"When I was in Albany in the late nineteen-eighties," New Yorker scribe Elizabeth Kolbert recalled, "the Cuomo administration [run by former New York Governor Mario Cuomo] came up with an

[...] inventive scheme: 'selling' Attica prison to New York's Urban Development Corporation, for two hundred million dollars. The arrangement ended up costing New York taxpayers some two hundred and ninety million dollars in interest payments, but from the administration's perspective it worked out so well that Cuomo subsequently 'sold' a section of I-84 to the Thruway Authority, which also assumed the road's multimillion-dollar maintenance costs. 'I did not come into government to win an award as the great accountant in the sky,' he once declared."