The Crypto Prince of Congress Has Ethics Issues
By Thomas Anderson
The problem with NYC machine politics is that it produces compromised elected officials who are forced to dabble in corrupt acts as a way of showing loyalty to the machine over everything else. Democrat Rep. Ritchie Torres, AKA the Crypto Prince of Congress, is the latest version of NYC pol to enter the swamp we call Washington DC. He’s the Oprah-endorsed, young, gay, minority, progressive who also happens to be a staunch supporter of Israel.
On paper, he’s the perfect politician but scratch slightly under the surface and what you find are the beginnings of a long career of corruption, fraud, and abuse of power. I’ve written many times before about the broken windows theory of law enforcement and how I believe it needs to be applied to elected officials like Torres. Raise the concerns early before shady individuals and organizations take a promising young politician’s career and turn it into a graft machine.
The OCE of the House of Representatives has a complaint I filed with them concerning a trip he took to Kosovo in late 2022. I filed the complaint because I saw that he had a traveling companion with him who has been financially benefitting from the Congressman’s campaign and leadership PAC while failing to file proper disbursements with the FEC on things like travel expenses. When following this trail I came across a set of campaign expenditures that appear to show the Congressman purchased two private club memberships at a unique high-society social club called Zero Bond. The disbursement was a little over $6,000 but was listed as paying for “meals” at the social club. The membership fee for Zero Bond is $3,000, so it appears that Torres and his travel companion to Kosovo received memberships to Zero Bond, not “meals” as they claim with the FEC.
The good thing about the FEC is we can compare expenditures to a vendor from different political campaigns. In this case, Zero Bond was only ever paid by Torres several times and one other PAC. By looking at the expenditures it becomes apparent $6,000 for “meals” at Zero Bond is beyond anything imaginable compared to the other Torres expenditures at Zero Bond.
