The 411K Rail worker? It was 461K......and they were charged with fraud
New York Times
One night two years ago, Thomas Caputo, a senior track worker for the Long Island Rail Road, put in for 15 hours of overtime for work he said he had done at the West Side Yard in Manhattan. His shift began at 4 p.m. and ended at 7 o’clock the next morning.
But, the authorities say, Mr. Caputo was somewhere else that evening: at a bowling alley in Patchogue, N.Y., more than 55 miles away, where he bowled three games, averaging a score of 196.
He took home an overtime payment of $1,217, the government said.
Mr. Caputo was one of five current and former employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority charged on Thursday with participating in an overtime fraud scheme that allowed them to become among the highest-paid employees at the agency, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said.
The defendants, who worked at the Long Island Rail Road and New York City Transit, frequently volunteered for lucrative overtime shifts and later claimed they had worked when they were in fact at home or other nonwork locations, or even on vacation, the prosecutors said.
Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said the scheme involved claims for “extraordinary, almost physically impossible, amounts of overtime.”
Mr. Caputo, 56, who retired in 2019 after three decades with the railroad, was listed in 2018 as the highest paid M.T.A. employee with total pay of more than $461,000, including about $344,000 in overtime. All five defendants each earned more than the salary of the M.T.A. chairman or Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who oversees the agency.
A lawyer for Mr. Caputo did not respond to a message from a reporter seeking comment. Mr. Caputo had been the railroad’s chief measurement officer, leading a crew on a track geometry car that inspects the rails to identify areas that need repairs.
In 2018, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday, Mr. Caputo claimed to have worked 3,864 overtime hours, on top of 1,682 regular hours.
If he had worked every single day that year (which he did not), the complaint said, his claims would average about 10 hours of overtime each day for the entire year, beyond his regular 40-hour workweek.
Another defendant, Michael Gundersen, 42, a maintenance-of-way supervisor at New York City Transit, was accused of reporting he had worked long shifts in March 2018, for which he was paid $2,481. But evidence showed that at the same time, he had hotel reservations in Atlantic City and tickets for concerts there on successive nights, a second complaint charged.
During other periods that Mr. Gundersen was paid thousands of dollars for claimed overtime, he was on vacation in Williamsburg, Virginia, participating in a 5K footrace in New Jersey, and on a family vacation at a resort in the Hudson Valley, the complaint said. Mr. Gunderson’s lawyer declined to comment.
Mr. Caputo and the four other defendants each earned more than $348,000 total in 2018, the authorities said. The others ranked fourth, fifth, 11th and 12th that year in pay among all M.T.A. employees.The charges come at a time when the authority is confronting its worst financial crisis because of the pandemic and a stalemate over federal aid. Without a financial bailout, the agency has said that it will have to
slash subway and bus service and that more than 9,000 workers could lose their jobs.
In a news conference on Thursday in the State Capitol, Mr. Cuomo noted that the five individuals charged represented a tiny fraction of the M.T.A.’s work force, saying that there were “bad apples” in every profession. He said the M.T.A. needed to have systems in place to monitor its employees and their bills.
Still, he said, “You will never eradicate all bad actors in any system.”
The U.S. attorney’s office investigated the scheme with the F.B.I. and the transportation authority’s inspector general.
“This type of double-dealing directly contributes to rising M.T.A. fares for the average, hardworking commuter,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the F.B.I.’s New York office.
Tim Minton, a spokesman for the transportation authority, said, “The alleged conduct by these M.T.A. employees is an egregious betrayal of public trust.”
He said the agency had undertaken aggressive overtime controls, which had resulted in a reduction of $105 million in overtime in 2019 alone.
The M.T.A. would “continue to root out waste, fraud and abuse wherever it occurs,” Mr. Minton said, “and will continue cooperating fully with this critically important investigation.”
The three other defendants were Joseph Ruzzo, 56, a retired Long Island Rail Road track foreman; and John Nugent, 50, and Joseph Balestra, 51, who are still working as track foremen.
Mr. Ruzzo’s lawyer declined to comment. Mr. Nugent’s lawyer, William Wexler, said his client denied “that he wrongfully obtained any monies from the rail road.” Mr. Balestra’s attorney, John LoTurco, said his client “vehemently denies all charges” and “adamantly asserts his innocence.”
The New York Times
reported in May 2019 that the prosecutors had subpoenaed pay records for Mr. Caputo and more than a dozen other employees at the Long Island Rail Road and New York City Transit.
The huge overtime payments made to Mr. Caputo and other M.T.A. employees were revealed a month earlier by the
Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Albany. Its research showed that 33 M.T.A. employees earned more than $300,000 in 2018, with almost all receiving large amounts of overtime pay.
Each defendant was charged with one count of federal program fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.
The charges come more than a decade after the Long Island Rail Road was caught up in a scandal over disability payments. A New York Times investigation had found that nearly every career employee who retired received a disability pension, even though many continued to lead active lives. More than 30 people — railroad workers, doctors and a union official — pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges. END.
Many of those privately run rail lines are closing, or have closed. Unless you are in Tokyo (One of the biggest Cities in the World), or going from one major City to another close by you may not have a great public transit option. Here in Japan = sky high costs!
I am trying to figure out how I would have carried those Klipsch, JBL, Sansui or Totem Mani Speakers I found in the last couple months that I had no idea I would find the day I took the CRV out. Or made the couple thousand I did off of those speakers.....(I kept the Mani's)
Oh, and yes I have road Public Transportation Numerous times, and yes, it can be all those negative things. But mostly from my personnel experience it is not.
Bus line right across the street.