Cuomo’s Fertilizer King
Cuomo’s administration enabled fertilizer billionaire Alex Rovt to build a new empire in New York’s hyper-subsidized health-care industry.
by William Bredderman
He’s an international man of mystery—a reclusive billionaire who once bought a lower Manhattan skyscraper in cash. He’s cut multimillion-dollar business deals with now-sanctioned figures in Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s circle. And, thanks in part to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration, he was left in charge of the health and well-being of thousands of poor and elderly New Yorkers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Typical assessments peg Alexander Rovt’s total donations to Cuomo, and to the New York State Democratic Party organization the governor controls, at around $320,000. But The Daily Beast determined that the real figure, including the contributions from Rovt’s numerous corporate entities and his tight-knit clan of business associates and family members, is more than three times that amount: over $1 million, making him one of the governor’s biggest and most consistent contributors.
Today, with help from the governor, who has near total control over New York’s heavily subsidized health-care industry, Rovt sits atop an empire of private hospitals and for-profit nursing homes and home health agencies.
Cuomo’s camp insists the Ukrainian-born Rovt’s donations had nothing to do with his rise in New York’s tightly regulated health-care market. “Political donations have zero bearing on policy,” asserted spokesman Jack Sterne.
But in 2020 a decade of decisions collided with COVID-19. Cuomo’s mishandling of the pandemic’s early surge has attracted increasing criticism and scrutiny in recent months, and the vast domain Rovt built with his state contracts, grants, and approvals were the scene of some of the outbreak’s worst carnage.
Data on fatalities during the first and worst wave of the pandemic is notoriously unreliable, especially in New York. But in March of last year, Brookdale Hospital—where Rovt has presided as chairman for more than eight years—became a nationally televised poster child for health system failure, with images of choked hallways and duct-taped plastic sheeting in its wards.
Dr. Oriana Ramirez, who completed her residency last summer at Brookdale in impoverished Brownsville, Brooklyn, compared the conditions at the medical center to those that compelled her to leave her native Venezuela.
“When I tell you it was horrible, I tell you there were patients on the floor in the [emergency department],” she said, noting the gulf between Rovt’s wealth and the care Brookdale provided. “I saw that all the time during residency the disparities between what the big bosses are to what we offered in the hospital.”
Ramirez described to The Daily Beast how chronic understaffing left her and her peers working 16 hours at a time without a bathroom break and 24 hours without going home. The residents at a hospital helmed by a billionaire who bought Manhattan real estate in cash had to crowdfund not only personal protective equipment, as staff at a few other New York facilities did, but even basic medical supplies like IV bags and crash carts.
By that May, 70 percent of emergency medicine residents at Brookdale had tested positive for the virus. By contrast, a study at another hard-hit Brooklyn hospital in June found COVID-19 antibodies in only a little more than a third of its residents working in the emergency room.