By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

New York State Senator Thomas W. Libous, the second highest ranking state senator, was found guilty Wednesday of false statements to the FBI.

The conviction came after a  seven-day federal trial in White Plains.

“Public corruption is a scourge. Every New Yorker wants us to work as hard as possible to end it,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. “But lies to law enforcement make the job of fighting corruption doubly difficult. Today, a jury unanimously found that Tom Libous, the second highest ranking New York Senator, told lie after lie to hide the truth from federal agents investigating corruption in Albany. Libous’s lies have been exposed, his crime has been proven, and Albany will be the better for it.”

Authorities charged that Libous, 62, had obtained a job for a family member at a Westchester law firm in exchange for a promise to refer business to the firm, and had arranged for an Albany lobbying firm that regularly lobbied him to secretly pay the law firm $50,000 per year to defray the cost of the family member’s salary and lease of a Range Rover.

The lobbying firm specialized in transportation issues and Libous served as the Chairman of the Senate’s Transportation Committee at the time.

Libous then lied to FBI agents investigating the matter.

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

A Hartford mobster is accusing the FBI of “outrageous government misconduct” as part an effort to make him cooperate, the Hartford Courant reports.

The paper reports that the FBI believes that mobster Robert “Bobby the Cook” Gentile, 79,  has information that could help recover half a billion dollars in art stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The FBI believes he once had two of the stolen paintings, something Gentile denies. He says he knows nothing.

The court papers allege that the FBI has twice used informants to induce him to commit crimes so that authorities would have something over him and make him talk. He is currently behind bars.

The paper writes:

What is not in Gentile’s motion to dismiss is an explanation of why, over the past five years, Gentile has twice taken the bait offered by FBI informants and allegedly committed crimes.

In 2012, he was charged and convicted after he said that a persistent FBI informant persuaded him to illegally sell prescription painkillers. Earlier this year, in the case he is trying to dismiss, Gentile was charged with selling a pistol and ammunition to another informant, an old friend convicted in the killings of three people during a 50-pound marijuana robbery in the 1980s.

McGuigan said Gentile was told that he could avoid prison in both the drug and gun cases if he cooperated with museum investigators. But Gentile has said he has nothing to offer, even after being promised immunity and a chance at collecting the $5 million reward that the museum is offering for return of the art.