WORKING STIFFS
Lawsuit reveals craziest office in America
This picture shows just another day at the office at New Jersey l ending business Corporate Bailout/Coast, complete with strippers, blow-up dolls and ball gags. A former HR manager is suing, saying there were constant X-rated antics.
The X-rated antics at this New Jersey debt-relief company would make even “The Wolf of Wall Street” blush — but when the office’s human-resources director tried to put a stop to the shenanigans, she was fired, a new lawsuit charges.
Seven owners and managers of American Funding Group, Corporate Bailout and related companies ran their office like a frat house, rewarding female workers who played along — sometimes in the middle of the office — with bonuses, gifts and access to the corporate credit card, according to the suit filed Thursday.
The papers said the Tinton Falls office was “so sexually aggressive, morally repulsive and unlawfully hostile that it is rivaled only by the busi- nesses portrayed in the films ‘Boiler Room’ and ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’ ”
In one raunchy example of the alleged debauchery, owner Mark Mancino and manager Michael Hamill were described as regularly summoning a female sales representative to a private office by shouting out, “Wendy, get your t-ts in here.”
Once she was in the office, Hamill and Mancino could be heard taking turns “motorboating” her breasts, the Middlesex County lawsuit said.
In a footnote, the court papers describe the lewd act as “placing one’s face in the area between a woman’s breasts and blowing onto her skin while rapidly shaking one’s head, thereby creating a sound similar to that of an outboard boat motor.”
Hamill “regularly and repeatedly” commented on the woman’s breasts with such remarks as, “Wendy, bring your t-ts back over here,” and “Who hasn’t seen Wendy’s t-ts?” according to the suit.
Reached at the office Thursday, Wendy, a worker whose last name is being withheld by The Post, declined to comment before telling a reporter to leave the offices “immediately.”
Mancino did not return a request for comment. Hamill, reached by phone, also declined to comment.
Employees who complained or refused to play along were “ostracized or terminated,” said the former human-resources director and two canned customer-service reps who filed the state court suit.
Mancino was also accused of hiring a 22-year-old woman he met at his gym for a $60,000 job and “unlimited access” to the corporate credit card.
In exchange for the job and other lavish gifts — including a car and $4,000 Gucci purse — the worker “wore provocative outfits in the office and during meetings intentionally bent over so defendant Mancino could gawk at her body and rub her inner thigh,” the lawsuit alleges.
Workers were told to keep the alleged naughtiness from Mancino’s wife, who learned about it anyway and is in the process of divorcing Mancino, the suit claims.
And then there were the strippers, who were regularly brought into the office to celebrate “special occasions,” including Hamill’s birthday party in June, the lawsuit said.
Video and stills attached to the suit as exhibits show a stripper straddling Hamill on an office swivel chair before she sits astride him on the floor — with a ball gag in his mouth — and playfully flogs him with a cat o’ nine tails.
The celebration culminated with a cake with a giant penis on it, the lawsuit said, as well as a blow-up doll with a certain look, because, as Mancino allegedly explained at the time, Hamill “likes ‘healthy women’ and ‘does not like fat girls,’ ” the lawsuit said.
Hamill later inserted a cigarette inside the blow-up doll’s vagina and a party horn into its anus, the lawsuit said.
Ahead of any strippers’ arrival, workers were told to sign a “waiver” saying they were OK with “lewd” activity during office hours. Employees who declined to sign were “laughed at for being ‘lame,’ ‘prude’ or a ‘tight-ass,’ ” the lawsuit said.
The plaintiffs — Nicole Orlando, Evelyn Grondski and Donna Simone — say they were fired for refusing to play along with the sexcapades and complaining about “illicit business practices,” which included ripping off customers on a regular basis, the suit alleges.
The suit also described a time a female employee, encouraged by male managers, lifted her skirt and pressed her bare butt against a glass conference-room window for the entire office to see.
Instead of reprimanding or disciplining the employee for the bizarre office strip show, accounts-- receivable manager Michael Marino gleefully threw himself against the other side of the glass and began “air humping” the worker, exclaiming, “How else could I respond to that?” according to the lawsuit.
“Defendants shamelessly created a sexual-harassment playground fueled by drugs and alcohol and swarming with handpicked young women rewarded for dressing and behaving provocatively — all in order to indulge their misogyny and vulgar sexual perversions,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Matthew Luber, of McOmber & McOmber, told The Post.
The lawsuit said Mancino, 50, also “openly and regularly” talked about the testosterone shots and male-enhancement pills he was taking.
“I have to keep my d- -k working to keep up with these young ladies,” he said, according to the suit.
And the company wasn’t shy about its frat-boy antics when it came to new employees, the suit charged.
Male managers would often bring inflatable sex dolls with exposed breasts into the interviews with the prospects, the suit said.
“This is how we do business here,” the potential hires were allegedly told. “Have you ever been to an interview with a sex doll?”
Marino did not return a request for comment.