MANHATTAN (CN) — Law enforcement arrested more than five dozen employees of the largest public housing authority in North America on bid-rigging charges unsealed Tuesday, setting a Department of Justice record for the most bribery charges in a single day.
Prosecutors say 70 New York City superintendents took more than $2 million in bribes in connection to $13 million in no-bid city contracts with the New York City Housing Authority, which is funded in part by grants from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“The culture of corruption at NYCHA needs to end today,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said at a press conference Tuesday morning where he announced a slew of criminal charges against current and former housing authority employees accused of lining their pockets with under-the-table deals.
According to a deluge of complaints unsealed Tuesday, between 2013 and 2023, the NYCHA superintendents and assistant superintendents signed off on contracts and withheld work if they didn’t receive their kickback from the contractors, often paid back in cash.
“That is the power we allege these defendants abused,” Williams said.
By Tuesday morning, 66 of the 70 defendants had been arrested in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and North Carolina. A dozen defendants are listed as residents of Pennsylvania, and one is from Florida. They will be presented on Tuesday afternoon across seven courtrooms in Manhattan federal court.
All of the NYCHA employees charged Tuesday will be suspended without pay, federal prosecutors said.
Four employees — Angela Williams, Joseph Fuller, Chrisie Salter and George Kemp — were additionally charged with counts of conspiracy.
Angela Williams — no relation to the U.S. attorney — was also charged with one count of destruction of evidence and one count of false statements. Prosecutors say she deleted all the data from her phone with a factory reset last month and misrepresented to investigators that an employee from a Manhattan cell phone was responsible for wiping out all of the data on her phone in January 2023, when forensic signal data showed the phone was not near the store when the phone was cleared out.
“As charged, these 70 current and former NYCHA supervisors and other staff used their positions of public trust and responsibility to pocket bribes in exchange for doling out no-bid contracts,” Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn E. Strauber said Tuesday. “The extensive bribery and extortion alleged here calls for significant reforms to NYCHA’s no-bid contracting process, which DOI has recommended and NYCHA has accepted.”
The complaints cite NYCHA employees indicating quid-pro-quo relationships with contractors.
One defendant, 45-year-old Herbert Rosa, is quoted in a complaint as telling two contractors who won contracts at the Lehman Houses in East Harlem, "take care of me, you get work, and if you don’t take care of me, you don’t get the work.”
Another defendant, Vernon Chambers from Brooklyn, is quoted telling a contractor who delivered thousands of dollars in cash, and was later awarded a contract for the East River houses, “take care of me and I’ll give you the job.”
Defendant Anthony Machado, also known as Vincent Arcelay, is quoted telling a contractor who performed work at the Amsterdam Houses on Manhattan's Upper West Side, “you make money, you have to take care of me,” and “if you take care of me, I’ll give you another job.”
From 2016 through 2022, Housing and Urban Development provided over $1.5 billion each year in funding to NYCHA, making up a substantial portion of the agency’s budget, prosecutors noted in their complaints.
NYCHA has 177,569 apartments in 2,411 buildings across 335 conventional public housing and Permanent Affordability Commitment Together programs as well as housing subsidized under the Housing Choice Voucher program, also known as Section 8.
The housing authority agreed to federal monitoring in 2018 after it was accused of chronic safety issues, including children being exposed to poisonous lead paint; elderly residents without heat in winter; people with asthma whose conditions are exacerbated by moldy and pest-infested apartments; and disabled residents without functioning elevators.
Representatives for NYCHA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
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