In the criminal prosecution of Joe Bruno, US Attorney Andrew T. Baxter has put a self-admitted thief on the stand to testify against the former New York State Senate Majority Leader.

Patricia M. Stackrow, the Senator’s longtime senate secretary admitted she stole money from Joe Bruno during her tenure. In return for her testimony, the government granted her immunity from prosecution, lest she invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on the witness stand.

Bruno, 81, has been charged under the “theft of honest services” law and after 3 weeks of trial, the government has yet to prove  he committed a crime.

The government’s grant of immunity to Stackrow in return for testimony of mystifying relevance belies the shakiness of its case. Apparently, Stackrow worked for the Senator for free on behalf of the Senator’s private affairs, often after long weeks in the Senate.

Such an arrangement may motivate one to steal, but according to Stackrow, her motivation to steal from Joe Bruno was not remuneration for her free service, but revenge. She felt so “degraded” that she retaliated by stealing from him.

This does not ring true for anyone who knows of Bruno’s nature. If anything, it appears that Bruno was known to suffer fools too gladly, such as the fools on his own staff.

Granting immunity to Stackrow, 66, in return for her telling lies about Bruno demonstrates the lengths that Baxter will go to in an effort to “get” Bruno and burnish the US Attorney’s reputation as a giant-killer.

In fact, Baxter’s predecessor Glenn T. Suddaby, now a Federal Judge, investigated Bruno thoroughly and informed Bruno’s lawyers that, although the FBI was pushing for an indictment, he could find no evidence of a crime. Only after Suddaby’s resignation did Baxter decide to prosecute Bruno.

One wonders if the jury will believe such a charade. The government does not care that Stackrow committed larceny, which the FBI must have independently discovered during its investigation of the Senator. Her theft is a liability because it discredits Stackrow as an honest witness, which is why the government extracted the evidence from her on direct examination - to lessen its sting.

Rather, the government was reaching for the subliminal suggestion that the secretary intermingled the Senator’s private and public interests; after all, intermingling of interests is the crux of the allegation against him.

This is why the government introduced Stackrow’s flimsy grand jury assertion that she stole from Bruno because she didn’t like him, not because she worked for free on her own private rather than state time. On the witness stand, Stackrow said she did not know why she stole from him.

Revenge as a motive of larceny rather than say the more believable and traditional greed rings just a tad disingenuous and may even merit an eye roll. If she had done it to reimburse herself for the hours spent on his private business, that would strongly suggest the Senator was not double dipping his staff and he, in fact, did keep his pursuits more separate than the government would have you believe.

In its trial brief, the government told the judge they planned to march a veritable cast of characters through the witness parade - those under indictment, those with criminal records, those who had signed cooperation agreements with the government in return for their testimony, and those who would be given immunity for their testimony. In other words, those with a slight burnish in their credibility.

The government’s roll call of crooks and would-be criminals reads more like a strained attempt at guilt by association rather than just a promise of substandard testimony; the shadier the better, no?

Such confounding proof ought to raise suspicions that the government’s case is feeble. The government was forced to offer Ms. Stackrow immunity in order to prevent defense attorney Abbe Lowell from eviscerating her credibility on cross-examination. The relevance of her testimony is glancing at best.

The government, as it has from the outset of this nebulous case, is reaching. It cannot offer a single witness who will testify that Mr. Bruno’s investment firm was chosen because of and in return for his legislative prowess and point to the government bounty it received as a reward for its use of Mr. Bruno’s investment services. There are allusions to and hints at this but it’s mostly a case of innuendo.

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