Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. (Getty Images)

Big things are happening at D.A.’s office. This spring, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes will be starring in a new six-part series on CBS, aptly titled "Brooklyn D.A."

A press release acquired by the Daily News said the show follows “hard-charging prosecutors (with) larger-than-life personalities both inside the courtroom and out. They’re eccentric and living right on the edge.”

CBS  called the new program a “reality series,” but Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for Mr. Hynes clarified:

“It’s a documentary, not a reality show,” he told The Observer. “It’s about the hard-working, dedicated people of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.”

With an executive producer like Susan Zirinsky from "48 Hours," we are still hoping Brooklyn D.A. will prove to be the genetically superior offspring of "Jersey Shore" and "House of Cards," but so far the off-screen, pre-primary shenanigans sound like a sequel to "Mean Girls."

Mr. Schmetterer said that a lot of dramatic stuff happens everyday in the office, but with the Democratic primaries approaching, the real drama may be taking place outside the office.

Mr. Hynes’ primary opponents, former federal prosecutor Kenneth Thompson and former Manhattan prosecutor Abraham George, were both less than pleased to hear about their competitor’s conveniently scheduled airtime (the show premiers on May 21.)

“Charles Hynes doesn’t want to be D.A. He just wants to play one on TV,” said Mr. George told the Daily News. While Mr. Thompson asserted that if Mr. Hynes “spent less time worrying about getting on TV and more about his job, Brooklyn wouldn’t have the lowest felony conviction rate in the city.”

“Jealousy is not a positive for political figures,” responded Mr. Hynes’s campaign spokesman George Arzt. But The Observer thinks that what he really meant was: “You can’t sit with us.”

Not that even my already inflated ego believes that you need to write about this and that it is newsworthy, but i wanted to let you all know that today I am endorsing the following candidates in this years election and will be voting for them tonight at the Democratic Executive Committee meeting in Kings county.

Mayor Bill Thompson

Comptroller David Yassky

PA Mark Green

DA Joe Hynes

BP Marty Markowitz.

It's worth noting that Fidler is not endorsing the only public advocate candidate from Brooklyn, Bill de Blasio. The two haven't generally seen eye-to-eye.

Gordon could face between 2 1/3 to 10 years in prison, and will, of course, be forced to give up her seat.

One politician considered a possible contender for her position is Charles Barron, a term-limited Councilman in the district who is, right now, running for borough president.

UPDATE: Here is an official statement from the city's Department of Investigation. And Gordon's official Assembly page is already down.

UPDATE II: Sheldon Silver released a statement: "This is an unfortunate situation and my heart goes out to Ms. Gordon’s family. However, this has been proven to be a breach of the public trust and the legal system is dealing with it accordingly."
 

Statements the witness, Linda Schiro, made a decade ago contradicted her later testimony to the Brooklyn DA's office.

Had they known about the earlier testimony, Hynes said, “It would have been unthinkable to proceed.”

It's never too soon to know about your elected officials. I guess.

Peters will be the Special Deputy Superintendent in charge of the New York Liquidation Bureau. Previously, Peters worked in Spitzer's AG office as chief of the Public Integrity Unit.

The official statement on Mark Peters is here.

-- Azi Paybarah

Andrew Cuomo could have been a victim of this rule in 2002 (he bypassed the convention and went straight to petitioning) when he ran against Carl McCall for the gubernatorial nomination.

Four years later, as front runner for attorney general, it seems he will be the beneficiary of it. When running for governor, Cuomo was quoted telling his backers, "I want to be the candidate who was placed on the ballot by the people, not by the party."

In another blast from the past, something that could trouble the leading Democratic candidates in this year's AG race is if Denise O'Donnell can coalesce her support as Karen Burstein did when she ran against G. Oliver Koppell, Charles Hynes and Eliot Spitzer in 1994, effectively splitting the primary ticket in her favor even though she lost the general.

—Nicole Brydson

Just last year, Assemblyman Dov Hikind campaigned, hard, against the incumbent district attorney, Joe Hynes, and for the organization candidate, John Sampson.

But on April 2, Dov will be presenting awards at the Boro Park Jewish Community Council’s legislative breakfast, including the "distinguished guardian award for integrity in government" to... one Charles J. Hynes. A reader who followed those Brooklyn races recalls that that wasn’t exactly what Hikind was saying about Hynes at the time.

But that doesn't mean it's not a political liability, which challenger Mark Peters probes pretty directly in this spot.

The letters on the screen read: "District Attorney Charles Hynes doesn't see all the corruption in Brooklyn...Maybe that's because he lives in a gated community...in Breezy Point, Queens."

Fortunately, there is still powerful opposition to Indian Point, on both safety and environmental grounds. Richard Brodsky, a state assemblyman from Westchester, has made closing the plant a priority. Of the N.R.C.'s recent decision, he remarked, "The N.R.C. is being an apologist, not a regulator." Meanwhile, the state has demanded that Entergy build a new cooling system, which would rely on recycled water and reduce by 97 percent the millions of fish the plant kills each year. Entergy, which is a $10 billion corporation, complains that this would cost more than $1 billion and that it would be forced to permanently close the facility. Anything that makes Indian Point less attractive as a business is a step in the right direction. And it's worth noting that several non-nuclear power plants now being built would be able to replace all the power, and then some, currently being generated by Indian Point.

Simply put, this is a matter of national security, not of energy policy. Terrorists would stop at nothing to use Indian Point as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. One of the planes that struck the World Trade Center flew right by the plant. A meltdown or terrorist attack at Indian Point would make Sept. 11 look like a minor tragedy. One N.R.C. study estimated that a meltdown at Indian Point would kill 46,000 people immediately-not to mention the panic, trauma and economic calamity that would result from a full evacuation of New York City, which is located just 35 miles from Indian Point.

If George W. Bush is at all serious about winning votes in New York, and isn't just using the city as a camera-ready, 9/11-tinged backdrop for the Republican National Convention this summer, he will understand that closing Indian Point would make all New Yorkers safer, and would frustrate militant Islam's unholy warriors.

Clarence Norman: Kings County Crook

It has been several months since Clarence Norman, the slippery Democratic boss of Brooklyn and a senior member of the State Assembly, was indicted on corruption charges. The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, has charged that Mr. Norman tried to steer judicial candidates to his organization's favored consultants, adding weight to the long-whispered charges that judgeships were sold in Brooklyn's Democratic political bazaar. Mr. Norman is also charged with billing the state for $5,000 in travel expenses, even though the party had reimbursed him.

Since the indictments, Mr. Norman has continued to function as the county leader of the Brooklyn Democratic organization and as an assemblyman. Outrageously, there has been little pressure on him to step down from either position, and he has shown no signs of doing so. And why would he, when he earns a $100,000 salary for his part-time Assembly work? Mr. Norman's arrogance is matched by his corruption; for years, he has weaved a web of finances and fishy explanations which smell worse than the Gowanus Canal on a mid-August afternoon.

Take, for example, the fact that Mr. Norman came to own a stock portfolio that grew from as little as $40,000 in 1995 to as much as $4 million by 1999. He has a simple explanation: He watched CNBC and read a book by Peter Lynch, the Fidelity fund's financial guru. Well, that explains everything. Mr. Norman's remarkable good fortune has been spread around to his friends: The head of the law firm that employed Mr. Norman, Ravi Batra, has received nearly a half-million dollars in court-assigned work. And Mr. Norman apparently felt quite comfortable with the Brooklyn Democratic Party's credit card, racking up $140,000 in expenses over five and a half years.

Mr. Hynes should move quickly in bringing this case to trial. The longer this is dragged out, the greater the opportunity for the borough's demagogues to play the race card. Even though Mr. Hynes has a reputation as a racial healer, some of Mr. Norman's allies are complaining that their man was singled out for prosecution because he is black.

That's worse than rubbish: Would they also claim that the late, unlamented Meade Esposito was prosecuted because he was Italian-American? The history of New York politics-particularly in Kings County-suggests that corruption is an equal-opportunity offense.

Let the case against Mr. Norman proceed. The longer he remains in power, the longer it will take the Brooklyn Democratic organization to rebuild after decades of corruption.

N.Y.U. Outshines the Ivies

Given his or her choice, most high-school seniors would want to attend an Ivy League university, wouldn't they? Not according to results of a new survey by the Princeton Review, which polled 3,000 high-school students to find out their "dream school" and asked, "What college would you most like to attend if chance of being accepted or cost were not an issue?" New York University came out on top, followed, in order, by Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Duke, Columbia, Princeton, Notre Dame, Georgetown and Cornell. Last year, in the same survey, N.Y.U. came in second to Stanford, but still beat Harvard, Yale and Princeton. So, for two years running, N.Y.U. has shown more drawing power than the Ivy League threesome so often mentioned in one breath as the Holy Trinity of American higher education.

While the academic community has known for years that an N.Y.U. education can match that offered by the Ivies, it's notable that high-school students are now attaching more value to a diploma from the leafy streets of Greenwich Village than they are to one earned on the banks of the Charles or in the gritty streets of New Haven. N.Y.U. has benefited from extraordinary leadership and the recruitment of top-quality academic talent from around the world-a magnificent legacy left by Larry Tisch and continued into the 21st century by chairman Martin Lipton and the university's visionary president, John Sexton.

The university's success is also a measure of the city's success at creating a highly desirable quality of life. The assertive crime-fighting policies of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have allowed New York to keep its standing as the safest large city in America. Parents can feel good about sending their children here-not to mention that they don't have to buy Junior a car. And N.Y.U. students have some of the world's greatest cultural institutions a mere subway ride away. Indeed, since 1994, undergraduate applications to N.Y.U. have increased by 135 per cent, and more students have applied for admission to N.Y.U. in fall 2004 than to any other private university-indicating that fears stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks haven't hurt N.Y.U.'s appeal.

N.Y.U. students don't just study here; after graduating, they contribute to the city in many important ways, working in finance, government, journalism or the arts. It's almost impossible not to encounter N.Y.U. graduates in the halls of city government, or deeply involved in arts institutions, or working on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. As Frank Sinatra sang, they know that if they can make it here ….