Bruno

Joseph L. Bruno, an upstate New York Republican, was majority leader of the New York State Senate from 1994 to June of last year. In that time, he was one of the "three men in a room,'' the common phrase for the way virtually all state business is settled in private by the governor and leaders of the Legislature's two houses.

Yesterday, a federal grand jury indicted Bruno on eight counts including mail and wire fraud. Bruno was charged with taking millions of dollars from companies seeking to do business with the state, from labor unions, ending a long-running investigation into one of New York’s most powerful political persons.

Bruno has been charged under an anti-corruption law making it a crime to deprive citizens of honest services from their elected officials. Bruno is accused of collecting more than 3 million dollars over a 13 years, starting in 1993, from a bunch of businessmen looking for state contracts and grants, as well as contracts to manage pension fund investments for at minimum, 16 labor unions. Bruno has repeatedly said he had not done anything wrong.

Back in late 2006, after word got out that federal authorities were investigating Bruno's business dealings, his hold on power had looked endangered. The election of Eliot Spitzer, a tough former prosecutor swept into office with a mandate for ethical reform, also seemed to bode ill for Bruno. But Bruno first outmaneuvered Spitzer to blunt his initiatives, then saw the tables turned when the governor and several of his top aides came under scrutiny in mid-2007 for utilizing state police data to gather damaging information on Bruno.

A different kind of setback came with the results of a special election in February of last year: a Democrat took a senate seat that had been hogged by Republicans for a century, cutting Mr. Bruno's majority to one vote. But less than two weeks later Mr. Spitzer's sudden resignation in the wake of revelations about his ties to a prostitution ring seemed to reshuffle the political deck yet again.

In June of last year, though, surrounded by signs that the federal investigation was intensifying, Bruno announced that he would not run for re-election and resigned his leadership position. He took a job as the chief executive officer of an information-technology company, CMA Consulting Services, that has many state contracts.