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Alan Hevesi, New York Official Who Fell From Grace, Dies at 83

Alan G. Hevesi, a cerebral, suave and blunt New York politician who spent 35 years as an elected official until he suffered a dizzying fall that led to his resignation as state comptroller and 20 months in prison for corruption, died on Thursday in the hamlet of East Meadow on Long Island. He was 83.

The cause of death, at an assisted living facility, was Lewy body dementia, his son Andrew said.

A former college basketball star and professor with a doctorate in political science, Mr. Hevesi represented his Forest Hills, Queens, district in the State Assembly from 1971 until he unseated Elizabeth Holtzman in the Democratic primary for New York City comptroller in 1993. He went on to defeat Herman Badillo, who was running on the Republican-Liberal lines, in the November general election.

As comptroller, in response to demands by the World Jewish Congress and other groups, Mr. Hevesi used his power over city pension fund investments to help force Swiss banks to indemnify heirs of Holocaust victims for their unredeemed Nazi-era bank balances. He was joined in the effort by officials from other states.

In 2001, he finished fourth in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary, which Mark Green won in a runoff. But one year later, with his gusto for politics undiminished, Mr. Hevesi won the nomination for state comptroller and defeated John Faso, a Republican assemblyman from upstate, in the general election.

He never finished his four-year term.

On Oct. 23, 2006, a state ethics commission concluded that Mr. Hevesi had knowingly violated the law by improperly assigning a public employee to handle personal chores. On Nov. 3, he was ordered by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to reimburse the state $90,000, in addition to $83,000 he had already paid.

Mr. Hevesi appealed to voters on television, asking them to “weigh my mistake against my 35 years of public service.” He added, “I’m human; I’m a good comptroller who did a dumb thing.” On Nov. 7, he was re-elected with 56 percent of the vote.

He persuaded the public, but not the prosecutors.

Barely a month after being re-elected, Mr. Hevesi acknowledged that he had unlawfully assigned state employees to chauffeur his disabled and chronically ill wife in a state car and to perform other family errands. He pleaded guilty to defrauding the government and, in a plea bargain, resigned from office effective Dec. 22, 2006. He was later fined $5,000 and permanently barred from holding elective office again.

Four years later, in October 2010, he pleaded guilty to corruption charges stemming from a pay-to-play scheme in which, as comptroller, he had accepted $1 million in gifts, trips and campaign contributions for steering $250 million in New York State pension fund investments to a California venture capitalist.

The scheme, masterminded by Mr. Hevesi’s political consultant Hank Morris, was prosecuted by Andrew Cuomo, the future governor, when he was the state attorney general.

Mr. Hevesi was sentenced to one to four years in prison. He was released on parole on Dec. 19, 2012, after serving 20 months.

Alan George Hevesi was born on Jan. 31, 1940, in Manhattan, a son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary who separately fled the looming war in Europe in 1938 and met in Queens. While his parents escaped the Nazis, 55 of their relatives died at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

His paternal grandfather, Simon Hevesi, had been the chief rabbi of Hungary. His father, Eugene Hevesi, was a banker, a diplomat, an economist and the foreign affairs secretary of the American Jewish Committee. His mother, Alicia (Parness) Hevesi, was a music publisher.

Except for when he was incarcerated, Mr. Hevesi always lived within one mile of his boyhood home in Forest Hills, although he moved five times.

He married Carol Stanton in 1967. She died in 2015. In addition to Andrew, an Assemblyman from Queens, he is survived by another son, Daniel, a former State Senator; a daughter, Laura Hevesi; and three grandchildren. His brother, Dennis, a reporter for The New York Times, died in 2017.

Mr. Hevesi had spent recent years in assisted-living homes; before then, he lived for about 50 years at the same house in Forest Hills.

Mr. Hevesi earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from Queens College and, in 1971, a doctorate in public law and government from Columbia University. His dissertation was titled “Legislative Leadership in New York State,” a subject he had studied firsthand as a graduate student while an intern for the State Senate majority leader, Walter J. Mahoney, a Buffalo Republican.

He became a political science professor at Queens College in 1967 and continued teaching for nearly three decades.

In 1971, when he was 31, he was elected to the Assembly to replace Emanuel R. Gold, who was elected to the State Senate.

Mr. Hevesi served in the Legislature for 22 years and sponsored 108 bills that became law. Known as a skilled debater, he championed protections for nursing home patients and the disabled, supported abortion rights and opposed the death penalty.

New York magazine, comparing him to his fellow legislators, described Mr. Hevesi as “a first-rate mind among dunderheads.” He rose to become deputy majority leader.

As city comptroller, he successfully challenged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s proposal to sell off the municipal water supply system to the quasi-independent Water Board.

As a custodian of the public employee pension funds, he wielded his influence over investments to enforce the MacBride principles, devised to increase employment opportunities among Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland.

His effort to pressure Swiss banks to make good on accounts belonging to victims of Nazi persecution that had been looted or wrongfully closed led to a $1.25 billion multistate settlement reached in 1998 and approved by a federal judge in 2000. Mr. Hevesi, along with officials in California, Pennsylvania and other cities and states, had threatened to begin imposing sanctions on the banks.

Unable to seek re-election because of term limits, Mr. Hevesi ran instead for mayor in 2001 but finished fourth in the Democratic primary. The next year, he defeated Mr. Faso for state comptroller. When he resigned as comptroller, the Legislature elected Assemblyman Thomas DiNapoli, a Nassau County Democrat, to serve out his term.

Considered a progressive in the party and at odds with the Democratic organization early on, Mr. Hevesi stunned many colleagues in 1986 with his grace in delivering the eulogy at the funeral of Donald R. Manes, the Queens borough president, a regular Democrat, who had killed himself in the midst of a corruption investigation.

Marlene Manes, the borough president’s wife, asked Mr. Hevesi to speak at the service after virtually every other politician and public official had abandoned her husband and declined to do so.

In his eulogy, Mr. Hevesi described Mr. Manes as a man who would “help individuals one at a time” and who “changed the landscape of Queens” by spurring development of educational and cultural institutions in the borough.

Mr. Hevesi himself was spoken of in similar terms by his children in pleas they submitted before his sentencing in 2011. His son Dan wrote that for Mr. Hevesi, “there was no black cloud of shadiness that hovers over many politicians.”

“He was a different breed,” he said. “It is simply tragic that a remarkable career of good work can be completely obliterated by several very misguided actions.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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