ALBANY – When few in the public or the press were watching, a remarkable drama in Albany last week produced unprecedented breakthroughs.

In a victory for the people’s right to know, there were unexpected heroes, a judge’s eloquence, and a candid, sometimes embarrassing peek at secret decision-making at the highest levels of government.

In the end, both Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who took on the executive branch in court and won, and Governor Pataki could claim a share of the victory.

The Democratic assemblyman refused to back down in seeking 600 pages of internal e-mails and memos involved in one of the administration’s most embarrassing scandals. And after the state Thruway Authority intentionally withheld the records it promised him, questionably redacted some names, then defied a subpoena, Mr. Brodsky prevailed in person. He stared down three attorneys for Mr. Pataki and the authority who argued to keep the records secret based partly on President Nixon’s claim to executive privilege during Watergate.

After Mr. Pataki’s lawyers had hastily submitted a handwritten intent to appeal, Mr. Pataki called it off, cutting short what could have been an indefinite delay in releasing the records to the public while taxpayers footed the bill for appeals.

In the decision, state Supreme Court Justice Joseph Cannizzaro showed Mr. Brodsky’s attempt to reach deep within the executive branch wasn’t the witch hunt Pataki aides long claimed. Judge Cannizzaro gave uncommon voice to the need for public information in notoriously shuttered Albany politics:

“We are the people’s government, made for the people, by the people and answerable to the people,” he wrote. “Consequently, inasmuch as government is the people’s business, it necessarily follows that its operations should be at all times open to the public view. Openness, accountability and transparency are as essential to honest governmental administration as freedom of speech is to representative government.”

As for Mr. Pataki, he and his staff rode out Friday’s release of 600 pages of sometimes embarrassing internal memos, e-mail, and presumably the private thoughts of his top spin masters and attorneys.

And in the judge’s decision, a maverick in the administration was vindicated. The Thruway chairman, John Buono, a Pataki appointee with a by-the-book reputation as a community college president and county executive, may have put his job on the line for daring to say the records should be released for the public good. It was a rare stand against the governor.

“I wanted to go to the judge because I wanted to release the documents,” Mr. Buono said, wedged “between a rock and hard place” because Mr. Pataki opposed him.

“I felt someone else has to play Solomon,” Mr. Buono said.

In those records, Mr. Pataki’s former communications director apparently used a profanity to describe the Democratic comptroller as the political spin of the scandal controlled the information provided to the press and public.

The scandal began in the late 1990s when some managers in the state Thruway Authority steered a contract to a developer for the rights to build along the 500-mile state canal system for $30,000. Criminal probes ensued and the state comptroller, Alan Hevesi, rescinded the contract as the authority blamed the scandal on a few employees who lied and have since been fired.

The documents showed the governor’s office directing the authority how to respond to questions from investigators, the media, and Mr. Brodsky’s committee after the scandal was revealed. While Mr. Pataki’s top attorneys and his former director of communications called the shots, they also directed the ThruwayAuthority to distance the public actions as much as possible from the governor.