The arrest and resignation of New York Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin this week was reminiscent of another lieutenant governor who had to step up to the governorship and who opted to choose his own second-in-command.

David Paterson was sworn in as governor of New York in March 2008 after Eliot Spitzer resigned in the wake of a prostitution scandal. Because the leadership of the state Senate at the time was chaotic, Paterson opted to appoint his own lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch.

According to Paterson, the transition between Eliot Spitzer’s resignation and his first few weeks as governor was a difficult one, and this week’s events reminded him of that period.

“What it makes me think of, is that there are a lot of things that people who worked for me and with me did that I have never really talked about publicly — where I was unaware of what exactly was going on. [And] in the end, it came back to hurt me,” Paterson told Capital Tonight. “There was a lot that went on, institutionally, that I didn’t change and that came back to bite me."

Paterson said, if he had to do it again, he would have cleaned house the minute he got there.

“So I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for Gov. Hochul right now, because she’s just trying to do the right thing,” Paterson said.

Capital Tonight asked Paterson for his thoughts on the failed vetting process of Brian Benjamin. 

“I think what may have happened is that they wanted to bring a lieutenant governor in right away,” Paterson said. 

Rather than “hiring slow and firing fast," Paterson’s analysis is that the Hochul administration “hired fast."

“Gov. Hochul, as we’ve noticed, is impatient. She wants to get things done and she wants to get them done now. She doesn’t spend a whole lot of time over negotiating or making life more difficult like our previous governor, who we won’t name,” Paterson said. “But the point is just that she likes to get things done quickly and what may have happened in this situation is that she just trusted that everything would go well.”

• SEE ALSO | Analyzing Gov. Hochul team's vetting process of Brian Benjamin

Interestingly, Paterson told Capital Tonight that he did not vet Ravitch who had already had a long and distinguished career in public service before he was tapped to be lieutenant governor.

“What was funny was that I was talking to former Gov. Spitzer about it once while I was in office and I said something about not doing a background check on Ravitch. He said, ‘I did a background check on you.’”

Paterson describes the period of transition after Spitzer’s resignation as chaotic and steeped in palace intrigue.

“It was almost as if someone had dumped hundred-dollar bills all over the streets of Albany and everybody is fighting each other to try to pick them up,” Paterson said.  “And it made me suspicious, and at times, I lost trust with people where I should have had that trust.”

He shared a few anecdotes.

“There was a well-known person all around the state who called me up, like, five times. I said, ‘can you give me a couple of weeks to get things together?’ And he said that Gov. Spitzer was going to appoint him to a major agency in June, but now that I was there, would I respect that appointment? I said sure I will. So, I started putting into place how this person is coming over to run the agency.”

“Then the person who was actually running the agency called me up and said, ‘I have never cursed at a governor before, Governor. But if I could, I’d curse at you right now.’ I said ‘why?’ And he said, ‘I had no plans to leave, and neither did the Spitzer people think I was going to leave.’ So, the whole thing was a con job," he continued.

“We even had a member of the administration basically tell me that when the governor resigns, it doesn’t automatically make the lieutenant governor governor. That there has to be a certification. And they wanted to have a whole process for certification and I refused to do it," Paterson also said.

Paterson called the late Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno one of the only people he could trust in Albany at that time. 

“He invited me into his office, in the middle of the day, Susan, and he wanted me to have a glass of wine with him,” Paterson laughingly recalled. “The last thing I need to do in my first week in office is to look intoxicated.”

Bruno’s intention was to reassure Paterson.  

“He said, ‘I don’t want you ever to resign. If you think you’re getting close to resigning, call me. I’ll pay for the lawyers. Because they’ve given you a hard time. If I became governor, they’ll never stop giving me a hard time. You stand between me and trouble,’” Paterson recalled Bruno saying to him. “After a while I thought that he was the only friend in Albany I had.”