Few political partners have been closer than Hank Morris and Alan G. Hevesi.

Mr. Morris ran Mr. Hevesi’s breakthrough political campaign, an upset of City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman in 1993. He was the guiding force behind Mr. Hevesi’s combative last race, when he won re-election as state comptroller amid scandal last November. And he was Mr. Hevesi’s main adviser when he resigned a month later after pleading guilty to using state workers to chauffeur his wife. 

Chief strategist, image maker and personal confidant, Mr. Morris, 54, has been far more than just a consultant to Mr. Hevesi. And it now appears that he earned much more than just political consulting fees from their relationship.

Since Mr. Hevesi took office in 2003, Mr. Morris created or was employed by half a dozen companies whose main purpose was to help hedge funds, private equity firms and others handle some of the investments of New York State’s $154 billion pension fund.

As comptroller, Mr. Hevesi had sole authority over the fund, and Mr. Morris appears to have been paid handsomely for making introductions: state investigators believe that at least $25 million in fees were paid to Mr. Morris’s business interests during Mr. Hevesi’s four-year tenure. 

Mr. Morris’s earnings from pension fund work, along with those of other friends and political allies of Mr. Hevesi, a Democrat, are now the focus of criminal investigations by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, also a Democrat, and P. David Soares, the Albany County district attorney. 

On Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo’s office said he had invoked sweeping powers under a decades-old state securities law, the Martin Act, to broadly expand his investigation of the comptroller’s office. Among the investigators’ discoveries is that a list of fees paid by investment firms to intermediaries like Mr. Morris had disappeared. Those intermediaries, known as placement agencies, helped investment firms win business from the pension fund.

Mr. Hevesi, 67, has denied wrongdoing beyond the chauffeur matter and cited the pension fund’s strong returns during his four-year tenure as evidence of sound management. Asked if Mr. Hevesi had been aware of Mr. Morris’s outside businesses, his lawyer, Bradley D. Simon, answered, “Mr. Hevesi was not aware of the alleged activities of outside third parties with respect to management of the pension fund.”

Legal experts say that it could be difficult to make a case against a political consultant moonlighting as a consultant to financial companies. But the investigation has cast a harsh spotlight on Mr. Morris, who declined to comment for this article.

Known for his nervous Woody Allen-like speaking mannerisms and penchant for wearing sweaters in all seasons, Mr. Morris has acquired a long list of enemies and former friends who are basking in schadenfreude. 

But others praised his acumen; Senator Charles E. Schumer, who hired Mr. Morris to direct his 1998 Senate campaign, said in a statement, “Hank is one of the brightest people around and has done a great job for me.”

A native of Long Island who began his career battling the Nassau County Republican machine that gave birth to former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, Mr. Morris met Mr. Hevesi in the early 1970s when Mr. Hevesi was a young Queens assemblyman. By the mid-1970s, the two were socializing when Mr. Morris worked in the office of Speaker Stanley Steingut.

“They’re pages in a book, back to back, very close,” said Arthur J. Kremer, a Democratic assemblyman from Nassau County in that era.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Morris apprenticed with the political consultant David Garth, but the two had a bitter falling out, and Mr. Morris opened his own soup-to-nuts firm.

“It’s very rare that you find somebody in this business that does everything,” said Norman Adler, a consultant and lobbyist who has worked with Mr. Morris. “With Hank, he was the campaign manager, the media guy, the fund-raising guy. He did everything. If there were any arguments, they were all in his head.”

Mr. Morris became known for running hard-hitting and sometimes audacious campaigns. In 1992, he pushed his mother, Rita, then 68 and a retired community college professor of library science, to run for Congress. She lost. In his slashing approach to the 1998 Senate campaign, he made sure all the world knew that Mr. D’Amato had called Mr. Schumer a “putzhead.” 

And in a political ad for Dianne Feinstein’s 1990 campaign for California governor, he raised eyebrows by using file footage of her emotional announcement of the shocking assassination of San Francisco’s mayor in 1978. Ms. Feinstein lost, making her one of Mr. Morris’s more notable failures.

George Arzt, who was Ms. Holtzman’s media consultant during the 1993 city comptroller campaign, said Mr. Morris would loiter among reporters during Ms. Holtzman’s press conferences on the City Hall steps.

“He would feed the reporters questions and would make comments out loud,” Mr. Arzt said. “He was basically trying to spook her. I have never ever seen that before, but it was the confrontational politics that he liked.”

Mr. Morris worked free for Mr. Hevesi’s 2001 mayoral bid, a move that led the city’s Campaign Finance Board to withhold millions of dollars from the Hevesi campaign. The sanction sparked an angry confrontation between Mr. Morris and the board’s chairman, the Rev. Joseph A. O’Hare, who was wearing his collar when he told Mr. Morris, “So sue me, go ahead.”

Mr. Hevesi was the city comptroller at the time; the city comptroller’s office said there was no record that Mr. Morris had done business with the office.
Even as he was building up his political consulting firm, Morris & Carrick, Mr. Morris was developing a career as an entrepreneur. 

He invested in and became chairman and chief executive of Curran & Connor, a company based in Hauppauge, N.Y., that bills itself as the largest producer of annual reports and other financial filings, though his role in the company is shrouded in secrecy. 

Scott L. Greenberg, president of the privately held firm, which has offices in 15 cities, said Mr. Morris, who is not mentioned on the company’s Web site, “does the things chairmen do,” but declined to elaborate. 

His various businesses tied to the pension fund include several limited liability companies he created, with names like Nosemote and Pantigo Emerging, most of which were based in an East Hamptons house he bought for $4.1 million in 2001. 

Mr. Morris also has worked for Searle & Company, a Connecticut financial services firm that has arranged deals between the pension fund and investment companies like the Carlyle Group, one of the nation’s largest private equity firms, and a Texas hedge fund, Hunt Financial Ventures. 

Robert G. Smith, a member of the state pension fund’s Investment Advisory Committee, said that what was striking about Mr. Morris’s role was that in many cases fees paid to him and others were not disclosed. Traditional money managers are required to disclose such fees, allowing pension officials to guard against conflicts. 

But Mr. Hevesi had joined a broad move in the pension world to give more business to nontraditional firms, such as hedge funds, which are not required to reveal whom they have paid for consulting work. 

As allegations continue to swirl in the case, Mr. Hevesi has taken an approach that could be called vintage Morris. His lawyer, Mr. Simon, has mounted a vigorous defense, attacking the attorney general for leaks and criticizing the current comptroller. Mr. Morris has also been consistent with his past practice, maintaining a low profile. 

But their relationship has changed: the men are no longer talking, on the advice of their lawyers, putting a three decade-plus friendship on hiatus.