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I apologize for not posting anything last week, but unforeseen circumstances
prevented me. Things are back to normal now and as long as they remain that
way I will continue to appear here every Monday.
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Although it’s still winter elsewhere, it’s springtime in Long Island’s
garden of graft. The defalcations are blooming in their glory in the borders, the
bribery patches are thriving, the hysteria is blossoming in the sunlight, the
greenbacks are wafting their sweet perfume in the air, while all around them
the embezzlers are buzzing and sipping the nectar that the blossoms bear. It’s
an idyllic scene, or was, until some spoilsports came along to charge that
the gardens were actually full of weeds that must be ripped up and bundled out
of the way instead of being further fertilized by the taxpayers’ cash. As
witness to this I quote some recent newspaper stories, case by case:
Case One. The Roslyn School District. A touch of comedy was added to this
case when the former principal of the name high school of the district sued the
former superintendent for $4 million for misleading him about eight trips
they took together to Las Vegas and New Orleans. He was told the trips had been
authorized by the school board, which was paying the freight. He considered
them "informal working retreats during which educational issues were discussed
over dinner". He didn’t mention the alleged conventions and seminars that
they were supposed to be attending, possibly because all the records that have
been found so far indicate either that they never took place at all or if they
did, Mr. Stoller, the principal, and Mr. Tassone, the superintendent, were not
among those present. They did patronize other attractions, though, and
apparently found them so agreeable that Mr. Tassone actually bought himself a house
in Las Vegas.
In his lawsuit against his former friend Mr. Stoller presents himself as a
gullible dupe who never suspected anything could be wrong in taking eight trips
to non-existent conventions or at least non-attended ones, because Tassone
reassured him there was nothing to worry about. This is a bit of a comedown for
a principal who, like all principals, was regarded by a thousand or more
adolescents in his charge as a kind of a High Lama exalted above the crowd,
controlling their lives from a remote fastness hidden from view. To find out now
that he’s picturing himself as a poor stooge taken in by a con man and hung out
to dry before a grand jury with a story only good for laughs, will shatter a
lot of illusions.
The Roslyn fallout has expanded to include at least ten more people, mostly
retired staff members who got illegal pay raises to increase the basis of
their pensions, as well as their
immediate take-home pay. The tactic used was to understate their salaries by
$30,000 or so when applying to the board for a $100,000 bonus, then have it
added in again when retirement pay was computed. Question: Did these ladies
have some kind of leverage on the administration to get such perks? These
people are an addition to the first ten profiteers named who were practically all
from the district administration, including the school board. Since a lot of
the profiteering involved payments to outside vendors, it is expected that
some of them will be investigated for things like overcharging and kickbacks on
contracts. Other vendors were innocent bystanders who say they got a lot less
payment for their services than was credited to them in the school records,
the difference being pocketed by the schools’ bookkeepers.
The biggest victim among vendors is the firm of auditors who approved all
these shenanigans. The firm of Miller, Lilly and LaPearce was used by 55 school
districts on Long island and the lower Hudson Valley up to a few days ago. On
January 6th the New York State Comptroller General issued a report charging
that their work was "so appallingly inadequate that it would shock…the
accounting profession…and the taxpayers…" Miller Lilly took the hint and announced
they were shutting up shop forthwith. They will become dangling men, waiting
for their subpoenas.
Case No. 2. The William Floyd District. In contrast to the Roslyn district
at the west, or New York City end of Nassau County, where money flowed like
water in an opulent community, William Floyd is located in the east end of
Suffolk County, far removed from New York, and also from opulence. In fact, it is
the second poorest district on the whole Island. That did not stop the
white-collar wise guys from helping themselves to fat unearned pensions, bulging
expense accounts and lush employment contracts.
The fomer district treasurer, a man named James Wright, worked the system so
well that he was able to retire in 2003 with a pension of $199,000 per year.
He had basically used the Roslyn system described above to inflate his salary
of $127,000 by an extra $210,000, from which his huge pension was computed.
The $210K wasn’t salary at all, but $110,000 that he invented plus a $100,000
bonus presented to him by the suddenly affluent school board.
And the money kept rolling in. The rule of a con man who gets ahold of a
sucker is to hang on to him and never let him go. He’s the gift that keeps on
giving. So Mr. Wright retired one day and on the next day he morphed himself
into a consultant at $185,000 a
year.
Although as a consultant he presumably shouldn’t have had access to the
school checkbook, he still managed to write himself five checks for $15,000 out of
it. That was small potatoes compared to what he did the year before when he
used it to write himself two checks in the amount of $353,000. Apparently
this also went into the basis of his pension.
He didn’t keep all the goodies for himself though. There was yet another
high flier operating in the district. His name was Daniel Cifonelli, who was
accused of stealing $230,000 from the districts insurance accounts, and then
retiring briefly before re-emerging as a consultant at $150,000 a year. Like
Wright, he didn’t bother to obtain the legal permission required to do this and
the school board didn’t bother about it either. No one has much doubt that when
it came to consulting, they must have done a lot of it with each other.
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