City ‘had it out for me’
Driver fined for stops at gym calls firing unfair
The working stiff fined by the city for driving to the gym says he got a raw deal.
Anthony Salamone, 36, was a driver for the Department of Cultural Affairs for 15 years until his firing last month.
He cried foul after getting dinged with a $1,000 fine for making two stops at the gym in his city-owned truck -while Mayor de Blasio uses his city-issued SUVs to make near-daily trips from his home on the upper East Side to his gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
“The mayor does it, so I don’t understand how they can do this to me,” Salamone, a dad of two from Staten Island, told the Daily News. “Double standard isn’t the word. … I don’t know what to call it, but it’s just totally wrong. It’s wrong in every which way.”
Salamone said a supervisor reported him for his gym pit stops in an effort to get rid of him.
He was ultimately terminated in a notice last month after being out of work on medical leave for a year, which he blamed on shoulder, ankle and back problems tied to injuries from a fall on the job and years of heavy lifting.
Because of his police-security detail, it’s legal for de Blasio to use his city cars for personal trips.
For most city employees, it’s against conflict-of-interest rules to use government property, including cars, for personal purposes.
But Salamone said he didn’t do anything wrong -- merely making pit stops at the Synergy gym near his route in Long Island City, Queens, to use the bathroom and clean up during designated breaks in his shift.
His job was to drive around in a city-issued truck picking up donations for the Materials for the Arts program, so the truck remained with him when he took his breaks.
“I thought I was doing nothing wrong,” he said. “I would go to this gym to use the bathroom, wash up, get a protein shake. It was on my break. It was my time.
“It wasn’t like I was taking the truck and saying, ‘Oh, I want to go to the gym in the Bronx today,’” the ex-driver said.
Salamone said his bosses never had a problem with it but got fed up with him after his injuries slowed him down on the job.
“They had it out for me, I guess. If they have it out for you, they have it out for you,” he said.
He accepted the $1,000 fine from the Conflicts of Interest Board on the advice of a union lawyer who said it wouldn’t pay to fight the case.
Meanwhile, he had been out on medical leave since last year. He wasn’t getting paid after using up his sick time but was receiving short-term disability, and was paying out of pocket for health insurance for himself and his family. On May 10, he received a notice that because doctors had not certified he was physically able to return to the job, his employment was terminated.
“I’m totally destroyed from this job. I broke my hump for the city for years,” Salamone said. “Basically they used and abused me.”
Cultural Affairs spokesman Ryan Max said Salamone’s termination was independent of the COIB settlement but declined to comment on any details of his firing.