NEW YORK -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg testified Monday against a former campaign operative accused of bilking him out of more than $1 million, then underwent hours of cross-examination by a defense lawyer who questioned whether he had skirted the law and came close to calling the billionaire politician a liar.
"He promised things that he didn't do," Bloomberg said of John Haggerty, who is accused of persuading the mayor and his staff to finance an expansive poll-monitoring initiative that never materialized, then using most of the cash to buy himself a house.
"Isn't that what you regularly did at Salomon Bros.?" lawyer Raymond Castello responded.
Castello asked the mayor a number of potentially uncomfortable questions, reading from a passage in his autobiography in which he said that as a businessman he had promised customers more than he planned to deliver, and bringing up topics that could be unpopular with voters and jurors -- from his flip-flop on extending term limits to his decision to keep an aide's domestic-violence arrest private even when publicly announcing his departure.
"I don't lie," the mayor said.
-- Associated Press
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