While liberals tend to credit Andrew Cuomo for a series of progressive minded victories in the 2010s, such as legalizing gay marriage in 2011 and later legalizing cannabis a decade later, it’s no secret that the administration that delivered them was a proudly cutthroat operation.

“We operate at two speeds here: Get Along, and Kill,” his former secretary Steven M. Cohen infamously told the Connecticut Post in 2011. In the rearview, it seems unnatural that Cuomo – married (and divorced) to a Kennedy, pals with the Clintons, the son of a former governor- would use his return to clout to settle for anything less than his rightful place.

As attorney general, he investigated former Governor Eliot Spitzer, and also looked into Spitzer’s successor, and Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson. A Paterson aide would later tell a writer for Vanity Fair that it “felt as if Cuomo was lurking beneath the floorboards of the governor’s mansion, holding a saw.”

In 2013, as governor, Cuomo set up the Moreland Commission to investigate political corruption in the state related to fundraising, promptly shutting it down the next year when the commission began looking into Cuomo’s own cronies and dark money contributions. The shutdown spawned its own investigation by US Attorney Preet Bharara, resulting in a “ranting and raving” Cuomo placing a phone call to the White House in a legally dubious attempt to stifle it, according to a report by the celebrity journalist Ronan Farrow. 

Around the same time, new light was being shed on his involvement with the New York Senate’s Independent Democratic Conference, the group of turncoat Democrats who effectively sold out a Democratic majority in the New York State Senate for much of the 2010s. (They even had their own logo!) Though he previously denied it, a story in Politico in 2014 claimed Cuomo was “deeply involved” in the formation and workings of the group, whose members could take advantage of stipends and increased budgets. Per at least one report, former members of the group would go on to become Mayor Adams appointees, lobbyists, and in one case spend time in jail.

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York, the stage was set for Cuomo to do what a seasoned, legacy politician like him does best: dazzle a captive audience with an array of human-like emotions. As the spring progressed, a scandal began to emerge concerning his infamous March 25 order that sent thousands of COVID-19 patients to nursing homes – and kept them there, leaving mostly empty spaces like the city’s Javits Center and the USS Comfort, set up by the federal government. (Over the next year, the Cuomo administration would go on to lie about this order, and try to obscure the larger death toll of the move, which by some estimates was as high as 15,000.)

But in the heady, reality-warping days of early 2020, one could focus on negative stuff like that or simply enjoy the warm daily spectacle of Andrew checking in with his brother Chris on CNN, eventually winning an Emmy for the 111 daily televised press conferences broadcast that spring. (Chris would be suspended in 2021 by CNN over advising his brother over dealing with sexual assault allegations, and has plotted his own broadcasting comeback on a smaller network, NewsNation. Andrew would eventually lose that Emmy.)

Vanity Fair would glowingly profile the governor, glossing over or ignoring the more glaringly corrupt episodes of his political history, painting a portrait of a stern but caring pater familias commanding a pandemic response against the obstacle of a belligerent Trump administration. 

The result of all this was a traumatized nation briefly developing a bizarre sexual fascination with Cuom; COVID-rattled liberals dubbed themselves ‘Cuomosexuals’; rumors of nipple piercings swirled. The now twice-divorced Cuomo perhaps began feeling himself to alarming levels.

 “I’m the love gov… a cool guy in a loose mood,” he told his brother on live TV, ironically assuming a nickname the press had used for Eliot Spitzer during his prostitution scandal.

Then there was the matter of his book. The publisher Penguin Random House was in touch with Cuomo as early as March, 2020 for the project; various state officials were allegedly “forced” to work on the project, work that seemed to conflict with the business of actually handling the pandemic. (American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID 19 Pandemic would be ready by summer; COVID restrictions in NYC were not lifted until 2021.) The $5 million netted from the book deal would be the subject of ongoing legal and ethical proceedings over the next few years.

In Albany, Cuomo fumed at the police and mayor over the protests during the summer of 2020. Enjoying a windfall in popularity, and with the daily death toll beginning to fall, the spectacle of police brutalizing protesters in the streets and gangs of unruly teens smashing up windows in the toney West Village shopping districts must have been unwelcome indeed. After all, people were talking about President Cuomo, just a few months earlier.  

Part two of a three part series on the rise, fall and return of Andrew Cuomo. Brian Jones Kraft is a writer based in Bushwick. Read part one here.