New York Family Feuds Go Public

Jeanine Pirro vs. Husband, Republican vs. Republican

New York Republican Jeanine Pirro enters a news briefing on an investigation of which she is the target. (By Kathy Willens -- Associated Press)

NEW YORK, Sept. 28 -- This is proving to be quite a hellish year or so on the campaign trail for Jeanine Pirro.

Pirro, a longtime Republican district attorney who is running for state attorney general, acknowledged this week that she asked Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner, to plant a listening device on her family yacht. She hoped to catch her husband, who already has fathered one child out of wedlock, in flagrante delicto .

Kerik, who has a few potential legal problems of his own, is heard on a government tape cautioning Pirro that her request comes laden with risk. "Everyone is panic-stricken because it's you," Kerik is heard telling her on tapes obtained by a local NBC affiliate. "I've gone out on a limb."

"What am I supposed to do, Bernie?" she is heard replying. "Watch him [vulgar verb for intimate activity] her every night?"

Federal prosecutors in New York have launched an investigation of whether Pirro's conversations with Kerik jumped the tracks from angry spouse to conspirators to illegal bugging. That investigation outraged Pirro, 55, who insists her behavior reflects nothing more than the fury of a long-suffering spouse with a philandering husband.

"Sometime last year I came to believe my husband was seeing another woman," she said during a news conference Wednesday that was fraught with emotion. "I was angry, and had him followed to see if what I suspected was true."

The real crime, she has repeatedly emphasized, was committed by whomever leaked word of the investigation -- and the tapes -- to reporters. She strongly suggested that the leak came from the office of the federal prosecutor, who years ago obtained a felony conviction against her husband.

"Prying into the personal lives of married couples is not the business of a federal prosecutor, and it's time to stop," she said.

Pirro summarized her grievances in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. So by Thursday, there was this intriguing spectacle: A Republican candidate had demanded that a Republican attorney general investigate a Republican federal prosecutor, accused of submarining her candidacy.

In pointed response, federal prosecutor Michael Garcia promptly released a statement confirming the investigation.

"This office is, as Jeanine Pirro said today, investigating allegations recently brought to our attention by other law enforcement agencies," Garcia said. "Their actions, and those of the FBI agents with whom they are working, have been approved by several layers of supervisors, including me."

It already has been a long strange campaign cycle for Pirro. Last fall, she announced her intent to challenge Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). The early betting line was for a doozy of a race, as two smart, rhetorically sharp and polished pols had at it.

But Pirro faltered out of the gates, losing a page of her televised announcement speech and falling silent for 32 very long seconds. Then she talked about New York's border with Ohio, forgetting that Pennsylvania lay in between. Then her husband, Albert Pirro, a millionaire lobbyist, was caught trying to persuade Republican powerbrokers to force his wife to drop out of her race.

Pirro, the husband, has been a source of unending problems for Pirro, the wife. An influential fellow, he has served 11 months in prison for hiding $1 million in taxable income. He claimed his purchase of dozens of gilded items -- from pet pigs to his Ferrari and her Mercedes-Benz -- as business expenses. (Jeanine Pirro signed those tax forms but was not implicated.)

Then there is his child fathered out of wedlock, whom Albert acknowledged only after being confronted with DNA evidence.

Events have left Jeanine Pirro, who already was trailing her opponent, Andrew M. Cuomo, the son of the former governor, by double digits in recent polls, looking at a long slog to election day. "Looked at crassly, women very often get a pass on jerk husbands," said Joseph Mercurio, a political consultant in New York. "But this? It's a nail in her political coffin."