The Penitent

Lots of evenings, Andy accompanies his dad home, a tidy attached Tudor filled with comfortable chairs purchased some years ago, by the looks of them. On a cabinet sits a photo, a souvenir from the cruise where he talked Carol into letting him run for state comptroller. She’d been loosened up with a glass of wine, he says. Lately, the shades are always drawn. It was Carol, his wife of 39 years, who opened them. She played the upright piano, now idle in the living room, and, until she couldn’t walk the steps, baked her special date-nut bread at Christmas—Hevesi’s a Jew; she’s Catholic.

In a sense, it all went wrong for Alan Hevesi after a phone call from J. Christopher Callaghan, the perfectly pleasant Saratoga County treasurer (staff of twelve) whom the Republicans had selected to lose to Hevesi. Hevesi didn’t bother with a campaign Website or significant campaign staff, except for consultant Hank Morris, the mastermind of nearly all of Hevesi’s public career. This summer, Callaghan trailed by 40 points in the polls. The election has been canceled, Hevesi joked at the time.

Then Callaghan received an anonymous tip that Hevesi had assigned a state employee to act as his wife’s chauffeur. Callaghan didn’t have the means to investigate, so he called Hevesi’s waste hotline and talked to the press. Hevesi quickly went public. The driver assured Carol’s security and also shuttled her to doctors’ appointments. That would have been an acceptable arrangement, if Hevesi had reimbursed the state for the non-security work. “I forgot,” Hevesi said.