When Bill de Blasio arrived late to a memorial marking the anniversary of the crash of Flight 587 last week, he came with an unlikely excuse: his boat to the site was delayed by fog. The mayor has since backtracked—he had a "rough night," he said later—but has maintained that weather played a factor. A new report suggests it didn't.

Sources contacted by DNAinfo's Murray Weiss place the blame for lategate squarely on the oversized shoulders of de Blasio himself:

De Blasio's press aides initially blamed the delay on "heavy fog," which they said made the normally 35-minute trip take 50 minutes.

But sources said the fog had virtually no impact on the trip.

"The fog played a minimal, if any, role," a law enforcement source said.

(De Blasio's admission that he had a "rough night" and was feeling "really sluggish" that morning should be read with a hint of [mimes smoking weed]—it's widely rumored in the City Hall press corps that DeBlasio's chronic lateness problem is exactly that.

The mayor's ferry was reportedly scheduled to depart from a pier near Gracie Mansion at 8:05 Wednesday morning—and had been ready to go as early as 7:35 a.m.—but the mayor didn't arrive at the boat until 8:35, according to Weiss' NYPD sources. Fog, they added, was never going to be an issue:

And even with a threat of fog, the NYPD was not worried because their boats recently underwent millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art radar and Global Position System upgrades capable of navigating "through pea soup," one source said.

Ultimately, de Blasio showed up at the ceremony about 20 minutes late, missing a crucial portion of the service. The mayor, DNAinfo notes, has been early to every appearance he's had since.

[Image via AP]