Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, they say, but if so, what’s going on in the quiet town of Marlborough and its representative in the county legislature?

As reported in some depth by the Daily Freeman last week, GOP Legislator Tom Corcoran Jr. may have misappropriated substantial funds from a local youth agency where he had been its treasurer for over a decade. Corcoran, who was dismissed as the agency’s treasurer, told the daily that it was all a case of him conflating his private accounts with the agency’s. And yet, he offered to reimburse the non-profit some $3,500.

Call that a yellow flag, to be generous, but then there’s statements from the person who succeeded him as treasurer that she “does not have any receipts (from Corcoran) for any transactions or any purchase.”

Adding to the intrigue is that a legislator from the northern border of the county blew the whistle on one from the distant southern border.

“How do you get involved in a story about another legislator from Marlborough?” I asked Joe Maloney, R-Saugerties. The allegations have nothing to do with county government.

“People from the kids’ sports organization came to me because they couldn’t get anywhere with anybody from the town,” Maloney said. “So, I looked into it.”

Checking bank records, credit cards, PayPal and the like, Maloney said he found a long-running record of misappropriations which he said exceeded $10,000.

“It was like a Burt Gulnick operation,” Maloney said, referring to the former county finance officer who admitted last year to embezzling over $100,000 from a non-profit and from former county executive Mike Hein’s campaign account.

As with the Gulnick case, state police will investigate if there is indeed fire.

Whether the legislature will pursue an investigation of one of its members remains to be seen, this controversy being in its early stages. The executive branch has not taken a position.

In the meantime, what could be called the Corcoran cloud, has attracted some attention in political circles as the town’s building inspector/code enforcement officer (and whose brother Scott is town supervisor) seeks a third term on the Republican line.

Probation for Scammers

A local father-daughter team of thieves recently was convicted of stealing $230,000 from a 92-year-old Accord woman, according to the state attorney general who prosecuted the case, only to be given probation and ordered restitution in county court.

I’ll pause here while readers cry, “Whaaat?”

These two bilked a helpless old lady out of almost a quarter million dollars and they’re walking the street?

What kind of signal does this send to other would-be scammers, all too eager to prey on our vulnerable senior population?

Who’s Bryan Williams?

In one of the more amusing conflations in recent memory, however inadvertent, was a Freeman malaprop that identified the judge who handed down the above sentence as “Bryan Williams.”

There is, of course, no such person sitting on the county bench. The misnomer apparently refers to a former county judge Donald Williams and the current judge, Bryan Rounds.

The back story on this pair only adds to the hilarity.

Williams, a former Republican district attorney, was seeking a second 10-year term in 2018, only to be outmaneuvered by Rounds, a Democratic liberal and one of the county’s leading defense attorneys. Rounds, it was said, through emissaries convinced the Conservative and Independence parties to take a pass on Williams, whom they had endorsed a decade earlier. Without those endorsements, Williams, a strict law-and-order type, had no hope of prevailing in a heavily Democratic Party electorate. Williams chose retirement, but did not go quietly into the night.

To attribute bad blood between the two even after half a dozen years is to swear, Your Honor, that the Hatfields and McCoys were good neighbors.

Ergo, to call this mythical figure Bryan Williams probably blew the dome off the county courthouse with guffaws.

Truth in Politics

Talk about oxymorons!

Here’s a couple of truths they ought to teach in journalism schools:

“In wartime, (politics) truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies … ” — Winston Churchill.

And, according to Webster’s (via Google), gaslighting is “a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind.”

The popular term comes from the classic 1944 Ingrid Bergman/Charles Boyer film “Gaslight.”

We see an awful lot of that these days.