By Jeff Lipton
According to detectives, Parks has been forging his mother's signature on the checks that were made out to her and then cashing them at a check-cashing business in Inwood.
Authorities said that Parks, 53, who lives in Freeport, collected payments on more than 100 checks, stealing nearly $15,000 from the federal government. The alleged scam was uncovered recently, and the suspect was arrested, officials said.
The suspect's mother, Rosa Parks - who was not related to the civil rights leader - was receiving $133 per month from the Department of Veterans Affairs as payment for her late husband's service to the country. When she died on May 25, 1997, the VA was not notified, and the monthly checks - a total of about 108 of them - kept coming, according to Detective Ronald Schepis of the Nassau County Police Department's Crimes Against Property Squad's Forgery Unit.
Schepis was contacted by Kevin Russell, an agent for the Department of Veterans Affairs, who sought Nassau County detectives' help in uncovering the alleged fraud, authorities said. "The VA continued to mail checks to her, not knowing that she had passed away," said Schepis. "I never had a case like this before from the VA. I definitely could see that it could be a larger problem, that it could slip through the cracks like that."
Schepis said that Parks forged his mother's signature on the checks and co-signed them with his signature. He then took them to a check-cashing business at 257 Sheridan Blvd. in Inwood, where he pocketed the money, investigators said.
When the fraud came to light, Nassau County detectives got in touch with Parks, encouraging him to turn himself in, Schepis said. When Parks kept putting them off, Schepis and another detective, Robert Gally, showed up at his Freeport home at 6:50 a.m. on June 7 and placed him under arrest, investigators said. As they closed in for the arrest, the suspect was about to go to work in Manhattan, where he told detectives he was an insurance broker, said Schepis. "Every time we called him, he would make excuses and not surrender, so we showed up at his front door," Schepis said.
At his arrest, Parks told detectives that he was the executor of his mother's will, Schepis said. Before she died, when she was gravely ill, her son signed her checks with her -- with her permission, he said. "After she died, he kept signing her name and the checks kept coming," Schepis said.
Schepis said Parks even changed the address so that the checks would go to a post office box in Far Rockaway instead of his mother's Brooklyn address.
The Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C., did not return calls for comment.
Parks was charged with third-degree grand larceny and second-degree possession of a forged instrument, investigators said. He was arraigned in First District Court in Hempstead on June 7.
Comments about this story? ACoen@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 210.
