Nobody Puts Fred Dicker in the Corner!

Fresh off his widely-publicized bout last night with Carl Paladino, Fred Dicker shot down Imus’s assertion that he has “big cajones,” saying that he was just doing his job as state editor of the New York Post.

At an event in Lake George, NY last night, Dicker confronted Paladino, the Republican candidate for Governor of New York, about charges he made that Andrew Cuomo, Paladino’s Democratic opponent, had cheated on his wife when they were still married.

“He’s throwing these very serious charges against Cuomo that we’ve never heard before out there,” Dicker said, noting that allegedly, Cuomo’s ex-wife Kerry Kennedy had actually been cheating on him. So when Paladino showed up at a State Business Council dinner last night, Dicker asked him for proof that Cuomo, New York’s current Attorney General, had been involved with “several paramours.”

“And then he takes off after me with three of his guys—big guys—standing around,” Dicker said. “He said, ‘I’ll take you out. F you!’ He was very, very aggressive, and he wouldn’t answer the questions.”

Paladino then accused Dicker of sending reporters to stalk his out-of-wedlock daughter and her mother, with whom Paladino admittedly had an extramarital relationship. “I’m based in Albany—I had no involvement with it,” Dicker said. “Buffalo is a five-hour drive from here. Our Sunday paper did it, and they have a semi-separate staff.”

It turns out that Paladino, who has appeared several times on Dicker’s own radio show, has a pattern of this sort of erratic behavior: calling former New York Gov. George Pataki “a degenerate idiot”; threatening to beat Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver with a bat on the New York Thruway and throwing him in prison; and referring to Cuomo as “a despicable bribe taker.”

Though Paladino “throws words around in a way that we’re not used to hearing,” as Dicker put it, some recent polls show he is quietly sneaking up on Cuomo, who is largely considered the favorite.

“He does have a chance,” Dicker said, adding that Paladino, a developer worth around $150 million, is no dope. “He’s a lawyer, he built a fortune—it’s not easy to do what he did. There are a lot of positives about him.”

Dicker claims he has always spoken highly of Paladino, who hails from Buffalo, New York, “a very tough, gritty, dying city,” he said, where Paladino “is a very important guy.”

Aside from last night’s dust-up, on which Imus complemented Dicker for standing up to Paladino, Dicker is concerned about the Republican nominee’s actual political prowess. “How does a guy who talks about taking a baseball bat to someone, or beating people up on the Thruway, deal with a legislature, deal with a state government?” he wondered. “It’s easy on one hand to be critical, and certainly government ought to be criticized. But you need some of the political skills that are required to be in politics.”

It remains to be seen, in Dicker’s view, whether Paladino possesses those skills. Hopefully Dicker will stick around long enough to find out.

-Julie Kanfer