He says he saw the light.
Tarnished Bronx lawmaker Nelson Castro said he was “done with politics” as he walked out of court Monday morning, having all but sidestepped perjury charges and gotten off nearly scot-free.
Castro, the former state Assemblyman who spent five years as an undercover agent after he was ensnared for lying under oath to the Board of Elections, says he’s withdrawing from the public spotlight — to sell energy-efficient bulbs.
“I’m focusing on my business and that’s it,” the beaming 42-year-old said after a Bronx judge accepted his plea of three years’ conditional discharge, ending the lengthy legal woes that included a federal conviction for lying to investigators.
Castro pleaded guilty in 2013 to three counts of perjury for lying under oath five years earlier, when he told the Board of Elections that he didn’t know two people who happened to be working for his campaign.
The frequent fibber then wired up for the U.S. Attorney’s office and led a double life as an informant in a probe targeting Albany corruption.
He would serve as the key witness in the case that brought down fellow Bronx assemblyman Eric Stevenson for accepting bribes from Russian businessmen eager for adult day-care center permits.
That cooperation proved to be the main reason for Castro’s cushy sentence, said his lawyer, Michael Farkas.
“We’re not going to look a gift horse in the mouth,” the attorney said after the sentencing. “We are going to show that by Nelson’s actions, he was very deserving of this great consideration.”
Farkas said that Monday’s ruling may have cleared Castro to seek another public office, though a court would have to determine whether his federal guilty plea disqualified him from running again.
Castro said it didn’t matter, insisting that his days in politics were over. He said he will focus on selling energy-efficient light bulbs to homes and businesses from his new venture, called Greenlight Consulting.
“We do an audit, and make recommendations on what to change to consume less electricity,” said Castro, who is running the business with his wife out of his University Heights home. “My job is to sell the actual light.”
