Roger Stone’s New York State of Mind: Campaign Stunts and Stunt Campaigns (2000–2010)
This article covers Roger Stone’s involvement in New York State politics between the years 2000 and 2010. Many of the individuals Stone surrounded himself with during this period later worked on the 2016 Trump Campaign and on Stone’s original“Stop the Steal” operation, which began during the 2016 Republican primary. It is the fourth article in a continuing series about Stone. While it is not necessary to read the previous entries, it is encouraged.
The first article covers Stone’s early life and involvement in Watergate, through to his work on the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign that brought him into contact with Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.
The second article covers his work on the controversial 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign, which was marred by voter suppression activities as well as his lobbying and early political consulting for Trump in Atlantic City.
The third article covers Stone’s involvement in Indian Gaming and his activities during the 2000 election, which included coordinating Donald Trump’s flirtation with running for President under the Reform Party Banner, and Stone’s involvement in the “Brooks Brothers Riot” during the 2000 Florida recount.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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After his successful hijinks during the 2000 election, Roger Stone was out for revenge. In 1999 he had been fined $100,000 by New York’s Temporary Commission on Lobbying for an illegal ad campaign he conducted on behalf of Donald Trump.
Stone laid the blame for the fine squarely on the shoulders of the governor of New York, a moderate Republican named George Pataki. Trump and Stone initially responded by running ads prior to the 2000 election discouraging Bush from selecting Pataki as his running mate, but were far from finished.
In the lead-up to the 2002 New York gubernatorial race, Stone aimed his dark talents at derailing Pataki’s desired third term. The ostensible reason he did so was because of the governors failure to reform New York’s drug sentencing laws. Stone, a self-professed libertarian, has long promoted a pro-drug legalization and sentencing reform position. Nonetheless, Pataki and his advisors were convinced that he was acting in revenge for having been fined due his illegal lobbying efforts.
Stone began be challenging Pataki’s bid to receive the nomination of New York’s Conservative Party. Despite its small size, no Republican candidate had won a statewide election in New York in 25 years without securing its nomination. Stone managed the campaign of former New York Giants receiver Phil McConkey in a Conservative Party primary challenge against Pataki.
Pataki’s political advisors believed Stone was only involved in the race as an act of revenge against Pataki for the fine. They further believed Stone was acting again secretly on behalf of Donald Trump. One of the individuals covering the matter was a young reporter writing for New York Magazine by the name of Tucker Carlson.
“The[…] reason I find it hard to get upset about a Stone-led conspiracy,” Carlson wrote, “is that I like Roger Stone. Stone has a mixed reputation in Washington, and if you talk to political people here, you’re apt to hear an unsavory story about him (or two, or ten, or … how much time do you have, anyway?). Doesn’t bother me. When I think of Roger Stone, I picture a man in a garish suit standing in the front room of the Palm, his gold, horseshoe-shaped pinkie ring flashing in the late-afternoon sun, talking on an impossibly tiny cell phone to “Mr. Trump.”
To Carlson, Stone was “smart and charming in a mob-related sort of way.”
In addition to the Conservative Party, Pataki was attempting to garner the nomination of another smaller party, the New York Independence Party. After McConkey, Stone managed the Independence Party primary campaign of Tom Golisano, the billionaire founder of the party who was challenging Pataki for its nomination. Stone was introduced to Golisano by Trump, who was also intent on harming Pataki’s electoral prospects.
Golisano pledged to spend an unprecedented $75 million in his challenge to Pataki. Using Golisano’s vast campaign war chest, Stone ran a brutal slate of attack ads against the Republican candidate. Though Pataki won re-election, he did so by winning less than 50% of the vote.
Greg Sargent, writing about the race for the Observer, suggested that the outcome eliminated any chances of Pataki being selected to replace Dick Cheney as George W. Bush’s running mate in 2004.
“It’s enjoyable,” Stone told Sargent. “Let me just say that I’m not unhappy with the byproduct. Any idea of him as a potent political powerhouse that could have helped carry New York State in 2004 is effectively dashed by this election. A candidate who gets less than 51 percent is never going to be the Vice Presidential nominee.”
While working for Golisano, Stone befriended a left-wing comedian, radio host, and voice impressionist named Randy Credico. They bonded over their distaste for New York’s drug sentencing laws. Years later, Credico became enmeshed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election after Stone lied under oath during Congressional testimony by claiming that Credico was his back channel to Wikileaks founder. This episode will be explored at length in a later article.
Pataki’s political advisors believed that Stone had played Golisano for a fool, convincing the billionaire to spend a fortune on a hopeless campaign that was in reality a revenge stunt. The claim that Stone took advantage of the candidates he worked with was echoed by Larry Klayman, founder the vehemently anti-Clinton advocacy group Judicial Watch. Stone ran Klayman’s 2004 Senate campaign for the state of Florida.
In his memoir Whores: How and Why I Came to Fight the Establishment, Klayman alleges that Stone and a group of operatives he brought with him bilked his campaign of funds for their own personal enrichment. Many of the individuals who Stone brought with him, who Klayman refers to as the “Dirty Dozen,” show up repeatedly in later campaigns managed by Stone and in Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
One individual who resurfaced during the Klayman campaign was Dianne Thorne, a close associate of Stone’s who he had placed on the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary, established during the 2000 Florida recount . Thorne was joined on the Klayman campaign by her husband, Tim Suereth.
“Commissioning the husband of his secretary [Dianne Thorne] to find space,” Klayman wrote in Whores, “Roger leased the entire upper floor of a dilapidated building, right above a dry cleaner. Perhaps I should have taken note of that as an omen. I didn’t realize then that Roger and company were taking me to the cleaners.”
The pollster Tony Fabrizio also joined the Klayman campaign at Stone’s behest. Fabrizio, who had cut is teeth working with the famous Republican political operative Arthur Finkelstein, later managed Donald Trump’s polling operations.
Paul Manafort, a friend of Fabrizio’s who got him hired onto the Trump campaign, provided Fabrizio’s 2016 polling data to the alleged Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik. According to the Department of Treasury, Kilimnik provided the data to Russian intelligence.
In 2004, Klayman met with Stone and Fabrizio at a villa in Miami to discuss the campaign. “Isn’t this great,” Klayman recalled Stone saying as they looked over Biscayne Bay. “I feel like Hyman Roth.” Stone was referring to a character in The Godfather Part II, based on Meyer Lansky. According to Klayman, Lansky was one of Stone’s heroes, alongside Roy Cohn.
Yet another Stone acolyte brought onto the Klayman campaign was Michael Caputo, who Klayman described as “a frequently well-lubricated press secretary who had once worked for Boris Yeltsin.”
Like Fabrizio, Caputo was hired by Paul Manafort to work on the Trump campaign and later served as a controversial spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A year earlier, in 2019, Caputo collaborated with the aforementioned alleged Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik, as well as another individual suspected of working for Russian intelligence named Andriy Derkach, on a propaganda documentary entitled The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder.
Stone and Caputo have known each other for years. Their remarkable and mysterious story will be subject of a later article in the series.
Larry Klayman lost the 2004 Florida Senate race, and referred to Stone and his entourage — which included Thorne, Fabrizio, and Caputo — as “a bunch of misfits.” Klayman later founded the conservative activist Judicial Watch, known for filing Freedom of Information Act requests to investigate supposedly corrupt officials in government. Judicial Watch was particularly active peddling the so-called “Russiagate” conspiracy theory. At this writing, Klayman’s law license has been suspended.
THE SHARPTON CAMPAIGN, NXIVM, AND WAR WITH ELIOT SPITZER
Among Klayman’s many complaints was the fact that Stone broke his promise not to work on any other campaigns. At the same time Stone was working for Klayman, a hard right candidate, he was also advising a very different kind of candidate in New York City. Indeed, Stone was quietly consulting the famous and controversial Reverend Al Sharpton, who was considering running or President in the 2004 election.
Outwardly, Stone and Sharpton made for strange political bedfellows. Sharpton was a civil rights activist and the founder of the National Action Network. He was known for his vocal and highly publicized involvement in cases related to racial discrimination and police violence.
Despite his activism, Sharpton was a controversial figure. In the mid-80s, he served as an informant for the FBI/NYPD’s organized crime task force, known as the “Genovese Squad.” Sharpton also gained infamy for his prominent involvement in the Tawana Brawley rape case, in which Brawley falsely accused six white men of having raped her.
While Stone and Sharpton attempted to downplay their joint machinations, a Village Voice investigation by Wayne Barrett revealed the extent of their relationship. Stone’s initial meeting with Sharpton to discuss his presidential campaign took place in March 2004. It was arranged by Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf and Randy Credico, the left wing comedian and radio host who would re-emerge years later during Robert Mueller’s investigation into Stone’s potential links to Wikileaks.
According to Credico, Stone told him that he and Sharpton shared “a mutual obsession: We both hate the Democratic Party.”
In a parallel to his involvement in Pat Buchanan’s Reform Party candidacy, Stone believed Sharpton would inject chaos, controversy, and disunity into the 2004 Democratic primary. He helped Sharpton apply for matching Federal funds for his campaign. Stone further enlisted Charles Halloran, who had managed Tom Golisano’s quixotic New York gubernatorial campaign, to take the reins of the Sharpton campaign. Halloran was just one of a variety of individuals that Stone placed in paid positions on the Sharpton campaign who had also worked with him on the Golisano and Klayman campaigns.
Early in the primary, Stone advised Sharpton to attack Howard Dean, the progressive early front runner in the primary, for not having any minorities on his senior campaign staff.
“If Roger found some ants in an anthill that he thought he could divide and get pissed off with each other,” Halloran told The Washington Examiner, “he’d be in his backyard right now with a magnifying glass.”
In order to ensure that Sharpton received Federal funding for his campaign, Stone arranged for many of his friends, family members, and business associates to donate to the Sharpton campaign. Among the donors were Dianne Thorne, Tim Suereth, and Michael Caputo. Another Stone associate who donated to Sharpton was a lawyer named Paul Rolf Jensen, who was also serving as treasurer of the Larry Klayman campaign. Jensen, who will pop up several more times, represented Stone and his “Stop the Steal” group in 2016.
It was strange that Jensen, notable for his outspoken stance against gay marriage and his lawsuits against gay-friendly Presbyterian ministers, would donate to the pro-gay marriage Sharpton. Strange, that is, unless you understood Stone’s intent to instill chaos into the Democratic primary. Despite Stone’s efforts, Sharpton only received 2.4% of the vote in the Democratic primary.
Jensen was involved in another Stone-led caper during the 2004 election that led to unauthorized yard signs being placed in Pennsylvania that featured Republican Senator Arlen Spector’s name alongside Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in an apparent attempt to get mostly liberal voters in the Philadelphia suburbs to vote split ticket. Stone had worked for Spector in past campaigns.
In early 2006, Stone began working as a political consultant for NXIVM, a multi-level marketing cult of personality built around Keith Raniere, a racketeer who claimed he had the highest IQ in the world and was later convicted of human trafficking, sex offenses, and fraud. Shortly after Stone began representing NXIVM, its two most prominent supporters, the billionaire Seagram’s heirs Clare and Sara Bronfman, donated $20,000 and the use of their private jet to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee.
The Bronfman’s grandfather, Samuel Bronfman, had made a fortune selling whiskey during prohibition and was a close associate of Meyer Lansky’s. According to Steven Pigeon, a Buffalo, NY-based political consultant who worked for NXIVM from 2003 to 2011, Raniere had convinced the Bronfman sisters that they could cleans their wealth by investing in NXIVM. Pigeon was a friend and associate of both Roger Stone and Michael Caputo.
Stone reportedly acted as a middle man between NXIVM and Joseph Bruno, the Republican leader of the New York State Senate. Stone and Pigeon also got NXIVM to hire another political consultant named Frank Parlato, who later was credited with breaking the story that the group was operating a sex cult that physically branded its female members as sex slaves.
To Stone’s credit, Parlato says that he was one of the earliest people to warn that Raniere was a “bullshitter” with a dark side. Before amicably parting ways with NXIVM in 2007, Stone told Parlato that his next endeavor was to destroy the political career of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.
“I thought Spitzer was a punk, and I wanted to fuck with him any way I could,” Stone later told Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker.
Michael Caputo had been involved in a feud with Spitzer dating back to the latter’s time as New York Attorney General. It involved a dispute between Caputo’s family insurance business and the Attorney General’s office. Caputo responded by creating spitzerfile.com and newyorkfacts.net, websites dedicated to collecting negative stories about Spitzer. Using a friend who had once worked on computer projects for the Pentagon, Stone and Caputo spread the stories as far and wide as they could.
Another bitter Spitzer foe was the aforementioned NY State Senate Leader Joseph Bruno, whom Stone had interacted with regarding NXIVM. In June of 2007, Bruno retained Stone for $20,000 a month to take on Spitzer. A month later, NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued a damning report accusing Governor Spitzer’s staff of ordering the State Police to keep special records on Bruno and coordinating a campaign to obtain and provide information to the media meant to discredit him.
Stone began his assault against Spitzer by dredging up a dated story regarding a loan Spitzer’s father had provided his campaign in 2008 while he was running for Attorney General.
On August 6th, 2007, Bernard Spitzer, the Governor’s 83-year old father who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, received a phone message from Stone. “This is a message for Bernard Spitzer,” Stone said. “You will be subpoenaed to testify before the senate committee on investigations on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the senate sergeant at arms. If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany — and there’s not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece of shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth. The fact that your son is a pathological liar will be known to all.”
A recording of the profane message was made public and distributed to the media, causing a minor uproar. Bernard Spitzer responded by hiring private detectives, who traced to call to a telephone owned by Stone’s wife.
Stone denied leaving message, even at one point floating the idea that Randy Credico, a known impressionist, may have impersonated him. Credico found the suggestion “hilarious.” The episode would be mirrored years later, on a much grander scale, when Stone claimed, falsely, that Credico was his connection to Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
Despite Stone’s denials, the message prompted Joseph Bruno to terminate his business relationship with Stone. Stone, however, was destined to have the last laugh. After being fired by Bruno, Stone claims that he found a group of “wealthy Republicans” to continue funding his anti-Spitzer activities.
On March 10th, 2008, The New York Times reported that Spitzer had been caught on a Federal wiretap utilizing the services of a high-priced prostitution ring. While there is no evidence that Stone played any role in breaking the story, he wrote himself into history as a key player in the scandal, and added an almost certainly false detail to the story that became on of its more recognizable juicy tidbits.
Shortly after The New York Times broke the Spitzer prostitution story, The Miami Herald and New York Post published articles claiming that Stone had tipped off the FBI about Spitzer through a letter written by his lawyer, Paul Rolf Jensen. Jensen, a longtime Stone associate, had worked on the Larry Klayman campaign, donated money to Al Sharpton’s campaign, and was later involved in Stone’s “Stop the Steal” group during the 2016 election. Jensen’s letter claimed that Stone had learned of Spitzer’s dalliances with prostitutes from “a social contact in an adult-themed club.”
The letter further alleged that “Governor Spitzer did not remove his mid-calf-length black socks during the sex act. Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information.”
The ridiculous sock allegation, for which there was no evidence other than Jensen’s letter, proved irresistible to the press and became part of the lore relating to Spitzer’s spectacular fall from grace. As it turned out, Jensen’s letter had never been sent to the FBI. Rather, Stone disseminated it throughout the media in a successful effort to insert himself into the story. It was yet another feather in the hat of the self-professed “Dirty Trickster.”
CARL PALADINO AND “THE MANHATTAN MADAM” KIRSTIN DAVIS: ROGER STONE AND THE 2010 NEW YORK GUBERNATORIAL RACE
During the 2010 New York governors race, Stone had his hand in not one, but two different campaigns simultaneously. Many of the exact same people Stone had placed on Larry Klayman’s Senate campaign, whom Michael Caputo described as Stone’s “traveling troup of ‘misfits,’” were involved. This includes Caputo himself.
In 2009, immediately prior to the New York governors race, Stone’s so-called “misfits” joined him in working to defeat an Indian gaming referendum in Ohio on behalf of Jeffrey Jacobs and MTR gaming. Jacobs owned an Ohio casino and a West Virginia racetrack and, as Trump had been ten years earlier when facing Indian gaming in Upstate New York, felt threatened by the potential competition. As a result, he hired Stone and funded a political action committee called TruthPAC. TruthPAC later provided funding for Stone’s candidates in the New York governors race.
With Stone came the “misfits,” and they were all-well paid for their efforts. TruthPAC shelled out $67,701 to Caputo Public Relations, Michael Caputo’s firm. An additional $5,000 was paid to Caputo’s Ukrainian wife. Unsurprisingly, a company owned by Stone-associate Dianne Thorne got in on that action too, receiving $15,000. Thorne’s husband, Tim Suereth, was paid $20,171. Her step-son, Andrew Miller, was paid $3,000.
Miller, who is extremely close to Stone, was later wrapped-up in in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
After the referendum, which Stone failed to defeat, he turned his attention back to New York State politics. As mentioned, he was involved in not one, but two campaigns for governor.
One of the candidates Stone supported was a foul-mouthed Buffalo businessman and conservative activist named Carl Paladino. Paladino has made a name for himself in recent years for being involved in a series of vulgar and racist antics, including publicly stating that he hoped Barack Obama dies of mad cow disease and comparing First Lady Michelle Obama to a gorilla. More recently, he was in hot water for describing Adolf Hitler as “the type of leader we need today.”
Stone played a central role in getting Paladino to run and staffing his campaign. While Stone publicly claimed that he was working for Paladino pro bono, the associates he placed on Paladino’s campaign were well-compensated. Michael Caputo was installed as Paladino’s campaign manager. Over the course of the campaign, Caputo was paid a staggering $407,190. Such generous compensation came just in the nick of time for Caputo. During the campaign, The New York Times reported that he had failed to pay $53,000 in Federal taxes during the previous few years.
Paladino’s pollster was Scott Fabrizio, who as mentioned later worked on the 2016 Trump campaign. Another Stone regular who showed up on the Paladino campaign was Dianne Thorne. According to the reporting of Wayne Barrett, two companies registered to Thorne were paid $84,320 by the Paladino campaign. That was a remarkable sum, considering Thorne was described as Paladino’s “scheduler.”
While there is no direct evidence that Stone was the recipient of kick backs, it doesn’t seem too difficult to imagine that such was the case. All-in-all, Stone’s associates collected nearly $1 million from the Paladino campaign.
Perhaps the most sordid episode during Stone’s association with the Paladino campaign was an assault charge filed against him by Lora Como. Como, a lawyer and campaign advisor to Paladino, a reportedly been “involved in a relationship with Stone.” The two were involved in a “domestic incident.”
Como, who was at Stone’s Chelsea apartment, claimed that Stone became enraged when she had smoked a cigarette indoors and threw her to the ground, bruising her ribs. She filed a police report and Stone denied the charges.
Andrew Miller, Dianne Thorne’s stepson, was also involved in the 2010 New York gubernatorial election. He was not associated, however, with Paladino. Miller served as the campaign manager for “Manhattan Madam” Kristin Davis, whose stunt gubernatorial campaign was another pet project of Stone’s. Miller apparently worked for Davis for free. Strangely, however, he was paid $17,000 by the Paladino Campaign while working for an ostensible opponent.
As with so many of the people around Stone, Davis’s story is stranger than fiction. After leaving a job at a hedge fund, Davis operated a high-priced prostitution ring in Manhattan. In March of 2008, she was arrested on charges of money laundering and promoting prostitution. Following her release after a four mont stint from Rikers Island, Davis appeared on a radio show with Stone and the two became friends.
While Stone claims he encouraged Kristin Davis to run for governor in a bid to change New York’s drug and prostitution laws, it appears more likely the the Davis candidacy was an extension of Stone’s campaign the humiliate and destroy Eliot Spitzer.
Without providing any evidence, Davis publicly claimed that Spitzer had used her prostitution ring “dozens, maybe hundreds of times,” and had been abusive to her workers. Stone further used her to “confirm” his made-up story that Spitzer wore thigh-high black socks during the act. Stone also leaked to the press that Davis had threatened to run against Spitzer if he ever tried to return to politics.
Despite Spitzer not running in 2010, Stone convinced Davis to run for governor. His stated goal was to have her receive at least 50,000 votes. While Stone’s associates worked on the Paladino campaign, he shadow managed the Davis campaign alongside Andrew Miller. One colorful detail about the Davis campaign was that her campaign committee was named “Friends of Kristin Davis,” abbreviated as FOKD.
And what would a Roger Stone campaign be without a dirty trick? This time it was played on New York’s Libertarian Party candidate Warren Redlich. Early in the race, Stone contacted Redlich and attempted to convince him to give up his gubernatorial ambitions and run for Attorney General in an alliance with Paladino. Redlich refused Stone’s offer.
Shortly thereafter, a black-and-white mailer was sent around accusing Redlich of being a “SEXUAL PREDATOR” and a “sick twisted pervert.” The mailer referenced a blog post Redlich had written following a Miley Cyrus photo scandal stating that it was not unusual to see sexy teenage girls in the media.
“I find it to be 100% accurate,” Stone said of flyer, while claiming not to be responsible for it. Stone then claimed Redlich “advocates and promotes sex with children. People should know that before they vote.”
Davis finished with only 20,898 votes. Paladino was crushed by Democrat Andrew Cuomo by over a million votes. Yet, somehow, Roger Stone likely felt like he came out on top. And probably quite a few dollars richer.
The next article in this series will cover Roger Stone’s political activities in Florida and his association with convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.
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