new district lines, he appeared to be sticking to his guns. In public remarks in July 2011, Cuomo promised, “I will veto lines that are not drawn by an independent commission that are partisan.” When asked if he believed that the task force could deliver such lines, he responded, “No, I don’t. It’s not non-partisan.” Awkward double negatives aside, Cuomo appeared committed to following through on his pledge. But like his father, he would end up reneging on that promise, at least in the minds of his critics.

Neither Silver nor Skelos appeared to be especially deterred by the governor’s public statements. Each set about drawing districts designed to once again preserve their respective majorities. But Skelos found himself in an even more unenviable position than his predecessor, Joe Bruno, had faced a decade earlier. Registered Democrats now outnumbered Republicans in the state by a two-to-one margin. And as the 2008 election had proven, such an imbalance was a significant obstacle to even the most creative of gerrymanders.

To make the map work, he was forced to resort to the same trick that Marino had employed in the 1990s, adding an additional seat to the senate, to bring the total to sixty-three. The new district, a more than hundred-mile-long monstrosity, meandered through the GOP strongholds in the suburbs and old industrial towns around Albany, before ending up in Poughkeepsie. Other than spectacular views of the Hudson River, there was very little that its disparate parts had in common. The district happened to contain the home of the Republican real estate developer and incumbent assemblyman George Amedore, who was expected to self-finance a campaign in 2012. He went on to lose to his Democratic opponent by only nineteen votes following a recount, demonstrating how thinly Skelos had been forced to slice his margins to create a map in which a Republican majority was even feasible.

The six Democratic incumbents representing Queens were redrawn into three districts, forcing them to either move or compete with one another in the primaries. District 51, west of Albany, included all or part of nine different counties and was so sprawling that the advocacy group Citizens Union estimated that it would take almost six hours to drive between its most distant corners. District 20, in Kings County, included a twenty-six-block-long corridor only a block wide that connected its main Prospect Heights neighborhood to a distant appendage in Sunset Park. District 11 in Queens crossed both the Long Island Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway before tacking on segments of Jamaica Heights that were only accessible on foot during low tide.

Almost as bizarre was District 16, also in Queens. “This absurdly drawn district,” wrote Citizens Union, “while well-intended in its goal to elect an Asian American, does so through nonsensical means. The district tiptoes through Whitestone along the Cross Island Parkway, makes a sharp 90 degree turn south along the Whitestone Expressway, takes in a chunk of Flushing, and then shoots out two elongated tentacles stretching into eastern and western Queens.” “District 29,” they continued, “posits the false notion that Central Park and the South Bronx are a community of interest. It also includes Roosevelt Island in the East River yet not a single block on the Upper East Side.”

District 31, less than a block wide in certain places, stretches almost the entire length of Manhattan. The New York Observer also got in on the fun, putting together a slideshow of some of the most bizarrely shaped districts, along with their alleged resemblances. These included “the silhouetted hair of Conan O’Brien” (District 35); “an extinct Pterodactyl perched precariously on a tree limb” (District 27); “a man wearing an elaborate, feathered headdress while projectile vomiting” (District 51); “a male camel that’s missing one leg and has a rather prominent package” (District 32); and perhaps my personal favorite, “a man with a prominent nose urinating on a small turkey.” In my opinion, the urinating man bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump urinating on a small turkey.”

And finally, by systematically underpopulating Democratic districts in New York City while overpopulating those held by GOP incumbents upstate through creative prison gerrymandering, Skelos was able to allocate one less seat to the Big Apple than strict adherence to mathematical equality would require. It was a master class in extracting every ounce of juice that could possibly be squeezed from the state’s electorate, and even then it was only just enough. Despite losing the popular vote by double digits in 2012, the Republicans nevertheless clung to the slimmest of majorities, winning thirty-two seats to the Democrats’ thirty-one.

Sheldon Silver’s assembly map was no more restrained in its creative use of oddly shaped, uncompact, community-dividing districts, although he had no particular need to resort to any of these tricks. But as Cuomo became ever squishier on his promise to veto a partisan plan, and began signaling his willingness to work with the Republicans in the senate, Silver became increasingly concerned about preserving a veto-proof majority in the assembly. This would require him to fashion more than a hundred districts that the Democrats could be reasonably assured of winning. His plan, unveiled by the task force in January 2012 alongside Skelos’s senate map, contained more than its fair share of affronts to the practice of cartography.

District 13, nicknamed the donut, was drawn specifically to elect a Democrat amid the Republican Nassau County strongholds of Westbury, Oyster Bay, and Glen Cove, on Long Island’s north shore. It straddles the coastline for miles, at one point jumping across Oyster Bay from Centre Island to Cove Neck, before looping back on itself and terminating on the other side of the Long Island Expressway from where it began. To traverse from one end to the other would require one to either be an extremely strong swimmer or have access to a rowboat.

But perhaps even more egregious was District 101, a 127-mile-long jagged sliver running from Oneida County east of Syracuse in the north, close to Lake Ontario, down to Orange County on the New Jersey border in the south. What do the citizens of the rural Tug Hill Plateau and the outskirts of the New York City metropolitan suburbs have in common? The answer is their tendency to vote Republican. Dubbed the “leftovers” district, the 101st was designed to vacuum up every lingering GOP community in its path, allowing the Democrats to capture surrounding seats. The district’s incumbent representative, the Republican Claudia Tenney, joked to the press that she would now need a mobile home in order to visit all of her constituents.

But would her district, and the others unveiled by the task force in January 2012, even see the light of day? A spokesperson for Governor Cuomo immediately threw cold water on the plans. “At first glance,” he told the press, “these lines are simply unacceptable and would be vetoed by the governor. We need a better process and product.” But when the final redistricting plan was passed by both houses of the state legislature in March, it was virtually identical to the earlier proposal. Cuomo was in a bind. While publicly insisting that he still intended to veto them (“He’s not backing off his position,” an administration official told the New York Daily News. “Nothing has changed”), in private he began angling for a deal that would allow him to save face.

The terms were simple. If Cuomo agreed to sign the heavily gerrymandered districts that had emerged from the legislature, they must commit to passing his proposed constitutional amendment to create an independent redistricting commission. Silver and Skelos agreed. On March 15, the legislature passed the amendment, and Cuomo signed the plans into law, exactly as his father had done in 1992. “It’s over, once and for all,” he declared. “You can’t live your life in a goldfish bowl.” And with that, the final handshake deal was completed. In the November 2014 election, New Yorkers endorsed the redistricting commission proposal by a 58–42 percent margin. That commission, rather than the legislative task force, would be primarily responsible for redrawing the state’s assembly, senate, and congressional districts after the 2020 census.

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What lessons can be drawn from this four-decade redistricting debacle? The first is that, contrary to what many may believe, gerrymandering does not require one party to be in total control of the machinery of state government to consistently subvert the will of the electorate. Politicians, above all, are motivated by self-interest. In an ideal world, they would certainly like to be in a position to rig election results in their party’s favor, as the Wisconsin Republicans had done during REDMAP. But the best-laid plans of mice and men must sometimes yield to the cold hard reality of divided government. And if a deal can be struck by opposing factions to preserve the status quo to the mutual benefit of incumbents on both sides, leaving the voters to pick up the tab, such is the price of doing business.

For decades, New York’s legislature was among the most corrupt and dysfunctional in the nation, and still nothing changed. Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit. In a two-party system, where the courts have abrogated their responsibility as the watchdogs of democracy, the voters have little recourse other than to choose their foxes. Here, the competing foxes had already agreed ahead of time to divide the chickens evenly among themselves, no matter which pack happened to make it inside the henhouse first.

The second is that gerrymandering is a potent recipe for corruption, especially when combined with lax ethics regulations and a culture of playing fast and loose with the public trust. According to research by Jeffrey Milyo and Scott Delhommer at the University of Missouri, between 2005 and 2015 no fewer than thirty New York state officials of both parties were involved in corruption cases. This was more than any other state, and twice as many as every state except Pennsylvania, which came in second with twenty-four. That same research also showed New York atop the list since at least 1986.

A report by the nonpartisan PolitiFact website similarly concluded that “the data shows New York State has led the nation in public corruption for decades.” Jennifer Rodgers of the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity opined, “While measuring corruption is a challenge, I think it’s fair to say that New York remains one of the most corrupt states if not the most corrupt state.” “Much of corruption is cultural, and in New York that means that you have to think about the way the New York political system has developed over more than 200 years,” she continues. “So you start with these corrupt political machines like Tammany Hall, and over time the problem replicates itself as the next generation figures out how things work and how much corruption will be tolerated, and so on down the line.” When gerrymandering means that nothing short of a criminal indictment will threaten your reelection odds, that tolerance is apparently pretty damn high.

Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos both learned their lesson the hard way. After decades of lining his pockets from his lucrative side practice, Silver was arrested by federal authorities in January 2015 on seven felony counts of bribery, extortion, fraud, and conspiracy. According to the indictment, Silver had received more than $4 million in referral fees, bribes, and kickbacks from two law firms with which he was affiliated, in return for using his influence as assembly Speaker to direct business and state grants to them and their clients. After a lengthy trial, a federal jury found him guilty on all seven counts, and the judge sentenced him to twelve years in federal prison.

The conviction carried with it mandatory expulsion from the assembly, ending his career as Speaker. He remained free on bail while he pursued an appeal, and in 2017 a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated his conviction on technical grounds. In 2018, he was tried again on the same charges, once again found guilty on all counts, and this time sentenced to seven years. On January 21, 2020, the appeals court again dismissed three of the charges against him but allowed the other four to stand. Finally, in June, Judge Valerie E. Caproni sentenced him to seventy-eight months in federal prison. “This was corruption pure and simple,” she stated at the hearing. “The time has now come for Mr. Silver to pay the piper.”

Skelos faced the music a few months later. In May 2015, he was indicted on eight felony counts of bribery, extortion, fraud, and conspiracy, along with his son, Adam, who was the main beneficiary of the scheme. The complaint alleged that he had used his position as majority leader to steer public benefits to three companies—a real estate developer, an environmental technology company, and a medical malpractice insurer—in return for some $300,000 in cash payments and benefits. Like Silver, he was alleged to have received more than $2.6 million in referral fees from a law firm to steer clients to them who had business before the state, despite performing no actual legal work on their behalf.

Less than two weeks after Silver had been convicted in the same courthouse, a jury found both men guilty on all eight counts. The Skeloses appealed, and in 2017 the Second Circuit also overturned their convictions, based on similar technical deficiencies as in the Silver case. In their second trial in 2018, both men were again found guilty on all counts, and Skelos was sentenced to four years and three months in federal prison. Having begun his sentence in January 2019, he was released in April 2020, when the Bureau of Prisons granted him permission to serve the remainder of his time in home confinement. Both Silver and Skelos maintained that they did nothing wrong.

How could corruption have run so deep throughout the government of one of the nation’s largest states? How could generations of lawmakers, of both parties, be so consistently assimilated into a culture where what mattered was not what you could do to better the lives of your constituents but how best you could line your own pockets? I certainly don’t mean to suggest that gerrymandering was the only reason for the Empire State’s persistent dysfunction. Lax ethics rules, and a general indifference among the public toward white-collar crime, at least when it’s their side that’s committing it, certainly played a significant part as well. But there’s scarcely a corner of New York politics or policy making that was not in some way dirtied by the stain of the handshake deals.

The state’s broken budgeting process, for example, was clearly exacerbated by chronic divided government created by gerrymandering, sparking fiscal crisis after fiscal crisis for which the citizens inevitably paid the bill. The parade of lawmakers who passed through the revolving doors between Albany and the Southern District’s federal courthouses were but a symptom of a broader disease. A broken system where the will of the people counts little for who wins elections and who controls the purse strings. When human beings are not held accountable in some way for their bad behavior, that behavior is allowed to fester. Stick your mitts in the cookie jar once and get away with it, and you’re much more likely to go back for a second dip. Pretty soon, the grubby paws of those around you start twitching too.

The nineteenth-century British aristocrat John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, better known as Lord Acton, once famously wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Clearly, the leaders of the New York legislature had become accustomed to, and corrupted by, their power. But that same letter by Acton, written to Archbishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, contains another dictum that is perhaps a little more apropos. “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it,” he wrote. “That is the point at which the end learns to justify the means.”

Here, I think, is the harm of gerrymandering in a nutshell. Silver, Skelos, Bruno, and their ilk all came to see the offices they held, and the majorities they commanded, not as a privilege conferred on them to serve at the pleasure of the people they represented but as something they were entitled to, something that belonged to them. Their property. Or maybe it was simply greed. The great NBC television producer Don Ohlmeyer perhaps put it best of all. “The answer to all your questions,” he said, “is money.”