atlantic development criminal investigation probe
TRANSCRIPT
Prosecutors raid Atlantic Development office April 24, 2009 08:30AM
Peter Fine
Manhattan prosecutors raided the Soho offices of Atlantic Development Group, one of the city's largest affordable housing developers, yesterday. The Manhattan District Attorney's office declined to comment on the raid, and a spokesperson for Atlantic confirmed that there is an ongoing investigation and the developer is cooperating with the authorities. According to the Post, the investigators were looking into an alleged bribery scheme, involving paying off city officials and construction companies to move projects along. The company, founded by Peter Fine, recently unveiled its Boricua Village project in the Melrose section of the Bronx. The $270 million mixed-used development is slated to include one million square feet of space for Boricua College. [Crain's]
DA investigating Atlantic Development July 27, 2009 01:00PM
Atlantic Development's Peter Fine
The Manhattan District Attorney is investigating the alleged employment of undocumented workers and payment of substandard wages at projects run by Atlantic Development. Peter Fine, founder of Atlantic, is also the producer of Broadway's "In the Heights." Sources told the New York Post that investigators have been asking laborers about Atlantic's wages and hiring practices. The company, which uses many subcontractors, develops affordable and low-income housing. Prosecutors raided Atlantic Development's office in April. The company's Boricua Village project in the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx opened several months ago.
Investigators Thursday raided the Manhattan office of a major developer who funneled thousands in campaign cash to local politicians, including White House aide Adolfo Carrión.
City Department of Investigation agents spent hours gathering documents from the 155 Sixth Ave. offices of Atlantic Development Group.
Armed with a search warrant from the Manhattan district attorney's office, agents and cops removed dozens of boxes of records.
DOI spokeswoman Diane Struzzi confirmed the raid but declined further comment.
A spokesman for Atlantic, Lee Silberstein, said only: "There's an ongoing investigation, and Atlantic is cooperating with authorities."
One target of the probe is a major Bronx project, Boricua Village, that's at the heart of a Daily News investigation into Carrión, the director of White House urban policy who, until last year, was Bronx borough president.
In the last few years, Atlantic's owners, Peter Fine and Marc Altheim, and other company execs gave Carrión $52,400 in political contributions.
During that time, the then-borough president recommended approval of Atlantic's Boricua Village, one of the biggest publicly subsidized projects in the Bronx.
Carrión also sponsored $7.5 million in taxpayer funds for the project, which includes 675 units of housing and a 14-story tower for Boricua College.
The Boricua project was designed by an architect who was doing renovation work on Carrión's City Island home.
Carrión has yet to pay the architect, Hugo Subotovsky, for work completed by February 2007. After The News revealed this arrangement, the White House told him to pay.
Carrión and Subotovsky would not comment.
Sources familiar with the investigation said the agency is looking at whether Atlantic illegally influenced local politicians to win approval for its many projects.
Another source said the probe arose during a gambling and loansharking probe involving organized crime figures operating at the Boricua Village job.
Investigators are examining allegations that Atlantic paid bribes to city Building Department employees to expedite permits.
The source said the probe could evolve into how Atlantic got permission to build and how they acquired land in Manhattan and the Bronx.
Altheim is a target, the source said.
He and Fine have made tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to numerous politicians and parties, including $40,000 to the New York State Democrats in 2007 and $16,800 to Bronx City Councilman Joel Rivera from 2003 to 2006
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/04/24/2009-04-24_city_raids_office_of_builder_who_donated_campaign_money_to_obama_aide_adolfo_car.html#ixzz0aIQlITWK
Probers looking at whether Adolfo Carrión got a steep discount on home renovations
BY Robert Gearty and Greg B. Smith DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Monday, March 23rd 2009, 12:00 AM
Lombard for News
Adolfo Carrión Jr. speaks outside the Bronx County Building.
Schwartz for News
620 City Island Avenue, on City Island, the home of Adolfo Carrion.
The probe of White House urban czar Adolfo Carrión has widened to explore whether he received a significant discount on the renovation of his home, the Daily News has learned.
The former Bronx borough president, who started last month as President Obama's director of urban policy, has acknowledged that he has not paid the architect, even though the work was done two years ago.
Now a law enforcement agency has obtained documents from the contractor who built a new porch and installed a balcony on Carrión's Victorian home on City Island, sources familiar with the investigation told The News.
The documents show the project's estimated cost was $50,000. Carrión wound up paying less than half the estimate - $24,000.
The Bronx district attorney has said he's looking into The News' report that Carrión had yet to pay his architect. The office declined to comment about the latest inquiry.
Early last week, investigators seized documents from Nationwide Maintenance of the Bronx, the firm's owner said. Investigators also obtained an October 2006 document signed by Carrión and filed with the city Buildings Department listing the "estimated total cost" as $50,000. That figure is typed in, as the document requires.
On that same document, the $50,000 figure was crossed out and replaced with a penciled-in lower figure - $32,000.
The owner of Nationwide said the final cost was even lower - $24,000.
Owner Marcie Manfredonia said she didn't know what the other figures were and said Carrión and his wife paid her for the construction work. No other entity helped pay the bill, she said.
Asked how she got the job, she said she was referred to Carrión by someone in the Bronx Chamber of Commerce. She could not recall whom.
Asked if she built both the porch and the balcony, she replied, "I'm not really sure. I think we did both of them, but I don't know. We did a job and we were paid for it and exactly what we did we were paid for."
Carrión has said he paid the contractor for the work, although he has refused repeated requests by The News to supply proof of that payment or reveal the total amount.
In one of several statements on the house renovation, Carrión said, "I hired a contractor to perform the porch renovations and fully paid that firm for the construction work that was completed."
The questions about the cost of construction come on the heels of revelations that Carrión has yet to pay the project's architect.
Carrión has said the architect, who at the time was seeking his approval for a major Bronx development, worked 51-1/2 hours for a total of $3,627.50. Carrión said the architect has yet to submit a bill.
On Friday, Carrión's only response to several News questions about the payments to the contractor was to say the contractor "was paid in full for his work by personal check."
The White House, which last week fielded questions about Obama's NCAA picks, refused to respond to multiple questions about Carrión's house.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/03/23/2009-03-23_probers_looking_at_whether_adolfo_carrin.html#ixzz0aIRc1SRM
2 years later, Adolfo Carrion pays architect who designed home renovation wrapped up in city probe
BY Greg B. Smith DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, April 25th 2009, 12:09 AM
White House aide Adolfo Carrion has finally paid the architect who designed his home renovation, a transaction that's part of an expanding city probe.
Carrion, the former Bronx borough president who became director of White House urban affairs, wrote out the $4,200 check this week - two years after the renovation was complete and a month after the Daily News exposed it.
The check was written to Hugo Subotovsky, architect of a major Bronx development called Boricua Village, which is at the crux of a Department of Investigation probe. DOI raided the project developer's office Thursday in a bribery and corruption probe.
The firm, Atlantic Development Group, got Carrion's approval for the Subotovsky-designed Boricua Village while Subotovsky was designing Carrion's home renovation.
The Carrion home renovation was finished by February 2007. Last month, Carrion admitted he hadn't paid the bill.
The architect's lawyer, Kenneth Breen, confirmed Subotovsky got a check for $4,247.50 this week from Carrion.
"The work that Mr. Subotovsky's firm did for Mr. Carrion was all done in the regular course of business ... Recently, the work was completed, a bill was submitted and payment was received," he said.
Carrion did not respond to requests for comment.
Last month, he said he hadn't paid because the architect was still doing a "survey" of the property. He promised to pay when the survey was filed with the city.
New York City lobbyists probed
BY GREG B. SMITH DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, November 18th 2007, 4:00 AM
After leaving his city job, former mayoral aide Jonathan Greenspun (below) lobbied on behalf of Thor Equities, which has big plans for Coney Island.
Albans/News
His new firm didn't detail whom he sought help from, in apparent violation of law.
Lobbyists for some of the city's biggest corporations and developers are hiding the names of city employees they've tried to influence in apparent violation of the law, a Daily News probe has found.
Last January, a new law was passed requiring all lobbyists to list by name all city employees they've pressed to obtain tax breaks, zoning changes, contracts and other perks for their clients.
The News found 95% of the 264 lobbyists who filed reports this year failed to reveal the names of the so-called "targets" they lobbied on their registration forms.
As a result, the public has no way to know which levers most well-paid lobbyists are trying to pull for their powerful clients.
On Friday, Acting City Clerk Michael McSweeney, whose office monitors lobbyists, ordered an investigation to ensure the law is enforced in response to the ongoing News investigation of lobbyists.
"People are supposed to be following the law," McSweeney said. "They're supposed to specifically state the people that they're lobbying and the subject matter upon which they are lobbying. The law is clear.
"Based on what we've seen, clearly a lot of people are not adhering to that as specifically as required."
The lobbyists could face fines and even prosecution on misdemeanor charges.
Mayor Bloomberg enthusiastically supported the new law as a way to shed light on what used to be back-room deals.
Lobbyists were told to attend training sessions to learn how to fulfill the new law's requirements. Some lobbyists did and included detailed lists of names.
For instance, Bryan Cave LLP, a lobbyist law firm based in Manhattan, carefully recorded the names of all city employees with whom the firm's lobbyists met.
Atlantic Development Group, for instance, paid Bryan Cave $12,544 this year to seek a permit to build affordable housing.
Records show the lobbyists reached out to Robert Dobruskin, an administrative city planner, and David Karnovsky, a lawyer in the city Planning Department.
"We take the lobbying requirements very seriously because we believe the city takes them seriously," said Robert Davis, one of the firm's lawyers.
In contrast, there's Jonathan Greenspun, who left his job as commissioner of Mayor Bloomberg's community assistance unit in June 2006 and registered as a lobbyist for the firm FHGR.
The law prohibits former city employees from lobbying any city agency on matters in which they had personal involvement while city employees. None of Greenspun's filings reveals the names of the city employees he lobbied.
During his years working for the mayor, Greenspun served as a liaison with numerous city agencies, including the Department of Buildings and the city Economic Development Corp. (EDC).
Immediately upon leaving the Office of the Mayor, Greenspun began lobbying both the Buildings Department and the EDC on behalf of seven corporate clients seeking zoning changes and city contracts, records show.
That included representing Thor Equities in its quest to win EDC aid to develop an amusement park and condos in Coney Island; his firm got $167,000, records show.
The records do not show the names of people who were lobbied. Greenspun declined to comment, but his partner Mike McKeon said he would not release the names because his lawyers said the forms comply with the law.
In addition, the forms raise another issue. City employees are barred from lobbying their former colleagues for a year after leaving public service.
Greenspun's lobbyist firm, FHGR, insists Greenspun only lobbied employees in city agencies, not employees of the mayor's office.
Some records back that up: Van Wagner Communications, a billboard company, paid FHGR $50,000 to lobby on an unspecified "local law." The record states Greenspun lobbied "only" the Buildings Department, while his colleague, McKeon, lobbied the mayor's office.
But other records list Greenspun as one of several FHGR lobbyists lobbying the "Office of the Mayor" on behalf of several clients during the year he was supposed to be banned from doing so.
Alabama-based Intergraph Corp., for instance, paid Greenspun and FHGR $132,000 to lobby the mayor's office and other city agencies on "security technology" within the year after Greenspun left City Hall.
McKeon said Greenspun was "extremely scrupulous" to avoid breaking the law on the one-year ban, seeking a ruling from a city ethics attorney and FHGR's counsel.
"He was very diligent in making sure that everything he did was right and proper," McKeon wrote in response to e-mailed questions. "He did not speak to any mayoral staffers about any client business at all during his ban."
McKeon said he handled all contact with the mayor's office during Greenspun's one-year ban.
Last month The News revealed that another mayoral aide, Anthony (Skip) Piscitelli, lobbied his former colleagues within a year of leaving public service.
Piscitelli's lobbyist firm, Wilson Elser, did not list the names of the mayor's aides Piscitelli lobbied on its 2007 forms, records show.
Disputing the law's fine print It's impossible to know which employees were lobbied by former politicians such as ex-Council Speaker Peter Vallone Sr. and ex-Queens Borough President Claire Schulman.
Vallone says he followed the law, which states lobbyists must report "the person or agency before which the lobbyist has lobbied." He interprets that to mean one or the other.
The city clerk's instructions to lobbyists state otherwise, spelling out that if a lobbyist contacts a city employee on behalf of a paying client, he must reveal that person's name. The city clerk's office said it will examine Vallone's filings.
Schulman said she was unaware that she was required to list the names of those she lobbied on behalf of a Queens developer who wants to develop two sites in Forest Hills. When asked, she volunteered the name of city employee John Young.
"I didn't like doing it to begin with," she said. "I don't like being a lobbyist or a consultant. It's just not my thing."
Buildings sprang up as donations rained down on Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion
BY Benjamin Lesser and Greg B. Smith DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Updated Sunday, March 1st 2009, 1:35 PM
Watts/News
Bronx Boro President Adolfo Carrion on the roof of the Bronx Courthouse with the old and the new Yankee Stadium behind him.
The man who is President Obama's newly minted urban czar pocketed thousands of dollars in campaign cash from city developers whose projects he approved or funded with taxpayers' money, a Daily News probe found.
Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion often received contributions just before or after he sponsored money for projects or approved important zoning changes, records show.
Most donations were organized and well-timed.
In one case, a developer became a Carrion fund-raiser two months before the borough president signed off on his project, raising more than $6,000 in campaign cash.
In another, eight Boricua College officials came up with $8,000 on the same day for Carrion three weeks before the school filed plans to build a new tower. Carrion ultimately approved the project and sponsored millions in taxpayer funds for it.
Carrion resigned as borough president effective Sunday and begins his new job as director of the White House Office on Urban Policy Monday.
Saturday Carrion declined to answer written questions about his receipt of timely campaign contributions. Instead, he issued a terse statement:
"Thousands of people who share the Borough President's vision for building a stronger Bronx and a stronger city have contributed to Carrion NYC. Teachers, parents, police officers, firefighters, members of the business community and concerned citizens have all contributed to the borough president's efforts to strengthen the Bronx and stimulate the local economy and he is proud to have such wide-ranging support."
Here's a look at some of his donors:
Last year
IDLE LLC
Jonathan Coren and a partner wanted to build 166 units of affordable housing in Parkchester.
Coren, for the first time in his life, became a registered fund-raiser - for Carrion. He raised $2,577 from multiple donors in the three weeks before Carrion approved the project on March 26.
On a single day - April 12 - he raised another $1,255, less than a month before the Planning Commission, which includes a Carrion appointee, approved Idle LLC's project.
Coren raised $6,532 for Carrion from 43 donors. The developers are awaiting funding from the city.
Asked about the purpose of fund-raising for Carrion just before he reviewed the project, Coren replied, "None, other than, to be perfectly honest with you, at that time I became aware of his campaign. It is what it is."
Coren says he never spoke "directly" with Carrion about campaign donations.
BORICUA VILLAGE
A top source for Carrion's campaign cash comes from a publicly funded project to build 679 units of housing and a 14-story college tower in Melrose.
Top officials at the Atlantic Development Group, the project's developer, and Boricua College contributed nearly $70,000 to Carrion during the time the project, called Boricua Village, moved through the system.
Atlantic needed Carrion and his planning commission rep to approve zoning changes and lift height restrictions for the tower.
The first application for the project was filed March 28, 2006. Less than a month later, Carrion got eight donations on the same day for $8,750, records show.
They all came from Boricua College administrators, including a $4,000 check from President Victor Alicea. Alicea has been a fund-raiser for Carrion.
On March 26, 2007, Carrion approved the application.
The grand total for Boricua donations was $17,512, while Atlantic owner Peter Fine and his employees came up with $52,400 - the largest single source of donations for Carrion.
In July, Carrion announced he was sponsoring $3 million in taxpayer funds for the project. Records show he has since sponsored another $4.5 million for the college part of the project.
Alicea insisted all Boricua donations came from "individuals," not the college. "We're very careful about anything that could be construed as a tradeoff or a quid pro quo."
A spokesman for Atlantic said Fine believes Carrion "is an outstanding public servant, and for that reason alone is happy to give financial support to his political endeavors."
JACKSON DEVELOPMENT GROUP
In 2004, a real estate group moved to build affordable housing on the site of an old Mott Haven brewery on St. Ann's Ave. The project stalled.
In April 2007, dozens of employees of Jackson Development Group started donating to Carrion. There were 23 contributions in two months, including $1,000 from a construction worker.
By November 2007, 41 donations from Jackson employees to Carrion totaled $35,650. In May 2008, Carrion approved the project. Two months later, he announced he was sponsoring $3 million in taxpayer funds for the project.
Jackson did not return a call seeking comment.
TRI-LINE CONTRACTING
One of Carrion's largest donors and fund-raisers is Jose Velazquez, owner of Tri-Line Contracting Inc. of Manhattan. Between his employees and developers and other donors, he has raised $83,700 for Carrion.
Tri-Line is working at two of the biggest developments Carrion has championed, including the new Yankee Stadium.
Carrion signed off on it in 2005 with the caveat that the Yanks hire a big percentage of local contractors and workers. One of the contractors was Tri-Line, which is building a conference center and museum in the stadium.
Velazquez said he raised money for Carrion because he supported him as a fellow Hispanic and felt that "this is the guy to lead this city."
Carrion "has never ever equated raising money with giving us work," Velazquez said, adding that Carrion did not help get him the stadium job.
Tri-Line is also building a
GATEWAY
Staples store in a new mall a block from the stadium called Gateway at Bronx Terminal Market. Velazquez said he got the job through competitive bidding.
Developer Related Companies' subsidiary, BTM Development Partners, needed Carrion and the city Planning Commission to change zoning, modify height restrictions and approve permits for parking spaces.
As the project moved forward, the neighborhood railed about increased traffic and the impact the chain stores would have on local businesses. All the while Related executives wrote campaign checks to Carrion.
On March 10, 2005, five $1,000 donations from Related executives arrived. On June 20, 2005, the company notified the city it planned to build a 1 million-square-foot retail center with 2,610 parking spaces and a 250-room hotel.
On Oct. 19, 2005, Carrion approved the project, with his office monitoring local hiring. Since 2003, Carrion has received $39,100 from 24 Gateway-related donations.
Related declined to answer questions.
In March 2008, Carrion sponsored $1 million in public funds for the Ader Group's plan to build 177 low-income rental units. On June 17, owner
THE ADER GROUP
Israel Neiman gave Carrion $4,950, a donation Neiman said was "just coincidental."
Neiman said the taxpayer money has not been spent and the project is on hold due to the collapse of the economy.