70 NYC Gov't employees arrested by feds: biggest single day bust for DOJ ever

New York City (D) -- Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged 70 current and former New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) employees with accepting cash bribes from contractors in exchange for lucrative Housing Authority contracts, The New York Times reported.

This is a record bust for bribery charges ever filed in one day by the DOJ.

It was reported that the miscreants are accused of accepting over $2,000,000 in bribes from contractors for work on about 100 NYCHA buildings in all five boroughs: Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

More than $13 million in work was awarded, with the suspects typically getting 10% or 20% kickbacks, sometimes more, prosecutors said.

The suspects were arrested in handcuffs in a major raid Tuesday morning. The handcuffs weren't too tight as cops were able to get one finger into it.

“This culture of corruption at NYCHA ends today,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York at a press conference Tuesday morning, calling it a “classic pay to play” scheme.

A large number of corruption incidents were with smaller contracts that weren't at first spotted. For example, if city contracts are below a $10,000 threshold, local development managers can award them without the mandatory bidding process used for larger contracts.

Lisa Bova-Hiatt, NYCHA’s chief executive, said the suspects “put their greed first and violated the trust of our residents, their fellow NYCHA colleagues and all New Yorkers.”

“We will not allow bad actors to disrupt or undermine our achievements,” she said.

Most of the suspects are Democrats, not that anyone reading this cares as all we want is justice.

At this time, there is a host of additional problems plague the city’s Housing Authority, which houses more than half a million New Yorkers across more than 2,400 buildings.

The NYCHA has been criticized for operating old buildings with rodents, leaky pipes, and broken elevators, as well as for its backlog of hundreds of thousands of people on the housing waiting list. The properties currently need about $78 billion worth of repairs.

At the same time, people are paying less rent to the agency than ever. In 2022, the Housing Authority collected a record low 65% of the rent it charged.

The city’s Housing Authority is the largest in the country and receives more than $1.5 billion in federal funding, which likely explains why they're not too worried about collecting all the rent owed.

Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has emphasized affordable housing, announcing back in the fall an ambitious goal of 100,000 new homes to combat the city’s severe housing shortage. He also emphasized the city to be a sanctuary city but seems to be sorry he made the declaration.

Tweet