Well, we guess this is good news. Remember how the city seems to have had $80 million stolen from its bloated $722 million dollar CityTime budget? While the theft continues to be one of the bigger scandals to hit the Bloomberg administration (snow or no) at least all of that cash doesn't appear to be gone for good. The city's Department of Investigation and the feds have already seized $26 million from bank accounts connected to the six defendants in the scheme.
DOI investigators got the dough from all over, including banks under in the defendants own names as well as accounts created in the names of their children and shell corporations. Of course, everything seized was taken after the DOI "documented the flow of money in and out of the relevant accounts to identify funds tainted by the scheme," according to a statement. They also got more than $1 million out of safe deposit boxes in the defendants names.
Of course, some of the cash is going to be harder to get back, what with it being in accounts "as far away as Latvia."
Meanwhile, if you are looking for a good review of the entire case so far, check out Graham Rayman's epic recap in this week's Voice which digs up some interesting wrinkles in the story, like the fact that the DOI had actually investigated the CityTime project in 2007...
