The crumbling campaign of congressional hopeful Jon Powers reached the bottom of the barrel last week, as the candidate enlisted the aid of Niagara Falls Democratic chairman and renowned political dirty trickster Dan Rivera in attacking Jack Davis, his main opponent in the September primary.
Rivera called a news conference the day before a highly damaging article about Powers appeared in the Buffalo News to announce that he personally had uncovered evidence of fraud in nominating petitions submitted by the Davis campaign, which were approved by both the Niagara County Board of Elections and the state Board of Elections.
In a letter to District Attorney Michael Violante, Rivera asked for an official investigation into whether or not the petitions were properly witnessed.
"It is the responsibility of the Democratic Party to clean up our own backyard, and such acts, whether you determine them to be illegal or not, should not be tolerated," Rivera wrote.
Perhaps the chairman would have done well to check a little closer to his own home prior to making the unsubstantiated charge. He might have found out that his own employer, Buffalo attorney and Democratic dealmaker Marc Panepinto, has already been convicted of the same offense.
Panepinto hired Rivera following the 2006 Democratic Primary here, during which Rivera improperly used his authority as an insurance investigator to obtain long-sealed police files on Gary Parenti, who was challenging state Rep. Francine Del Monte.
Rivera's employer, Liberty Mutual, fired the political hack after Parenti sued and recovered a sizable settlement for invasion of privacy. Panepinto saw potential in the political operative, and hired him to do investigations on behalf of his law firm.
But apparently Rivera forgot to investigate Panepinto. If he had, he would have discovered that the former Laborers Local 210 organizer was charged with election law violations, pleading guilty in Erie County Court and earning a conviction on Oct. 11, 2001. Panepinto admitted to the court that he had signed his name as a subscribing witness to nominating petitions that were not in fact signed in his presence and turned out to contain fraudulent signatures.
The misdemeanor conviction resulted in Panepinto paying a fine.
But he was subsequently suspended by the New York State Bar Association, a decision he fought all the way to the state Appellate Court, which upheld the suspension in 2001.
"This Court determined that misconduct in relation to petitions is a serious crime," the judges stated.
Rivera claimed to possess notarized affidavits from nine North Tonawanda residents who allege they signed Davis petitions witnessed by a female, Kelly Taylor, which had actually been circulated by an unidentified man. If Violante eventually finds any wrongdoing in the case, any charges that might come up would not go before a judge before next spring at the earliest.
Not so coincidentally, Rivera's news conference was timed to coincide with a Buffalo News article by Bob McCarthy that detailed the finances of War Kids Relief, a charity founded by Powers to allegedly provide aid for Iraqi children orphaned by the war there.
The organization raised somewhere between $150,000 and $250,000 for the orphans, money collected from private donors throughout Western New York who were touched by Powers' pitch. The candidate is a former substitute schoolteacher who served as an Army officer in Iraq in 2003.
While the charity has yet to file a required statement with the Internal Revenue Service detailing expenditures and contributions, Powers apparently paid himself $77,000 in salary for running the operation over a period of 18 months, McCarthy wrote.
Over that period of time, one small shipment containing some soccer balls and a few school backpacks stuffed with pencils and crayons made it to the war orphans.
In 2007, Powers traveled to Washington, D.C., and lobbied the Democratic Congress for $1 million to fund his program, but his request was rejected. Still, his efforts were enough to earn him profiles on CNN, ABC and the "Nightly News With Brian Williams" on NBC. He parlayed that notoriety into a congressional run, announcing his candidacy a short while later. Since that time, his campaign has directed most of its efforts to waging a highly negative campaign against Davis, one filled with personal attacks, allegations of impropriety and even criminal activity.
And at the center of the smear campaign, Rivera is hoping for a repeat of 2006, when Del Monte squeaked past Parenti, in part due to the chairman's bag of dirty tricks.
"Clearly, the attack on Davis was directed to take attention away from Powers' own troubles with his so-called charity," one longtime Democratic strategist told the Reporter. "You can't help but think that a large part of the money he said he was raising for war orphans went instead into his own pocket so he could run for Congress."
Although McCarthy's expose ran on Aug. 5, Powers has yet to issue any sort of denial. He is floundering in the polls, and has scant resources compared to Davis, a self-made millionaire and populist who came very close to unseating Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Reynolds for the same seat two years ago.
Even if he can somehow pull off a win, he will have to face Republican Chris Lee in November with little cash on hand and allegations swirling around War Kids Relief still dogging his trail.
Lee is a wealthy Tonawanda industrialist whose family business, International Motion Control, was sold last year. The split in the Democratic Party here is no more evident than in Niagara Falls, where the city committee has all but severed ties with the county chairman. Under Rivera's watch, the Republican caucus edge in the county Legislature has grown to 14-5, and -- if Niagara Falls City Police Chief of Detectives Ernie Palmer wins the sheriff's race in November as expected -- GOP officeholders will occupy every important elected position in county government.
Candidates unendorsed by the party beat endorsed candidates in both the mayoral and City Council races last year, and a July fund-raiser staged by Rivera at the Red Coach Inn to raise money for the party drew just 18 party hacks and social climbers.
State Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith, who was to have been the guest of honor at the event, refused to attend when he was made aware of an incident earlier this summer, which resulted in the resignation of veteran Lewiston activist Diane Roberts over what she said were harassment and intimidation by Rivera.
The differences between the city committee and Rivera's county mob came to the forefront again two weeks ago, when Democratic stalwart Johnny Cheff held his annual picnic at Hyde Park in support of Palmer, a Republican, and hammered the final nail into the political coffin of Dep. James Voutour, the endorsed Democratic candidate and former sheriff Tom Beilein's hand-picked successor for the office.
"The disintegration of the Democratic Party under Rivera has been an astonishing thing to see," a saddened Democrat said this past weekend. "He couldn't have done any more to destroy the party had he been working for (Republican Chairman) Henry Wojtaszek."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Aug. 12 2008 |