Cigar Smoke & Mirrors
Piggy Pol Swindled Kids out of 400g,
Spent it on Apts. & Tobacco Biz - Feds

By Thomas Zambito
New York Daily News
December 14, 2006
 

State Sen. Efrain Gonzalez Jr. allegedly spent $9,000 to launch own special brand of cigars.

Gonzalez and alleged girlfriend and collaborator Lucia Sanchez (above) each own a condo in this building on Fordham Hill Oval in the Bronx.

Caribbean gems: Gonzalez mom's house in the Dominican Republic. The state senator also owns a ritzy flat there.

In an audacious display of craven greed, a Bronx politician cloaked himself and his family in luxury using more than $400,000 he drained from a charity that was supposed to help poor kids, authorities charged yesterday.

State Sen. Efrain Gonzalez Jr. steered taxpayer money to the nonprofit Pathways for Youth, Inc., and then used a backdoor scheme to put most of it in his own pocket, according to a federal indictment.

"This is a gross manipulation of elected office," said Rose Gill Hearn, commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation.

The Bronx Democrat blew the cash over seven years on high-end baubles, vacation homes and vanity projects, authorities said.

He spent $50,000 on rent for a luxury apartment in the Dominican Republic for his wife and $9,000 on a company that turned out cigars with labels like "Assembly" and "Speaker," the indictment said.

Gonzalez also paid for jewelry and college tuition for his daughter, bought Yankees tickets, rented a country residence in upstate Monroe, bought into a Dominican vacation club and renovated his mother-in-law's house on the island nation.

"I'm innocent," Gonzalez told the Daily News in Albany. "And, you know, I'm innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. At that time I will speak and that would be the best thing."

He is expected in court tomorrow.

Prosecutors said the scheme started with Pathways, a Castle Hill-based nonprofit that has provided kids an after-school oasis for decades. During the investigation, its management was taken over by the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, itself in trouble for improperly steering money to the liberal radio network Air America.

Gonzalez sent Pathways $423,000 in so-called "member items" - tax money that is handed out by legislators to fund individual groups, usually in the lawmaker's district.

Gonzalez also set up a shell charity called the West Bronx Neighborhood Association where his alleged girlfriend, Lucia (Lucy) Sanchez, 50, had only one responsibility: accept money from Pathways and cut checks to Gonzalez, authorities said.

The lovebirds own separate condos on the same floor of an apartment building at 9 Fordham Hill Oval that the government is trying to seize, sources said.

Sanchez was indicted, along with Pathways executive director Neil Berger, 55, who got his start at the charity more than 25 years ago coaching softball and working as a counselor at a summer camp.

Prosecutors are trying to seize Berger's Teaneck, N.J., home.

Gonzalez and another co-defendant, Miguel Castanos, are also charged in a separate scheme of stealing more than $225,000 from a charity called the United Latin American Foundation. The group also used cash funeled through Pathways.

ULAF was given a no-show consulting contract by Pathways and also paid some bills for Gonzalez, the indictment said.

A former city bus driver who's been a lawmaker for 18 years, Gonzalez was reelected in a landslide in November.

He now faces more than 100 years in prison.

The Gonzalez probe began after DOI investigators uncovered payments flowing from Pathways to the West Bronx charity two years ago. "From that moment on, DOI investigators peeled away the layers of the scheme and discovered that West Bronx did not engage in any substantial not-for-profit activity but instead was being used primarily as a conduit by Sen. Gonzalez to pay his expenses," Gill Hearn said.

A West Bronx Neighborhood Assn. treasurer has been cooperating with federal investigators in the probe.

This is the second time Gonzalez has been indicted; in August, he was hit with mail fraud charges for taking $37,000 from West Bronx.

Two days before Gonzalez was scheduled to be in court for a hearing on that charge, federal prosecutors smacked him with the new charges.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said his office will continue to ferret out abuses among the $200 million in member items from Albany.

"Public corruption is a betrayal of trust," Garcia said.

With Robert Gearty and Joe Mahoney

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/480036p-403826c.html

Give All of the Stinkin' Guys a Stogie

Editorial
New York Daily News
December 14, 2006

If you want the perfect holiday gift for your state legislators, try the cigar company that state Sen. Efrain Gonzalez is said to have bankrolled by diverting state funds.

Gonzalez Rojas offers a wide selection, and the names on the bands say it all:

"SENATOR"

"ASSEMBLY"

"SPEAKER"

"COUNCIL"

Of course, not many legislators are as brazenly corrupt as Gonzalez, who was indicted yesterday for a scheme that allegedly began with awarding $423,000 in taxpayers' money to a nonprofit organization in the Bronx.

The money was part of the about $200 million the legislators make available for themselves and the governor each year so as to bestow "member item" grants at their individual discretion.

The subject of Gonzalez's munificence was Pathways for Youth Inc., whose stated purpose is to "improve and further generally the welfare and happiness of young people." Pathways forwarded the state money along with some federal funds to a pair of Bronx organizations whose apparent purpose was to further the happiness of Gonzalez.

With that aim, the organizations footed more than $400,000 of Gonzalez's bills. These expenses included $8,740 paid to the upstanding Camelot Consulting Company of Albany.

"For cigar band design," the indictment notes.

Camelot had no reason to believe Gonzalez was anything but legitimate.

"He just brought a box of cigars in and basically asked us to design a little cigar band," the creative director, Frank Romeo, recalled yesterday.

Gonzalez told Romeo that the cigars were individually hand rolled with tobacco grown from special seeds. The names for the various types of cigars were entirely Gonzalez's conception.

"He pretty much had something sketched out already," Romeo remembered. "He was very proud about it."

Thus was born the Gonzalez Rojas line. A whole box marked ASSEMBLY should go to State Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, who is himself under indictment for using public funds to meet his personal expenses. He is said to have used his member item prerogative to fund the Eastchester Little League, then siphoned off $95,000 intended for the kids.

Let us hope most corruption in the Legislature is not so overt, maybe not even criminal. But a good number of the member items are clearly so unethical as to merit a Gonzalez stogie.

What better way to say where there's smoke there may be fire than to give a box of SENATE cigars to State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno? Bruno reportedly awarded $500,000 in member item funds to a for-profit technology company whose principal figures included a close personal friend.

The friend is said to have furnished Bruno with private aircraft for personal jaunts. The friend's wife purchased waterfront property from a company that Bruno partly owns. Now, there's a deal that should have been sealed by puffing Gonzalez Rojas' best.

A box of SPEAKER cigars should go to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Records show Silver showered nearly $1 million in member-item money on two organizations that have one of his former aides on retainer as a lobbyist. Another $600,000 went to a charitable outfit headed by the spouse of Silver's chief of staff.

Until recently, both houses of the Legislature sought to keep from public view exactly how much a particular legislator bestowed on a particular organization or project.

That is changing thanks to a lawsuit brought by the Albany Times Union and supported by the Daily News. Bruno and Silver have released the pertinent details regarding recent member items and pledged to make such information public in the future.

Meanwhile, Gonzalez's cigars are the perfect gift even for legislators who use member items only to buy votes, which would be almost all of them in both houses.

If the evidence against Gonzalez is as strong as it seems, he should add one more variety to his proud line of cigars and stash away a 20-year personal supply:

CONVICT.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/480041p-403825c.html