Al admitted errors on his returns, but blamed sloppy accounting. He pointed a finger at his younger brother, Anthony, his accountant and co-defendant. Al may have written the checks or charged expenses to his American Express card. Anthony should have picked them up and reconciled them at year’s end.

“So that’s why I speed, so I can catch her attention?” Al asks derisively. “The more clever question would be, Do you feel you’re acting out some inferiority because your wife is more accomplished than you?”

One day, Al, fearing his brother was going to turn state’s evidence, invited Anthony to his office, and secretly videotaped the meeting. It’s a disturbing spectacle, the older, dominant brother pushing the younger brother to “tell the truth” and save Al’s skin. On tape, Anthony admits he was negligent, careless. To Anthony’s mind, the problem was that if he tried to ask questions, he tells Al, “you scream at me.” The only time they met was when Al and Jeanine signed the returns. (Then Anthony tells Al on the tape, “You sit there with Jeanine, banging your chest, claiming, ‘I made more than you.’ ”)

Anthony, a struggling middle-class accountant who couldn’t afford his own defense, had been in therapy for years, and one of his issues was how to stand up to his older, successful brother, also his most important client. On the tape, Anthony, in what seems like a therapeutic breakthrough, tells his brother, “It’s me against you, Al.”

Al did everything he could to avoid indictment. He filed amended returns and paid nearly $1 million in back taxes and penalties. The government used the new returns as a road map to its prosecution. Its contention was that all those mistakes in Al’s favor couldn’t have been by chance. One year, Al claimed to have earned $620,000; later, the amended returns pushed it past $1 million. Either way, it wasn’t a lot for a place like Harrison. “You can’t live like a lord of the manor on that income,” pointed out a lawyer involved in the defense. “He needed a little tax help.”

Jeanine, in her second term as district attorney, appeared in court for most of Al’s trial. She and Al held hands, worked the press like it was a cocktail party. When Al was convicted, Jeanine, who prided herself on toughness toward criminals, wrote the judge a seven-page letter asking for leniency. “The mission ingrained in Al was to succeed and then give back to his parents and siblings,” she wrote. “He was indoctrinated to this by a variety of means, including physical violence and guilt.” The beneficiaries of Al’s giving back, of course, included Jeanine and the kids.

Al was sentenced to 29 months—he served eleven in prison. (Anthony received a stiffer sentence of 37 months. The brothers no longer speak.)

On the eve of prison, Al’s career, his pride, were in tatters. He seemed to give up hope for his marriage, the thing he’d once desperately wanted to preserve. “If this woman intends to pursue her career and continues to pursue politics, she should definitely get rid of me,” Al says. “I mean, that’s so obvious.”

Jeanine didn’t consider leaving politics. “For me, this is who I am,” she tells me. Jeanine forged ahead, winning again for district attorney. “My husband was in prison when I ran to be the chief law-enforcement officer,” she points out.

She did, though, contemplate leaving her marriage. Their political partnership was, by then, mostly over. Al may have created her, but she no longer needed his fund-raising talents. “She can raise money on her own now,” he agrees. “She stopped taking political advice from me.”

Al’s power base had been eroding anyway. Republicans no longer held sway in Westchester. The county had elected a Democrat as its executive. “It was made real clear to Al that there are new rules,” explains one Democratic leader.

Jeanine and their two kids visited Al in federal prison in Florida, where they have a second home. “The most difficult day in my life, other than the day when I watched my dad die, was when I took my children to federal prison to visit their father,” Jeanine says.

It was troubling for Al, too—he couldn’t seem to find much to talk about with his family after the initial greeting.

Jeanine decided she couldn’t leave Al while he was in prison, though some in her camp thought she’d be better off without him. “Things had changed in their relationship,” says a close friend in whom Jeanine confided after Al left prison. “She said, ‘I was with him through the paternity through the trial through prison. If I had every reason to leave him those times, and certainly I did, what reason is left to me now?’ ” To the friend, it seemed that Jeanine had tested the limits of till-death-do-us-part. “At some juncture, you’re no longer at that point at which things are going to break. You have that thing that’s called a family. That’s how she explained it to me,” the friend says.

Related:

• Archive: “Politics”
• Articles by Steve Fishman
• Table of Contents: Oct 23, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!