Probe eyeing school ‘favor’
Federal prosecutors are examining whether Mayor de Blasio reopened a religious girls’ school in Brooklyn closed for safety violations as a favor to a political donor, sources said.
Williamsburg rabbi and prominent Democratic fund-raiser Moishe Indig allegedly asked City Hall to lift a Satmar school’s partial vacate order in December 2014, sources said.
“They just found out about it and they’re looking at it,” said one City Hall source familiar with the inquiry. “This info came late to them.”
City building inspectors had found several “illegal classrooms” in the basement of the Sanford Street school and issued a partial vacate order on Dec. 18, 2014, for a “failure to maintain the building,” city building records show.
Six days later, on Christmas Eve, the order was rescinded when Brooklyn Building Commissioner Ira Gluckman inspected the premises himself, records show.
One source close to Indig, whose Aroni Satmar sect ran the school, said the Hasidic power broker called the mayor at the time and asked him for assistance.
“He called the mayor and the mayor overturned the agency and they got a free ride,” the source said.
A de Blasio spokesman asserted that the mayor “never intervened in this issue. Period.”
Members of Indig’s family told The Post Saturday that he was not available to comment.
Federal prosecutors interrogated de Blasio for nearly five hours at his law firm’s Midtown office on Friday, a sign that US Attorney Preet Bharara’s months-long corruption probe into his administration is winding down.
Investigators have zeroed in on the mayor’s relationship with several political donors, including Indig, and any favors they have received from City Hall.
Indig, 46, has successfully solicited donors to contribute to the mayor’s campaigns and co-hosted a well-attended fund-raiser in Williamsburg in October 2013.
Since the mayor’s election, Indig has acted as an all-purpose City Hall “go-between” in Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Borough Park, sources said.
Indig handed over his cellphone and documents to federal agents in December as part of the inquiry, The Post reported.