The councilman was Bill de Blasio, now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York.
During his eight years on the Council, he had advocated for millions of dollars in city money for the hospital, Maimonides Medical Center.
Maimonides did not have a job open for Mr. de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray. So it created one.
Pamela Brier, chief executive of Maimonides, the largest and most prestigious hospital in Brooklyn, said that Mr. de Blasio’s position and support of the hospital had nothing to do with his wife’s hiring. “Bill was like, not much in those days,” Ms. Brier said. “Who knew he was going to run for mayor?”
Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray declined to comment. But a de Blasio campaign spokesman, Dan Levitan, said that Mr. de Blasio, with a Council colleague, had “recommended funding for several meritorious projects” at the hospital, because of its reputation for “delivering quality care to underserved, underprivileged communities.”
“Each of these funding recommendations was implemented by the Bloomberg administration and was unrelated to the employment of Chirlane McCray,” Mr. Levitan said in a statement.
Ms. Brier said that Mr. de Blasio had introduced her to his wife “at some social event” and that she learned from Ms. McCray that a job she had with Citigroup had not worked out and that she was looking for a new one. “He didn’t say, ‘Here’s my wife, hire her,’” Ms. Brier said. But she said that she was immediately impressed with Ms. McCray because, “she seemed so capable, so grounded,” because she had speech writing experience under former Mayor David N. Dinkins, and because the hospital needed more minorities in administrative-level positions.
“I’m the one who wanted to recruit her,” Ms. Brier said, adding that she likes to have women employees around her when possible. “I said, ‘Of course, I have no job for you. But I could probably invent one.’ I do that a lot.”
New York City hospitals are often dependent on public support, and many of them have hired friends and relatives of elected officials, or sometimes the officials themselves. Despite thin experience, the wife of Councilman Erik Martin Dilan, in one recent example, worked as a $ 75,000-a-year director of public relations at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick, in Mr. Dilan’s district. Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr. of Brooklyn was indicted in 2011 on federal bribery charges when prosecutors said he received a no-show consulting job for Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in exchange for helping the hospital in dealings with Albany. Jurors acquitted Mr. Boyland, saying in interviews that they did not think the job rose to the level of bribery; he is now facing bribery charges in a separate case.
Ms. Brier said she made her annual requests for money to Brooklyn’s City Council delegation as a whole, not to Mr. de Blasio specifically. But it was Mr. de Blasio and a fellow Brooklyn councilman, Michael Nelson, who recommended the city give $ 5.7 million to Maimonides, according to City Council records. The money was given over several years, from 2003 to 2009; according to Eileen Tynion, a hospital spokeswoman, most of it was for a cancer center.
Stephen Spaulding, staff counsel for Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said that for a hospital to employ “in a non-leadership capacity” the spouse of a public official with financing power was not necessarily an ethical violation, but should be handled as transparently as possible. Mr. de Blasio did disclose his wife’s job to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, and on the floor of the Council at a 2009 budget vote.
But Mr. Spaulding also said he was troubled by the speed with which Ms. Brier appeared to have offered Ms. McCray a job. “It raises questions as to whether she was offered that job based on who she’s married to and her connections,” he said.
Ms. McCray’s salary was $ 90,000 when she began working at the hospital in 2005 and was $ 114,000 when she left in 2010, according to her husband’s campaign. At first she worked part time in human resources and part time in the executive office, until a job opened up in marketing, Ms. Tynion said. Ms. McCray’s biography on her husband’s Web site says that she was “immersed in the challenge of developing culturally sensitive messages in a hospital environment.”
Jerry Della Femina, chairman and chief executive of Della Femina Advertising, recalled working with Ms. McCray on an ad campaign that depicted “a bunch of tiny babies” with the message, “At Maimonides, we’ve learned to say goo goo in 68 different languages.”
Mr. Levitan said that a year or two before her conversation with Ms. Brier, Ms. McCray had been interviewed for and offered a job in the communications department at Maimonides but turned it down. “Her later employment was the result of a thorough interview process, and any suggestion that Chirlane did not earn her job at Maimonides on her own merit is offensive to her long career as a writer, editor and communications professional,” Mr. Levitan said.
A few months after her husband took office as public advocate, the citywide position he now holds, Ms. McCray moved to a job with Mack/Crounse Group, a Democratic direct-mail and consulting firm. “I was sorry to see her go,” Ms. Brier said. “She grew in the job and was very clear about the separation between politics and work.”
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