One year after a sweeping corruption takedown at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), law enforcement’s scorecard reads like this: 64 convictions out of the 70 housing authority employees arrested on charges of taking cash bribes to hand out contracts to vendors performing public housing repairs.
Dozens of NYCHA superintendents and assistant superintendents have received prison sentences ranging from six weeks to 48 months.
Many have been ordered to pay NYCHA restitution equal to the sum of the graft they pocketed — from a few thousand dollars up to $329,000.
On the other side of this corrupt transaction, however, it’s a very different story.
Since the big sweep on Feb. 6, 2024, billed as the biggest one-day takedown in Department of Justice history, NYCHA has awarded hundreds of contracts worth a total of $7.8 million to eight companies whose operators have publicly confessed to participating in the decade-long bribery conspiracy, an investigation by THE CITY has found.
All of these corrupt contractors have admitted under oath that they regularly handed over cash bribes from $500 to $2,000 in the basements and stairwells of NYCHA developments to dozens of NYCHA staffers, sometimes for years.
None of the vendors were charged with a crime.
All were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony against the NYCHA employees they paid off.
This crooked system of cash for contracts has worked out well for them.
The eight bribe-paying vendors that THE CITY discovered are still getting NYCHA work have, over the years, racked up $70 million in taxpayer-funded contracts for everything from installing vinyl tile to performing minor repairs to painting apartments, an analysis of contract records found.
Why NYCHA continued to hire them after the corruption scandal exploded into the headlines appears to be a function of a decision to not look too closely due to the urgent need to address a growing backlog of unresolved repair requests.
For years, NYCHA has struggled in vain to resolve tenant repair requests.
The number of open requests has soared, forcing the authority to supplement its own staff and hire vendors to handle smaller repairs.
But that well-intentioned strategy opened the door to a pay-to-play mentality that took hold in housing developments across the five boroughs.
Development-level superintendents and their assistants were given the power to hire contractors without competitive bidding for so-called micro purchase contracts — work valued at less than $5,000, an amount later lifted to $10,000.
And even some competitively bid transactions known as “blanket” contracts had a fatal flaw: vendors were retained to perform small jobs on an as-needed basis, but each job had to be certified by the low-level superintendents as complete.
In both cases, some NYCHA staffers came to regularly demand cash to either award a no-bid contract or sign off on individual jobs under a blanket contract.
All told, they pocketed more than $2 million in bribes over the last 10 years, prosecutors alleged.
Meanwhile, the desperate need for repairs continued apace.
Since the takedown in February of 2024, the number of open tenant repair requests has grown, from 585,000 to 623,000 a year later.
In response to THE CITY’s inquiries, NYCHA officials said they continued to hire the eight bribe-paying vendors identified by THE CITY because they were unaware of their track records, even after several bribe-paying contractors testified to their actions in open court.
Law enforcement, the officials said, had declined their request for a list of vendors implicated in the bribery scheme.
“NYCHA has not been made aware of the nature of the vendors’ involvement, or any charges levied against them,” authority spokesperson Michael Horgan wrote.
“Without this information, NYCHA does not have sufficient evidence to disqualify a particular vendor.”
The city Department of Investigation, which led the probe, defended its position to keep the names of the corrupt vendors secret because the agency sees them as victims, not perpetrators.
“Based on this investigation, the contractors were victims of the charged conduct as they were required to ‘pay-to-play.’
Because of that, NYCHA was not made aware of the contractors’ identities, although some of their identities were revealed when they testified,” DOI spokesperson Diane Struzzi said.
Struzzi also noted that NYCHA had agreed to adopt all 14 of DOI’s recommendations to tighten up the system for awarding micro-purchase contracts going forward, including having central staff review all such contracts awarded by development-level managers.
Courtroom Evidence
While NYCHA points to law enforcement’s withholding of information to explain why it kept hiring these dubious contractors, the authority does have its own system for determining if a vendor seeking a contract is “responsible” and has a “satisfactory record of business integrity.”
A vendor could be found not responsible and thus ineligible to bid on contracts if they have “engaged in improper behavior including bribery,” if they have made a “false, deceptive, or fraudulent statement in any bid,” or have been given a “grant of immunity or an investigation in connection with a criminal prosecution of the contractor.”
Based on the courtroom testimony of several of the contractors, the actions of all eight contractors implicated in the bribery scheme appear to fall into at least one of those categories.
NYCHA officials say they have not monitored these court proceedings, which could continue to reveal the extent of the corruption: six more cases have yet to get to trial.
The testimony to date detailing the scope of the contractors’ activities in gaming NYCHA’s desperate need for repairs emerged in the cases filed against four NYCHA managers, including three who went to trial instead of pleading guilty.
The pay-to-play scheme was so longstanding and so vast that one vendor got flustered when he was asked how many NYCHA employees he’d bribed.
“Twenty to 25,” responded Harjeet Singh. “There could be more than that, but I don’t remember the exact number.”
Singh’s company, Metro-City Renovations, has grossed more than $29 million in NYCHA contracts since 2013, including $3.2 million approved since the February 2024 takedown.
He won a $750,000 competitively bid “blanket” contract to handle sewer repairs awarded Feb. 1, 2024 — five days before the takedown.
On the witness stand through a translator, Singh admitted that he’d paid bribes to NYCHA staff for years to win thousands of no-bid micro-purchase contracts, but insisted he’d committed no crime.
“I didn’t know if it was legal or not legal.
They demanded money from me,” he said.
“In my eyes, if I was giving anybody some money to get some work, in my thinking, it was not a crime.
If somebody asked me or extorts money from me, or somebody demands from me, that is a crime.”
He also found ways to keep the income flowing.
NYCHA would temporarily suspend micro work when a contractor reached a cap of $250,000 within a year and have DOI vet the vendor.
The procedure, known as a Vendor Name Check (VNC), could take months.
To work around this pause in his revenue stream, Singh says he formed an affiliated company in his wife’s name called Ultra Contracting to keep the work going.
Records show Ultra received more than $1 million in micro-purchase contracts this way.
Another NYCHA contractor, Suraj Parkash, the owner of Suraj Construction, admitted he took this dodge a step further, opening three companies under relatives’ names to get around the pause in work during a VNC of his company.
Parkash appeared as a witness after NYCHA superintendent Juan Mercado pleaded guilty to taking bribes but insisted he’d never asked for anything — claiming that contractors like Parkash had simply given him money.
During his Vendor Name Check questioning by DOI, Suraj had denied connections to any other companies.
DOI later discovered the connections to the companies in his relatives’ names, noting that Suraj had not reported any of these affiliations in the city’s PassPort database as required.
Mercado’s attorney, Harvey Fishbein, confronted Parkash about the VNC workaround scheme, stating, “The reason you did not admit that you had connections to these companies is because you use these companies when Suraj Construction reaches its limit.
You need to have the other companies doing the job.”
“This is correct,” Parkash said.
“I used to receive a lot of calls for work and I was not left with any other option.”
Fishbein also raised the possibility that Parkash had inflated the cost of roof fans he was paid to install at the Roosevelt Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, billing the authority $1,735 for fans that cost him $725.
Over a decade, Parkash’s company took home more than $14 million in NYCHA contracts, including $1.1 million since the takedown.
On Feb. 6, five months after he testified about bribe payments in the trial of NYCHA employee Joy Harris, NYCHA awarded him a competitively bid $1 million blanket contract to perform painting at developments across the city.
Testifying in the Harris trial, Parkash boasted about his continued work with NYCHA, stating, “I’m not a thief.
I still go there looking for work.”
“Nobody has ever threatened to take these contracts away from you?” Harris’ attorney, Mikhail Usher, asked.
“Why would anybody do that?” Parkash responded.
“I am very honest.
I am a very good worker.”
“Yes, very honest,” Usher retorted, triggering the judge to jump in and instruct the jury to disregard the lawyer’s “inappropriate remark.”
image source from：https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/04/16/nycha-super-bribes-contractors/
