SHAME-FACED
9/11 pension scam cop ain’t too flip now
THE BIRD-FLIPPING ex-cop who has become the smug face of New York City’s 9/11 disability scandal claimed the World Trade Center attacks left him too bummed to work — or even leave his home.
But a Manhattan prosecutor called Glenn Lieberman’s claims a crock and said there’s no evidence he logged any time at Ground Zero.
That is “the most shameful thing,” Assistant District Attorney Bryan Serino said at Lieberman’s arraignment. “Every officer who responded on 9/11 received an exposure number. Glenn Lieberman doesn’t have an exposure number.”
Also, Serino said, Lieberman’s name is not on the list the NYPD kept of officers assigned to the Pit.
Lieberman and 81 other excops, firefighters and correction officers were busted Tuesday for allegedly soaking taxpayers for $21.3 million in Social Security disability payments by falsely claiming to have stress-related injuries. Many of them claimed the 2001 terror attacks contributed to their disability.
The 48-year-old former Brooklyn anti-gang officer, accused of stealing $150,000, became infa- mous after prosecutors released a photo of him riding a Jet Ski with a sick grin on his face and flipping a double bird.
Serino said as soon as Lieberman got a dose of taxpayer money he became a businessman who “traveled around the world, around the country.” He said Lieberman has at least three import-export companies registered to him.
Lieberman’s high-priced lawyer, Gerald McMahon, said six “ranking” NYPD members can vouch that he served at Ground Zero.
Dressed in a squall jacket and a white baseball cap, Lieberman left the Manhattan courthouse without a word after posting $25,000 bond. Prosecutors say the accused were coached to act dysf dysfunctional and steered to shady doctors who green-lighted disability payments of anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a year.
The ringleaders of the scheme — Raymond Lavallee, Thomas Hale, Joseph Esposito and John Minerva — had been operating since 1988 and in that time filed fraudulent claims for some 1,000 people totaling $400 million, prosecutors said.
An attorney for John Orosz, a former firefighter accused of stealing $122,315, insisted he logged more than 500 hours at Ground Zero.
“The Manhattan district attorney’s office fails to understand depression,” said Mario Gallucci.
Up in New Hampshire, the wife of former NYPD Officer Richard Cosentino, accused of stealing $208,000, insisted he was “an honest cop.”
“My husband didn’t do anything wrong,” Candace Cosentino said. “He looks good from the outside, but on the inside, he’s a train wreck.”
She said the trauma of 9/11 and the heart-wrenching funerals that followed had a lasting impact on her husband.
“It will never be the same in your heart (after witnessing so much),” she said. “There will always be a piece that’s in darkness.”