NEW YORK - Eighty retired New York City police officers and firefighters were charged Tuesday in one of the largest Social Security disability frauds, a decades-long scheme in which false mental-disability claims by as many as 1,000 people cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, according to court papers.
Scores of those charged in the case essentially stole in plain sight, according to a 205-count indictment and a bail letter, collecting between $30,000 and $50,000 a year on the basis of fabricated claims that they were completely incapacitated by serious psychiatric disorders. Many said their actions in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were responsible for their psychiatric conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety or depression.
But their Facebook pages and other websites, according to the court papers, tell a starkly different story.
The bail letter includes photographs culled from the Internet that show one riding a personal watercraft and others working at jobs ranging from helicopter pilot to martial arts instructor. One is shown fishing off the coast of Costa Rica and another sitting astride a motorcycle, while another appeared in a television news story selling cannoli at the Feast of San Gennaro on Mulberry Street in Manhattan.
Prosecutors charge that they were coached by the scheme’s organizers to appear disheveled and disoriented during interviews, in which doctors initially evaluated their disability applications before finding them to be mentally disabled and incapable of any work whatsoever.
The indictment, brought by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., charges a total of 106 people, four of whom are accused of running the scheme since 1988. That group includes an 83-yearold lawyer who has worked as an FBI agent and a prosecutor, an 89-year-old pension consultant and a 61-year-old official of the union that represents New York City police detectives, according to the bail letter.
Scores of those charged, including a number of the 72 retired officers and eight firefighters, were arrested early Tuesday and were scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.
“It’s a particularly cynical part of the charged scheme that approximately half the defendants falsely claimed that their psychiatric disabilities were caused by the 9/11 attacks,” Vance said at a news conference Tuesday. “This fraud not only forced taxpayers to finance the lifestyles of New York scammers, but it also takes away from the already limited resources we have for people who actually suffer from psychiatric disabilities, and that includes, of course, the brave first responders who ran toward the fires on Sept. 11.”
The indictment accuses the four men it identifies as the scheme’s organizers of directing hundreds of applicants to the Social Security disability insurance program to lie about their psychiatric conditions and feign certain symptoms in order to obtain benefits to which they were not entitled. Those men - the lawyer, Raymond Lavallee; the pension consultant, Thomas Hale; the detectives’ union official, John Minerva; and Joseph Esposito, 64, a retired New York police officer who is accused of recruiting many of the other defendants - were charged with first- and second-degree grand larceny and attempted second-degree grand larceny.
The other 102 people charged in the case, who all received Social Security Disability Insurance payments on the basis of what the indictment alleges were false claims, were charged with second-degree grand larceny and second-degree attempted grand larceny.
Information for this article was contributed by Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 01/08/2014