Former Comptroller, John Liu, cited his withholding $42 million on the City Time contract, which is called the greatest fraud in City history with the loss of at least $600 million of taxpayer money, as his single achievement in that office.
What it dramatically demonstrated was how easy it is to steal from the City especially if you hire the newly exited Comptroller, Elizabeth Holtzman to lobby for the crooked contractors. Indeed, since if you win the city contract you can pay all and any lobbyists or consultants as much as he or she wants from city funds (“our money”), the sky is the limit. The two litigant firms SAIC and Technodyne also put on the payroll a deputy mayor for both Giuliani and Bloomberg, Peter Powers and the former technology commissioner for Bloomberg, Gino Menchini.
In November of last year, three consultants – Mark Mazer, Gerard Denault and Dimitry Aronshtein – were convicted of this, the largest and most brazen rip-off of city funds; the News thinks the head crook Mark Mazer could get life (I don’t think so).
In Washington, this is called the revolving door where one day you are protecting tax payer dollars and the next you are lobbying to get them. With former deputy mayors on their payroll, the lead crooks came to believe they had a direct pipeline into the city treasury and competed to siphon off millions to foreign bank accounts and stuff cash into safety deposit boxes all over the city in what became a paroxysm of greed.
It takes the fun out of democracy.
