Carl McCall announced yesterday he will return his letters to the State Library this week for public review – and his spokesman said he “expects” there are more letters seeking employment for relatives or friends.
McCall, the state comptroller, abruptly decided to give back the documents after he had ordered them sealed last week, when The Post published two letters, written on official stationery, asking private-sector executives to consider hiring two of his relatives.
“I would expect that there were more routine letters dealing with résumés and dealings with lots of governmental issues,” said McCall’s spokesman, Steve Greenberg. “Everything that was in those boxes will go back to the state archives by the end of the week.”
The McCall aide promised that “not one document will be removed” and that only personal information, such as people’s Social Security numbers and addresses, would be blacked out.
Seven boxes of outgoing letters from McCall, written from 1993 to 1998, were available for public inspection in the State Library’s archives. But the letters were then taken out of circulation on Friday after it was reported that in 1997, the state comptroller wrote a Bell Atlantic executive about finding a job for his daughter, and he separately wrote a Coca-Cola honcho about hiring his cousin.
McCall, who has sole control of the $105 billion state pension fund’s investments, cited the fund’s holdings in those companies in both of the letters.
As McCall’s camp sought to squelch questions about the two letters and fend off GOP charges of a cover-up, the state comptroller was hit by his first bit of criticism by a fellow Democrat – Sen. Chuck Schumer.
In an interview on “Good Day New York,” Schumer said McCall shouldn’t have sent the letters on official stationery – quickly adding, “I don’t think it’s the biggest issue in the world.”
-2>”Look, he shouldn’t have done it,” Schumer said.
0>In the letter to Bell Atlantic, McCall notes that the state’s pension fund is a major shareholder in the company, while in his letter to Coca-Cola, he wrote that he is “an investor.”
At the time the letters were written by McCall, the pension fund held $143 million of Verizon stock and $700 million in Coca-Cola stock.
Bell Atlantic – which became Verizon – hired Marci McCall in 1998 while McCall’s cousin, Elaine Mason, was never employed by Coca-Cola.
Campaigning in Buffalo, McCall said that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t remove any letters from the files before they’re returned to the archives, where they can be viewed by the press and public.
“We can’t take anything out because somebody’s already looked through the letters. They know what’s in there,” he said.
McCall – the Democratic nominee for governor – grew testy when asked whether the flap over the letters has become a distraction.
“You’re a distraction, but this isn’t a distraction at all,” he told a reporter.