The Times has at last published its hotly anticipated bombshell exposé anticlimactic profile on Governor Paterson, and, as it turns out, the piece contains no salacious details on the rumored "drug fueled swinger parties" in the Executive Mansion. Instead, the article mainly focuses on Paterson's longtime right-hand man, David Johnson, and his shady past selling crack and (allegedly) beating women. Paterson and others call him D.J., and colleagues say that because he's 6-foot-7, with a booming voice, he makes the legally blind Governor feel safe. And when arguments with constituents got heated in Paterson's former Harlem office, one source explains, "It was good to have a big guy in the office."
When the Times bombshell rumor mill was churning full tilt, sources told the Post that Times reporters had been interviewing an ex-lover of David Johnson, and that turns out to be correct, so chalk one up (one!) for the tabloid of record. In fact, many of those close to Paterson were eager to trash D.J. on background, because they're worried about his "increasing prominence, and Mr. Paterson’s reliance" on the Deej. "We were all quite surprised about D. J. taking more of a policy role,” one former official told the Times. "It seemed like it was a long way to come in a short period of time for a guy who had been the governor’s wing man."
In 2001, when Paterson was a State Senator, D.J. punched his then-girlfriend outside the Harlem office, according to one witness. No charges were filed, but the former girlfriend (anonymously) insists she filed an earlier domestic violence complaint against Johnson. (The Times found no record of that.) She says nothing ever came of it because, "It was a long time ago. They didn’t take things as seriously back then." Johnson, through a spokesman for the governor, said he never touched her, and that others in the office had asked her to leave.
Two other altercations led to calls to police, the most recent last Halloween, when cops were called to a woman's apartment after a dispute with D.J. "involved the woman’s costume." It's unclear whether Johnson had torn it off her or menaced her further. All of this is pretty awkward for Paterson, who has made domestic violence one of his core issues. But in an interview with the Times, he defended the Deej, saying, "I think in anybody’s history, you can come up with a couple incidents where they acted improperly. And this may, and I accentuate may, have been one of them."
And when D.J. was 18, he was arrested for selling crack cocaine to an undercover officer outside his mother's Harlem apartment. (Where's Uncle Jesse when you need him?) He could have received up to 25 years in prison, but was sentenced to five years of probation, which he completed without incident. He went on to graduate from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2002, and is now Paterson's "closet confidant," earning $132,000 a year. "I will not turn my back on someone because of mistakes made as a teenager," Paterson said in a statement.
