Attorney general Andrew Cuomo is a press-release-dispensing machine. Since he took office, Cuomo has set a blistering pace, issuing a bulletin nearly every day (50 as of last week)—and that’s after campaign spokeswoman Wendy Katz left last month. (She hasn’t been replaced, and Cuomo hasn’t yet hired an official communication director, either.) Eliot Spitzer, not known to be publicity-shy, had roughly half of Cuomo’s press-release output when he started as A.G. “Putting out press releases is the best way to show New Yorkers what the attorney general is up to,” says John Milgrim, Cuomo’s deputy press secretary and currently the most senior guy on the job. “They have a deterrent value—they show if you do something that crosses the legal line, he will be going after you.” Last month, for instance, Cuomo announced the takedowns of a Westchester gas-station owner (he was fined $2,000 for price gouging), a Rockland County nurse’s aide (she copped to slapping a wheelchair-bound patient in the face), and an upstate wedding photographer charged with fraud (she needs to post a $50,000 bond to take any more newlywed pics). Milgrim says, “You know how many couples were distraught when they didn’t get their pictures?”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Geoffrey Gray
• Table of Contents: Mar 5, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!