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Crime takes a holiday. Not out here, in the cauldron. I moved out here to
Long Island five years ago, for familial reasons. A safe place, I thought.
Dull, maybe, but okay. How could I have anticipated this riot of larceny,
fraud, malfeasance and corruption to which we’ve been subjected since my arrival?
It has all come as a terrible shock. It has only one redeeming feature -- it
’s mighty interesting, and it sure gives me something to write about. That’
s important. I can’t write about Iraq, since I’ve never been there and I don’
t know anything about the place, but I don’t have that trouble with the
guerrillas and bushwhackers out here. I’ve seen them before.
This was their week. We had two headline indictments and one roundup right
on top of each other. This place is a hotbed, man. First, in the Roslyn
school scandal we had the indictment of the former superintendent of schools, Frank
Tassone -- is that Dr. Tassone, master of pedagogy? Probably, although his
bio has vanished off the internet. Anyway it seems there’s a good chance he’
ll be using his teaching skills for inmate classes in one of our better jails
before long. His lawyer says he just had a good contract with the school
board, which allowed him to charge expenses like trips to Las Vegas, $37,600 in
doctor’s bills, dry cleaning and other goodies, to his school credit card,
even if he did exceed its limits once in a while. That doesn’t explain the
$200,000 dished out to his roommate for testing services or things like $1,000,000
in payments booked to a school equipment company, which now says it only got
$45,000. What happened to the other $955,000? What indeed? Did it go into
the new house in Las Vegas? That’s what the district attorney wants to know.
That was Tuesday. Thursday we had another indictment. The indictee was
Peter Sylver, formerly Deputy County Executive of Nassau County. Over six months
of investigation the charges against him had been narrowed down to a felony
charge of false official statements to get reimbursed for travel expenses, and
several misdemeanors, including sexual abuse. No mention was made of the deal
made with the sex abuse victim for her complaint to be withdrawn in return
for a job promotion and a pay raise of $15,000 yearly. This arrangement was
made with her by another Deputy County Executive and the Chief Deputy County
Attorney, but has since broken down, with the victim suing civilly on grounds of
coercion to make it. The DA must be going to do something with it. It’s the
one I want to hear about.
Mr. Suozzi, the actual County Executive, told a press conference the affair
will have no effect on his re-election prospects, although he hired Sylver
with no inquiry into his checkered background, something I’ve reported in this
space when I introduced the story here. He said all this with a fixed grin on
his face, like George Costanza telling a girl he’s a marine biologist.
Also on Thursday the federal court sentenced the former Chief Deputy County
Executive in the previous administration to a year and a day in prison for his
part in awarding the county employees’ health insurance plan to a company that
fraudulently claimed to be able to save the county $1 million a month over
what it was then paying out. For this he got $150,000 under the table. Eight
other people, including three members of a family insurance brokerage, had
previously been sentenced, with two co-operators still waiting. Nassau lost
millions.
From all this, it looks like L.I. crime is being cleaned up with a flourish.
However it refuses to go away. On Tuesday , well I’ll let the newspaper tell
it, “Hundreds of federal agents and police raided dozens of Long Island gas
stations allegedly controlled by a loosely organized network of Turkish
organized crime figures…” They smuggled hundred of illegal immigrants in to run the
stations and collected millions of dollars, according to the feds. The gas
receipts were sent to a central collection point and then broken down into
packages under $10,000 each to be deposited in banks without the need of reporting
to the Treasury. It’s called “structuring”. How much of the money came
from gas and how much from contraband of some sort was not reported. Seven Turks
allegedly ran the operation, of whom two are still at large. One of the two
banks where they made their deposits is around the corner from my house. In
fact I have an account there. Two of the ringleaders arrested come from my
neighborhood. One of the fugitives does also. I am now on red alert.
Such is the uneventful life of the citizens of the North Shore. “There was a
crooked man with a crooked education. He went and got some gas from a
crooked filling station”. We make jokes like this about these things. For instance
the township I live in is called Brookhaven.. The newspapers think nothing of
renaming it “Crookhaven”. That’s because there have been so many of its
officials busted over the years for swindles of one kind or another. Contracts,
tax breaks, zoning changes, are all possible opportunities for graft, plus
other things I don’t know about. If we travel outside the town limits, we are
likely to meet people…who bring things up. We’re notorious, in other words.
Here’s how our newspaper treats us:
June 4, 2004 IN “CROOKHAVEN” DA SPOTA STRIKES AGAIN
May 25, 2004 CORRUPTION PROBE: ARREST OFFICIAL
May 16, 2004. SUFFOLK CORRUPTION PROBE
April 30, 2004 SUFFOLK CORRUPTION PROBE WIDENS
April 23, 2004 GETTING EVIDENCE. PROBE NEARLY A YEAR OLD
April 19, 2004 CROOKHAVEN AGAIN: GUILTY PLEAS BETRAY ‘REFORMS’
April 16, 2004 OFFICIAL ADMITS TO PAYOFFS
From all this you might conclude that I am living in the Wild West or back in
the days of the Gangs of New York, when to all appearances Suffolk is just
another suburb with the usual admixture of good folks and bad, mostly doing
their own thing and causing no trouble to their neighbors. Well, I wanna tell
you, this is the way it is and that’s the kind of people we are, and don’t let
anyone tell you otherwise. There’s only one thing wrong out here and I wanna
tell you what it is. For some reason which I can’t figure out----
WE’RE GETTING A BAD PRESS!
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