CROOKED POLS WHO WON’T PAY UP
First, lowlife politicians steal from us Then they do ‘best’ to avoid restitution
WHEN BROOKLYN Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. was sentenced for stealing from the taxpayers a year ago, he owed a lot of people a lot of money.
He was supposed to cough up a total of $325,020.28, including restitution to the state for the money he stole, plus a money judgment to the feds as punishment for his many crimes.
Getting that money, it turns out, wasn’t so simple.
First, after he was convicted of filing for bogus travel expenses and using a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he controlled for political activity, Boyland, a Democrat, quickly sold off his twofamily Ocean Hill townhouse for $875,000.
As a result, the feds could no longer seize and sell his house as collateral.
Instead, they had to track down where the proceeds from the sale went. They finally turned up a company that was created three weeks after Boyland was sentenced.
That company, Solar Studios, was supposed to be producing a children’s educational TV show. Its CEO, Andre Soleil, says Boyland loaned it $90,000 from the house sale, with the repayments set to pay off child support Boyland owed.
Soleil says Boyland paid off the $155,000 he owed the state, although the state couldn’t confirm that, citing privacy laws.
As for the $169,000 judgment he owes the feds, documents filed May 6 by Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers say he hasn’t paid a dime. Capers has moved to garnish whatever money Boyland put into Solar Studios.
Soleil has offered to turn over the cash at a rate of $1,125 a month. At that rate, it will take Boyland — who won’t be released from prison until 2026 — 150 years to pay his debt.
Not surprisingly, Boyland’s case is hardly unusual.
Some of the city's most corrupt pols fight tooth and nail to avoid repaying what they stole from the taxpayers, a Daily News investigation has found.
Convicted Assembly, Senate and City Council members dodge, postpone, litigate — anything to keep from ponying up the hundreds of thousands of dollars in money judgments and restitution they owe.
Often they do this while collecting hefty city and state pensions.
Take ex-Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin (D-Queens), who’s been collecting $1,211 monthly pension checks since he pleaded guilty in 2008 to stealing everything in sight.
The courts approved a money judgment of $3 million against him, but as of today, a huge chunk of the payments didn’t come out of his pocket.
Instead, in 2011 — three years after he pleaded guilty to stealing from unions, electric companies and even a Queens Little League team — he used leftover campaign contributions to pay off $845,000 in restitution.
Some of that money was donated by unions he stole from.
The group he once ran — the New York City Central Labor Council — and its many affiliates donated more than $40,000 to him in the year before he was arrested. Some of that wound up paying back the $268,821 he stole from them. And when the feds seized and sold McLaughlin’s Long Island home for $1 million, his mother and wife demanded $471,000 of the proceeds. McLaughlin, who got his 10-year sentence reduced to six years after cooperating with prosecutors to bring down other dirty pols, is now out of prison. Neither he nor his attorney Michael Armstrong returned calls.
In contrast, ex-state Sen. Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn), now serving seven years in federal prison for stealing $223,000, paid off all his restitution quickly with personal funds — not his campaign treasury.
“Not one (campaign) dollar,” said Kruger's lawyer Benjamin Brafman.
Then there’s Sen. Efrain
Gonzalez (D-Bronx), sentenced six years ago for looting taxpayer-funded nonprofits he controlled.
Since then he’s received a $3,144 pension check each month, but records indicate he’s yet to pay a dime on the $737,000 a judge ordered him to pay to his victims.
He’s fought restitution with multiple appeals and squeezed a compromise out of the feds, reducing his debt to $92,000. But even that wasn’t good enough.
Gonzalez contested the trimmed amount by claiming it was invalid because he was not present in court when it was approved by the judge. In January, the feds filed yet another brief calling his claim ridiculous, noting that he had agreed to the new amount. The battle continues.
Imprisoned Sen. Hiram Monserrate (D-Queens) — convicted of using a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he controlled to bolster his campaigns — was supposed to pay 10% of his income starting in February 2015 toward his restitution.
The feds discovered the former cop was earning $3,511 a month, mostly from his taxpayerfunded NYPD pension, but making only token payments of $100 a month.
In June 2015, the U.S. probation department forced him to hike the payments to $350 a month. Four years after his conviction, he’s so far paid less than $5,000 toward the $79,434.49 he owes.
Ex-City Councilman Larry Seabrook (DBronx) was convicted in July 2012 on a long list of corruption charges and immediately began collecting a pension at an average of $3,512 a month. Four years later, he’s collected about $168,000 in pension checks but hasn’t paid a dime of the $418,252.53 in restitution he owes. In May 2015, a court ordered him to start paying, but he immediately appealed. The appeal is pending. In December 2013, Councilman Miguel Martinez (D-Manhattan) — convicted of steering public dollars to a nonprofit he used to pay personal expenses — agreed to pay $106,000 he owed. He’s been out of prison for more than two years, but so far he’s paid off less than $6,000.
He’s only got $100,000 to go.
Three years after disgraced Bronx Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. was sentenced to prison and ordered to forfeit $368,088, including $118,531 to the IRS, he’s coughed up about $15,150.
He’s fought the U.S. attorney’s efforts to collect all the way, moving to block access to his state pension, and when that failed, convincing a judge that a portion belongs to his wife. He only starting writing actual checks in October, and the increments are tiny — $459.10 on average.
Meanwhile, he continues to collect $618.89 a month from his pension and is set for release from prison a day before Halloween 2017.
Because of this pattern of avoidance, both Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Capers and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara have begun aggressively targeting pensions of convicted pols.
Last week, a federal appeals court shot down a move by convicted bribe-taker Assemblyman Eric Stevenson (DBronx) to block the feds from dipping into his pension for the $22,000 in restitution he owes.
And both the recently convicted Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-L.I.) have fought to delay paying a dime until an appeals court rules on their convictions.
Last week, Manhattan Federal Judge Valerie Caproni allowed Silver — who lined his pockets through two secret payment schemes — to delay paying off the $5.3 million judgment he owes.
But Caproni didn't give Silver a total pass. She specifically required him to begin paying toward part of a $1.75 million fine, with monthly minimum payments set at $5,846.
That happens to be the exact amount of Silver’s monthly pension checks. The first payment is due Thursday.