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NEWS RELEASE

August 10, 2021

Contact: Leon Koziol

President, Citizen Commission Against Corruption

(315) 796-4000

A nonprofit commission is asking New York Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul to reopen hearings of the 2013 Moreland Commission on Public Corruption so that a broader level of whistleblower complaints can be obtained regarding the operation of state government. This comes on the heels of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s announced resignation today.

The Citizen Commission Against Corruption (CCAC) explained that this request is timely, even “long overdue,” given the governor’s decision to postpone his exit from public office by two weeks and the corruption which has gained momentum since 2013. The Commission also quoted from its mission statement to directors on July 4, 2021 to justify its request:

This (Moreland) commission was created by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to address a “culture of corruption in Albany.” However, when testimony began to implicate the governor himself, his commission was prematurely dissolved with no prosecutions by a publicly financed and politically appointed panel of experts and law enforcement.

Some of the Moreland panelists are still in office and engaged in current investigations. The 2013 closure incited one of the hearing speakers, federal prosecutor Preet Bharara, to seize commission files resulting in the convictions of the leaders of both houses of the legislature and a top Cuomo aide. The governor managed to evade similar liability but as fate would have it, he would later be subjected to multiple investigations for sexual harassment, family favoritism, abuse of state resources for book profits and falsified nursing home reports.

Leon Koziol, was one of those selected to testify at the first Moreland hearing at Pace University while countless others were left on the streets to protest their exclusion. A model parent and former civil rights attorney, Mr. Koziol suffered horrific retributions after helping to expose judicial misconduct. It included his pedophile custody judge, Bryan Hedges, and his replacement custody judge, Michael Hanuszczak, for sexual harassment of his court clerks. Both were forced to resign.

After 23 years of unblemished practice, Mr. Koziol’s near death experience in 2020, and his unyielding search for justice, have proven that there is no legal protection for lawyers who expose corruption in our third branch of government. His ordeal was published this month in bookseller sites across the country. Titled Whistleblower in Paris, this timely literary work has already earned a French promotional translation by Amazon.

Moreland Commission testimony can be found at https://publiccorruption.moreland.ny.gov/

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[1]   Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, The New York Legislative Process: An

    Analysis and Blueprint for reform (2004); Still Broken: New York State Legislative Reform (2008)

[2]  Robert Gavin, Oversight lawyers quit amid inquiry, (Albany) Times Union, July 10, 2013