A Little Good News!

On Wednesday, September 14, the NYCERS executive director, Diane D'Alessandro, announced that she was retiring at the end of December.

Hopefully the exit of this vicious incompetent boss should provide most NYCERS employees with some relief from their daily stress at work. Of course it will create serious concerns for all the equally incompetent flunkies that she has hired over the last 11 years as well as some other specific employees that have done her dirty work during that time. I am referring to Karen Mazza, Felita Baksh/Ramsami/DiLorenzo, Kin Mak, and Liz Reyes among others.

There was a DOI investigation started in response to the Ellen Carton hiring. I suspect D'Alessandro wants to get out of Dodge before the sheriff arrives.

I sincerely hope that the trustees are able to clean house after she is gone. This agency has a totally adequate operating budget as opposed to other city agencies. It should be an example of almost perfect service to members and retirees as opposed to the arrogant dismissive operation that it is.

Assuming D'Alessandro has no pre-2001 NYS/NYC service, her pension will be about $50K/yr. based on a $217K/yr salary and 14 years of service. This is not a smart financial move. Six more years of service and 12% increase in salary would have increased her pension to $97K/yr.

My Wife Resigned from NYCERS in May of this Year

In May of this year my wife resigned from NYCERS about two years shy of the date she would have been able to retire. She started working at NYCERS in the fall of 1998. In December of 2003, she was promoted to Deputy Director of Administration by Milt Aron, the Deputy Executive Director.

Prior to that, starting in 1980, she worked at the Mayor’s Office, the Sheriff’s Office, and the Department of Homeless Services.

In June, 2005 she was demoted by Aron with the explicit approval of Martha Stark, Chair of the NYCERS Board of Trustees and the Finance Commissioner. She was demoted because of her relationship with me. She was forced back to her permanent civil service position and her salary was reduced by $14,000, the amount that she had been given when she was promoted.

From June of 2005 to May of 2015 my wife was given no work. She was told many times that there were strict orders from the executive staff that she was not to be given any work. Many times over the ten years she explicitly asked for work.

On a few rare occasions she was given some significant work but the minute the executive staff became aware of it, the work was stopped. Kin Mak could always be counted on to pass the word along to Karen Mazza about the work assignment.

In 2013 my wife was hospitalized for 12 days with acute ulcerative colitis.

In 2014, while driving to church on Palm Sunday, she had a major heart attack. She almost died on the side of the road. It was incredibly fortunate that she was at a stop sign and that her 16 year old daughter was with her in the car. The EMT’s were there in minutes and were able revive her with a defibrillator. She spent 18 days in the hospital. She was on reduced body temperature protocol for possible brain damage. She had double bypass surgery and another procedure for a defibrillator implant.

Both of these illnesses were directly caused by stress.

After both of these hospital events she returned to work. Both times she asked for work and both times NYCERS executive staff refused to assign her any work.

In the spring of 2015 the stress of being totally marginalized at NYCERS finally became too much of a threat to her health. She reluctantly resigned. At that point her salary was $104,000.

For many years now, I have been writing about the wretched way that NYCERS, and I mean D'Allesandro, Mazza, and Baksh/Ramsami, have treated members, retirees and NYCERS employees. I speak from personal experience.

You can understand why people lie, cheat, and steal for their own personal gain but to be just plain nasty for no good reason is despicable. The only thing I can come up with is that they are so incompetent they think they have to kick every one under them to hide their own failures. Maybe City Hall and the new NYCERS Chair will get tired of them like the previous mayor did with Martha Stark.

Those Pesky Emails.

We all saw yesterday how emails can trip up political figures. How did Gov. Christie miss that email but the Bergen record was able to get it?

It reminds me how the Department of Investigation was unable to get copies of NYCERS emails back in 2004. Of course, Kin Mak had no trouble finding them and stashing them away at his house in the Poconos. Maybe the Bergen Record hired Kin Mak.

DOI and Mazza

The Department of Investigation (DOI) recently released a fraud report involving theft of NYCERS checks.

Below is an excerpt from the beginning of the report which was 23 pages long and dealt with the loss of nearly $384,000 from NYCERS. The report, while accurate about the fraudulant cashing of NYCERS benefit checks, is a lot to do about a relatively small issue. DOI rarelly reports a complete accounting of the actual convictions and prison sentences that result from its investigations.

I want, however, to point out specifically the mention of Commissioner Gill Hearn's thanks to Karen Mazza at the end of the excerpt. Of course, Gill Hearn doesn't mention that she has not completed the investigation that DOI had committed to pursue into perjury and corruption charges against Mazza and other NYCERS management staff. I am sure the financial impact of corrupt management at NYCERS is far greater than $384,000.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: DIANE STRUZZI
WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 2012
(212) 825-5931
DOI RELEASES PENSION FRAUD REPORT INVOLVING EIGHT SEPARATE CASES IN WHICH INDIVIDUALS ATTEMPTED TO DEFRAUD OR DEFRAUDED NYCERS OF MORE THAN $400,000
ROSE GILL HEARN, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation (“DOI”), released a report today detailing eight recent investigations into fraud upon the New York City Employees’ Retirement System (“NYCERS“), the country’s largest municipal pension system. The eight investigations included in this report are the most recent that DOI has conducted and illustrate a range of fraudulent schemes that include family members and beneficiaries of deceased pensioners taking NYCERS funds they were not entitled to receive and the theft of NYCERS checks by ndividuals who falsely claimed they had not received the funds. These eight investigations identified nearly $384,000 in NYCERS funds that individuals wrongfully obtained and an attempt to obtain approximately $17,200, which was thwarted by DOI and NYCERS. Five of the eight individuals have already been criminally charged and three of those individuals have pleaded guilty, with one individual receiving a 60-day jail sentence just last week. A copy of the report is attached to this release.
...
Commissioner Gill Hearn thanked NYCERS Executive Director Diane D’Alessandro, NYCERS Director of Security Craig Thornton, and NYCERS General Counsel Karen Mazza, and their staffs, for their assistance and cooperation in these investigations.

State Insurance Audit Checklist

Since July 29. 2013 the State Insurance Department (NYS DFS) has accessed my blog 29 times. So I thought I would provide them with a suggested reading list. Below is a starting list. If I see something else that looks interesting, I'll add to the list.

• Who got the $140M?
• Why was the Transit Operating Force death benefit changed?
• The former chair of the NYCERS Board of Trustees
• Why is NYCERS paying the Comptroller?
• The civil service qualifications for the current NYCERS executive director
• Unaccounted investment fees , background , and more
• Investment madness
• Lack of disclosure on private equity and real estate transactions
• Hedge funds
• Private equity managers
• Delays in processing loans
• Examples of SPD errors ( A , B )
• NYCERS perjury
• D.O.I. and the perjury charge
• Funny wrinkle to the perjury and corruption story
• The WC offset nightmare
• Denial of due process
• The assumed interest rate
• Finally 7%, sort of
• Delays in pension benefit revisions
• The Met-Life building
• Disaster recovery site at L.I.C.
• Allegra Capital and lack of accounting oversight
• Harassment of EMS disabled retirees, and more
• Outside legal services
• Background on past State Insurance Department reports

NYC Department of Investigation – Can You Trust DOI?

In the spring of 2009, two and half years ago, I reported to both the Department of Investigation (DOI) and the NYCERS trustees an act of perjury (deliberately giving a false statement under oath) by Felita Baksh (aka Ramsami) during a sworn DOI interview.

In response to my notice, one of the trustees, the former Public Advocate, asked that DOI investigate the matter and report back to the Public Advocate and to me. The Public Advocate was the only party to take any action or acknowledge my allegation. In response, DOI notified the Public Advocate that it was forwarding the matter to the Department of Finance IG for review. DOI did not notify me of this action but the Public Advocate did.

I provided all parties with a copy of the verbatim testimony of the DOI interview of Baksh from July, 2004. The interview was given under oath. In a very careful manner, the DOI interviewers gave Baksh a second chance to correct her original false testimony after warning her that she was under oath. She did not change her testimony. The false testimony related to the help Baksh received from Karen Mazza, a staff attorney at NYCERS, in regards to Baksh’s fraudulent appointment as HR director at NYCERS in 2004.

You might be wondering how DOI managed to miss this almost certain act of perjury during one of its own interviews. In 2004, DOI chose not to make a verbatim transcript from the audio tape of the interview. DOI chose, instead, to allow the lead investigator, Carol DeFreitas, to make a summary from the audio recording of the interview. DeFreitas was not one of the DOI investigators who interviewed Baksh. DOI had put her in charge of the investigation even though she was only a temporary employee recently on loan from Martha Stark. DeFreitas was actually a Department of Finance employee receiving a pay check from Finance and not DOI.

Subsequently, DeFreitas became involved with Mazza in an effort to hide the extent of the help that Mazza gave to Baksh. In addition, Mazza pulled another NYCERS employee, Kin Mak, into the cover up. Mak, an IT staffer, enabled Mazza to hide incriminating emails but not before Mak made copies of all the emails that pertained to the events surrounding the investigation.

Those copies are safely tucked away at Mak’s home in Pennsylvania. Those emails, I suspect, cast a wide net and have crippled the investigation into the Baksh perjury charge because of the people implicated by the emails.

I previously reported all of this in a series of postings: perjury, DOI, and sleeping trustees.

Recently, in response to a FOIL request for DOI’s closing memo for the investigation of the perjury charge, DOI refused to release any information. DOI claims that the information is exempt under FOIL because it would be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” and it was “compiled for law enforcement purposes and would identify a confidential source or reveal confidential information relating to a criminal investigation”.

It is clear that the perjury charge against Baksh is public record. There is no personal privacy to protect in this case. If DOI finds that this public charge is untrue, it should at least clear Baksh’s name. But I am very certain that DOI found the charge to be true. It appears that DOI does not want to deal with the charge and the web of corruption that goes along with it.

The majority of DOI’s work is allegedly for law enforcement purposes. DOI is claiming the closing memo would identify a confidential source. That can’t be it. I publicly supplied them with all the information they need to reach a conclusion on the charge. In addition, after two and half years, I don’t think that there is any criminal investigation going on. It is completely reasonable to conclude that DOI is protecting one or more people.

Unfortunately, DOI has not given a report on the investigation to the Public Advocate or to me.

Even more unfortunately, the current Public Advocate has made no effort to obtain the closing memo from DOI even after being questioned about the investigation.

In closing, the perjury allegation is almost certainly true and therefore, almost certainly the NYCERS trustees are allowing three criminals to continue to work at NYCERS. This raises suspicions about the judgement and integrity of the trustees.

The Email Superman

For all you IT pros, this should be a funny story.

Quoted below is an excerpt from an affidavit submitted by Kin Mak on June 19, 2007.

Mazza was under investigation by DOI (DeFreitas) for improperly influencing the hiring of Baksh as NYCERS HR director with respect to both Baksh’s resume and possibly Baksh’s second writing sample. Mazza had told DeFreitas that she had previously deleted all her relevant emails to Baksh. DeFreitas had asked Mak to search for Mazza’s deleted emails. For some reason DeFreitas allowed Mazza to participate in the alleged search for the deleted emails.

Here is the quote:

3. My search for the e-mails requested by Ms. DeFreitas was structured as follows.
First, the time period for the search was January 2004 through July 27, 2004, the date of the DeFreitas request.
Second, I searched for two types of e-mails:
(1) e-mails in Ms. Mazza’s e-mail box in which Ms Mazza was either the sender or the recipient and “resume” was the subject of the e-mail: and
(2) e-mails in Ms. Mazza’s e-mail box in which Felita Baksh, was either the sender or recipient at the e-mail address of bakshf@fdny.nyc.gov., and which either had “resume” in the subject field or the substance of the email concerned Ms. Baksh’s resume.
I conducted the search for the above e-mails by:
a) searching Ms. Mazza’s then-current e-mail box, i.e., the e-mail box as it existed on July 27, 2004; and
b) searching the weekly backup tapes starting from July 27, 2004, and going back to January 2004.

4. As result of the above search, I was able to recover one e-mail, dated January 28, 2004, in which the original sender was Felita Baksh at bakshf@fdny.nyc.gov, the subject was “Resume” and which had been sent by Ms. Baksh to Niki Browne NYCERS, who forwarded it to Ms. Mazza. On July 27, 2004, I forwarded the recovered e-mail to Ms. DeFreitas. A copy of an e-mail from me to Ms. DeFreitas, dated July 27, 2004, containing the recovered e-mail, is annexed hereto as Exhibit “B”.

This alleged search occurred sometime between 7:17 AM and 10:22 AM on July 27, 2004. As per instructions from DeFreitas and Mak’s comment in his 7:17 AM email, Mak spoke to Ms. Mazza before going ahead with the email search. For all of you who know Mazza’s morning arrival record at NYCERS, you will conclude that Mak did not start his search promptly at 7:17 AM. By 10:22 AM on the 27th, Mak emailed DeFreitas the results of his search, the one email mentioned above.

To anyone who is not familiar with the logistics of Microsoft’s Outlook, Mak’s description of this alleged search appears to be unremarkable. It is, however, the equivalent of someone describing a one mile run that took only 5 seconds. This was a patently false affidavit. The Law Department was made aware of the obvious lies in the affidavit but chose to bury the inconvenient truth. It’s not cheating, if you don’t get caught.

While it was very easy to search the current email box, the alleged searching of the 27 backup tapes would have been an enormously time consuming project. The tapes are not directly accessible and have to be downloaded to perform the search that Mak described. It usually takes over an hour for NYCERS to perform the daily backup of its Outlook system. The backup process is relatively simple compared to the restore process. I will spare you the complexities of restoring Outlook especially when there is already an active production Outlook system running. It is almost metaphysically certain that Mak did not search any of the backup tapes. Of course, there is no paper documentation of this search on the morning of July 27, 2004.

The affidavit was notarized by, guess who, Karen Mazza.

Subsequent to this affidavit Mak had to clarify that the famous one email was actually found in Niki Browne’s current email box and not in any of Mazza’s email boxes. At least that was what Mak said. Why was he looking Ms. Browne's email file?