The mess of a scandal that it is the city's bloated CityTime payroll project got more interesting yesterday as a new indictment was unsealed and one of the men charged in the scheme pled guilty in a bid for leniency.
The bribery and other charges against Victor Natanzon could carry a maximum 40 year sentence, so he had good reason to flip. According to newly unsealed papers Natanzon admits to paying a $20k bribe last fall to alleged scheme mastermind Mark Mazer. Mazer also reportedly forced Natanzon to "kick back 80% of his CityTime projects" along with regular $5k payments.
And that isn't the only new development in this constant headache for Bloomberg's third term. Officials added another defendant to the case, a cousin of Mazer's named Anna Makovetskaya. Meanwhile another defendant in the case, 61-year-old Scott Berger, apparently died on December 19 of a heart attack.
And the list of defendants may be about to grow even more. SAIC, the major defense contractor in charge of the $700+ million project, went and fired an executive, Carl Bell, after an internal review "found he approved timesheets for a highly paid CityTime consultant for years even though the consultant did no work on the project," according to a Daily News source. Bell is the third SAIC employee involved in the project fired in recent weeks. A project manager and a CityTime consultant were also recently let go.
And now that prosecutors have themselves a major witness involved in the mess, this is bound to get a whole lot more interesting. Of the $80 million that is thought to have been stolen from city coffers in the scheme, investigators have so far recovered more than $26 million from defendant's bank accounts.
