Friday, March 17, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.
The scene was sordid and sleazy.
A businessman who needed to buy influence. A middleman eager to help present his case to the elected officials.
And politicians only too willing to accommodate if the contribution was right.
No, this was not a picture of an average day on Grand Central Parkway or at City Hall or inside the Legislative Building. Or was it?
That was the central question where this unfolded at the federal courthouse Thursday as prosecutor Dan Schiess painted the picture during his morning-long opening argument in the G-Sting political corruption case.
After years of waiting, the trial's opening sounded like Mister Rogers reading "Lady Chatterley's Lover," with the mild-mannered Schiess spinning a tale of sex, money and sin that resulted in the indictments of former Commissioners Dario Herrera and Mary Kincaid-Chauncey.
Even D.H. Lawrence might have blushed as Schiess, in the blandest possible manner, painted ex-strip club boss Mike Galardi as feeding Herrera's sexual and financial appetites, which included golf course trysts and Newport Beach getaways with a mistress.
The prosecutor's description of Kincaid-Chauncey was thankfully less salacious but no less grotesque, depicting her as a mother who happily thanked Galardi for helping her grandson get into a ski school and for providing lap dances to an Air Force son on leave.
The members of this jury surely will rush to their showers after each day of testimony during an estimated three months of sex, lies and audiotapes.
Although Schiess' presentation was at times mind numbing, so, too, is the evidence arrayed against Herrera and Kincaid-Chauncey, hours upon hours of wiretaps that contain the most crass chatter about favors for favors.
Herrera and Kincaid-Chauncey, based on the transcribed excerpts Schiess presented, were at least foolish and reckless and at most venal and avaricious. Did they ask for and receive anything other than campaign contributions, which they simply failed to disclose?
Or was it something much more insidious, as Schiess and some of the evidence suggested, that Galardi had them at his beck and call, with bagman Lance Malone, another former commissioner already convicted in a related San Diego trial, supplying the money and sex - what Schiess labeled "the currency of corruption."
At one point, the fuzziness of the line between legally and illegally buying influence was made when Schiess mentioned that Galardi once hired well-known insider Jay Brown - for $50,000, he asserted - to help with a strip club ordinance because he was close to Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates.
Paying a lot of money for someone with access to elected officials is called buying juice; paying elected officials for their votes is called committing a crime.
Schiess drew a distinction between Herrera, whom he described as demanding and obnoxious, and Kincaid-Chauncey, whom he painted as kind and solicitous. But that distinction makes no difference in the case, he said.
"It doesn't matter if you are crude or kind, if you are grateful or ungrateful (if) you are a corrupt public official," he told the jury.
Schiess also underscored a potential weakness in the government's case and tried to inoculate himself for the trial to come. He acknowledged that jurors "are not going to hear clear, direct language, not such open obvious statements" showing the quid pro quo. Instead, he told jurors, "I ask you to draw reasonable inferences" when they hear phrases such as "Let's get together and say hi" or "Let's hook up."
And while I could not stay Thursday for the defense's opening statements, surely this is what the lawyers will seize on during the trial. They will argue that the government, despite how awful some of the intercepts sound, cannot simply infer that corruption was taking place. Maybe saying hi meant saying hi. Maybe hooking up meant having a beer. Maybe this was all innocent banter - and even if it's not quite innocent, that doesn't mean it's automatically criminal.
It's clear that the softness in the government's case is the lack of a money trail - Galardi operated in cash - and the lack of any wiretap confirmation of vote-buying - Galardi paid generally to influence generally, Schiess argued.
So the strategy is obvious. Schiess declared, after some salacious detail about Herrera, "Ladies and gentlemen, this case is about public corruption. It's not about sex and making Dario Herrera look bad."
But of course it's about making Herrera and Kincaid-Chauncey look bad. And the worse they look, thanks to those wiretaps, the more it will appear as if they are corrupt, no matter whether you define the word as the standard sordid and sleazy behavior or something more sinister.
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