Bus Fleet Owner Arrested for Forging Registrations
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The owner of a bus carrier serving hundreds of students at Manhattan private schools was arrested yesterday for allegedly forging registration stickers on more than half of the buses in his fleet and failing to carry insurance, police said.
The owner, Patrick Florio, of Frank’s School Transportation, was arrested after detectives and transportation officials began inspecting his buses and found that more than half of the fleet lacked legitimate registration stickers, police said.
Serving more than two dozen private schools in Manhattan, the company has had previous problems with bus safety and maintenance, records from the city’s Department of Transportation show. In the school year that ended in 2003, the company was fined $4,500 when nearly two-fifths of its buses failed the biannual state safety inspection. In the previous school year, three eighths of Frank’s buses failed inspections, and the company was fined $2,250, records show.
“We need to be absolutely certain that school buses that are out on the road are working properly,” a spokesman for the state’s Department of Transportation, Peter Graves, said. He added that all of the fines issued against the company had been paid in a timely manner.
In the past 10 months, police officials said the company has also been served with between 75 and 100 summonses for a variety of alleged traffic and motor-vehicle violations such as balding tires, broken headlights and brake lights, cracked windshields, and failure to carry fire extinguishers.
In police custody late yesterday, Mr. Florio could not be reached for comment, and calls to the bus company were not returned.
The investigation into the company began last week, police said, after two of Frank’s private buses were stopped during random safety checks and officers noticed apparent irregularities with registration stickers.
Yesterday morning, police said, they began checking registration stickers and found that 35 of the company’s 75 buses had allegedly forged the stickers and allegedly were not insured. More of the buses were being inspected for proper registration and insurance yesterday evening, police said.
