Will tax scandal ruin N.Y. governor's top aide?

Calls for resignation
Enter the Republican party trying to hold the its last bastion of power — the state Senate — where they cling to a one-vote majority. This week, three Republican Senate candidates called for O'Byrne's resignation and the Republican-led investigations committee that put Spitzer on the public rack for a year turned to O'Byrne.

It's an odd spot for O'Byrne, a guy who says his Catholic faith steered him to a life of public service, who took a dicey flight to Nicaragua to bring in medical supplies during the Reagan administration's embargo, and who volunteered to help disabled kids and homeless adults on his way to the priesthood.

That's the puzzle of O'Byrne: nice guy but just don't get in his way. Some have witnessed the wrath of the ex-priest built like a barroom brawler up close.

"He was infuriated, he was screaming," a former Spitzer aide said of a blow-up in the Executive Chamber that many around O'Byrne say are rare. "He was staunchly defending David ... but he came around two days later and apologized and everything was fine after."

In a Playboy article in 2002, the year he left the priesthood after four years, O'Byrne blasted what he called hypocrisy in the church, referring to some gay priests as "boyologists."

"I became aware that there was sex all around me," he wrote. "One of my best friends, a virgin at 30, was surprised when his superior encouraged him to respond to the sexual overtures of an older Jesuit."

Impact on Paterson
O'Byrne's edge is a counterweight to the likable Paterson in a place ruled by outrage and outsized egos. The line is that Paterson is like a game of telephone. He can give three people the same message and all three will have heard something different, and all three will think they won.

Then O'Byrne straightens them out.

Paterson and O'Byrne met when O'Byrne signed on as a part-time speech writer for Paterson, then the Senate minority leader. The two clicked, and Paterson went from a near backbencher to the governor's mansion in the ashes of the Spitzer administration.

With O'Byrne's guidance, Paterson has started to cut a national swath, warning the sky was falling on Wall Street months before it fell, expanding gay rights, and calling for a cap of the nation's highest property taxes.

Just off stage was O'Byrne. But for how long isn't certain.

It's embarrassing and bad timing, but not fatal, said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and a longtime New York political reporter. This time, he said, it's Paterson who's protecting O'Byrne.

"Any negative hurts, but will it hurt in the long run? No. Because no one can imagine Paterson being part of anything like this."

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