Joe Percoco, a close friend of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s and formerly one of his top political advisers, was arrested last week on charges related to an alleged corruption scheme. PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE GROLL / AP

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, can be grateful that the lowest moment of his tenure took place on a busy news day last week. While the nation was preoccupied with the Presidential election and the aftermath of a police shooting in Charlotte, Cuomo’s best friend, who has also been one of his closest political advisers, was arrested on charges related to what is allegedly a seedy corruption scheme that took place right under the governor’s nose.

In his eulogy for his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo, in January of 2015, Andrew Cuomo gave that friend, Joe Percoco, the warmest salute of any non-family member. Cuomo said that Percoco was like “my father’s third son, who I sometimes think he loved the most.” Now forty-six, Percoco began volunteering on Mario’s campaigns when he was nineteen, and has spent most of his life working for one Cuomo or another, with his latest (and final) turn as one of Andrew’s closest aides in the executive chamber in Albany. He was also the campaign manager for Cuomo’s successful reëlection bid, in 2014. Through these years, Percoco had no particular policy portfolio (or expertise) to speak of but, rather, served as a kind of political bodyguard for the governor, rewarding friends and punishing enemies.

Percoco was also on the take, according to the federal criminal complaint filed by Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. (Through a lawyer, Percoco denied the charges.) In a way, the scheme seems remarkably simple. In 2012, Percoco and his wife, Lisa Toscano-Percoco, a schoolteacher, bought a home in Westchester for eight hundred thousand dollars, which they could not afford on their salaries. So Percoco, according to the complaint, accepted three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars in bribes, mostly laundered through little-work jobs for his wife, from businesses that were seeking state government contracts. The complaint quotes from Percoco’s e-mails, which suggest that he knew he was engaged in illicit activity because he used code words for the payments. (Admittedly, the code was simpleminded, using, for instance, the term “boxes of ziti” for “money.” The term apparently originated in a scene from “The Sopranos.”)

This would all be bad enough for the governor—a betrayal of public trust by an intimate adviser. But the story for Cuomo may be considerably worse. The charges suggest that one of his signature initiatives—the Buffalo Billion project, a plan to revitalize that troubled city—is beset by corruption and self-dealing. Six other people are charged in Bharara’s seventy-nine-page complaint, including several players who were instrumental in the Buffalo plan. Among those charged with bid-rigging is Alain Kaloyeros, who, as the head of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, was one of the architects of Cuomo’s economic-development efforts. (Kaloyeros has also denied the charges.) A lobbyist named Todd Howe appears to have played middleman (and bagman) in the scheme, and he has pleaded guilty and is coöperating against the others.

Cuomo himself is not charged in the case, and Bharara, in a news conference, said that the governor was not personally implicated in the alleged illegal activity. Cuomo said after the charges were filed that he was unaware of any improper behavior by his aides. But what would it say about Cuomo’s leadership if he did, indeed, turn over a major part of his power as governor to this motley collection of (alleged) crooks? When I profiled Cuomo, in 2015, I found that he was often portrayed by his subordinates as a control freak, fixated on putting his stamp on every corner of state government, but especially the Buffalo Billion. Either way—whether Cuomo did or did not know about the alleged rot in his midst—the verdict on his governorship would be a harsh one.

As for Bharara, whom I also recently profiled, the charges represent the chance for sweet vindication. When Cuomo shut down the Moreland Commission, a body that was supposed to be his own attempt to identify and limit corruption in Albany, Bharara tried but failed to make a case involving obstruction of justice on the part of the governor and his circle. Now Bharara has made a related case, if not against the governor himself.

But to what end? Through many years and scandals, the power structure in Albany has proved to be incapable of policing itself. In the year before the Percoco case, Bharara won convictions against the two most powerful legislators in the state, Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the Assembly, and Dean Skelos, the former majority leader of the State Senate. Little appears to have changed. Albany prosecutors, asleep at the switch, seem to be relying on Bharara, from his distant perch in Manhattan, to do their work for him. Cuomo, despite this embarrassment, is probably headed for a third term in 2018, in large part because the stable of plausible opponents is bare. Bharara keeps cutting off branches, but the tree of corruption in Albany, diseased and unsightly, still stands.