So there you have it. The class-action lawyers will end up with as much as $144.5 million. Mr. Hevesi makes off with $42,900 in campaign contributions. The city and state retirees, whose money Mr. Hevesi is supposed to be watchdogging, lose $45 million. Not to mention all the other Citigroup shareholders who are going to wind up paying for this settlement.

That was our assessment in Tuesday’s New York Sun, in an editorial written in the hours after the New York State comptroller, Alan Hevesi, announced a $2.65 billion settlement with Citigroup, the big New York bank. The New York State Common Retirement Fund Mr. Hevesi controls is the lead plaintiff against Citigroup and 16 other banks in a suit on behalf of WorldCom stock and bondholders. Well, it turns out that the campaign contributions to Mr. Hevesi that are attributable, directly or indirectly, to the two law firms that stand to “earn” a $144.5 million fee from the Citigroup settlement amount to even more than we’d reckoned. As the adjacent graphic details, the two law firms 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 fee “is presumptively fair, adequate and reasonable.”

A word is in order about how Mr. Hevesi’s haul breaks down. Of the sum, $37,000 is in direct contributions to his campaign from the partners of the two law firms. Another $30,400 came from the “Consumer Advocacy Pac,” a New York political committee that is based in Washington. The pac would be more accurately described as the Philadelphia Lawyer Advocacy Pac, because, according to the committee’s records for 2002 and 2003, virtually every contribution to the pac came from a person or company with ties to Barrack, Rodos & Bacine.

That’s one of the two law firms splitting the $144.5 million fee. Gerald Rodos gave $45,000 to the Consumer Advocacy Pac. Leonard Barrack and his wife, Lynne, put in a total of $60,000. Of the 10 contributors the pac reported in 2003, eight are Barrack, Rodos, & Bacine lawyers, one shares a home address with a Barrack, Rodos & Bacine lawyer, and the tenth is Benjamin Galdston, an associate at the other firm splitting the $144.5 million fee, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman LLP. Two companies — Revere Aviation and Jet Flight Services — that operate from the Barrack, Rodos & Bacine offices and own its two helicopters and Citation jet donated to the pac, but state records indicate they then reconsidered and backed out the contributions.

Then there is the $45,400 — the legal limit — donated to Mr. Hevesi’s campaign by Steven Goldman of Philadelphia. Wondering why a Philadelphia man would care so much about the outcome of a New York state election, we tried to reach him yesterday by calling the offices in Philadelphia of Barrack, Rodos, & Bacine. Sure enough, the operator connected us to him. Mr. Goldman says he is an accountant,and that Barrack, Rodos & Bacine is one of his largest clients. He said his wife, Maxine Goldman, works at the firm as its shareholder relations manager. He declined to say who had solicited him to give to Mr. Hevesi’s campaign. But he said he met the man who is now New York State’s comptroller in the Barrack, Rodos, & Bacine law firm’s Philadelphia headquarters. “There was a fund-raiser in this office. He was here,” Mr. Goldman told The New York Sun.

These campaign contributions may not seem like much money in the context of million-dollar legal fees and billion-dollar settlements, but in the political world, a $45,400 contribution like Mr. Goldman’s is a lot of money. By way of comparison, federal election law sets the maximum legal contribution to a candidate running for federal office at $2,000 for a primary and $2,000 for a general election.

Barrack, Rodos & Bacine’s ties to Mr. Hevesi extend even beyond hosting the fund-raiser for him. According to the firm’s own newsletter, the Barrack Bulletin, Barrack, Rodos & Bacine earlier this year hired as a lawyer in its Philadelphia office one Regina Calcaterra. “She served as the Chief Lobbyist and Director of Intergovernmental Relations to then New York City Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi,” the law firm newsletter says.

Barrack, Rodos & Bacine and the other law firm that stands to gain a fee in the Citigroup settlement, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman, aren’t the only law firms specializing in shareholder lawsuits that gave a lot of money to Mr. Hevesi’s campaign. Milberg Weiss, whose lawyers gave at least $137,000 to Mr.Hevesi’s campaign, was tapped by the comptroller last year for a class-action shareholder suit against Bayer AG, the German pharmaceutical company, as our William Hammond reported from Albany.

There’s a temptation — particularly among those of us who question the constitutionality of campaign finance limits —to shrug at all this. After all, Albany is so dominated by the trial-lawyers lobby that it’s become nearly impossible to lease a car in New York state. The speaker of the state Assembly, Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, moonlights as a lawyer for one of the most aggressive tort firms, Weitz & Luxenberg. He refuses to disclose his income from this arrangement to the public.

But at least the speaker hasn’t just wrested a $2.65 billion settlement from a company, Citigroup, whose shares a lot of New Yorkers own. In Mr. Hevesi’s case, that may be just the beginning. He is suing, on behalf of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the rest of Wall Street, too: J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Banc of America, Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, Blaylock , CS First Boston, Goldman Sachs, UBS Warburg, ABN/Amro, Utendahl Capital Partners LP, Tokyo-Mitsubishi International PLC, Westdeutsche Landesbank, BNP Paribas, Fleet Securities, Mizuho International, and Caboto are all defendants in the same suit that Citigroup just settled. If they settle, too, the fee split by the two law firms representing Mr. Hevesi will swell even more.

The comptroller’s spokesman, David Neustadt, insists that Mr.Hevesi has been “aggressive” in reducing fees of class-action lawyers in securities litigation. “Hevesi didn’t select the firms for this litigation. He dropped their fees,” Mr. Neustadt said. But, as these columns previously noted, the agreement under which these firms are going to gain these enormous fees was inked under Mr. Hevesi.

The complaint the two law firms filed on behalf of Mr. Hevesi against Citigroup targets Citigroup telecommunications analyst Jack Grubman, referring to his “conflicted role as both investment banker and analyst.” It quotes a Salomon Smith Barney retail broker calling Mr. Grubman a “[P]oster child for conspicuous conflicts of interest.”

Well, as far as conflicted roles, Mr. Hevesi’s has to be right up there with Mr. Grubman’s. The New York State Common Retirement Fund he controls owns almost $1 billion worth of Citigroup stock, yet the fund is suing Citigroup. Mr. Hevesi is accepting hefty campaign contributions from lawyers that his office is negotiating fee agreements with for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. All the more reason that Mr. Hevesi should leave enforcing the securities laws to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission rather than the class-action bar. All the more reason that Judge Cote should look skeptically at any fee agreement negotiated by the New York state comptroller.