Longtime jail guards’ union boss gets prison

The longtime boss of a union for New York City corrections officers was sentenced to nearly five years in prison Friday for corruption convictions, a steep fall for a man credited with winning guards pay and benefits parity with police and firefighters before squandering $19 million in union funds.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein announced the sentence for Norman Seabrook after hearing the former head of the New York City Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association defiantly defend his two decades of work leading the union.

The judge told a courtroom packed with Seabrook supporters, including former New York Knicks star Charles Oakley, that all the good Seabrook did after rising from a childhood of poverty left him wondering anew: “Why do good people do bad things?”

“Mr. Seabrook, I believe, was blinded by his own sense of importance and a desire to benefit himself after having benefited others for so long,” Hellerstein said.

As he left the courthouse, Seabrook bristled at a reporter who asked him why he expressed no remorse.

“How can you be remorseful for something you didn’t do?” he asked.

Seabrook, 58, was convicted last August at a Manhattan trial after prosecutors said he accepted $60,000 in cash bribes in 2014 to funnel $20 million in union funds to a risky hedge fund. All but $1 million was lost.

A trial witness, Jona Rechnitz, told jurors he talked Seabrook into the investment on a free trip to the Dominican Republic, then later handed off $60,000 in a designer bag.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Martin Bell told Hellerstein during sentencing arguments that Seabrook kept the bag he received cash in hanging on a doorknob at his home when it should have been a source of shame.

Seabrook, though, told Hellerstein the bag was filled with cigars.

He said there was no evidence he ever intended to “lose a dime” of union members’ money.