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Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: The big apple - North of the Core
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Oink Oink Oink Oink Oik Oink Oik. E - I - E - I - OH!!!
Beyond the Disclosure About Kerik's Nanny, More Questions Were Lurking
Published: December 13, 2004
From the NY Times online
While serving as New York City correction commissioner in the late 1990's, Bernard B. Kerik spoke to the city's Trade Waste Commission on behalf of a close friend who was helping a company suspected of mob connections try to get a license from the city, according to a former commission executive.
The conversation was part of a web of relationships Mr. Kerik developed with officials of a New Jersey construction company long suspected by New York authorities of connections to organized crime. The company, Interstate Industrial Corporation, hired Mr. Kerik's close friend Lawrence Ray, the best man at Mr. Kerik's wedding, to help with its licensing problems. Mr. Ray said yesterday that he gave Mr. Kerik more than $7,000 in cash and other gifts while Mr. Kerik was commissioner of correction and the police. The gifts were first reported in The Daily News yesterday.
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Interstate also hired Mr. Kerik's brother, Donald Kerik, after the conversation with the Trade Waste Commission executive, Raymond V. Casey, then head of enforcement at the agency, although there is no indication that the hiring was in return for the conversation. Both Mr. Kerik and one of the owners of Interstate, Frank DiTommaso, acknowledge that they were friends, but said there was no effort to inappropriately influence the licensing process.
Mr. DiTommaso said his company did not have ties to organized crime. But in January of this year, city regulators recommended denying the license, citing what they said were ties to organized crime over many years.
Mr. Kerik says he does not remember the conversation with Mr. Casey - a top official of a city agency set up to weed out the influence of organized crime from the hauling industry - and Mr. Casey says he cannot recall who initiated it. Nonetheless, the story of Mr. Kerik's relationship with Interstate was almost certain to be one of a mounting number of details from his past that would have been fodder for Senate committees deciding his suitability to be secretary of homeland security, the post to which he was nominated by President Bush last week.
Mr. Kerik withdrew from consideration on Friday evening and said his discovery that he had employed a nanny and housekeeper who appeared to have been in the country illegally was the sole reason. White House officials say that the nanny matter was not disclosed during their background investigation, and that none of the other matters that they were aware of were sufficient to disqualify Mr. Kerik.
But other questions surfaced after his nomination was announced: his ties to Interstate, his huge profits from companies doing business with the Homeland Security Department, accusations that he abused his authority in an investigation of employees working for a Saudi Arabian hospital 20 years ago, the effectiveness of his effort to improve the Iraqi police force.
The accretion of these questions - even if any one of them could be explained away in one form or another - could well have sunk him later, according to several Capitol Hill officials. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recommended Mr. Kerik to the White House, now says that even if Mr. Kerik had survived the questions about Interstate at his confirmation hearings, they would have made his task much more difficult as secretary.
"I believe they would have been issues," Mr. Giuliani said yesterday. "I think he would have been able to give a sufficient answer. But I think he would have been under much closer scrutiny once he became secretary."
Much remains unanswered about Mr. Kerik's ties to Interstate, including how much he knew about the accusations that it was connected to organized crime, and who initiated the conversation with the Trade Waste Commission. Nonetheless, Mr. Kerik's involvement raises questions about his judgment as a law enforcement official in playing any role in a matter where a personal benefactor was involved.
Mr. Kerik said in an interview on Saturday that he did not try to influence the company's application for a license, but the lingering questions provide an insight into what he expected to face if the nanny issue had not cut short his nomination. Mr. Kerik and his lawyers were informed last week that both The Daily News and The Times were asking questions about his relationship with Interstate, and Mr. Giuliani said he believed that Mr. Kerik informed the White House of the issue last week. White House officials said yesterday that they could not confirm whether they knew about the Interstate issues, citing privacy rights.
According to a memorandum issued in January by the Business Integrity Commission, the successor to the Trade Waste Commission, Interstate paid more than $1 million in 1996 to buy a debris transfer station in Staten Island from a company controlled by a captain and a soldier in the Gambino crime family, and it then employed organized crime figures at the station and did business with trucking companies owned by crime figures. The memorandum, which recommended denying the company a transfer station license, said the owners of Interstate associated with crime figures and had a cavalier attitude about the integrity of their employees.
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"There is ample evidence on which to conclude that Interstate Materials Corp. and its principals, Frank and Peter DiTommaso, lack the good character, honesty and integrity required of a transfer station permit holder," according to memorandum. Interstate Materials is an affiliate of Interstate Industrial, both owned by the DiTommasos. They have not been charged with any crime.
In recent testimony in an unrelated case in Federal District Court in Manhattan, an informant, Anthony Rotondo, has made more direct accusations about Interstate, saying that it has been tied to two crime families for years and that the company paid bribes in paper bags to the DeCavalcante crime family of New Jersey so as to be allowed to use cheaper, nonunion labor.
As the commission was looking into Interstate in 1999, Mr. Kerik spoke to Mr. Casey, then the agency's deputy commissioner for enforcement, about the man Interstate had hired to help with its licensing problems, Lawrence Ray. Mr. Casey said in an interview that Mr. Kerik had told him that he "thought Ray was a good, honest person with a security background that could help the commission alleviate the concerns with Interstate. And that Ray was someone we could work with."
The next year, Mr. Ray was indicted and later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit stock fraud in an unrelated federal case.
Mr. Casey said that after his conversation with Mr. Kerik, he assigned a commission detective to talk to Mr. Ray, along with a supervisor. Mr. Casey said he thought it was "weird" for the correction commissioner to speak up on behalf of an employee of a company under suspicion, but said he did not think Mr. Kerik intended to improperly influence the commission's decision.
In the interview Saturday, Mr. Kerik described himself as a friend of Frank DiTommaso, and said he did not recall having the conversation with Mr. Casey. He defended his relationship with Mr. DiTommaso.
"I do not know of wrongdoing or criminal activity on the part of Frank DiTommaso," Mr. Kerik said. One of Mr. Ray's lawyers, Thomas G. Roth, said that Mr. Kerik distanced himself from Mr. Ray after the stock-fraud indictment.
Mr. DiTommaso maintains that the company has no organized crime connections, and said that a decision earlier this year by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission to license his companies to do work on Atlantic City Casinos buttressed that assertion. However, the state's Division of Gaming Enforcement, which has contended that the company does have organized crime connections, has appealed the commission's decision.
On Oct. 1, 1999, Frank DiTommaso sent a letter to the Trade Waste Commission announcing that Donald Kerik had taken over the daily operation of Interstate Materials, which operated the transfer station. "Don is a fine individual and will continue to provide your agency with full cooperation as we at Interstate Materials Corp. have always done," Mr. DiTommaso wrote.
Mr. Kerik said he had no role in any of the hirings, but Mr. DiTommaso, in sworn testimony, said that he hired Mr. Ray, whom he knew and had been dissatisfied with from a previous business relationship, largely because Mr. Kerik had vouched for him. Mr. DiTommaso said he paid him $100,000 a year.
Mr. Kerik has not explained the gifts Mr. Ray has said he gave, which The Daily News said were not reported to the city's Conflicts of Interest Board. City officials are required to report gifts of more than $1,000.
Christopher Drew and Eric Lipton
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