Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas said she hopes her office’s criminal investigation into questionable separation payouts to employees in Long Beach wraps up soon, but emphasized that the probe is ongoing.
“We’re not leaving leads untraced — we’re going through the evidence in a very methodical way and hopefully it will wrap up soon, but we’re still very much in it,” she said during an interview with Herald editors last week.
Singas, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year, launched the investigation more than a year ago in conjunction with State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office.
In June, the Herald reported Singas’s office questioned a number of current and former City Council members and officials over the past year about separation payouts to employees when they left city government, and subpoenaed hundreds of documents from City Hall. According to multiple sources close to the investigation, some have also testified before a grand jury convened by Singas earlier this year.
DiNapoli’s office issued a draft audit in August, which found in part that the city had overpaid 10 current and former non-union employees more than $500,000 in separation payouts — including former City Manager Jack Schnirman — and noted that the city had failed to take corrective action in response to two prior audits in 1992 and 1996, which found questionable leave payments that were inconsistent with city code — 30 percent of unused sick days and 50 vacation days — or contracts. The state recommended that the city recoup any overpayments identified in its report.
People familiar with the probe told the Herald that the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York are also looking into whether payouts made in the 2017-18 fiscal year — including a number of payments to non-union employees who remained on the payroll, and a $108,000 payment to Schnirman, a Democrat who is now the county comptroller — were proper. Schnirman recently returned a $52,000 overpayment to the city.
Over the past month, some current and former council members and city officials have also testified before a federal grand jury in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, sources told the Herald.
Singas said that she could not discuss specifics of the investigation and declined to say whether her office is working with federal investigators, but added that she stood by comments she made in a letter to the city in August, in which she said it should seek to recoup overpayments and that the draft audit made clear that “current and former city officials failed to comply with the plain language of the City Code and former city manager’s contract, and the City Council has not adequately exercised its oversight authority.”
She also said that her investigation had “been delayed by a lack of cooperation by some critical witnesses and the unavailability of certain records that may be material to our review,” though her office later clarified her comments to say that the city had been cooperative. “I talk to so many people in Long Beach and share people’s frustration about how long it’s taking,” Singas told the Herald, noting that her office continues to work with the state. “I thought it was important that we bring in other agencies that have that gravitas and have the tools to help.”
She added that investigating allegations of public corruption remains a top priority. Her office is also looking at termination payments made to employees of the county’s Industrial Development Agency while they were still employed, and her office cited the arrests of former Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor John Venditto and John Novello, a deputy commissioner for the Town of Hempstead Buildings Department, among other high-profile cases.
“Public corruption cases are the toughest cases for us to prosecute. The tools that we have on the state level are woefully deficient compared to the tools that the feds have,” Singas said. “We’ve been asking Albany for better tools for a long time, but we’ve gotten nowhere with it. But despite that, we’ve still made some pretty good public corruption cases.”
Singas’s opponent, Frank McQuade, an attorney from Long Beach, said that she ignored the city’s payout scandal because, he claimed, it involved Schnirman, a high-profile Democrat. McQuade said that it wasn’t until he, Nassau County Legislator Denise Ford and residents called for an investigation last year that Singas launched a formal probe.
“I think the fact that she’s been so slow in moving on the Long Beach case — compared with the speed with which she went to the IDA investigation and the John Novello case, even Venditto — is because Jack Schnirman is in an important position on the county level and a member of her party,” McQuade said. “I would hate to think she is delaying any action on this case until after Election Day is past.”
Singas has strongly denied those claims, and the probe was launched in conjunction with the state audit in the spring of 2018.
“That preliminary audit came out — we joined with DiNapoli on it — and some money has gotten back,” she said. “There was obviously money that shouldn’t have been paid out … and it’s already coming back, and I feel that should give some comfort to the people of Long Beach that this wasn’t some kind of situation that everyone was turning a blind eye to.”
Speaking generally about public corruption cases, Singas added, “Lots of times we run down these rabbit holes only to find out that whatever it is they’re saying is happening is morally corrupt, is morally bankrupt, but it doesn’t mean there’re elements of a crime. So that’s always where the rubber hits the road — if we can prove a crime, we’ll prove a crime. But I’m not just going into it to say I’m going to make an arrest here because everyone is demanding it. It’s as hard not to bring a case as it is to bring a case.”
