Details still to come in latest Nassau County corruption case

Federal criminal case No. 18 0087 filed Thursday against Rob Walker is just the latest entry in Long Island’s culture of corruption sweepstakes.

For the full eight years Edward Mangano served as Nassau’s county executive, his chief deputy, Walker, awarded taxpayer money to vendors who did business with the administration. During that time, close to $1 million in campaign donations, much from those very same county vendors, flowed to the Hicksville Republican Club run by Walker. Such riches enabled the purchase of a skybox at MetLife Stadium, where Walker’s favorite football team happens to play, and allowed the club to grow a war chest that gave him outsized political influence.

Yet, in the most bizarre of the spate of federal official corruption indictments against Mangano, former Oyster Bay Town Supervisor John Venditto and former State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, the charges against Walker seem to relegate him to the junior varsity.

In just 14 lines of type, the indictment signed by U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue alleges that Walker tried to thwart a grand jury investigation in August, and then lied when he was questioned by the FBI in November. The bail letter used at his arraignment provided few more details. It alleges that Walker took $5,000 from a Nassau County contractor in 2014 at a Notre Dame football game and then tried to hide it when the FBI came around to ask him about it.

We have charges of a cover-up, but no sense of whether there was an underlying illegal act. Walker raised prodigious amounts for his GOP club while he oversaw millions in county contracts, and all we know are the murky details of him allegedly taking $5,000 stuffed in an envelope in Indiana and later trying to give it back at a Hicksville park.

The contest for worst violation of the public trust continues.