A former deputy chief of staff to Council Speaker Christine Quinn has been fined for soliciting campaign contributions for Quinn while working for her City Hall office. City laws bar Council staffers or anyone with "substantial policy discretion" from working on their bosses campaigns, but a board found that Maura Keaney solicited contributions from union representatives for Quinn's re-election campaign in 2007. According to the Times, Keaney—who last year took a gig with Mayor Bloomberg's re-election campaign and landed a $150,000 bonus—was fined $2,500. Just hours after the city's Conflicts of Interest Board ruled against her, Bloomberg's school's chancellor Joel Klein announced that Keaney had been appointed as the Department of Education's executive director of external affairs for $143,000 per year. more ›

ABC News reports that Richard Zabel, "the new chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan," has recused himself from the Bernard Madoff investigation "because his father represents one of the potential targets." Zabel's dad's client is Jeffrey Picower, who allegedly took $7.2 billion from Madoff's fraud. One lawyer said, "[The feds] have been dragging their feet and have not shown an appetite for going after others who may have helped Madoff devise the scheme." more ›

In what must have seemed to Rudy Giuliani like a scene out of his nightmares, yesterday it was determined that there is officially a room where discussing 9/11 is off-limits—inside the courtroom of former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik's corruption trial. During a pretrial meeting in White Plains federal court, the judge told Kerik's team, "This is not about 9/11." Kerik was indicted of trading city contracts for free apartment renovations to his Bronx apartment from a mob-linked contractor. more ›