He didn’t work hard for the money: A Long Island Rail Road worker managed to pull in more than $280,000 last year — more than half in overtime pay — while just chilling out at home for countless shifts. Yet he managed to retire on full pension, unpunished.
And he’s plainly just the tip of the iceberg.
Raymond Murphy, a foreman with the LIRR’s Buildings and Bridges department, was one of the MTA’s top earners in 2017, pulling in $405,021, including $295,490 in OT, according to data compiled by the government watchdog Empire Center.
And he was on his way to raking in even more when the MTA’s inspector general caught him at or near his home on 10 separate occasions when he was on the clock in April, May and June 2018.
His managers should have screamed “fraud”: Murphy’s time sheets had him clocking impossible amounts of time — 114 hours over a five-day period in May, and 92 in a four-day June stretch.
Called out by the IG’s office, he lied, claiming his union contract let him leave work if he finished early and that he was paid for travel time. You know, like every commuter.
Nor is Murphy remotely alone. The IG also discovered 20 MTA bus and train drivers working as for-hire car drivers during their mandatory rest time — a safety violation that routinely put the public at risk.
And it caught MTA Police Department Assistant Chief Thomas Odessa routinely arriving late to work and leaving early, while illegally using his MTA car to drive to side gigs.
Odessa’s scamming is particularly significant, since it shows a top manager ripping off the public for his personal profit.
The only possible conclusion is that a culture of fakery runs through the entire MTA, inflating paychecks and pensions — with non-cheating workers and managers afraid to lift a finger to stop it.
Setting things right will require not just a thorough house-cleaning, but major management reforms and changes to labor contract work rules. The ripoffs must end.
Alfonso Castillo
The financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is adding urgency to the agency’s efforts to curtail overtime numbers that critics say remain alarmingly high.
The MTA said at Wed Read More
According to Ken Girardin, a labor analyst at the right-leaning Empire Center for Public Policy, every new police officer will cost the MTA roughly $56,000, which means the new personnel would initially cost the MTA roughly $28 million a year.
Those costs should rapidly increase over time, as police salaries rapidly increase. Read More
“That’s one heck of an incentive,” said E.J. McMahon, research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, the organization that publicized the MTA’s alarmingly high overtime rate in an April MTA payroll report. Read More
The MTA’s heightened focus on overtime follows an April financial report from the Empire Center for Public Policy that revealed alarmingly high overtime rates among some MTA employees, including former LIRR chief measurement officer Thomas Caputo, who made $344,147 in overtime on top of his base salary of $117,499. Read More
DeLeon — who began at the MTA in 2007 and earned $44,754, according to the Empire Center — was fired by the agency. But he still kept his pension, according to sources close to the investigation. Read More
The cop — who earned $240,926 that year, according to the Empire Center — was then busted using his cruiser to make 14 visits in eight weeks to funeral homes on Staten Island, where investigators suspected he was moonlighting. Read More
Murphy was one of the top earners in the whole MTA in 2017 — making a jaw-dropping $405,021, with $295,490 coming from overtime, according to data from government watchdog group the Empire Center. Read More
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last month picked Pokorny, a former federal prosecutor, to fill the office of MTA Inspector General amid growing concerns about potential overtime fraud at the authority. The concerns stemmed from an April report by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, that revealed the MTA’s top earner in 2018, LIRR chief measurement officer Thomas Caputo, made $344,147 in overtime on top of his base salary of $117,499. Read More