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DEL MONTE'S DIRTY POLITICAL SMEAR BASELESS, AUDITOR'S REPORT SHOWS

Analysis by Mike Hudson

A sleazy political attack, dreamed up by the desperate and defeated Francine Del Monte and propagated by a stenographer from the Niagara Gazette, has been dismissed as utter fiction by the accounting firm that performed the audit of the Lew-Port School District's Teacher's Benefit Trust.

According to a press release issued last week by the Del Monte campaign, and dutifully typed up almost verbatim by the Gazette's Nick Mattera, some $750,000 in money from the trust had gone mysteriously missing. The trust is administered by Flexcare, a company owned by Paul Accardo, brother of John Accardo, who beat Del Monte soundly in the Democratic Primary last month.

But an Oct. 20 letter from Brown & Co., which performed an audit of the trust fund, showed absolutely no wrongdoing on the part of Flexcare or Paul Accardo.

"We would have informed the Trustees of any material errors and any fraudulent financial reporting or misappropriation of assets that came to our attention," wrote Steven Brown, a CPA and partner in the firm. "There were no material errors ... fraudulent financial reporting or misappropriation of assets."

Brown wrote two sentences, which dismiss entirely two weeks of scurrilous reporting by the county's largest daily newspaper. Whether they will ever appear in that paper is doubtful, since the Gazette has blindly supported Del Monte -- a former employee -- since she first took office a decade ago.

Del Monte is now running on the Working Families Party line. Although she has no hope of winning the three-way race that also includes Republican John Ceretto, she is hoping to split the Democratic vote as a means of getting revenge on the man who beat her.

Her Working Families Party is currently under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for election fraud.

Normally, criminal accusations leveled just prior to an election by one candidate against another are dismissed by serious journalists. Mattera, a recent college graduate who has fawned over Del Monte in print ever since getting the Gazette job, was perhaps unaware of this standard journalistic practice.

The Gazette itself has broken with what Publisher Peter Mio referred to just last year as the "longstanding policy" of the Gazette not to cover "third party or fringe" candidates in elections. Kathryn Mazierski, who ran on the Independence Party line in the Lewiston Supervisor's race after losing the primary to incumbent Fred Newlin in 2009, told the Niagara Falls Reporter that Mio said there was nothing he could do about it.

"So in my case there was one policy in place at the Gazette and for Francine Del Monte there's an entirely different policy," Mazierski said. "It's apparent that any sort of journalistic ethics just goes out the window when they're dealing with her."

Paul Accardo said Del Monte knew from the beginning that there were no "missing funds" in the Lew-Port trust fund.

"All of a sudden, some reporter calls me up and asks, 'What about these missing funds?'" Accardo said. "And I was, well, I had no idea what they were even talking about."

Still, he says, he tried to accommodate the reporter.

"We were on the phone for a half-hour, and when the article came out, I was allowed one sentence at the very end," he said. "It was clear to me anyway that they were interested in smearing John whether it was true or not."

The bizarre nature of Del Monte's charges and the fact that a gullible cub reporter chose to take them seriously just two weeks before Election Day is indicative of the petty and vindictive nature of politics here on the Niagara Frontier. It's why it is so difficult to find decent, qualified candidates to run for office.

No one on the political scene personifies the poisonous, nasty atmosphere here better than Francine Del Monte, who, in the past, has used a private detective to illegally dig up dirt on opponents.

For his part, candidate John Accardo remains philosophical and upbeat.

"The people made their decision about Francine Del Monte nearly two months ago in the primary election," he said. "She can't get over that, and that's a shame. But I'm running a serious campaign to try and get to Albany, to try and undo some of the damage she's done over the past 10 years. I don't really have the time to deal with what looks like a mental collapse."

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com October 26, 2010