Parks Contractors Arrested On Charges of Bribery

A significant number of contractors doing work for the Parks and Recreation Department are willing to pay bribes to get around prevailing wage rules, according to details of a city investigation announced yesterday.

Nine contractors were arrested yesterday on corruption charges after allegedly attempting to bribe an investigator who was posing as a Parks Department official. In each case, the contractors had stopped receiving payment because the parks department discovered they were not paying their employees the prevailing wages, according to a Department of Investigation statement. The bribery occurred when these contractors allegedly offered the investigator money to lift the "stop payment" order on their contracts.

"These nine individuals won their contracts by placing the lowest bid on the project," the commissioner for the Department of Investigation, Rose Gill Hearn, said in a statement sent via e-mail. "They then failed to pay their employees the wages legally required and tried to mask that by offering bribes."

The nine contractors are from companies in Brooklyn and Queens. They were working on a variety of projects worth between $578,000 and $1.7 million. The projects included the construction of ball fields and playgrounds. The bribes were for between $1,000 and $4,500, according to Ms. Hearn's statement.

The prevailing wages to which employees on parks department contracts are entitled to by law are higher than the market rate. One of the contractors arrested yesterday was paying laborers $10 an hour, although the prevailing wage rate was $50 an hour, a spokeswoman for the Department of Investigation, Diane Struzzi, said.

The contractors face possible prison time if convicted. They are being charged in state Supreme Court in Queens.