NYCHA a party for me — till it wasn’t
Ex-worker recalls days of sex, booze, pot
For some of the public housing staff at the Throggs Neck Houses in the Bronx, work time meant party time. But if you weren’t invited to the party, life could be very unpleasant.
Neil Andrade, 32, says he learned this the hard way when he briefly worked as a NYCHA caretaker at the development that’s now the subject of an ongoing investigation into on-the-job boozing and sex parties.
The entire staff of this huge Bronx public housing development was reassigned last month amid allegations that supervisors and subordinates participated in these parties — sometimes putting in for overtime.
Andrade says he didn’t participate in the sex parties but did have a sexual relationship with his boss, supervisor of grounds Brianne Pawson, 29, while he was working there, and repeatedly witnessed workers openly drinking and smoking reefer while on the clock.
Andrade says he arrived at Throggs Neck, a sprawling 29building development that houses 2,700 tenants, in June 2017. By December — while he was still a probationary employee — he says he was propositioned by Pawson. “She just approached me with the opportunity,” he said.
The boss and employee began a relationship, Andrade claims, and while it lasted he says he got plenty of overtime and was assigned what he said was a typical workload of taking care of two buildings.
When he broke off the relationship three months later, he says, Pawson erupted. “When I terminated the relationship, she was upset. Very upset,” he recalled. “She gave me extra work. Before I was given two buildings (to maintain). After I terminated the relationship, I had four. I said ‘Why am I doing extra buildings?’ She said it’s none of my business.”
And, he says, the overtime dried up. “It was the people she chose who were the only ones who got OT,” he said.
Meanwhile, the employees in her favor began to harass him and call him a snitch, he says. “I was being bullied by colleagues in her circle,” he said.
As the work piled up, he became increasingly angry at the abhorrent behavior of some of his fellow NYCHA employees. Constantly, he says, he witnessed drinking on the job. Some of the staffers, including Pawson, drank openly, sometimes in the management office, he says. They favored high-end liquor. “They were drinking and smoking (reefer) all the time. Drinking Patron out of the bottle,” he recalled. “Hennessy. I’m talking about $80 bottles. They were popping bottles like it was a club.”
Some workers, he says, would show up to clock in at 8:30 a.m., then disappear for the entire day, returning at 4:30 p.m. to clock out. Sometimes they’d return with cartons of lobster and shrimp from nearby City Island.
When he complained to the superintendent of the development, Wallace Vereen, about the drinking and retaliation by Pawson, Vereen said there was nothing he could do, according to Andrade. “I complained to him twice,” he said. “I basically threw myself under the bus. They retaliated against me.”
Finally in April he couldn’t take it anymore.
“When you spoke to your supervisors, when you spoke to the chain of command, when you spoke to the union — I had no help,” he said.
He quit and moved to Florida, where he recently learned his old work environment had become the subject of frontpage Daily News exposés.
As The News first reported, on Aug. 24 NYCHA reassigned the entire staff at Throggs Neck. The News learned soon after that the city Department of Investigation had received two tips about the on-thebooks orgies early in the summer, but kicked them back to NYCHA to handle internally.
After The News revealed the orgy allegations, the DOI decided to open an informal investigation and Pawson, Vereen and a third Throggs Neck staffer were suspended without pay. The DOI investigation is ongoing. Pawson and Vereen did not return calls seeking comment. NYCHA declined to comment pending resolution of the probe.
Last week, Adende decided to speak with The News about his experience at Throggs Neck, bringing along his lawyer, David McGruder, who’s exploring a possible lawsuit.“It’s a clear sexual harassment claim,” McGruder said.