SCHOOL BUS SAFETY OFFICIALS ARE ACCUSED OF SOLICITING BRIBES

Four City Department of Education employees were charged in a federal indictment on Tuesday with soliciting bribes in exchange for promising preferential treatment, including on safety inspections, to bus companies that serve thousands of special education students.

In an indictment unsealed in Manhattan, prosecutors said the employees – three supervisors and one inspector – accepted cash payments ranging from several hundred dollars a year from some companies to tens of thousands of dollars a year from others. The indictment seeks the forfeiture of $1 million in total from the defendants.

The indictment said the bus companies, which were not named, had paid bribes from the mid-1990s to 2007 for a variety of reasons, among them to get reduced fines for safety violations and advance notice of inspections that were supposed to be unannounced. The Education Department said bus safety was not compromised by the bribes.

Sometimes the companies paid bribes simply to secure the good will of the agency’s employees; at other times, they paid based on the number of new routes they were granted, the prosecutors charged. And on occasion the employees took money while pledging to provide assistance they were in no position to grant.

Related Article: SCHOOL BUSES, UNIONS AND THE MOB: A SPECIAL REPORT

The indictment included a conspiracy charge against the four defendants: three Office of Public Transportation supervisors (Neil Crimin of Queens; George Ortiz of the Bronx, and Ira Sokol of Brooklyn) as well as one inspector, Milton Smith of Tobyhanna, Pa.

All but Mr. Ortiz still work for the Office of Public Transportation, department officials said.

At their arraignments on Tuesday, all four defendants pleaded not guilty and each was released on $100,000 bond. Each faces a maximum sentence of 55 years in prison, prosecutors said.

Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan, announced the indictment in conjunction with the United States Labor Department.

Parents of special education children have complained for years about unreliable bus service as well as abusive treatment of their children by bus drivers and matrons.

Related Article: OFFICIALS SAY SCHOOL BUS SYSTEM HAS TIES TO MOB

Dee Alpert, the publisher of a Web site that collects information on corruption in New York City’s special education system, said, “The prosecutors are looking at the middleman, but they’re not looking at the terrible damage done to some of the children.”

Ms. Alpert, who said she helped bring the bus corruption allegations to the prosecutors’ attention, said parents who complain about problems on special education buses have been threatened with loss of service.

The indictment noted that other unnamed Office of Public Transportation employees had solicited and received cash payments. The indictment charged officials working in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, but not Staten Island or the Bronx.

The indictment comes four months after the former president of the city’s main union for school bus drivers, Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, pleaded guilty to federal extortion and bribery charges as part of a racketeering conspiracy. That official, Salvatore Battaglia, was accused in a 2006 indictment of being a member of the Genovese crime family.

A law enforcement official said the indictment grew out of an investigation into the bus drivers’ union and its connection to organized crime, including Matthew Ianniello, the former acting boss of the Genovese family who is known as Matty the Horse.

Related Article: EX-MOB LAWYER LINKS THE MAFIA TO SCHOOL BUSES

Asked whether the department still had contracts with companies that paid bribes, Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said, “It’s a federal investigation, and we don’t know the names of the companies.”

But she said the department had not severed any contracts with bus companies within the past year.

Ms. Feinberg said the department has long had a system of both unannounced and announced inspections. While some of the unannounced inspections were “compromised,” she said, “safety was never compromised.”

Nonetheless, she said that the department had recently moved to tighten the process of safety inspections by waiting until the morning of unannounced inspections to inform the inspectors of their assignments. The indictment asserted that in some instances the defendants knew that the bus company owners were making payments in the belief that they would receive improper benefits in exchange, even though the defendants could not actually deliver those benefits.

According to the indictment, the bus companies were sometimes paid extra for handling routes that started before and ended after the normally contracted times. But the indictment said some Office of Public Transportation employees took bribes in exchange for falsely classifying regular runs as “extended” even though they did not start before or end after the regular times.

SOURCE: This ARTICLE was written by Steven Greenhouse and published in The New York Times, on May 14, 2008. Elissa Gootman, Alan Feuer and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.