Predatory slumlord swindled city housing agencies for 8 years

QNS 

A Far Rockaway man was charged for defrauding government rental assistance programs by renting out dilapidated apartments he did not own to families in need, prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Paul Fishbein, 47, faces wire and mail fraud charges for allegedly falsely claiming to be the owner and landlord of 20 rental properties, mostly in the Bronx, while collecting government subsidies and evicting tenants over the course of eight years, according to the Southern District of New York.

“As alleged, Paul Fishbein not only took advantage of New Yorkers in need, he also defrauded city and federal government programs designed to help these very people,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said. “Fishbein allegedly lied about ownership of residential properties, fraudulently took rent subsidies and other benefits from those government housing programs, and often evicted tenants without cause from housing that was substandard in any event. Now Paul Fishbein is in custody and facing serious federal charges for his alleged fraud and exploitation.”

According to a complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court Tuesday, Fishbein allegedly lied about owning the properties beginning in 2013 based on forged deeds. He then allegedly rented the properties to homeless and low- to moderate-income families through rental assistance programs operated by three city agencies — NYCHA, the Human Resources Administration and Housing Preservation & Development — and collected money, including federal funds, as the purported owner and landlord of the properties.

The complaint estimates Fishbein defrauded the three city agencies out of about $1.5 million, including more than $270,000 in federal funds. In addition to taking payments, Fishbein allegedly faked using a broker to rent out the properties and kept certain broker’s fees for himself that the HRA issued as payment.

Fishbein is also accused of faking financial eligibility for Medicaid since at least 2014, the complaint says. He allegedly told the HRA he worked at a company where his total income was about $150 a week — or $600 a month — when he in actuality made hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Prosecutors allege Fishbein received nearly $50,000 in Medicaid benefits to which he was not entitled to as part of his scheme.

Mayor de Blasio used city government workers for electioneering during re-election campaign

NY Daily News

A city-run tenant outreach program led by one of Mayor de Blasio’s top political operatives is strongly believed to have doubled as an arm of his 2017 reelection bid, according to sources who worked for the program.

The Public Engagement Unit, which falls under the city’s Human Resources Administration, had workers knock on “thousands” of tenants’ doors to gather personal information, including names and addresses — in what former staffers described as an effort to lay the groundwork for 2017.

David Andrade, a former PEU tenant support specialist, described the unit as “very shady” and said he has no doubt the data it gathered was directed to de Blasio’s political operation.

"This wasn't kosher," he said. "It wasn't talked about ... but you could connect the dots. I knew it would be migrated."

Andrade said a connection to the campaign wasn’t spoken about openly, but was laid out to him by co-workers with ties to Rick Fromberg, who worked as de Blasio’s 2017 campaign manager and the PEU’s senior adviser from January 2015 to May 2016.

“It was wink wink, like this is going to be helpful in 2017 — that’s the way the senior adviser [Fromberg] would talk about it,” said another former PEU staffer. “Everybody could smell that it was sketchy.”

Public records confirm Fromberg was politically active at the time.

A March 2015 email obtained by the Daily News shows that while working at the unit, Fromberg wrote to former de Blasio adviser Peter Ragone about devising political strategy at the behest of City Hall.

“Emma/Boss gave me point on putting together a suburbs/upstate political strategy,” Fromberg wrote, referring to top de Blasio advisor Emma Wolfe. “She lets me know you’ve (very generously, of course) offered some guidance here. Got some time to connect on it?”

A month later, Fromberg followed up with Ragone about "suburban strategy."

“Boss is meeting with [former Nassau County Executive] Ed Mangano next week, and a couple other elements are in play for some regional partnerships,” he wrote. “Would love to wrap this all together. What do you think?”

 Fromberg denied sending PEU data to the campaign.

“We unequivocally did not move data between the PEU and the de Blasio campaign,” he said. 

“Anyone insinuating that we did is both misinformed and uninformed.”

Before working for the city, Fromberg worked for the Global Strategy Group, a public affairs firm that specializes in political campaigns.

Brooklyn building illegally converted into shelter

From Kings County Politics:

The city announced today it removed all its resident clients from a four-story Bedford-Stuyvesant walk up illegally converted from a 14-unit apartment building to a 42-unit single room occupancy (SRO) shelter.

But the entire incident, in which the owner of the building at 529 Monroe Street appeared in some form of collusion with both the city and the non-profit organization that has a contract with the city to house homeless in an illegally converted building has local officials deeply concerned.

According to Community Board 3 District Manager Henry Butler residents have filed complaints about the building with CB3 as far back as the spring of 2017 when construction first began on the 4-story walk up.

Despite repeated complaints that the construction was illegal, the owners Monroe Lewis LLC, one of the shadowy landlords that operate out of 199 Lee Avenue in Williamsburg, was able to not only complete the illegal work, but secure a contract whereupon the city contracted with the non-profit Core Services to turn the site into a SRO homeless shelter.

The owners were able to do this even after the DOB slammed them with several fines including one for occupancy exceeding nearly three times the building’s Certificate of Occupancy and for altering plumbing without a permit.

Then, since September 2017 – around the same time the city passed legislation that would ramp up penalties as well as allow the Department of Buildings easier access to buildings suspected of illegal home conversions, the city began to illegally fill the building with tenants.

Despite the DOB leveling fines at the building’s owners for the illegal conversion, the HRA continued to house the homeless there, netting the landlord and Core over $40,000 a month in guaranteed city funding to split up as the city pays $1,047 per SRO unit.

Great report!

Elizabeth Crowley admits she's got a strong opponent

Yesterday, Liz Crowley sent out a fundraising solicitation in which she admitted that she is going to have a tough time getting re-elected to a third term (which would bring her total time in the council to 13 years!):

I suppose this is why she recently introduced a useless bill - as the sole sponsor - to require that a separate Inspector General oversee the DHS & HRA.

Samaritan Village can't pay for Pan Am kitchens

From DNA Info:

The shelter provider at the former Pan Am hotel has gotten a six-year contract extension from the city — despite saying it can't build the mandatory kitchens for each unit because it can't get a loan to fund construction.

Samaritan Village Daytop's Boulevard Family Shelter got its extension bid approved by the city's Human Resources Administration on March 17, as well as an additional $10.5 million through the end of June — which includes $4.8 million for rent at the former hotel.

That brings the total contract amount for the shelter to $26,431,554 each year — but still doesn't include the cost of building kitchens in each of the rooms, which last year was part of the mandatory requirement before a contract extension could be approved.

The city said last year that it will pay for the renovations needed to turn the shelter into a Tier 2 facility, and Samaritan Village was required to lay out a timeline for the work.

Samaritan Village has been delayed since it hasn't been able to receive a loan "due to the lack of registration for this work," a letter states.

A Department of Homeless Services official said work on the 216-room hotel's kitchens will begin this July, with 100 units finished by July 2018. The rest will finish by 2019. it was not immediately clear where the money for the kitchen construction would come from in light of the operator's issues with getting a construction loan.

Residents opposed to "supportive housing"

From the Times Ledger:

Southeast Queens residents and elected officials headed to City Hall last week to voice their concerns over the city’s new supportive housing plans for their shelter-saturated neighborhoods.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week a new plan to build 15,000 supportive housing units for those in need across the city at an estimated cost of $2.6 billion in capital funds over the next 15 years.

The City Council’s Committee on Housing and Building and Committee on General Welfare held a joint hearing Nov.19 about the new supportive housing plan with the city’s Human Resources Administration and Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

During the testimony, HRA Commissioner Steven Banks said HRA provides a form of financial support, temporary housing assistance, training for employment and services for those unable to work.

Council members Ruben Wills (D-South Ozone Park), I. Daneek Miller (D-St. Albans) and Donovan Richards (D-Laurelton) all spoke up about their residents’ concern about more homeless shelters in their neighborhoods.

HRA workers stole welfare and food stamp benefits

From the Daily News:

A pair of corrupt city bureaucrats ripped off more than $2 million in food stamps and public assistance over the last five years — even using stolen benefits to buy Red Bull in bulk and resell it, the city Department of Investigation announced Tuesday.

Two Human Resources Administration workers and 11 co-conspirators were arrested early Tuesday and charged with recruiting dozens of welfare recipients and others to game the system out of millions of taxpayer dollars between 2008 and 2013.

Cherrise Watson-Jackson, 44, an HRA supervisor, allegedly created fake electronic benefit transfer cards to generate $120,000, which was used to buy cases of Red Bull from BJ's Wholesale Club, according to charges filed in Manhattan federal court.

Watson-Jackson and her crew then resold the high-octane drink to small local grocery stores and split the proceeds, DOI alleged.

Another HRA employee, Petronila Peralta, 51, was caught allegedly generating more than $600,000 in bogus cash assistance benefits to 140 individuals between 2008 and 2011.

Peralta even paid recruiters to give welfare recipients cash to use their account information to generate fraudulent benefits, DOI said.

Queens requests the most municipal IDs

From the Times Ledger:

Queens residents have submitted the largest number of municipal ID applications out of the five boroughs, the city announced last week.

Out of 101,063 processed applications from the five boroughs during period from Jan. 1 to March 30, the city has received 34,616 applications from Queens, according to the first quarterly IDNYC report prepared by the city Human Resources Administration, the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Operations.

The second highest was Brooklyn, with 30,805 applications, and the lowest was Staten Island, with 3,513. The city received 14,976 applications from Manhattan and 17,153 applications from the Bronx.

Because what NYC needs is more people on welfare

From the NY Post:

Welfare is making a comeback under Mayor de Blasio, with 13,000 more New Yorkers on the dole by the end of his first year in office, according to a new report obtained by The Post.

Enrollment in the city’s cash ­assistance program swelled by 4 percent in 2014 to 352,596 — one of the biggest increases in more than a decade, the Manhattan Institute found.

The rise comes even as the city’s economy has prospered — some 90,000 jobs were added in 2014, according to the “Poverty and Progress in New York” report ­being released Tuesday.

“If government dependence on welfare is rising in a good economy, what’s going to happen in a bad economy?” wondered study author Stephen Eide, who said the trend was antithetical to data dating back to around 1960.

The surprising uptick, reformers say, is partly by design. De Blasio’s pick to head the $10 billion Human Resources Administration, Steven Banks, is a proponent of loosening welfare restrictions.

With Banks at the helm, the HRA launched a series of sweeping changes in its state-approved Biennial Employment Plan, including changing requirements for welfare recipients with kids younger than 4 years old. Recipients previously had to clock a 35-hour workweek to get their checks.

Welfare recipients can now substitute full-time education — ­including GED preparation — for their work requirement.

The de Blasio administration is also phasing out the Giuliani-era Work Experience Program, which gave welfare recipients jobs in city agencies, in favor of “additional job search, work study or internships for cash assistance clients with recent work histories or with advanced degrees,” the report notes.

Eviction rates are sky high

From AMNY:

More New Yorkers are turning to the city to avoid getting kicked out of their apartments.

In the 2005 fiscal year, the City's Human Resources Administration paid $48 million in emergency grants to landlords to prevent eviction for 31,478 households that had fallen into rent arrears.

In the 2013 fiscal year, the number jumped to 43,412, and the city doled out $121.6 million.

"We've never seen this many people in trouble. In my life, I've never seen anything that even approaches this," said Sally Dunford, executive director of the West Bronx Housing and Neighborhood Center, who said her agency serviced more than 1,300 people last year for eviction prevention.

While a job loss or illness is most often to blame for a tenant falling behind, landlords of stabilized units who illegally hike rents "hoping no one would catch them," are aggravating the loss of affordable units, she said.

Because legal increases are permitted after a vacancy, the more churn there is in the market "the more rents go up," she noted. Overcrowding is at epic levels, she added.

While the number of completed evictions -- about 30,000 annually -- has wavered only slightly in the last three years, more New Yorkers are facing the nightmare that is housing court.

The number of eviction cases filed in the city jumped from 119,263 in 2004 to 138,732 in 2013 -- with the number of cases in the city's poorest borough -- The Bronx -- rising from 40,387 to 50,134 during the same time period.

There are more cases than evictions because many people finally come up with money owed after their landlords have filed suit (sometimes, with the help of a one shot grant) or they move voluntarily.

Bloomberg inconsistent on immigration

From the NY Sun:

Mayor Bloomberg, in a startling departure from his pro-immigration stance, is testing a new program designed to chase down sponsors of legal immigrants who end up on certain kinds of public assistance, and the city intends to make the sponsors pay back money to the government.

The threat is being made by the city’s Human Resources Administration, which is circulating a press release warning that it will start sending out in August letters to sponsors of immigrants who are not citizens but who are receiving cash assistance from a program called Safety Net. It estimates that there are 12,000 sponsors the city could go after, but says it expects that it will only recover from about 8% of them, or 960 cases.

Mr. Bloomberg’s demarche, which was signaled in the budget earlier this year, has been little-remarked-upon. In the large scheme of things it is a modest test. Yet it contrasts sharply with the mayor’s generally welcoming stance toward immigrants. In 2007, the mayor denounced Governor Romney of Massachusetts for saying that the federal government should slash funding for cities that don’t strictly enforce immigration laws. “Boy, let them come,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the time in a riposte to Mr. Romney, who’d denounced New York as a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants.

Describing New York City’s new policy last week, the Bloomberg administration insisted that the city “believes that immigrants coming here from countries throughout the world are vital to the success and vibrancy of our City. We also believe in personal responsibility.” It called its initiative “only one small component of HRA’s ongoing recoupment and recovery efforts that we conduct as part of our regular business. Additionally, we are ensuring the commitment by the sponsor is honored.”

So, coming here illegally is "personally responsible?"

Food stamp rush causes crowded facilities

From the Wall Street Journal:

Growing numbers of New Yorkers seeking food stamps have created an unwelcome spillover effect at some of New York City's job centers: overcrowding that in some cases has grown so severe, benefits were jeopardized.

The crush of people grew so large at one Brooklyn center in November that the Fire Department intervened and prevented anyone from entering the building.

HRA spokeswoman Connie Ress blamed the overflow crowds on rising numbers of people seeking food stamps. The number of New Yorkers getting the benefit has increased by 200,000 in the past two years, jumping to 1.8 million from 1.6 million in late 2009. At the same time, the agency has consolidated some facilities, Ms. Ress said.

This is how 3/4 houses work

From the Daily News:

An operator of transitional housing facilities for former addicts, ex-convicts and the homeless is harassing tenants of a Bedford-Stuyvesant building despite a court order, tenants charge.

Yury Baumblit’s tactics over the past month have included threats of eviction to residents of 85 Kingston Ave. and tampering with the boiler so the heat was off for nearly a week at Christmas, tenants said.

But the handful of remaining tenants are anxious — especially since some saw Baumblit send an employee to the basement one morning before Christmas and discovered soon afterwards the thermostat for the boiler had been ripped off the wall.

Their complaints are the latest volley in a legal battle with Baumblit, a defendant in a class-action suit in Brooklyn state supreme court.

He and his companies’ alleged mistreatment of tenants at nine three-quarter houses in Brooklyn — including 85 Kingston — and one in Queens, are the focus of the case.

Three-quarter houses proliferate in Central Brooklyn nabes including Bed-Stuy, Brownsville and East New York. Unlike halfway houses, to which their name refers, three-quarter houses do not have trained counseling staff or support services on-site.

Operators typically put dozens of bunk beds in single- and two-family homes and receive tenants’ $215-per-month city Human Resources Administration housing vouchers as rent. Occupants are required to attend off-site substance-abuse programs — whether or not they’re recovering addicts.

The Kingston Ave. building was an eight-unit apartment building before Baumblit leased it from its owner three years ago and turned it into an all-men’s three-quarter house.

No shame whatsoever

From the Brooklyn Paper:

The city is moving to reverse an earlier decision to halt more than $100 million worth of health care service contracts to a Bushwick-based nonprofit that is the subject of two federal investigations and the city’s own fraud probe.

The Human Resources Administration indicated that it would continue funding two new contracts to the homecare division of the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council this week, providing $135 million in contracts for home attendant services in Brooklyn and Queens.

Mayor Bloomberg justified the new contracts to Ridgewood Bushwick by saying that the nonprofit is providing essential services.

“There is no other organization at the moment capable of providing the services to the community that really needs it,” said Bloomberg. “Nobody with the scale and the experience, and [Department of Investigation commissioner Rose Gill Hearn] said in terms of that, they’re doing a good job.”

Photo from A Short Story.

Tweeding effort in overdrive

From the NY Times:

In the world’s most diverse city, it was hailed as a milestone: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed an executive order in July 2008 requiring every New York City agency that dealt with the public to provide interpreters, translated documents and other language help to people who spoke little or no English.

The order was supposed to help immigrant New Yorkers use services and navigate a daunting city bureaucracy. And in keeping with Mr. Bloomberg’s passion for applying good business practices to city government, the policy was meant to prevent the waste of time and money caused by miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Mr. Bloomberg pledged at the time to “make our city more accessible, while helping us become the most inclusive municipal government in the nation.”

But two years later, the mayor’s promise has fallen short. Many government workers fail to offer interpreters, even if people ask for them, and signs and forms in multiple languages are often nowhere to be found, according to people who have sought services and a lawsuit filed against one of the city’s largest agencies where the problems seem particularly acute.

The agency, the Human Resources Administration, is a virtual lifeline to millions of New Yorkers who depend on it for benefits like food stamps, cash assistance and subsidized medical care.

So not only are we giving people who aren't from this country handouts, we are paying to get them on the public dole. Why are we allowing people to come here and become a burden on us?

Please, beam me up, Scotty!

Joe Bruno's pals still got city contracts

From the Daily News:

In the months after Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno was indicted on federal corruption charges, the city awarded $8 million in contracts to a consulting firm the disgraced GOP kingpin headed.

The firm, CMA Consulting Services, received five contracts from the city Human Resources Administration and one from the Department of Consumer Affairs between February and November of 2009, city records show.

The HRA contracts were awarded despite a warning by the city Department of Investigation to the agency that Bruno was facing criminal charges.