Another Blow for Pirro
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WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) – The federal investigation of former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro has branched out to include the jewelry business she set up while she was in office, a Pirro spokesman said Tuesday.
The spokesman, Pirro family friend Michael Edelman, said agents have begun questioning some of the people who bought the bead jewelry she made several years ago in what he said was an attempt to raise money for charity.
He said clerks, an assistant district attorney and others who were “around the courthouse” when Pirro was district attorney have been summoned by federal prosecutors and several were questioned Tuesday.
“They’ve subpoenaed a lot of the people who bought the beads,” Edelman said.
He said he did not know specifically what interested the investigators, but he said Pirro was cooperating and had turned over all requested records.
U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia’s spokesman Herb Hadad said he couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation.
Pirro acknowledged last year, while she was the Republican candidate for state attorney general, that she was under investigation for plotting to eavesdrop on her husband, Albert Pirro, in 2005, when she believed he was having an affair. She said she had sought help from disgraced former New York police Commissioner Bernard Kerik to plant a bug on the family boat, but she said she never went through with it and broke no law.
Edelman said Pirro’s stab at the jewelry business “was a flop.”
“There never was a profit,” he said. “She folded it, and that was the end of that.”
He said she filed all required tax documents.
Pirro’s financial disclosure forms, made public during the campaign last year, indicated that she ran a small jewelry-making business for several years before dissolving it in 2003.
Edelman said he had seen some of the jewelry, which he described as “nice.”
“She bought beads, and she strung them together,” he said. “It was a hobby. If there had been any profit it would have gone to charity.”
He said pieces sold for “maybe $150.”
The New York Post reported last week that Pirro, who lost the attorney general’s race to Andrew Cuomo, would be paid about $1 million for a television talk show that would probably go on the air next fall.
