Online Chats Tie Politicians to the Troll of Staten Island

Russian trolls had the run of Facebook and Twitter last year, it now emerges, spinning up thousands of phony accounts to spread propaganda during the election, weigh in on political issues, place ads.

Staten Island had its own social media troll, at scale.

There, a political operative set up fake Facebook pages to hurt people running for local office.

Two politicians from the borough denied being involved in the phony Facebook page operation, but details of private communications between them and the operative, Richard A. Luthmann, appear to undercut those assertions.

One of them, Kamillah Hanks, a candidate in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for City Council, said she hired Mr. Luthmann only to help her get on the ballot. Asked last week about a fake page that he set up to attack her opponent, Ms. Hanks referred the inquiry to a spokeswoman.

“Ms. Hanks had no prior knowledge of these social media pages,” the spokeswoman, Jennifer Blatus, said.

Since that denial, The New York Times has reviewed a Facebook Messenger conversation that Ms. Hanks had with Mr. Luthmann. In it, he passes along a post from a sham Facebook page set up in the name of her opponent, City Councilwoman Deborah Rose, inviting people to support her “partnership” with a real estate developer to turn a property into an “SRO Welfare Hotel full of Criminals.”

Ms. Hanks does not respond to that. Then Mr. Luthmann points out to Ms. Hanks that a community board includes a member they apparently consider unpopular or controversial.

“Yes! Check who appointed her,” Ms. Hanks replies, adding, “I would BET it was Debi Rose.”

She concludes, “Find out.”

Ms. Hanks would not discuss the exchange with Mr. Luthmann. For his part, Mr. Luthmann said he regarded Ms. Hanks as his “conscience” and said: “She is a far better woman than I am a man. These were almost motherly communications.”

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The other political figure, Ron Castorina Jr., who serves in the Assembly and as chairman of the county Republican Party, said last week that he was merely attempting to “placate” Mr. Luthmann.

The assemblyman reiterated that more strongly on Thursday when asked about specific material from their conversations. In another chat reviewed by The Times, Mr. Luthmann sends Mr. Castorina pornographic images, including one altered to make it appear as though Mr. Castorina’s female opponent had been photographed while engaged in a sexual act.

“She will jump in front of a bus,” Mr. Luthmann writes.

Mr. Castorina responds with an abbreviation for a phrase that loosely means he is laughing so hard, a part of his body will fall off.

The assemblyman also writes:

“there’s her pearl necklace whe always wears.”

Mr. Luthmann says that some “sick” individual has just posted the image to the internet. Mr. Castorina responds, “I hope not.”

Replies Mr. Luthmann: “Dark web. Untraceable IP.”

Mr. Castorina is not assuaged. “It will be twisted and turned by her and come back at me,” he writes. “i’m just going to win on the merits.”

“Don’t worry,” replies Mr. Luthmann. “It won’t get publicized.”

He adds that the image was next to a picture of another Staten Island politician being sodomized. Mr. Castorina says he worries that he will be subject to retaliation, but once again signals through abbreviation that he finds the matter hilariously funny.

All the exchanges, Mr. Castorina said Thursday, were initiated by Mr. Luthmann, and his own responses were calculated to avoid setting off disputes. “In the context of a private conversation, I made political decisions to placate this guy,” Mr. Castorina said. “His memes and communiqué are not my actions, nor did I ask to see them. They are horrible, unwanted and I totally disavow them. Some of my own reactions were crude and off-color, and I apologize for that, but all were simply meant to placate. I wanted to move the conversation on, and not embolden his actions.”

The material was being made public, Mr. Castorina said, because of a feud among Staten Island Republicans.

Mr. Luthmann said he was the victim of a criminal act in the intrusion on his exchanges, which include doctored pornographic images involving several public officials and, in one case, the adult son of an official. “I throw some outlandish things out there in private conversations to see what was within the bounds of discourse,” he said. “I never intended for my personal and private thoughts to be strewn across the public square.”

He expressed no regrets or remorse for any fake social media pages. Mr. Luthmann said they were simply shrewd politics.

“For public officials, there’s no proscription against staking a claim in digital real estate,” he said. “If I knew there were 15 or so contestants for the next presidential election, I would be a smart person to grab the handles on Facebook and Twitter. ”