WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK – On Wednesday, federal Judge Kenneth Karas handed former New York City Councilman Dan Halloran a 10 year prison sentence for his part in a corruption and bribery scheme. The sentence exceeded the U.S. Probation Department’s recommendation of 6 ½ to 8 years. At the time of his arrest, Halloran was the highest elected official in the U.S. who is openly an adherent of a Pagan or Heathen religion.
Dan Halloran
In September 2012, Halloran, along with state Democratic Senate majority leader Malcolm Smith and ex-Queens Republican Party leader Vincent Tabone, were the focus of an FBI sting operation. Halloran was recorded taking payoffs to facilitate a plot to get Smith, a Democrat, on the GOP line for the 2013 New York City mayoral race. Halloran testified during his trial that he expected Smith to appoint him as first deputy mayor.
Halloran says he was trying to uncover corruption when he took the bribes and would have turned evidence over to authorities for investigation. He also said he thought a second bribe was a legal retainer fee for his services to broker meetings with GOP officials.
According to the New York Post, Judge Karas went with the higher than recommended sentence because
“For five days, he lied on the stand,” White Plains federal Judge Kenneth Karas said of Halloran. “It was egregious. There was overwhelming evidence of his guilt,” added the judge as a stone-faced Halloran took a deep breath and nodded. “I saw him squirm and look uncomfortable on the stand … He lied and lied repeatedly. It was grotesque and offensive.”
Halloran faced a tough campaign in the 2009 election when local press, allegedly instigated by his opponent, outed his religion. His beliefs were often sensationalized by the press, including Village Voice cover art depicting Halloran with a dead sacrificed goat, ceremonial robe and runic cloak. Halloran was at one time a prominent member of the Théodish belief system, a faith that seeks to practice Germanic pre-Christian religion.
See Nick Ritter on Theodish Belief
See Nick Ritter on on Dan Halloran’s History Within Theodism
The tactic, and a possible backlash against Halloran’s opponent for allegedly attacking his religion, worked and Halloran was elected as Queen’s representative on the New York City Council. He went on to a failed bid to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2012. Just five months later, on April 2, 2013, Halloran was arrested for bribery and corruption. A month later he announced he would not stand for re-election for his City Council seat.
Co-defendants Smith and Tabone were convicted on federal corruption charges earlier this year, but haven’t yet been sentenced.
Halloran is scheduled to begin serving his prison term, which also includes two years of house confinement after he finishes his jail sentence that will begin April 17. His attorney says he plans to appeal the sentence.
Follow all Wild Hunt coverage of Halloran here.
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Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow. Break your troth, reap your harvest.
It’s sad that this is one of the most famous heathens among the non heathen and non pagan community. When he was first running, heathens were excited that we were being represented positively in the mainstream press at last. Hopefully this news will be overshadowed by the press’s current obsession with the Icelandic temple story, so hopefully it won’t damage our community too badly. Too many people are already hesitant to come out because of how heathen religions are viewed by the wider society.
“When he was first running, heathens were excited that we were being represented positively in the mainstream press at last.”
Yeah, and unfortunately he turned his back on us when he tried to play up his Catholic heritage. That’s when I dropped any hope of him being anything more than a business as usual New York politician.
He shucked his heathen identity, all but formally renouncing it, almost as soon as he got into politics and set his eyes on higher offices.
Where did the April 17 date come from? I didn’t see that in the NYT article you linked to.
The April 17th date was reported in several sources, including the NY Post link above and several local journals (Gannett).
Ah, thanks. My old eyes missed that link.
Guess he won’t be teaching his SCUBA courses for a long time.
There’s a tasteless prison joke in there somewhere. ..
Wow, ten years? For accepting some bribes? That feels a bit much, especially compared to what other NYC officials get for killing bystanders.
Well, accepting bribes and trying to corrupt the political process, and perjuring himself along the way I suppose.
he apparently tried to buy influence. Even if it is quite disgusting, it’s not like anyone ended up dead or hurt.
This is true. My thought is that a seemingly self-contradictory justice system might be evidence that it is only partly broken.
We all get hurt when the political system is undermined by corruption.
I agree, but 10 years still seem like much. I don’t think corrupted officials get that much when they get caught here.
Our most recent governor to go to prison for corruption in Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, drew 14 years.
Dafuck? You guys are hardcore in the US. In France for example, a politician doing jailtime for corruption is almost unheard of.
Yes, and that is a feature, not a bug.
Well, you need to understand the context. Illinois has a storied history of corruption, going back to the beginning of the 19th Century, which is ancient history for us. Blagojevich was not the first governor to go down for corruption. Five others had been charged, all in the last century, and three convicted (one that did beat the rap saw to it that the acquitting jurors got state jobs after the trial…”
Two others did just a a couple of years apiece. Blagojevich came into office right on the heels of George Ryan, whose corruption was discovered when six kids were wiped out in a truck crash by a driver who had simply bought his license outright when George had been secretary of state. That was the tip of the iceberg of a whole system of contract steering, kickbacks, campaign funds disbursed to family members, all run by a sort of hillbilly mafia of associates from his hometown area. He did about five years of a 6.5 year sentence.
This was just the state capital. Chicago has so much corruption that reporters spend entire careers just attempting to catalog it all.
In just one of the more colorful tidbits, the mayor of Chicago hired a guy named John “Quarter” Boyle for a transportation job. “Quarters” had earned his nickname for stealing $4 million from the Illinois Tollway Authority – in coins! The mayor himself never got in trouble, but the circles of people surrounding him came straight out of Goodfellas or Jabba the Hut’s house parties.
People were well fed up with corruption when an ambitious young Blagojevich came into office. He was going to be the bold reformer! He turned out to be a populist crank and megalomaniac who saw the office solely as a way to glorify his name and bank account. He rarely turned up for work in Springfield, operating instead from his Chicago mansion in his PJs. He also had an almost Caligula-scale narcissism, charging a staffer with carrying a special hairbrush for him at all times and re-working hundreds of thousands of tollway signs to include his name.
In addition to the usual contract and hiring fraud, Blagojevich undertook to sell the Senate seat left vacant by Barack Obama when he was elected president. He continued to do so fairly boldly even when it was pretty clear an investigation had begun.
Blagojevich got hard time, though about half of what he could have received – because he was seen as The Last Straw where Illinois corruption was concerned, and he displayed an open contempt for the rule of law itself.
This time nobody died.
The economy of social harms with corruption is not as straightforward as many other types of crimes. As individual acts, most corruption crimes are, by themselves, petty or seemingly inconsequential to the average person. Some political insider sells an office to another insider. Some civil servant takes a few bucks to fast-track an application. Someone’s nephew gets paid to not drive a public works truck.
It’s all stuff the system can absorb to a degree, and it’s inevitable to a degree. The problem is that over time, there is no such thing as “a little corruption”, and what results is fatally toxic to a functioning democracy, or functioning civil society of any kind, really. If you look at the places beset by Islamic terrorism, or the slaughterhouse that is cartel Mexico, or the other Latin American countries sending tens of thousands of child refugees to our borders, or the mafia economies of Eastern Europe which send most of their best and brightest west, corruption is the one feature they all share in common.
He’s a small enough fish, they can call him out as a corrupt politician and look tough on it.
Plus the judge explicitly said he was being extra harsh since he felt Danno was lying on the stand. Honestly, I bet he’ll win a shorter sentence on appeal (the original 6.5-8) based on that admitted bias alone.
The only good news for Halloran is that there are a good number of Heathen groups in the U.S. prison system. That is, if they would accept him.
Can TWH get a design Dan a prison tattoo contest going?
Not sure why Wild Hunt is interested in this. Pagans do bad stuff too, deal with it.
TWH has tracked Halloran’s political career since he first emerged above the ground clutter, as it has other public Pagans (with a broad definition of “Pagan”). Failing to cover this would be inept journalism.
That and the fact that those of us who’ve actually had the misfortunate of meeting Dan Halloran have been so looking forwards to this day coming to pass.
You make a good point: Halloran’s seeming abandonment of his Heathen faith, in the interest of picking up more political plus points is more religiously relevant than Halloran’s seeming abandonment of the law, in the interest of picking up more political plus points. At the same time, though, many of us have either had encounters with this man, or remember clearly when he first entered politics, making this news – if not religiously relevant – still quite interesting.
I doubt that Halloran will have much affect on the Heathen Community. After all the community has survived far worse people. More Heathens are getting known for the good that they do in the military and elsewhere. We can always use more stories of what Heathens are accomplishing and that will over power the few bad guys. Every community have some we wish were not part of our community.
I have interviewed a fair number of Heathens in ACTION, including the one who got the stone circle up at the Air Force Academy. Believe, it not, there are plenty of non-Heathens who are glad to learn more about Heathens and overcome any stereotyping that they have picked up over time. Some of those may even become Heathens if given a chance. Look at the continued growth in the Heathen community that comes from the hard work of Heathens.
Look at how you get covered here at The Wild Hunt. I am sure Heather would love to do more articles on the good that Heathens are accomplishing. Also there need to be more Heathen reporters in the Pagan/Heathen media. Who else would tell the stories best and with full understanding? Heathens are forming more and more events for Heathens. So nothing is going to stop the Heathen Community. As Heathens say: You are your deeds. “
Wow. In australia one of our corrupt politicians claimed $186,000 for kitchen appliances for his home, and misappropriated $15,000 to have a custom bookshelf build in his personal library, and he didn’t even get FIRED, let alone get jail time…