Minaj ma: Bro ‘rape’ was set up
CITY INVESTIGATORS posing as NYCHA workers were able to cart away kitchen appliances from unlocked storerooms without detection at public housing developments across the city, the Daily News has learned.
The Department of Investigation sent its staffers out last summer — sometimes wearing Housing Authority uniforms and sometimes in civilian clothes — to test security in NYCHA’s long-vulnerable storerooms.
The undercovers hit 19 developments, and backed off at 13 either because the rooms were locked or there were too many real NYCHA staffers around.
But at six sites they waltzed right in to unlocked basement storerooms and wheeled out a total of eight refrigerators and stoves stored there as replacements for tenants. Seven of the appliances were brand-new.
“Not only were investigators able to steal these items with ease, but followup visits at these six sites revealed that . . . staff were still unaware that DOI had removed these items,” the report states.
The department released the report late Thursday after The News learned of the undercover operation.
NYCHA spokeswoman Jean Weinberg noted that staff at 13 sites followed the correct procedures, and she said the agency is exploring disciplinary action against staff at the sites where the protocols failed.
“Safety and security are our top priority at NYCHA,” she said.
At the six vulnerable sites, she said NYCHA is immediately increasing surveillance and conducting “a top-to-bottom review of all of our sites to prevent this from happening at any other developments in the future.”
Agents found unlocked storerooms in all five boroughs: Sheepshead Houses in Brooklyn, Pelham Parkway Houses in the Bronx, Smith and Wald Houses in lower Manhattan, Hammel Houses in Queens and Mariners Harbor Houses on Staten Island.
In each case investigators walked uncontested into basements, handcarts in tow, and left hauling out appliances meant for tenants.
In the first four developments — Pelham Parkway, Smith, Wald and Sheepshead — investigators wore NYCHA uniforms. At Hammel and Mariners Harbor they purloined their loot in civilian clothes.
At all six sites they came and went without anybody asking who they were, what they were doing and where they were going with the NYCHAowned appliances.
When investigators returned to ask managers if they were missing any items, all said they were not. A manager at the Smith Houses admitted NYCHA has “horrible inventory practices” due to short staffing.
The probers found most storeroom doors weren’t self-closing and staff often left them propped open. Trades workers are given unrestricted access to storerooms, and NYCHA does not keep appliance serial numbers in a searchable database.
The investigation came in response to the July 2016 arrest of a $41,000-a-year NYCHA caretaker caught selling appliances purloined from the Seth Low Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn to a local appliance store.
After that arrest, the Investigation Department recommended that NYCHA tighten its inventory protocols. NYCHA said at the time it was already in the process of doing that. But by that July, NYCHA had upgraded the system at only 16 of 328 developments.
In 2012 NYCHA began trying to account for a huge inventory of appliances, tools and equipment sitting in 5,000 storage rooms across the city.
An investigation by The News found tens of thousands of dollars of items that had been purchased years ago, but couldn’t be accounted for. And city Controller Scott Stringer found a lax system where workers signed out equipment under aliases such as “X-Men.” TENSIONS FLARED Thursday in the rape trial of Nicki Minaj’s brother when their mother testified about text messagessent in the days after her son’s arrest.
Prosecutors said Minaj’s brother, Jelani Maraj, raped his wife’s 11-year-old daughter as often as four times a week in their Long Island home before he was arrested Dec. 1, 2015. But Maraj’s family says Maraj’s estranged wife, Jacqueline Robinson, trumped up the charges in a bid to extort $25 million from the rapper’s family.
“You guys set up my child,” CarolMarajwrote in a text message to Robinson the night her son was arrested.
Carol Maraj told jurors in Nassau County Court she didn’t remember the text, but later admitted she wrote it.
Earlier that day, after the arrest, Robinson had given her motherin-law a ride to the courthouse for Jelani’s arraignment.
“We had a little conversation,” Carol Maraj said. “As we were getting out of the car she said, `It’s going to take a lot of money to get out of this one.’ ”
But Assistant DA Jared Rosenblattsaid thewitness was just trying to protect her daughter’s music empire, and tried to back up the accusation with a text message Carol Maraj sent to Robinson days after the arrest.
“I don’t think you should give people details on anything,” the message said. “You don’t have to share your business with everyone who calls.”