NY Post
Three Brooklyn women at the helm of a Coney Island affordable-housing development pocketed more than $870,000 in bribes by fraudulently fast-tracking wealthy home-buyers into high-demand units meant for low-income families that needed them, officials said Tuesday.
Anna Treybich, Irina Zeltser and Karina Andriyan now face a 78-count indictment for the scam they ran from January 2013 through this month at the taxpayer-subsidized Luna Park complex, funding their luxurious tastes, officials said.
“Corrupt insiders got cash bribes, applicants got the apartment they wanted without having to wait, and honest families were left out in the cold,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said.
He was surrounded by a sampling of the trio’s alleged ill-gotten finery, including bags, shoes and jewelry bearing the names Chanel, Fendi and Cartier — and a rack of fur coats.
Playing gatekeeper in their respective roles as president, treasurer and office manager of the Luna Park Housing Corp., Treybich, Zeltser and Andriyan wormed well-heeled tenants into 18 apartments at the five-building, 6,000-resident Mitchell-Lama complex in exchange for cash bribes as large as $120,000, prosecutors said.
In nearly all of the cases, they did so by doctoring applicants’ documents to claim that they were relatives of outgoing tenants, allowing them to cut ahead of non-connected applicants, some of whom had seen their names sit on waiting lists for decades, authorities charge.
Otherwise, Mitchell-Lama hopefuls coming in cold without relatives are processed on a first-come-first-served basis.
As of Tuesday, the waiting list for Luna Park included 585 applicants for studios, 3,806 for one-bedrooms and more than 9,700 each for two- and three-bedrooms, according to public records.
