a federal jury in Manhattan federal court took 10 hours to convict three of the masterminds of the CityTime fraud, a massive fraud. Mark Mazer, Gerard Denault and Dimitri Aronshtein. They are now the sixth, seventh, and eighth people who have been found guilty in this massive conspiracy that went on for almost a decade with contractors for New York City who were creating a payroll system, stealing tens of millions of dollars. In fact, the main contractor, SAIC, the defense contractor, ended up paying the city of New York back $500 million and then federal authorities seized — they say now they have seized about $40 million more in assets from the criminal conspiracy. So, altogether, the taxpayers have recouped $540 million. I started the articles in late 2009 and early 2010. By the end of 2010, the New York City Department of Investigations and then the federal prosecutor, Preet Bharara, then began arresting people. Altogether, 11 people were arrested in the conspiracy. Eight have now been convicted, 2 of them fled to India with about $35 million that they took with them when they fled to India. One subsequently died before the trial.
CityTime was supposed to be a payroll and timekeeping system to make sure that the 300,000 city workers did not cheat on her hours. And it was the people who are developing the system to assure that the city workers weren’t cheating who are robbing the taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars.
President Obama has named Deborah Lee James to be Secretary of the Air Force and she was a chief executive of SAIC, the main company who ended up paying back $500 million, and it was actually in charge of ethics and integrity at SAIC at the time that all of these contractors were arrested by federal authorities. So, the idea that President Obama would nominate her now to be in charge of the Air Force and passing or approving the purchase of missiles and planes when she could not even do well in terms of assuring the integrity of one contract in New York City is really astounding. But, the Senate has still to vote on her nomination.
– source democracynow.org | 2013/11/27