Son's death helped propel Paladino into race

After a grief-counseling session in March, Carl Paladino - still newly devastated by the 2009 death of his son Patrick - gave his family some surprising news.

"We went to a local restaurant afterwards and Carl said, 'You're going to be hearing some things about me running for governor,' " his wife of 40 years, Cathy Paladino, recalled. " 'But it's just talking. I'm trying to maybe start a dialogue with people and see, and right now that's all it is.'

"And I'm thinking to myself, 'Hmmmm,' " she said.

Both his wife and their son Billy said they knew right away that Paladino - a crusading, polarizing and larger-than-life figure who rose from a working-class childhood to become a multimillionaire landlord in his native Buffalo - would do it. It was an unusual, but not astonishing step for a man who had amassed a $150-million fortune and a real estate empire, who had become increasingly frustrated with state government, and who lately had been transformed by grief over the sudden death in a car crash of his 29-year-old son.

'He needed something new'

The campaign, his friends and family said, gave him new reason to live.

"It's just the best thing that ever happened to my father," said Billy, 39. "He just refocused. It took his mind off the same old monotony he was doing in his life. This is . . . new, and he needed something new."

It's been a wild ride. Paladino said he hasn't run for elective office since law school at Syracuse University, when his anger over scholarships awarded primarily to wealthy students, rather than needier ones like him, led him to the student senate. Yet he surged from tea party-backed long shot to Republican nominee, and then, according to some polls, came within striking distance of the heavily favored Democratic candidate, Andrew Cuomo.

Since then he's hit rough patches, been forced to apologize for inflammatory remarks about gays, become a YouTube sensation for publicly threatening to "take out" a newspaper reporter, and apparently backed off an assertion that Cuomo was unfaithful to his ex-wife. But supporters say the developer, who describes himself as "mad as hell" and has pledged to take a baseball bat to Albany, remains unbowed.

Paladino, 64, grew up in the Buffalo neighborhood of East Lovejoy, one of three children of Italian immigrant parents.

He speaks fondly of Bishop Timon High School, the Franciscan, largely Irish high school in South Buffalo he attended and later served as a trustee, despite a priest who used to line up six boys in the hallway to slap them all across the face at once, to "conserve energy." He loved basketball and baseball and was a star at track, but a knee injury when he was 15 effectively ended his participation in school sports.

He graduated from St. Bonaventure University, but when he considered studying engineering, his father talked him out of it. "This is not you," Paladino recalled him saying.

Instead, Belesario Paladino urged him, "Go to your weaknesses," which for Paladino meant studying English and going to law school. At Syracuse University's College of Law, Paladino said he felt out of place among the richer kids whose fathers were lawyers and, he said, "knew the word 'tort.' " He drove home to Buffalo every weekend to work overnights as a mailer for the Courier-Express newspaper and to see his fiancee, Cathy, whom he married in 1970.

Launching his career

After a stint in the Army, Paladino returned to Buffalo, where he went into practice with John "J.B." Walsh, a close friend of Cathy's late father. He later began managing the building housing his law office, and in 1978 assembled investors to buy it. That deal launched his career as a developer.

"Carl was very passionate about Buffalo and developing Buffalo. When other people would not invest in downtown Buffalo, Carl did," said Walsh. "He just saw things that others didn't, and put his money where his mouth is."

Not everyone is a fan. His brash manner and aggressive tactics have earned him his share of critics, who call him a liar, a hypocrite and worse.

"He tries to give this old hokey line, 'I'm just an ordinary guy.' But he's sly like a fox. . . . He's just a bully," said former Buffalo Common Council President James Pitts, who clashed frequently with Paladino. "I told people 30 years ago that he was out of his mind and crazy."

Feuds and controversy

Pitts, a registered Democrat, remembers Paladino evicting low-income renters so he could build a parking lot. "He tries to pretend that all he cares about is the people. He cares about his friends and those who will follow his bidding, and anybody who questions him he's going to attack."

Paladino said just six homes were at issue and they were shoddily constructed under an urban renewal program. "They were fire hazards," he said, adding that he couldn't keep tenants in them. He said he did evict "one or two families" and helped them find new homes in another property of his. Years later, he said, "we built a beautiful parking lot that everyone said was an addition to the neighborhood."

Paladino is known in Western New York for his feuds with public officials. He bought radio ads - "Hellooooo," they would begin - to vent his frustrations with the mayor or the school board.

Two decades of controversy have dogged Paladino: criminal charges over his company's failure to report asbestos on a property in Syracuse (Paladino said a licensed inspector's mistake in the initial inspection and an overzealous federal prosecutor turned what should have been a civil matter into a criminal charge against one of his companies. Paladino wasn't charged in the case.); his insistence that the head of Buffalo's school board was hired only because he was black; racist and pornographic e-mails he forwarded to friends emerged early as a campaign issue. The self-proclaimed political outsider has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions over the years and makes millions on government leases.

But supporters insist Paladino's success lies more in his loyalty, fairness and his highly competitive rents. "There've been some mistakes here and there, but we're pretty much an open book, and that goes back to our integrity and honesty," said Billy Paladino, a senior vice president at the company.

Family life suffered

As Paladino's business took off, his family life sometimes suffered. After Patrick's death, Paladino told his wife - and the public - that he had a 10-year-old daughter, Sarah, whose mother had worked for him.

Patrick, whose father was rarely around when he was young, fell in with the wrong crowd, Billy said, developing an alcohol and drug addiction.

"Almost to a fault my father wanted to help my brother," Billy said. Like his siblings, Patrick worked for the company - his desk faced his father's, in the same office. "He couldn't keep him close enough."

Paladino had been approached about running for governor before his son died, friends say, but the loss helped seal his decision. At one point, his friend and driver, Rus Thompson, suggested leaking the idea of a candidacy to the press to gauge public reaction. Within three hours, according to both men, he got a call from Paladino.

"What the hell did you get me into?" Paladino said.