ALBANY — Gov. Paterson and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo were at odds yesterday over who authorized a $300,000 settlement with a photographer who claimed Paterson fired him because he is white.
Paterson initially claimed at an afternoon press conference that he had wanted to fight the embarrassing lawsuit, and had agreed to settle only at Cuomo’s urging.
“I certainly wanted to fight the case,” said Paterson, who fired the photographer in 2003 just after becoming the Senate’s new Democratic minority leader.
“It was recommended to me by the AG’s Office that it would probably be better to settle,” added Paterson, who denied any racial motivation for the firing.
But a spokesman for Cuomo quickly denied the governor’s claim, insisting the attorney general “never recommended that the $300,000 settlement be accepted.”
A Paterson-administration official later sought to “clarify” the governor’s remarks, saying the attorney general had said a settlement should be “considered” but had not, in fact, said that the $300,000 be paid.
Meanwhile, a counsel for Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens), who also had to approve the settlement, confirmed that the $300,000 payment was recommended by Paterson’s office, and not Cuomo.
The Post disclosed yesterday that the state had quietly settled a federal racial-discrimination lawsuit that accused then-Senate Minority Leader Paterson, the state’s first black governor, of firing Joseph Maioriello, a white Senate photographer, in 2003 in order to replace him with an African-American.
Paterson had been expected to be called as a “star witness” in the trial, an appearance the governor wanted to avoid, sources said.
Maioriello, a 26-year Senate employee, was fired from his $34,000-a-year job as a photographer two years earlier after Paterson ousted Martin Connor (D-Brooklyn) as the Senate minority leader.
“I was really just trying to put a team around me that I knew. Clearly, this was not the case of a normal leadership succession,” Paterson said as he sought to explain Maioriello’s ouster.
Maioriello, 56, contended in the lawsuit that Paterson’s then-chief-of-staff, John McPadden, said he was being dumped because a number of minority senators wanted to replace him with “a minority photographer, a black photographer.”
Maioriello also claimed McPadden told him, “You got to remember who Sen. Paterson is. Sen. Paterson is black,” a statement McPadden denied having made.
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli