Well, you could start by asking, I guess. Realistically, how this will play out is that Ricatto's campaign manager will say he asked and that Aponte said he had a valid license, Aponte will corroborate, and it'll be on him.

Realistically, I don't know how much onus there should be on an employer to verify that his employee is being truthful here. The job I had before this one, at one point I used my boss's car to drive some papers from our office in Midtown to a client's home in Nassau County for hand delivery. I don't even know if he asked if I had a license (I do, of course) but if he had asked and I had said yes, I wouldn't have expected him to verify it.

Now, if you're hiring someone to be a driver, and especially of a large vehicle rather than just a garden-variety car, there should presumably be more obligation on the part of the employer.

Someone left the following comment on my blog:

"To be fair, you could have called him "Gazillionaire businessman" and let everyone infer."

So money wasn't a problem...

Who is actually licensed to drive one of these things? Probably not the average campaign volunteer.

This of course highlights what a joke this "punishment" is. What percentage of people with suspended or revoked licenses do you think are still driving? I'm guessing somewhere between 99 and 100 percent.

This is clearly terrible, and that location is like the intersection of three highways. But what I wonder is who gives a candidate for a local office like this enough money to rent that bus? Given that the office was only vacated in early November?