On Monday, former acting counsel to the governor, Seth Agata, testified that administration employees essentially needed Joe Percoco’s blessing before they were able to depart. | AP Photo Former senior Cuomo officials say aides were threatened when they tried to leave

Two former high-ranking aides to Gov. Andrew Cuomo testified this week in the federal corruption trial of former Cuomo aide Joe Percoco that he and other members of the governor’s senior staff threatened employees who tried to leave the administration for the private sector.

The testimony came as prosecutors tried to give jurors a glimpse of how powerful Percoco was in the executive chamber. Known as the governor's enforcer, Percoco is charged with accepting bribes from a lobbyist and real estate executives who stand accused of paying him in exchange for his pressure on state agencies on their behalf.


On Monday, former acting counsel to the governor, Seth Agata, testified that administration employees essentially needed Percoco’s blessing before they were able to depart.

“I think [the executive] chamber's staff are free to go at any time, but I was aware that there were times when Joe's clearance, or — I guess permission's not the right word because there is no form of control — but people would want to run it by Joe before someone left the executive chamber,” Agata said in testimony.

Agata specifically recalled an instance in which an attorney in the counsel’s office, John Regan, was offered a job at a private law firm but felt he needed Percoco’s permission before he could accept.

Agata told Regan he’d speak to Percoco. When he did, he recalled Percoco asking “Well, do you need him to stay? Do you want him to stay?”

Agata didn’t, so Percoco said he didn’t care if Regan came or went and Regan was allowed to leave, according to testimony.

Former Deputy Director of State Operations Andrew Kennedy, who left state government in June of 2016 to become president and CEO of the Center for Economic Growth, told jurors Tuesday that he’d considered leaving the administration in the summer of 2014, when he was still the assistant secretary for economic development.

He’d been offered a job at the University of Albany doing government relations, and had accepted, but was “encouraged to reconsider taking that position by the Secretary to the governor,” Larry Schwartz.

“The secretary suggested I not pursue” the opportunity, Kennedy said. “Otherwise, the governor’s office would call the university and recommend that they reconsider their offer.”

Kennedy and Agata’s testimony feeds a narrative that has long circulated in the Capitol as former senior aides who departed for private sector jobs reappeared at Cuomo’s events or did behind-the-scenes spin for reporters on background when the administration required.

The joke was that Cuomo’s office is something like Albany’s answer to “Hotel California” — a place where you could check out any time you like, but you could never leave.

In court filings made before the trial began, federal prosecutors said they planned to introduce evidence showing that between 2011 and 2016, while he worked for the administration and for the Cuomo re-election campaign, “Percoco threatened at least four New York State employees ... who were considering leaving their current jobs or State service entirely, by claiming that Percoco would use his extensive influence in New York State to prevent them from finding future employment.”

Those employees were not named in the filing, but prosecutors said they included people who served as, “the Director of Operations for New York State, the Deputy Commissioner for Public Affairs of the New York Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, the Executive Deputy Commissioner of the Office of General Services and an Executive Chamber employee who sought to work at SUNY [Polytechnic Institute].”

It’s not clear whether the state operations director in question is Howard Glaser, who left the Cuomo administration in 2014 , or Jim Malatras, his successor. Malatras left the administration to become president of SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute in 2017, but previous positions he lined up did not come to fruition.

Sources told POLITICO the remaining three employees were, respectively, Peter Cutler, Joe Rabito, and Dan Brown. The men either didn’t respond to messages seeking comment or declined.

In court filings, Percoco’s defense attorneys dismissed those former employees’ experiences as fiction, invented by the lobbyist Todd Howe, who was involved with the alleged bribery schemes in which Percoco is accused of participating.

“These assertions are baseless, and their vagueness suggests that they do not arise from interviews of the relevant employees, but rather the opportunistic imagination of Todd Howe, a government cooperator who has demonstrated a penchant for prevarication,” Percoco lawyer Barry Bohrer wrote.

Jimmy Vielkind contributed to this report.