A Bloomberg DOE Scandal Still Haunts The City

Do you remember the Willard Lanham/Project Cougar NYCDOE scandal from back in 2011?

If you don't, you can look up some posts I wrote about it here, here and here.

The basic overview was a DOE tech consultant stole a bunch of money from the DOE with the help of IBM and Verizon, who helped him cover the trail.

The consultant, Willard "Ross" Lanham, stole $1.7 million from the DOE from 2002-2008 on top of the six figure salary the Bloomberg DOE was already paying him as a consultant.

The scandal got the tabloid treatment when it was discovered that Lanham had an estranged wife (who you can see below) still living in his house (which you can see above) he had built in his own little real estate development and running a "Cougar" dating service for herself out of it.

She billed herself as "yummy mommy" on her blog and lived the high life meeting 20-somethings in the Long Island club scene:

Lanham had even named the street where his house was after his wife, Laura.                     

It was a sweet story of crime, betrayal and fiscal ineptitude from Bloomberg and his minions.

News of the story came around the same time we were beginning to understand just how much got stolen in the CityTime scandal.

The $1.7 million Lanham stole with the help of IBM and Verizon was a pittance compared to the $600 million the CityTime crooks stole, but it still pointed to an underlying rot in the way Bloomberg and his government outsourced work, hired consultants and did little-to-no oversight on the projects.

Now we learn via a Scott Stringer report that the city is STILL paying the piper for the Lanham scandal, two years after Lanham went to jail and almost a year after "fiscal genius" Bloomberg flew off to Bermuda:

New York City has been missing out on tens of millions of dollars a year in technology funding for schools from the federal government because of a continuing investigation into the Education Department, the city comptroller said this week.

...

The money comes from a program called E-Rate. It charges an average fee of about 25 cents per month to landline and cellphone bills and then uses that money for services like broadband technology in schools and libraries, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program.

Since 1998, the city has pulled in more than $3 billion in E-Rate financing, the comptroller said, and while New Yorkers have continued to pay into that system, they have been barred from the receiving end since 2011 because of a federal investigation.

The F.C.C. declined to confirm or deny any investigation, but a city official said the inquiry was prompted by a scandal involving Willard Lanham, a former technology consultant for the city. He was accused of stealing money from the Education Department and using it to satisfy his and his wife’s expensive tastes, including for cars like a Corvette and a Porsche and to finance the construction of luxury homes on Long Island.

Mr. Lanham was sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2012 for stealing $1.7 million that was supposed to pay for Internet access at the city’s public schools.

In the letter, Mr. Stringer requested an update on the proceedings and asked when the city would be reinstated to the program. The comptroller said that while the Education Department had retained experts in E-Rate compliance as consultants, and paid them more than $670,000, “apparently those contracts ended without resolution to the city’s E-Rate problem.”

A spokesman for the department said that applications had already been submitted for the current E-Rate funding year, and that the program’s administrators were reviewing that application as well as those from the previous three years.

Last week, the F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, proposed raising the annual spending cap on the E-Rate program, which has not changed substantially since it began in 1997, to $3.9 billion, in an effort to increase Internet connectivity in schools. The F.C.C. said the increase would cost consumers a few cents more per line each month.

Mr. Stringer said this potential increase in spending could mean the city would miss out on more than $350 million by the 2018 fiscal year. He said he did not know if the city would eventually receive the E-Rate money at the end of the investigation.

I've said this before, I'll say it again today:

Why does Bloomberg still have the reputation for being a fiscal genius and responsible manager of the city?

When you add up the consultant scandals and tech boondoggery during the Bloomberg Years, you see that billions were either stolen or wasted.

And as you can see from the Stringer report, the city STILL continues to pay for Bloomberg's criminal malfeasance.

Let's imagine this was de Blasio screwing all this stuff up for years and years.

Can you imagine the treatment it would receive in the papers?

And yet, we see time and time again these stories of consultant criminality and tech boondoggery during the Bloomberg Years get reported with nary a negative word about our former billionaire mayor.

Reminds me a little of this, without the guillotine part at the end:

CityTime Fraud Couldn't Have Happened Without Help From Inside City Hall

Al Jazeera has a really good video report on the CityTime scandal:



This is the biggest theft in NYC history - the crooks stole $600 million dollars.

Mayor Bloomberg shrugs over it all, says the money just "slipped through the cracks," and anyway, the project is working now and stopping future fraud by city employees sneaking off early from work, so Bloomberg is thrilled with the results.

And it only cost over $700 million dollars, $600 million of which was stolen!

Amazing.

Just amazing.

And the sad thing is, Bloomberg is getting away with this.

This scandal should tarnish his reputation the way Tea Pot Dome tarnished Harding.

And like the Tea Pot Dome scandal was just one scandal among many in the Harding administration, this one is just the tip of the iceberg for Bloomberg and his outside consultants and tech contracts.

The more they look into the outside consultant contracts handed out by the Bloomberg administration, the more fraud they will uncover.

At the NYCDOE, there are at least two other outside consultant/tech scandals (the Willard Lanham scandal and the Judith Hederman scandal.)

Yet somehow Bloomberg moves on, making believe he's some financial management genius.

Financial genius, my ass.

Warning Harding is more like it.

Bloomberg ought to be forced to resign in disgrace.

Instead, he's still governing like he's got a four million vote mandate.

He's slashing the budget and cutting programs for seniors and laying off thousands of teachers to save hundreds of millions of dollars while the crooked consultants rob the city blind.

It's time to go, old man.

Time to go.

Bermuda is calling.

Bloomberg Gave Verizon $175 Million Contract 9 Days Before Company Was Cited For Helping Contractor With Fraud

The outrages from the Mayor of Outside Consultant Corruption continue:

The city awarded a $175 million contract to Verizon, just nine days before the communications giant was cited by special schools investigator Richard Condon for "facilitating" a $3.6 million fraud by a technology consultant.

City officials insist the timing was coincidental, noting the two-year deal for phone and data services approved on April 19 was actually retroactive to Jan. 1.

On April 28, Condon issued a scathing report that accused both Verizon and IBM of playing roles in an alleged six-year swindle by consultant Willard Lanham, who was accused of shielding his thievery through layers of contractors and subcontractors in a project to wire public schools for the Internet.

Condon charged that Lanham was able to pull off his scheme by hiding the consultants as workers for Verizon and IBM, which billed the Education Department for their services at marked-up rates.

Nick Sbordone, spokesman for the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, defended the deal with Verizon.

"We will evaluate Verizon proposals in the future with knowledge that it was mentioned in the special investigator's report, but not implicated in the criminal case," he said.

Verizon claims they were duped in the Lanham case, but Condon found otherwise.

As for the mayor, it seems there is no wrongdoing a private entity can do that would make him want to cancel a contract or criticize a company.

He still maintains the $770 million CityTime boondoggle is working great now despite going $700 million and years over budget, most likely due to contractors extending out the work as part of a kickback scheme.

And he maintains that Verizon helping a DOE consultant steal $3,5 million is not a big deal because they weren't actually charged with a crime.

But if these entities had been unionized teachers, the mayor would be screaming up in Albany and on every TV channel that he needs new powers to deal with the "bad actors".

Business guys can do no wrong, unionized teachers do no right.

CityTime Consultant Arrested For Kickbacks, Fraud And Money Laundering

The Bloomberg Consultant Scandals (and I think we can now label them such - there are enough of them) just keep coming and coming.

Another arrest was announced this morning:

A former consulting company executive was charged on Friday with receiving at least $5 million in illegal kickbacks in connection with his work as a project manager on the CityTime automated payroll project, people briefed on the matter said.

The consultant, Gerard Denault, a former executive of Science Applications International Corporation, was also charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering in an indictment unsealed in United States District Court in Manhattan.

Mr. Denault was arrested in Danbury, Conn., on Thursday, and he is expected to be presented in federal court in Manhattan on Friday.
He was charged as a result of an ongoing investigation by the city’s Department of Investigation and the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.

“It is deeply disturbing that while he was hired to help cut costs and save money, in reality, Gerard Denault was allegedly ripping city taxpayers off to to pad his own pockets,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan.

Mr. Denault’s lawyer, Barry A. Bohrer, did not immediately return a phone message or an e-mail on Friday morning.

On Wednesday, Science Applications International said it had fired Mr. Denault for misrepresenting the number of hours he had worked and promised to return to the city $2.4 million, the amount the company had billed for Mr. Denault.

The complaint filed in federal court said that for much of the last decade, the Bloomberg administration has been developing the project, meant to modernize the payroll system for city employees, and working to implement it.

Originally budgeted for $63 million, the CityTime project costs have ballooned to roughly $700 million, with additional expenditures still expected to complete the program.

Mr. Denault’s arrest brings to seven the number of people who have been charged by prosecutors in the CityTime case. One of those charged pleaded guilty in February is cooperating with investigators.

Mr. Bahara said that the investigation was continuing and that “there are more individuals yet to be held accountable.

There are more individuals yet to be held accountable in this mess?

Great - how about Bloomberg?

He is the financial and managerial genius who has overseen this mess.

Accountable Talk points out that Denault was charged with steering $450 million in city money to various subcontractors who paid him at least $5 million in kickbacks for the contracts.

Think about that dollar number for a minute - $450 million.

The mayor is going to lay off 4,278 teachers to save $300 million.

Denault steered $450 million in city money to subcontractors in a project that went $700 million overbudget in order to receive $5 million in kickbacks.

That's an awful lot of money that could have been used to pay teachers and lower class sizes that was doled out by a guy Bloomberg hired who just got arrested for taking kickbacks on city contracts.

When the mayor trots out the layoff card again in a couple of weeks, he must be called to account for this scandal. $700 million over budget, $80 million stolen by four consultants involved in the project, another $5 million in kickbacks taken by another consultant involved in the project and the investigation is still ongoing and the US attorney says more people will be held accountable for this.

So far, one person has managed to skirt accountability for this mess, and that is the Accountability Mayor himself, Bloomberg.

But no longer.

There have been too many consultant scandals, too much money stolen, too many people arrested - both consultants hired by the city and city employees who were supposed to be conducting oversight of these consultants - for Bloomberg to avoid scrutiny and accountability.

And keep in mind - this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The US attorney says more arrests are coming in the CityTime scandal, the Judith Hederman case at the DOE looks like it is going to widen and culminate in some arrests, Comptroller John Liu is investing many other city contracts, especially contracts handed out by the DOE, that look fishy (including anything involving two vendors, IBM and Verizon, who helped another DOE consultant, Willard Lanham, hide $3.6 million in stolen city money.)

The Bloomberg Consultant Scandals are just growing and growing.

Ed Koch had Donald Manes and Mario Biagi and Stanley Friedman and the Parking Bureau scandal to deal with in his third term.

Bloomberg is going to have to deal with the fallout from the Bloomberg Consultant Scandals.

And the amount of money that has disappeared in criminal activity during the Bloomberg years is adding up and making the money stolen in the Koch scandals of the 80's look like peanuts.

So have it, Mr. Mayor. Tell us how fiscally prudent you must be by laying off 4,278 teachers so you can save $300 million in teacher salaries.

Then we can ask you, point blank and on camera, how have you allowed all this money to be stolen by city consultants on your watch and how have you allowed all these city employees at the DOE and elsewhere to engage in so much criminal activity.

I mean, you are the Accountability Mayor, after all.

Project Cougar - Maybe She Should Run The NYCDOE?

The arrest of the tech consultant that the NYCDOE had hired to provide Internet access to schools is the scandal that just keeps on giving.

Bloomberg claims he needs to lay off 6,166 teachers in order to save $300 million dollars so that he can spend $550 million in the next fiscal year to upgrade technology in schools.

Meanwhile he has spent over $1 billion on technology in the past few years and what do schools have to show for it?

An ARIS data tracking system school staff hate and don't use.

Internet access that doesn't provide any access at all (takes fifteen minutes to check your email sometimes, depending upon time of day.)

But of course the outside consultants hired by Bloomberg to provide all this technology have done very well.

Take the one who was arrested this week for stealing $3.6 million from the city from 2002-2008 on top of the six figure salary the DOE was already paying him.

Willard "Ross" Lanham was really living it up on the mayor's largesse.

He bought three luxuries home and built his own real estate subdivision on Long Island - even took the neighbors on vacation trips.

And his wife - now estranged - well, what can we say about her that the Daily News hasn't:

Red-spiked Steve Madden heels with a barely-there sundress, a fire-engine red shade of lipstick and green eyeshadow.

Self-proclaimed cougar Laura Lanham is ready for a typical Saturday night out - although she makes it clear her provocative outfit isn't hunting gear.

"I don't prowl - they find me," the lithe, hazel-eyed housewife said Saturday. "The young guys love hanging out with me and my friends because we're not demanding."

Lanham, 42, met with the Daily News at Four - a trendy Melville, L.I., spot that bills itself as a "Food Studio/Cocktail Salon" - to describe an ordinary day in her unusual life.

The mother of three said she never set out to be a cougar. She was 23 when she married now-estranged hubby Willard (Ross) Lanham - a Department of Education computer consultant accused of stealing millions in public money - and led a typically sedate suburban existence.

The couple has a 15-year-old daughter, and Lanham is stepmother to a 24-year-old son and a 21-year-old daughter.

But when she filed for divorce in April 2008, Lanham soon found herself looking at men her son's age in a different light.

"Yes, I'm attracted to them," she said. "But you know, at first I thought it was weird, because I'm a mother. My friends said it's much more common than I thought."

The "yummy mommy," as Lanham was billed in one of her blog postings, acknowledges there's an attraction to the 20-somethings in Long Island dance clubs that was missing with her 57-year-old husband - with whom she still shares a home.

"I'm not going to say there isn't a sexual compatibility there, because there certainly is," she said. "Let's put it this way: I get along with these kids."

In a strange twist of fate, Lanham's 15 minutes of recent fame is all because of her estranged spouse.

His arrest for allegedly swiping $3.6 million in city school funds propelled her into media attention. The one-time aspiring Playboy centerfold has handled it well, and even expressed her desire for a reality show.

Her friends say she should aim higher.

"They said, 'Look at Demi Moore. You could be the Demi Moore of Long Island!'" Lanham said.

Now this woman I like - living it up on the city's largesse, unapologetic about it all and just looking for the next cocktail and next co--, er, young buck to make those nights go by faster.

Hell, judging by the articles about her, I'm surprised that Bloomberg hasn't offered her a job as schools chancellor to replace the now defunct "cougar" Cathie Black.

I think because Laura Lanham doesn't go to the same UES parties as Bloomberg, she hasn't been offered the position yet.

But now that she's getting some press and getting the mayor's attention, maybe now he'll put her in her rightful place in the Bloomberg worldview - a position of power and prestige.

After all, Laura Lanham has lived off the largesse of others, has stolen everything she has, is a bloodsucker extraordinaire and seems clueless about every important aspect of life - just like Cathie Black.

Why not have one predatory cougar replace the last one?