{"id":53768,"date":"2025-11-27T04:57:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T04:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/53768\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T04:57:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T04:57:10","slug":"doj-convicts-70-nycha-employees-in-bribery-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/53768\/","title":{"rendered":"DOJ Convicts 70 NYCHA Employees In Bribery Plot"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Department of Justice<\/a>\u00a0has convicted dozens of\u00a0New York City Housing Authority<\/a>\u00a0employees in a pay-to-play contracting scheme.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 70 employees were charged in February 2024 with accepting bribes in exchange for awarding repair contracts. In\u00a0an announcement<\/a>\u00a0Tuesday, federal prosecutors called the sweep \u201cone of the largest single-day corruption cases in the history of the Justice Department.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Placeholder\"\/<\/p>\n

\n St. Mary’s Park Houses, a NYCHA development in the Bronx\n <\/p>\n

Three defendants were convicted after jury trials, 56 defendants pleaded guilty to felony offenses and 11 defendants pleaded guilty to misdemeanor offenses.<\/p>\n

All together, the defendants accepted $2.1M in bribes in exchange for distributing $15M of no-bid contracts. The scheme touched almost one-third of NYCHA<\/a>\u2019s 365 developments across the five boroughs, according to the announcement.<\/p>\n

NYCHA requires contractors to undergo a bidding process for jobs valued at more than $10K. In the cases pinpointed by the DOJ<\/a>, the contracts fell below the threshold, allowing NYCHA staffers to distribute work to companies of their choosing without soliciting other bids.<\/p>\n

As part of the scheme, employees \u2014 primarily managers \u2014 requested cash payments from contractors either before awarding contracts or after the work was completed, when a city worker\u2019s sign-off was required, the DOJ said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The defendants typically received approximately 10% to 20% of the contract value \u2014 ranging\u00a0from $500\u00a0to $2,000\u00a0\u2014 though some were paid even more.<\/p>\n

Sentencing is ongoing but may include up to two years in prison. Additionally, the defendants were ordered to pay over $2.1M in restitution to NYCHA and forfeit over $2M in criminal proceeds.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u2019s final guilty plea is an important milestone in bringing to an end the egregious pay-to-play bribery scheme that wasted millions of dollars that should have benefited [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development<\/a>] tenants in New York and raised serious questions about the integrity of NYCHA operations,\u201d HUD Acting Inspector General Brian Harrison said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

New York City Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber noted in a statement that her office made recommendations in 2021 to regulate the microbidding process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The city authority has now implemented 14 new controls to the process, three of which are similar to the 2021 recommendations that it previously rejected.<\/p>\n

NYCHA is the largest public housing authority in the country, with nearly 178,000 apartments. About one in 17 New Yorkers lives in city-operated housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Years of neglect have notoriously led to poor housing conditions within NYCHA developments. A 2023 audit<\/a> projected the total cost of repairs and replacements to exceed $78.3B <\/a>over the next 20 years.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The defendants] chose to serve themselves instead of the residents of NYCHA, driving up costs of maintenance and improvements in a public housing system dependent on scarce resources,\u201d Strauber said in her statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The\u00a0Department of Justice\u00a0has convicted dozens of\u00a0New York City Housing Authority\u00a0employees in a pay-to-play contracting scheme.\u00a0 The 70 employees…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[29603,128,29602,383,26083,29601,29604,9,24,5136,63,305,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-53768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-brian-harrison","tag-bronx","tag-department-of-housing-and-urban-development","tag-department-of-justice","tag-doj","tag-hud","tag-jocelyn-strauber","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-housing-authority","tag-nyc","tag-nycha","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}