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From the
NY Post:
A couple who run a small urban farm said powerful Queens lawmaker James Sanders offered them $1.7 million in taxpayer money to fund their operation — then demanded a $250,000 kickback.
Marion Moses and Malisa Rivera said they refused Sanders, then a city councilman, during a 2012 sit-down. Sanders, now a state senator running for Congress, became irate, and the couple believe their charity has been blacklisted by government officials ever since, they told The Post.
Three weeks ago, Moses filed a civilian crime report with the office of Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara. Sources said the feds were already investigating Sanders for steering City Council discretionary funds to other nonprofits.
Mike Duvalle, a former Sanders staffer, told The Post that he met with the FBI last month in connection with that probe.
From the
Daily News:
A crooked real estate developer touted himself in a Housing Preservation and Development brochure for “giving back” to his Brooklyn community at the same time he was defrauding the city agency, according to court papers.
Sergio Benitez will be eating those words Wednesday when he is sentenced in Brooklyn Federal Court on corruption charges.
Benitez was featured in HPD’s glossy New Housing Marketplace Plan of 2011 with a blurb accompanied by his photo.
“I’m originally from Brooklyn and I see my work as a way of giving back,” he says.
He had built about 80 two- and three-story affordable homes on properties that had been sold to him for $1 each by the city.
But Benitez had a secret. He was bribing then-HPD Assistant Commissioner Wendell Walters with cash in golf ball boxes and coffee cups and was awarded development contracts in return.
He also took $228,000 in kickbacks from the general contractor hired on the Decatur Cluster development in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
The contractor, in turn, fraudulently inflated its costs that were submitted to the city in order to recoup the shakedown by Benitez.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Cristina Posa blasted the defendant for shamelessly holding himself out as a model developer.
