The state comptroller, Alan Hevesi, couldn’t resist a swipe at The New York Sun yesterday at a Crain’s breakfast here in the city. What got his goat was our editorials – particularly one of May 14, 2004, headlined, “Hevesi’s Haul” – recounting how Mr. Hevesi had held a campaign fundraiser at the office of a Philadelphia law firm that now stands to split a legal fee of $330 million for a case the bulk of which was settled before trial. That plaintiff’s law firm and the other one involved in the Worldcom case and individuals and committees with ties to them poured a total of $121,800 into Mr. Hevesi’s campaign coffers in the year before an aide to Mr. Hevesi signed a retainer agreement with the firms stipulating that the legal fee “is presumptively fair, adequate and reasonable.”

The Wall Street Journal yesterday quoted one of the plaintiff’s lawyers who donated $5,000 to Mr. Hevesi’s campaign, John P. Coffey, as suggesting that Mr. Hevesi balked at a settlement agreement with a lawyer for the city’s investment banks after the lawyer threatened to introduce into evidence a Sun article about the law firms’ contributions to Mr. Hevesi’s campaign. Before the federal judge presiding over the litigation, Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, approves a legal fee anywhere close to $330 million, she may want to ask Mr. Coffey and Mr. Hevesi why they were so adamant that the “Hevesi’s Haul” editorial not be entered into the record of the case. And then she might want to have a look at it anyway.