Boss of Bronx homeless nonprofit gets 27 months for kickback ploy

The head of one of the city’s largest homeless housing providers was sentenced Monday to 27 months in federal prison for pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for the city’s neediest residents.

Bronx Parent Housing Network CEO Victor Rivera collected the cash through bribes and kickbacks on top of his $453,000 salary during a surge of homelessness between 2013 and 2020, authorities said.

The charity head handpicked and overpaid contractors at construction, security and real estate firms for projects at soup kitchens, shelters and affordable-housing facilities — in exchange for some of the city cash he used to pay them.

“Victor Rivera had an opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of New Yorkers experiencing homelessness,” city Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber said in a statement Monday. “Instead, he chose to exploit the system and engineer a bribery-and-kickback scheme to benefit himself and his relatives.”

In one scheme, Rivera’s co-conspirators subleased a property controlled by the Housing Network and wrote checks for consulting fees to a company owned by Rivera’s son — which Rivera then spent on himself.

“Particularly egregious” in Rivera’s backdoor dealing was that his victims were the city’s poorest, prosecutors said.

“No high-ranking executive should ever demand kickbacks or let improper benefits corrupt a decision the executive makes on his or her company’s behalf. But when the decision involves issues as serious as the housing and security of the homeless, the offense is that much graver,” reads the prosecution’s sentencing submission.

Rivera’s troubles began in April 2021 when an exposé in The New York Times alleged he sexually assaulted and harassed 10 women. A sealedprobe into the allegations by Bronx prosecutors ended without charges but he was ousted as head of the nonprofit.

His turncoat cooperation in another sealed federal investigation in early 2021 was not enough to persuade prosecutors to give him a reduced prison sentence, according to court filings.

The nonprofit head secretly recorded phone conversations and in-person meetings leading to at least one bust and a property seizure valued at more than $53,000 in that sealed case, according to court documents. But the feds ultimately found him not credible enough to take the stand at trial, and not entitled to a letter of recommendation for a reduced sentence.

According to court filings, Rivera used some of the dirty money to pay the mortgage on his own $780,000 home in Stony Point in Rockland County.

His legal team had implored Manhattan Federal Court Judge Saul Stein to go easy on Rivera and referenced his personal experience with poverty and addiction in the early 1990s.

But the feds noted Rivera’s first-hand experience proved he was keenly aware of the harm he was inflicting.

“Having overcome homelessness and other personal hardships … Rivera grasped the importance of BPHN’s mission as well as anyone,” reads the memo by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Abramowicz.

Rivera agreed to pay more than $902,000 to the Bronx nonprofit under the city’s monitorship on top of $1.2 million in forfeiture money, equal to the cash doled out to contractors who gave him kickbacks.

Rivera’s lawyer Harlan Protass did not immediately respond to a request for comment.