GOVERNMENT CONFLICTS, CORRUPTION AND INDICTMENTS

- NEW YORK -

Date	Individual / State Agency	Who, What, Where?
09/01/2004	Suffolk County	Treasurer Charged With Second Degree Larceny Former William Floyd Schools Treasurer James Wright, 56, a 30-veteran of the school district, was arrested Monday and charged the next day with one count of second degree grand larceny. The charges stem from investigations initiated at the William Floyd School District and are continuing at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. County investigators have discovered that at least $752,000 in funds are missing from the district.
09/01/2004	Roslyn School Board	Superintendent Charged With Stealing From School District School superintendent Frank A. Tassone and senior administrator Pamela C. Gluckin have been charged with stealing more than $1 million from the Roslyn School Board. The funds were used to finance four new homes, buy a Lexus, and numerous luxury items.
01/11/2005	Staten Island District Attorney’s Office	Employees Paid Too Much The District Attorney’s Office overpaid employees, issued one-time “payments” to employees, paid workers outside of their job titles, and paid for undocumented unused vacation time.
01/12/2005	Deputy Commissioner for Veteran’s Affairs	Assemblyman Given Plum Job Immediately after a key Democrat missed a vote critical to the Pataki Administration, former Assemblyman Ronald Tocci was handed a plum job in the administration as the Deputy Commissioner for Veteran’s Affairs.
01/12/2005	Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)	MTA employees Charged With Accepting Gifts Fourteen MTA employees have been charged with illegally taking gifts from companies doing business with the MTA. Six of the employees agreed to pay $20,500 to settle the charges. The MTA’s Chief Compliance Officer is studying whether the employees will receive additional punishment.
01/18/2005	Suffolk County	Assistant Supervisor Charged With Extortion Daniel Cifonelli, the former assistant supervisor of the William Floyd School District, has been charged with extorting $700,00 by using a phony corporation, DCC Consulting, to steal money from life insurance premiums for employees and receiving retirement pay while still on the job.
02/08/2005	Department of Transportation	Official Linked to Corruption Back At Work as Lobbyist A former State Department of Transportation official, James B. Cantwell, who has been secretly recorded stating he would give preferential treatment to a company linked to Guy J. Velella even if it cost taxpayers money, is now working as a lobbyist. Four months after Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau indicted former State Senator Velella, Cantwell retired on a pension of $87,128 per year. Mr. Cantwell retired obviously knowing that there is a provision in the law that shields former employees regardless of what corrupt activities they participated in while in office
02/17/2005 02/23/2005	Brooklyn Surrogate Court	Surrogate Judge Damages Public Confidence Brooklyn Surrogate Judge Michael Feinberg “irredeemably damaged public confidence in the integrity of his court” according to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, and recommended his removal from the bench. The commission stated that Feinberg rewarded political pals with lucrative court appointments. The Commission on Judicial Conduct ordered Brooklyn Surrogate Judge Michael Feinberg off the bench pending disposition of his request for review.
03/04/2005	New York City Police Department	5 Cops Arrested for Bribery Four Manhattan police officers from the 13^th Precinct allegedly accepted bogus Coach bags and sports jerseys from a street vendor who sold counterfeit merchandise. The officers also alerted merchants to hide their merchandise when searches were planned.
03/04/2005	Brooklyn Democratic boss	Brooklyn Democratic Boos to Face Charges Brooklyn Democratic boss Clarence Norman and his top lieutenant, Jeffrey Feldman, will face charges that they extorted thousands of dollars from two potential judges in order to use specific vendors for their campaign literature and paraphernalia.
03/08/2005	New York City Corrections Department	Riker’s Island Head Pleads Guilty to Tax Evasion The former bureau chief of the Correction Department has pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges stemming from $200,000 in salary he was paid as a political consultant to the New York Republican State Committee, the Friends of Pataki and other organizations in 1996, 2001 and 2002, and pocketed over $62,000 in expense money that was destined for campaign workers. He also admitted using prison workers as poll watchers, security guards and drivers to various political groups.
03/11/2005	Transit Authority/ Housing Authority	Municipal Employees Steal $100,000 in Disability Funds Six people, employees of the Transit Authority and Housing Authority, have been arrested for illegally holding jobs while receiving disability benefits. They have been charged with grand larceny, insurance fraud and falsification of business records.
03/16/2005	New York City Housing Development Corporation	Rudy Giuliani Aide Stole $400,000 Russell Harding, Former aide to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, admitted stealing $400,000 as president of the city’s Housing Development Corporation. The money was used to support his lavish lifestyle and to own and possess child pornography. He faces up to 63 months in jail. The big question is, “Will he still get his pension?”
04/15/2005	New York City Human Resources Administration	City Employees Rip-Off Welfare System Four New York City employees were charged with ripping off the welfare system by creating dozens of bogus housing accounts. These employees issued rent checks to fake landlords on behalf of welfare recipients. The scheme was uncovered by the Human Resources Administration when they tried to recoup expenses from one of the homeless people for which a check had been written.
05/06/2005	New York City	Janitors Make Clean Sweep of Supplies Janitors working at a half dozen schools in Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx stole $529,000 in monies that were intended to purchase janitorial supplies since 1999. Working with a corrupt vendor, they accomplished this feat by submitting bogus orders and paying for products that would never be delivered.
05/06/2005	New York City	Sanitation Worker Collects $200,000 in Public Assistance A sanitation worker collected over $200,000 in public assistance even though she worked full time for the Sanitation Department since 2001. She collected $183,887 for rent subsidies, food stamps, childcare and Medicaid while she earned $205,500 at her city job and a second position at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital.
05/15/2005	New York City	New York City Workers Living High On Hog In two separate incidents, a sanitation worker stole $200,000 in public assistance while earning $205,000 in her two jobs for the Sanitation Department and at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. She somehow collected $183,887 for rent subsidies, food stamps, childcare and Medicaid since 2001. That’s damn good money for someone who is supposed to live a marginal existence feeding at the public trough. In the second incident, sixteen janitors made over $500,000 on cleaning supplies by working with a corrupt vendor creating bogus orders knowing full well that the supplies would never be delivered.
02/01/06	State Health Department	New Agency To Fight Medicaid Corruption According to the New York Times, it’s just what we needed. Governor Pataki has decided to create a spanking new agency to fight Medicaid fraud by yanking the responsibility from several state agencies. The governor has pledged to spend millions of dollars to hire scores of investigators and other workers to police the program, which provides health care for 4.2 million New Yorkers at a cost of $44.5 billion per year. The battle against Medicaid fraud in New York has long been shared by two agencies, the State Health Department, which is supposed to uncover it, and the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit in the state attorney general’s office, which prosecutes it. The governor finally decided on this course of action after the New York Times published two articles last year detailing how billions of dollars were being lost through fraud, waste and profiteering. Why is it that newspapers, private citizens or federal prosecutors are the only ones exposing the waste and corruption in city and state governments? The Times found that the Health Department referred only 37 cases of suspected fraud to the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit in 2004, far fewer than similar agencies in other large states. The amount of money recovered through the prosecution of abusers is miniscule in comparison to the estimated fraud. The new agency would absorb hundreds of workers from the antifraud units of the State Health Department, as well as Governor Pataki has proposed hiring 81 new workers for the agency, but the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit will be retained intact. That means that Pataki is simply switching the responsibility from one incompetent agency to a new larger and more than likely “do nothing” organization, because the hundreds of workers in the State Health Department were only able to expose 37 instances of criminal abuse. It sounds like a horrible misuse of taxpayer money and classic government incompetence. And I’ll bet you won’t see any reduction in the budgets for these agencies that will no longer tackle the fraud problem. So now not only will the taxpayers need to pay billions to support Medicaid, they’ll be charged many millions more to pay for the bureaucrats in the Medicaid police. Will the bureaucrats in charge of the antifraud activities be held responsible for the miserable performance of their troops? Of course not, this is government. Most likely, they will all receive promotions down the road.