Backing Bill de Blasio sure has its rewards — as The Post’s story Wednesday about Moishe Indig illustrates. (Yet again.)
E-mails the city coughed up under the Freedom of Information laws show that Indig, an influential rabbi in Brooklyn’s Arony Satmar community, got the royal treatment from City Hall after helping then-candidate de Blasio raise cash for his 2013 campaign.The rabbi got the mayor’s personal e-mail address. Deputy mayors, commissioners and other bigwigs cleared time for him on request.
“Very important that [Indig] has a line of communication open in the Commissioner’s office,” a de Blasio aide told Buildings Department brass in one e-mail. “This one is important,” the aide nagged City Planning staff in another, ordering them to meet with him. Team Blas even helped Indig get a stop-work order lifted.
Sounds just like City Hall’s treatment of another Friend of Bill, Jona Rechnitz, who testified that hefty donations won him major access. “Whenever we would call” the mayor for a favor, said Rechnitz, “we were getting the response that we expected.”
Indig played a key role in delivering 7,500 votes to de Blasio, the Satmars say — enough to put him over the 40 percent threshold to avoid a 2013 runoff.
Of course, that was only after de Blasio agreed to roll back Bloomberg-era regulations on a form of religious circumcision Satmars practice — one that poses serious risks to infants. (De Blasio kept his vow.)
It’s a repeating pattern: Help the mayor, and he helps you, even if it means using (abusing?) the power of his office to do so.
That prosecutors declined to indict anyone in the mayor’s pay-for-play scandal remains a mystery. Don’t be surprised to see more of it over the next four years: Now he has national political ambitions to fund.