Ray Harding, the former leader of the state Liberal Party whose long career as a political rainmaker ended with a guilty plea in a pay-to-play scandal, died this morning of cancer at 77.
When he was a child during World War II, Harding and his family were part of
brought to U.S. to escape the Nazis.
Harding was born Branko Hochwald in Yugoslavia. His family, in fleeing the Nazis, first ended up spending more than a year
in a barbed-wire-ringed Italian camp
before getting to America, where he changed his name in a hat tip to his favorite radio show, “David Harding, Counterspy.”
Harding grew up to become a political power player in New York, but his career ended ignominiously in connection with the massive pay-to-play scheme centered on former state Comptroller
.
As our Lovett and Grace
, “As part of a plea deal with then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, [Harding] was allowed to withdraw his felony plea after having given his ‘full cooperation’ to investigators during the scandal probe.”
He pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor and served no jail time, unlike Hevesi, who’s still behind bars. Harding was also not ordered to pay back any of the $800,000 he received in pension fund-related fees in exchange for political favors for Hevesi.
“I am profoundly sorry for what I have done,” Harding told Judge Lewis Bart Stone at the time.
A lawyer for Hevesi declined comment, according to our Ken Lovett.
Update
: The funeral will be held at 11:45 a.m. Sunday at Riverside Chapel, 180 W. 76th St., Manhattan. Shiva will take place Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at the Riverdale home of Liz Harding.
“Ray was a loving, caring person,” Liz Harding, his wife of 55 years, told the Associated Press. “That’s Ray Harding, bottom line.”
While the Liberal Party never had power on par with its Democratic or Republican counterparts, Harding made the most of it, including helping Mario Cuomo get elected governor and establishing a relationship with Rudy Giuliani that helped catapult him into the mayor’s office —
the votes Giuliani won on the LP line pushed him over the top against David Dinkins
— and
made Harding a close, if untitled, advisor
.
As the AP
, Harding “was rewarded as a lobbyist and with jobs for his two sons, Robert and Russell. Russell would in 2005 be sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling $400,000 from the city’s Housing and Development corporation.”
Said Giuliani in a statement to The Daily News: “I am very saddened by the loss of Ray Harding. Ray was a great political leader, and one of the people who made it possible for me to be in a position to help reform New York City. And for that, I will be eternally grateful. Judith and I extend our deepest condolences to the Harding family.”
Harding cut an unforgettable figure as he made the rounds of New York politics:
As Mark Kriegel described him in a 1997 Daily News piece
,
“An outsized man in a pinstripe suit, Ray Harding’s very presence injures the image of a Liberal as a liberal. He smokes unfiltered Camels at an impressive pace. There’s a Mont Blanc pen in his pocket, a silver lighter in his palm. He doesn’t look like a caricature of a namby-pamby liberal. He looks like another maligned cartoon, which his party was once sworn to fight. Make no mistake, Ray Harding is a Boss.”
The Liberal Party that Harding once controlled ended up, somewhat ironically, losing ballot status after Andrew Cuomo’s first abortive attempt to become governor.
In 2002, Cuomo withdrew from his primary against fellow Democrat Carl McCall, but his name remained on the Liberal Party line.
The party lost official recognition after Cuomo failed to get 50,000 votes on its column.
The party was recently
, if still unofficially, under the leadership of former NYC Parks Department Commissioner Henry Stern, and has endorsed
Manhattan Media Publisher Tom Allon
in the 2013 race for mayor.
“It’s a tragedy on so many levels. Personal, for him and his family, and [in the] demise of the Liberal Party, which was the project of his life,” Stern, who knew Harding for some 40 years and was first elected to the City Council on the L.P. line in 1973, told The News. “It was his monument.”
While Harding “was no angel,” Stern said, “he was a talented individual who had great powers of persuasion.” Having come to the U.S. with no connections or advantages other than having escaped the Nazis, he went on to become educated and influential and “he kept a tiny party in the forefront of New York politics.”
Overall, Stern said of Harding, “his party, like Icarus, steered too close to the flame and was destroyed by his machinations, but he didn’t go around deliberately injuring people. His moral standards were the standards of many people today… who haven’t been caught.”
Harding’s death was first reported by NY1 News.
Images: NY Daily News; Liberal Party Of NY
