Guy Velella - Biography

Biography

Velella was born on September 25, 1944, in East Harlem, then a heavily Italian-American neighborhood, in Manhattan. Velella's father, the late Vincent J. Velella, was a lawyer who became wealthy through real estate deals. The Velella family moved to the Bronx in the late 1950s. In 1967, Velella graduated from St. John's University, Jamaica, New York. He then earned a law degree from the Suffolk School of Law (today the Suffolk University Law School) in Boston, Massachusetts, and joined his father's law practice.

In 1972, aged 28, Velella, a Republican, ran for the New York State Assembly in the East Bronx. The incumbent Democrat withdrew from the race unexpectedly, and Velella won the race. He served in the Assembly for 10 years. After redistricting, Velella found himself running in a new Democratic district in 1982, which now covered Throggs Neck and Parkchester. In a bitter campaign, he ran against popular Assemblyman and head of the Parkchester Tenants Association John C. Dearie. After losing that election by a wide margin, Velella told the Bronx News, a local weekly newspaper, that he was done with politics. In January 1983, Velella returned to practicing law full-time. Despite his pledge that his political career was over, Velella was elected to the local school board. Many political observers expected Velella to run for the seat in Congress held by Mario Biaggi, a Democrat, when he retired.

Velella returned to elected office on April 22, 1986, when he was elected to the New York State Senate in a special election to fill the unexpired term of State Senator John D. Calandra, who died on January 20, 1986. The three-way race was bitter and costly, as JoAnn Calandra, Calandra's widow, backed by the late senator's partisans and patronage recipients, and hoping to capitalize on the late senator’s ties to the Senate Majority establishment, sought to retain family control of the seat. The Democratic candidate, Michael Durso, also generated interest. The seat, the 34th Senate District included mostly white neighborhoods in the Bronx and parts of lower Westchester County, areas hand-picked by Calandra during the last redistricting and including portions of Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle and all of Pelham. Velella received the endorsements of the Right to Life Party and the Bronx Conservative Party.

In a battle that echoed those for the Republican nomination and the Senate Seat itself, Velella also became chairman of the Bronx Republican Party. He was subsequently re-elected to the State Senate in November 1986 and in every subsequent election. He resigned his seat on May 14, 2004, as part of a plea bargain reached on criminal charges that he took bribes to help businesses win lucrative state contracts. According to the text of the indictment, the bribes were in the form of payments to the Velellas' law firm for little or no work.