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A few weeks ago I wrote about a case here on Long Island where the County
Executive hired an Assistant County Executive without bothering about his
history of bankruptcy and check troubles. Once in office this chap widened his
field to include sexual harassment, nepotism and credit card abuse. When he
went to fire his sex target for non-cooperation she threatened his exposure, but
through the good offices of another Deputy County Executive she wound up with
a transfer to a new job paying $15,000 more than her previous one. In return
she made an agreement to withdraw her complaint and keep her mouth shut.
(Where have we heard that one before?) But the Republicans heard the story and
began hammering on it until the District Attorney agreed to investigate
everyone for criminal activity.
This was enough for most scandal buffs and rather more than I had expected
when I moved to Long island five years ago. I had high standards for scandal
after the Lewinsky uproar and hardly expected anything equal to it in the ’
burbs. But here was one that stacked up with any in terms of human interest,
drama, chicanery and all the other ingredients that go to make up a good newspaper
story. I was impressed I was even more impressed a few weeks ago when,
contrary to my expectations, yet another outrage surfaced, quite equal to the first
one and even more attention-grabbing than that. Long Island is a happenin’
place after all, I decided.
The latest sensation involves schools. That touches everyone because this is
suburbia, where children come first. People swear by their schools or swear
at them. It’s not unknown for school boards to engage in hanky-panky by
hiring relatives for cushy jobs and steering contracts to good friends, but this
has mostly been confined to low-income districts and hasn’t reached into the
plush areas of the so-called Gatsby country. There the schools are expected to
be squeaky-clean, even if the fire departments and the town planning boards aren
’t. These entities are continually under fire for misappropriating funds or
fudging appraisals of properties depending on whether they’re to be bought or
sold. Schools are above this -- they exist to teach citizenship to the next
generation who are the future of the community.
The foregoing is the theory of education anyway. There are others. One was
held by a lady who was the assistant superintendent for business of the Roslyn
school board on the North Shore. She looked at the flood of tax money
rolling in for the schools and decided that the old saying that youth is wasted on
the young applied to money too, so it would be better employed if devoted to
her wellbeing rather than that of the kids. So the receipts began to disappear
into her accounts, not the school’s. She got into this habit so deeply that
eventually she had maybe $8,000,000 stashed away -- no one really knows the
actual figure.
In October 2002 the school board discovered $250,000 missing from their
accounts, but despite being advised by counsel that the matter ought to be reported
to the district attorney, instead accepted restitution from the lady and
permitted her to retire. They then went shopping for a lawyer to give them an
opinion against reporting the matter. But their house of cards collapsed this
year when an anonymous letter led to a real investigation and the abovementioned
$8 million loss was uncovered.
This was going too far, and the lady was arrested and is now awaiting a grand
jury hearing, which will come when the District Attorney has unraveled the
paper trail of the defalcations to the point where he can present a convincing
case against the suspect and any others who may have aided and abetted her. In
explaining things to the outraged citizens, the school board did not hesitate
to blame their lawyers for advising them to take no action in 2002. The
lawyers responded that they had refused to give this advice when asked and had
recommended reporting instead, causing the board to get another lawyer as
described above. They then accepted their discharge by the school board, having made
it clear that they were not going to allow themselves to be scapegoated for
the board’s mistakes. The citizens responded by voting down the proposed
school budget for the first time in history and voting out the two board members up
for election at the time.
Mrs. Gluckin, the lady in the case, wasn’t the only one bringing in the
sheaves from the Roslyn harvest. There was also a Mr. Tassone, the superintendent
of schools, who lived out of the district, in the same apartment house as my
daughter in Manhattan. She didn’t know him, she says, leading me to hope that
she won’t be called as a material witness. His practice was to contract all
the district’s testing work to a Mr. Signorelli, a gentleman who happened to be
his roommate. Nobody on the board noticed this coincidence and $800,000
changed hands between the board and Mr. Signorelli, since there was a lot of
testing to be done, although somehow no records of it were kept. As of this date
Mr. Tassone has resigned, and Mr. Signorelli has left town.
Naturally there are expectations of new bombshells going off at any time.
The potential is there. Roslyn is a an unusually wealthy district, as can be
seen from the nonchalant way money was allowed to seep out to all comers, but it
is not the only rich school district in New York. Far from it. There are
over 700 school districts in the state, and some of them are just as wealthy as
Roslyn. As I write this, two of them are reported as examining their records
for possible links to the Roslyn case. Mr. Tassone was superintendent in one
of them prior to moving there. Mr. Signorelli was there too, consulting away.
There were also two other consultants whom Tassone later used in Roslyn.
One conveniently became the internal auditor there, the other specialized in “
sensitivity training”. Tassone neglected to inform the Roslyn board that they
were brother and sister. It might have prevented them from cleaning up the
$470,000 he paid them for their work.
Yes, you’ll find excitement in Long Island everywhere you look. This week we’
re hosting the U.S. Open at Shinnecock. We might have a World Series if the
Mets can tap in to their inner resources and actualize their latent potential.
It’s just a place where anything may happen. Our local newspaper, Newsday,
where we get our news about the frauds and thefts of other people, has just
been found guilty in a civil trial of cheating advertisers of millions by
reporting false circulation figures. In justification, I guess, they report that
swindling started here in 1665, when a Captain Scott split for Barbados upon
being directed to produce a deed for twenty choice square miles he claimed to own
in Setauket. Today people prefer the Cayman Islands.
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