GILDED CAGE ON RIKERS
‘Pol’ serves in style
A former City Council candidate who got a slap-onthe-wrist sentence for trying to steal almost $20,000 in campaign donations only goes to prison on the weekends — when a black van picks her and her baby up to bring them to Rikers Island, The Post has learned.
Celia Dosamantes, 33, was sentenced in 2018 to four months’ worth of weekends behind bars for her crimes, which included faking donations to get a 6-for-1 match from taxpayers’ coffers for her doomed campaign three years earlier.
But Dosamantes — who comes from a family of New York City politicos and wept her way through a leniency plea — doesn’t go through the typical crucible most prisoners face thanks to her cushy sentence.
A black van from the New York City Department of Correction’s transportation division picks her up every Friday at 5:30 p.m. and ferries her and her child to the Rose Singer Center on Rikers Island, sources confirmed to The Post. Dosamantes brings a car seat, breast pump, kiddie medications. baby bottles and two days’ worth of clothes for her baby daughter,
sources said.
When she arrives, prison staff bring the child to the facility’s nursery while Dosamantes is processed. Two days later, Dosamantes strolls out of the clink alongside staff and her baby.
The DOC and sources pushed back on the idea that the council wannabe from Queens was receiving some sort of special treatment.
One correction source said Dosamantes’ 1-year-old daughter has medical issues and that “the department is literally trying to protect the welfare of a child who did nothing wrong.”
“Any characterization otherwise is ridiculous,” the source fumed.
“The Department followed all appropriate nursery protocols,” a DOC spokesperson said.
reporting