JAIL BREAK
City’s top warden goes AWOL — and mayor’s OK with it
NYC Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte (above right) misused his city-issued vehicle for 90 days of personal, out-of-state trips, according to a Department of Investigation report — and Mayor de Blasio shrugged it off, saying the commish had merely been given bad advice.
The head of the city jails didn’t let a surge in bloody violence at Rikers Island spoil his fun — using a city-owned vehicle for unsanctioned trips to far safer places like the bucolic Maine coast, a damning report found.
Department of Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte wasn’t allowed to use that car for personal excursions, but it didn’t stop him from logging 18,500 miles of out-of-state travel over 90 days, mostly for trips to his home state, the Department of Investigation found.
Thirty-five of those days fell during the workweek, says the report, which was sparked by an anonymous tip that DOC staffers had been misusing their cityissued cars. Ponte claimed he had put in a full eight hours of labor on 29 of those days.
All told, the commissioner — who ran Maine’s correction department until he was hired by de Blasio in 2014 to turn around the city’s violence-plagued jails — rang up $1,043.44 on gas outside New York and another $745.56 in E-ZPass charges.
“Commissioner Ponte’s vehicle was almost exclusively used for personal travel outside of the vicinity of DOC facilities and the five boroughs,” the report says.
While Ponte was hundreds of miles from the city, there were 27 inmate-on-inmate stabbings or slashings, three slashings of DOC officers, an on-duty death of a staff member and an inmate escape, the DOI found.
“However, [he] informed DOI that he never actually responded from Maine to any DOC emer-
gency,” the 17-page report says.
Instead, “he would rely on his staff who was at the department at the time of the emergency to physically respond and brief him via phone and e-mail.”
The car Ponte used for personal trips is one of two vehicles the city has assigned to him. The other car is used by his security detail to shepherd him around.
Ponte’s flagrant misuse of his city car was part of “a top-down practice” that involved 20 other DOC employees, including several high-ranking officials who also used their vehicles for personal trips, the report says.
The staffers went all over the East Coast, taking trips in their city-issued cars to places including the Mohegan Sun Casino, Niagara Falls, the Poconos, airports and outlet malls.
“DOI determined that the combined cost of the unreimbursed use of city resources by DOC staff exceeds $20,000,” the report says.
Ponte and the other 20 staffers have been referred for discipline. The DOC said that, as a matter of policy, it doesn’t comment on disciplinary action.
Ponte and other high-ranking officials insisted to investigators that they thought they could use the cars on personal trips since they’re on “24-hour call.”
But none of them reported responding to an emergency while on a personal trip outside of the city.
“No staff member could cite a specific policy to support using a city vehicle for personal business, and, indeed, all had received copies of the city policy prohibiting such use,” the report says.
In fact, one of the senior staffers had been disciplined for a car-related infraction previously.
Deputy Commissioner Gregory Kuczinski was fined $1,500 by the Conflicts of Interest Board in 2015 for having a junior staffer ferry him and his family members to JFK Airport for a vacation.
At the time, he admitted, “I did not have authorization from DOC for any of my family members to be passengers in a departmental vehicle, which was assigned to the Investigations Divi- sion to perform investigations and was to be used for official business only,” the report says.
But in 2016, he took more than 20 trips to Westchester County in his city car — once using it to go golfing on a vacation day.
He also drove the car to the airport eight times and regularly chauffeured his wife to dinner.
“This widespread disregard of policy undercuts DOC’s ability to ensure order and discipline at an agency already struggling to control violence and crime in its jails, issues that DOI has been investigating for the past three years,” DOI Commissioner Mark Peters said.
“Most disturbing in this report is the conduct of senior officials who must be accountable for their actions.”
The DOI report gives several recommendations to the DOC, including refreshing staffers on the rules for city-assigned vehicles, conducting audits on vehicle usage and tracking employees’ trip logs.
DOC spokesman Peter Thorne said any violation of the city’s rules regarding the vehicles “was an inadvertent misunderstanding and will not recur.”
“Commissioner Ponte and his senior staff are on call all day, all night, all year,” he said. “Despite the need for them to be away from the city periodically, thanks to cellphones and computers, the work of the department does not grind to a halt.”
Meanwhile, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association said city officials should demand Ponte’s resignation.
“Commissioner Ponte has been AWOL at a time when this agency needed strong leadership now more than ever,” COBA President Elias Husamudeen said.
Violence at Rikers Island continued to climb last year, as the four main measures of assaults per inmate — whether on staff or other inmates — have all increased since fiscal 2013, according to data from City Hall.