Key workers never interviewed
five months earlier while interviewing engineers and ironworkers at the port. The conversations appeared to confirm that the contractor’s team had been hiding the matter from the Thruway Authority and its inspectors, who were a mix of state investigators and private contractors.
Riley, according to Mcnall’s account to investigators, said that he believed the recordings revealed potential criminal fraud. Riley, who still works for Alta Vista, reported the alleged fraud to the state inspector general’s office. Riley did not respond to a request for comment.
Mcnall’s information would trigger an investigation by the inspector general, and later by the state attorney general’s office, into allegations that Tappan Zee Constructors had potentially endangered the public, violated its contract and falsely certified that the bridge was safe.
For the past eight months, the Times Union has burrowed into the state’s investigations, the findings of which have remained secret. The newspaper’s efforts included interviews with confidential sources and multiple people who worked on the project, and a review of engineering reports, scientific analyses, court records and correspondence on file with the attorney general’s office.
The newspaper’s inquiry has raised questions about the structural integrity of the bridge as well as the thoroughness of the state’s inquiries, which languished for several years and did not include interviewing many of the ironworkers and laborers who had firsthand knowledge of the situation. The paper’s probe also suggests the posture of the attorney general’s office — over the course of four years and three administrations — devolved from seeking an incisive probe of the bolt failures to pursuing an effort to arguably downplay the severity of the allegations, including any potential structural threat to the bridge.
The attorney general’s office, in its handling of the case, had apparently relied heavily on investigations by the inspector general’s office and the Thruway Authority. Tappan Zee Constructors and their attorney declined to be interviewed for this story. For their part, they have denied concealing bolt failures, accused Mcnall of inflating the severity of the situation, and contend the bridge is safe.
Some of the records obtained by the Times Union were generated in connection with a False Claims Act case filed in state Supreme Court in March 2017 by Mcnall — who is considered a whistleblower — and his attorneys. The case has remained sealed for four years at the repeated requests of the attorney general’s office while it investigated the allegations, and more recently at the request of Tappan Zee Constructors.
The False Claims Act imposes liability on companies that defraud the government. Under state law, the cases normally are unsealed when the government agrees to intervene or the case is settled.
The Hearst Corp., which owns the Times Union, recently submitted a letter asking a state Supreme Court justice to unseal the case, in part, because of the enormous public interest at stake. The attorney general’s office and Mcnall’s attorneys also have asked that the case be partially unsealed, but Tappan Zee Constructors is fighting to keep it permanently secret, according to a court record in the case that was made public last month.
That court record, an unsealing order by state Supreme Court Justice Joan B. Lefkowitz, outlines many of the allegations made by Mcnall and indicates the attorney general’s office had recently settled the case with Tappan Zee Constructors. A person with knowledge of the settlement said it requires Tappan Zee Constructors to pay a $2 million penalty and to extend its warranty on the bridge’s construction for one year. The warranty, however, only applies to a limited number of sections of the bridge.
The settlement is an indication that the attorney general’s office has accepted Tappan Zee Constructors’ assertion that while its engineers had concealed they had been secretly replacing broken bolts, it only occurred for a three-month period in early 2016 — at the height the construction — and had nothing to do with widespread defective bolts.
The unsealing order that was made public recently indicates the judge rejected the company’s arguments for permanently sealing the case, including that its business reputation and ability to win future public projects may be irreparably harmed. The company also had argued that disclosing the details of the case — including specifics of the bridge splices — would make the bridge vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
The judge cast aside those arguments. “Although the TZC defendants might prefer there be no publicity about this case, that is not a sufficient basis for sealing,” the judge wrote in the order, which apparently is now subject to an appeal.
The settlement falls far short of what Mcnall and his attorneys had sought, a person briefed on the case said. They had provided expert analyses, including a 2018 Powerpoint presentation that was the subject of several news reports that year, indicating that as many as 1 million bolts used to assemble the bridge might be defective, and had requested a major financial penalty and a thorough inspection — paid for by Tappan Zee Contractors — to determine the structural integrity of the bridge. That type of inspection could cost millions of dollars and result in significant lane closures while the work is done, according to the person with knowledge of the matter.
Despite concerns from engineering experts that girders could separate and the bridge could collapse without notice, the state’s investigations moved slowly. Also, many workers at the site throughout the multiyear project — some with firsthand knowledge of the extent of the broken bolts — were never interviewed by investigators.
‘Strikingly lenient’
On Sept. 11, 2018, the attorney general’s office finally met with Tappan Zee Constructors to disclose its investigative findings. It was more than two years after the state learned of the situation — and four days after Cuomo had christened the bridge’s second span, and signed the bill naming it in honor of his father.
The case had initially been handled by the administration of then-attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, who resigned in disgrace in May 2018 due to his alleged abuse of women. Schneiderman, who had eagerly pursued the bridge investigation, assigned the case to Maureen