Disgraced ex-pol Anthony Weiner leaves CEO gig at Brooklyn glass company
Disgraced ex-pol Anthony Weiner has quit his job as chief executive of a Brooklyn-based company that makes recycled glass countertops after just over a year in the role.
The former Democratic congressman — whose serial sexting cost him his political career and later sent him to prison — explained in a post on LinkedIn that his company, IceStone, will become a worker-owned cooperative, making his role as CEO obsolete.
“The IceStone workers cooperative will not happen all at once and right away, but one thing it does not need is a Chief Executive Officer,” he said last week in the post. “So I have stepped aside to turn my seat over to the men and women who will now be making the decisions.”
“I will be keeping my IceStone hard hat. That may come in handy,” he added.
According to Weiner’s LinkedIn page, he started as CEO of IceStone in May of last year, though his new job was first reported on by The Post in September after a promotional email about the company’s products revealed his career change.
His page indicates that Weiner stopped working for IceStone in June.
In his post, Weiner said, “Being a worker’s cooperative is exactly how it sounds – a company that is managed from the factory floor up and not the top down. It gives each employee a voice in policy and practices; a stake in the progress; and a share of the gains.”
Weiner appeared to fit right in at IceStone, which says its “commitment to second chances goes beyond our factory and our products.”
“We hire the homeless, refugees and train the formerly incarcerated and ensure that everyone gets paid a living wage and has access to subsidized health insurance and a voice in the company,” according to the company’s website.
The company will now be run by IceStone owner Del LaMagna — who made a fortune as founder of the Tweezerman brand of beauty tools — and IceStone president Lisa Bowen.
A then-married Weiner quit his seat in Congress over a now-infamous 2011 scandal that unfolded when he accidentally tweeted a lewd crotch shot of himself in his underwear to the public.
He mounted a comeback run for mayor two years later — and surged to first place in the polls — before his campaign went down in flames amid a second sexting scandal while he was still married to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin that revealed his use of the online alias “Carlos Danger.”
But even those debacles were eclipsed in 2017, when he broke down in Manhattan federal court as he tearfully confessed to sexting with a 15-year-old girl.
Earlier, Weiner helped upend the 2016 presidential race when FBI agents seized his laptop as part of that probe and found emails exchanged by Clinton and Abedin.
Clinton later blamed her stunning loss to Donald Trump on then-FBI Director James Comey’s decision, 11 days before the election, to reopen an investigation into her use of a private computer while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Abedin, who repeatedly stood by Weiner’s side despite being humiliated by his extramarital sexting, finally left him in August 2016 after The Post revealed he’d sent another woman a crotch shot he snapped while their toddler son was cuddled up next to him in bed.
Abedin eventually filed for divorce hours after he pleaded guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor, but she later withdrew the case from court to settle it privately and “reduce any impact of these proceedings on their child.”
IceStone owner LaMagna previously told The Post that he met Weiner years ago while unsuccessfully running for Congress, and later visited him several times while Weiner served a 21-month prison sentence.
“I knew him from the political world. He talked me out of running for mayor, which was good, and we developed a relationship,” LaMagna told The Post last year.
“And then he got sucked into that whole thing. I wanted to help him any way I could. He served his time and coming out is tough. And so I said, ‘Can you work for IceStone?’ because he knows everybody in the city and the company is in Brooklyn.”
LaMagna started Tweezerman in 1980 after a string of failed business ventures and wound up selling it to Zwilling J.A. Henckels for $57 million in 2004.
LaMagna acknowledged that IceStone, in which he was initially just an investor, “has never been successful” and that he hired Weiner in a bid to turn it around.
“When the founder lost a lot of money, I stepped in and thought I could take it over and save the job,” he said.
“And I realized maybe it’s time to replace myself because I didn’t have the energy.”
Weiner, he said, had relevant experience from Congress, where he had “a big budget and a staff of 25, 30 people to manage.”
“Anthony is a better CEO than I was,” he said.
Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton and Bruce Golding
