Editorial comment: With God on his side

It would seem, Pedro Espada Jr. has fallen into the same trap as President Richard Nixon — the belief that power justifies itself.

“When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” Mr. Nixon said in 1977, mistaking himself for an omnipotent king.

Pedro Espada, the state senator who represents Kingsbridge and slivers of Riverdale as well as Bedford Park and other Bronx communities, announced his certainty that God is in him and with him last week. If He is, He has strange taste in politicians.

Mr. Espada’s comment was part of a campaign to overcome doubts placed in the minds of voters by the accusations of corruption that have marked his time in government.

Despite numerous investigations and indictments, the senator has yet to be convicted of any crime. But if the Almighty is an ally of the senator, He’d better watch out — the closer you are to Mr. Espada, it seems, the more likely you are to be ensnared in the web of justice.

In 2000, four of his henchmen — all employees of a non-profit health clinic controlled by the senator — were found guilty of using taxpayer funds to help his campaign and that of his son.

God’s self-declared candidate spoke eloquently in placing blame for his troubles on a racist society that doesn’t want “brown people” to accumulate power, rather than on the more than $20,000 of home-delivered sushi he enjoyed that was allegedly paid for by the nonprofit health clinic he founded in 1978. That’s only one of the charges gubernatorial candidate and state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed against Mr. Espada in civil court. Mr. Espada is accused of looting a total of 14 million from the Soundview Health Center.

To add alleged insult to alleged injury, the home where the Espadas enjoyed their cold fish isn’t the apartment he pretends to live in inside his working-class district of the Bronx, but rather in Mamaroneck, a much tonier place in Westchester.

Oh, Pedro, where did you go so allegedly wrong?