Without naming names, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, discussed pervasive corruption in Albany on March 6 at the Fordham Law Review’s spring symposium.
The event, “Fighting Corruption in America and Abroad,” featured legal academics, prosecutors, defense lawyers, economists, and political philosophers. Also participating were Fordham Law Professors Thomas H. Lee and Zephyr Teachout, who ran for New York governor on an anti-corruption platform and whose book Corruption in America was recently published by Harvard University Press.
“Our cases have more resonance than people in this room can realize,” Bharara said, citing letters of support from New Yorkers who were “turned off by government because the status quo won’t change.”
“They tuned out, but when you clean out [the problem]they tune back in—and that’s no small thing when you care about democracy,” he said.
Bharara said that the topic relates to patterns seen in other pervasive crimes that his office handles, such as gang violence. “If you are a narcotics prosecutor and you take a gang off the street, that’s a job well done. But what impact does that have if the next day another gang moves in? Then we haven’t quite done the job. That’s true for public corruption as well.”
Everyone bears responsibility for routing out criminal behavior, he said, not just prosecutors. He warned of a permissive atmosphere propagated by people standing by and not blowing the whistle.
“Good people who do nothing bear responsibility for the bad things that go wrong in their institution,” he said. “There is nothing better than self-policing. The body politic has to take care of itself first.”