Benjamin Weiser and Vivian Wang

Collins, 69, the first sitting member of Congress to endorse President Donald Trump in 2016, had been accused of using private information about a drug company in which he was invested to help his son and others avoid financial losses.

Collins was to be tried in February along with his son, Cameron Collins, 26, and a third man, all of whom had pleaded not guilty. A document filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Monday said there would be a “change of plea” hearing Tuesday for all three men, although the filing did not indicate what charges the men would be pleading guilty to.

The men were facing charges of conspiracy, securities and wire fraud and making false statements.

There is no law that requires members of Congress to give up their seats when convicted of a felony, though House rules dictate that the member not vote after their convictions.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office received a letter of resignation from Collins, a spokesman for Pelosi confirmed Monday, and his resignation will be effective once the letter is filed during the House’s pro forma session Tuesday. A state official confirmed that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had also received Collins’ letter.

With Collins’ resignation, Cuomo, a Democrat, will have to call a special election to fill the seat.

A spokeswoman for Collins did not immediately return a request for comment, nor did lawyers for him and his son. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.

Collins had not said whether he would seek another term, though he transferred $500,000 of his own money into his campaign fund in June. Aside from that money, he had raised just $14,000 in the first six months of this year.

In 2017, by contrast, Collins received more than $500,000 in contributions in the same period.

Contenders in both parties had already stepped up to challenge him. Nate McMurray, the Democratic town supervisor of Grand Island, New York, which is just north of Buffalo, has declared his plans to run again.

McMurray lost by less than half a percentage point last year, even though the district had voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of almost 25 points.

Several Republicans had also announced plans to run in the primary election: two state senators, Chris Jacobs and Robert Ortt, as well as Beth Parlato, a lawyer and former judge. Republican Party officials, including the state party’s chairman, Nick Langworthy, had suggested that they would like to see a candidate other than Collins run.

Prosecutors had said that Collins was at the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on June 22, 2017, when he received an email from the chief executive of an Australia-based drugmaker, Innate Immunotherapeutics. Collins was a member of the company’s board of directors and one of its largest shareholders, owning nearly 17% of its stock, authorities said.

In the email, the chief executive, Simon Wilkinson, informed Collins and other board members that he had “extremely bad news”: An experimental drug that the company was developing to treat multiple sclerosis had just failed a critical clinic test.

“Wow,” Collins wrote back, according to a federal indictment. “Makes no sense. How are these results even possible???”

Collins then repeatedly called his son, reaching him on the seventh try, and told him about the failed drug trial — information that was not public — in anticipation that his son “would use it to trade and tip others,” the indictment said. Cameron Collins passed the tip to others, including Stephen Zarsky, his fiancée’s father, authorities said.

In the following days, by selling Innate stock before news of the failed drug trial became public, Cameron Collins was able to avoid losses of about $570,000 and Zarsky of about $144,000, authorities said. The congressman did not make any trades, the government said.

Collins was stripped of his seat on the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee after his indictment in August 2018. Paul Ryan, then the Republican House speaker, in announcing the punishment also called for the House Ethics Committee to investigate the allegations.

Days after the indictment, Collins suspended his 2018 reelection bid. But a month later, he reversed course and resumed campaigning, blindsiding party leaders.

This article originally appeared in

Rep. Chris Collins Resigns Before Expected Guilty Plea in Insider Trading Case

Rep. Chris Collins, a fourth-term Republican from western New York who narrowly won reelection last year despite fighting federal securities fraud charges, resigned Monday in advance of an expected guilty plea.

Kaloyeros, 62, whom Cuomo once called a genius and described as “New York’s secret weapon,” had conspired to steer hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts to favored firms in Buffalo and Syracuse, prosecutors charged.

His conviction further tarnished the reputation of a Capitol already known for a steady parade of corruption headlines, and cast a shadow on the development projects that Cuomo has made a centerpiece of his administration. (The governor has not been accused of any wrongdoing.)

“Kaloyeros’ willingness to lie and cheat tainted the Buffalo Billions with fraud and cynicism,” the judge, Valerie E. Caproni, said before imposing the sentence, which also included a $100,000 fine.

She told Kaloyeros that his prosecution “should serve as a warning to others in government everywhere: You are serving the public.”

“If you can’t live with that,” she said, “then get out of government.”

Kaloyeros, in brief comments to the judge, said the harm done to his family, former colleagues and taxpayers weighed heavily upon him.

“I feel an enormous responsibility for the hurt and loss I have caused others,” he said.

Kaloyeros is the last major defendant to be sentenced in a series of state corruption prosecutions first announced nearly four years ago by Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, in what he made a campaign against Albany’s culture of secrecy and influence peddling.

Another of Cuomo’s associates, Joseph Percoco, was convicted in March of soliciting and accepting more than $300,000 in bribes from executives of two firms with state business. Percoco, once one of Cuomo’s closest advisers, was sentenced to six years in prison.

Cuomo, a Democrat, had appointed Kaloyeros, then the president of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, to oversee the Buffalo Billion project, which has funneled $1.5 billion to upstate and western New York. The government did not allege that Kaloyeros profited financially through the bid-rigging scheme but rather that he used it to strengthen his relationship with Todd R. Howe, a former lobbyist with ties to Cuomo, and with the governor himself.

Caproni suggested the same motive in her remarks. While she called the lack of monetary gain a significant mitigating factor, “regardless of whether he profited financially, he profited politically,” she said.

“He let his desire to earn Brownie points in the executive chamber overcome the normal, well-thought-out processes that treated all developers fairly,” she said, “whether they were giving money to Cuomo campaign coffers or not.”

She also noted that Kaloyeros had deleted incriminating emails from a personal account, an act that prosecutors had portrayed as an attempt to obstruct the investigation.

Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement after the hearing that “public corruption — especially at such a disconcertingly high level in Albany — contributes to the frustration and eroding faith” of New Yorkers in their government.

Berman’s office had recommended a “substantial” term of imprisonment for Kaloyeros. Matthew Podolsky, a prosecutor, acknowledged in court that Kaloyeros had been a titan in his field who had made “real contributions to the economy of New York state.”

But ultimately, Podolsky said, Kaloyeros decided that his loyalty lay not with taxpayers, but with preserving his own influence.

“When Dr. Kaloyeros’ power was at risk, and when he wanted to expand that power, he was willing to abuse the authority that was conferred on him,” he said.

According to prosecutors, Kaloyeros and Howe had conspired to award lucrative contracts to two firms — LPCiminelli, a Buffalo construction management firm, and COR Development, a Syracuse-area company — whose executives were major donors to Cuomo.

They said that Kaloyeros and Howe had tailored requests for proposals to fit the special qualifications of the two firms, both clients of Howe’s, and ensure that they were chosen for the projects.

They accused Kaloyeros of engineering the plan to tailor the requests, and said that he himself had sat at his computer to draft the “fraudulent language” they contained.

LPCiminelli received a contract to build what became a $750 million solar-panel plant on the banks of the Buffalo River, while COR received contracts worth more than $100 million on other projects.

Kaloyeros’ lawyers, arguing for leniency, underscored that the scheme had yielded no financial gain for their client and had been aimed at furthering the state’s revitalization. They asked for a sentence at the low end of a range of four to 10 months.

After the hearing, the lawyers, Reid H. Weingarten and Michael C. Miller, called their client an innocent man who would appeal his conviction.

“Alain committed no crimes in connection with his work on the Buffalo Billion program,” they said in a statement. “He attempted at every stage to make sure that the people of the state of New York got the right contractor for the right job at the right price.”

Along with Kaloyeros and Percoco, others convicted in the series of federal corruption trials in Manhattan were Sheldon Silver, the former powerful Democratic Assembly speaker; Dean G. Skelos, the former Republican Senate majority leader; and several executives whose firms did business with the state and who were major donors to Cuomo. (At least two cooperating witnesses have yet to be sentenced.)

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/nyregion/kaloyeros-buffalo-billion-sentencing-cuomo.html" id="31607f5a-dbcc-321f-a0fc-ca3508e15b25">The New York Times</a>.

Mastermind of Cuomo's Economic Development Efforts Is Sentenced to Prison

NEW YORK — Alain E. Kaloyeros, the central architect of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s largest economic development efforts, was sentenced Tuesday to 3 1/2 years in prison for his role in a bid-rigging scandal involving the governor’s signature upstate revitalization plan, the so-called Buffalo Billion.

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Benjamin Weiser and Vivian Wang

Articles written by the author

Rep. Chris Collins Resigns Before Expected Guilty Plea in Insider Trading Case

Mastermind of Cuomo's Economic Development Efforts Is Sentenced to Prison