NEW YORK: Looks like the old Indian habit of getting the palms greased to get jobs done dies really hard. Two desi New York City Department of Transportation employees, including a high-ranking official earning $106,000 a year, were charged Nov 28 with soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from a company handling bridge repairs.
The New York Times reports that investigators said in court documents that in a series of secretly recorded meetings, the employees pledged to manipulate negotiations against the city’s interest and arranged to accept kickbacks. The employees, Balram Chandiramani and Uday Shah, have been suspended without pay, investigators said. At a hearing in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Judge Marilyn Dolan Go released the two men on $500,000 bail each, posted by their wives. Judge Go ordered them to stay in the New York area, the NYT report states.
Though no formal indictments have been filed, prosecutors said the men could face 10-year prison sentences. Defense lawyers said they would plead not guilty. Shah, 46, an assistant civil engineer who has worked in the department for 19 years, earns $57,023 a year, city officials said. Chandiramani, 65, is the director of the department’s movable bridges bureau, earning $106,984.
City officials said he has worked in the department for 37 years, a distinction for which he was to have been honored at a ceremony the same day that he was arrested by federal agents following an investigation announced by the United States attorney for the Eastern District, Benton J. Campbell, and the City Department of Investigation’s commissioner, Rose Gill Hearn, the NYT report says. The accusations concern repairs to the Third Avenue Bridge, a 109-year-old steel-framed swing bridge spanning the Harlem River.
In January 2001, the city hired the Kiska Construction Corporation to perform $118 million in repairs. The work was completed last year. Investigations revealed that Shah took a bribe of $1500 in cash for arranging to increase payments to Kiska and introducing him to Chandiramani, according to the NYT.
Chandiramani, in turn, accepted a bribe of $10,000 in cash and a total of $400,000 partly through wire transfers, the NYT says quoting court documents. In secretly recorded conversations between Chandiramani and the Kiska executive, prosecutors said that Chandiramani had disclosed the department’s bargaining position and gave advice on negotiations.
Kiska is a Turkey-based company with offices in Long Island City, Queens. In a statement released subsequent to the charges, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said a payment of $2.7 million to Kiska had been stopped. A spokesman for the Transportation Department, Seth Solomonow, said the bridge was safe, according to the NYT.
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