The retrial of former state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Adam Skelos begins Tuesday, meaning a jury will again hear embarrassing wiretap conversations between the powerful father and his oddly immature adult son.
“Dad’s here to help, so just remember,” the elder Skelos told his son in one conversation from 2015. “Don’t freak out.”
“Aaaaargh! This day sucks!” Adam griped to his dad in another call after finding out an alleged moneymaking scheme was not going to work.
“I’m going to now refocus on a lot of other things with you, OK, pal?” the once-powerful Nassau County Republican replied.
Father and son face retrial on bribery and extortion charges for a scheme in which the elder Skelos allegedly strong-armed companies with state business into giving his 36-year-old son no-show jobs.
The Skeloses were bonded so strongly that one family therapist told the Daily News that “this father did not allow this boy to grow.”
“You know who I am. I’m Adam Skelos,” Adam Skelos told his supervisor on his first day of work at a job his dad got for him, according to testimony from the first trial.
In yet another call, Adam Skelos told a supervisor — after the funeral for hero NYPD cop Wenjian Liu — that wakes are good places “to get a lot of business done.”
Judge Kimba Wood sentenced Dean, 70, to five years in prison and Adam to six and a half years in 2016. The verdicts were thrown out due to a Supreme Court decision redefining what constitutes bribery of a public official.
Former state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver got a retrial for the same reason. It ended in his conviction — again — last month.
Wood will oversee the Skelos retrial, which will take place just down the hall from the courtroom where former SUNY Polytechnic Institute head Alain Kaloyeros will be tried alongside three upstate developers.
“The conduct and the underlying evidence would constitute corruption under the new definition — but the jury instructions will be different, which is what happened in the Sheldon Silver case,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School.
She noted that retrials are generally thought to favor the defense, which gets a full preview of the evidence. Prosecutors, however, also get a “dress rehearsal,” she said.
“A shorter trial — more directed at the evidence that is going to be convincing — is a better trial more likely to result in a guilty verdict,” Roiphe said.
