(Helayne Seidman)
Four-foot piles of discarded corn husks, guys selling bedsheets, the stench of street meat and traffic backed up for blocks. It’s another summer street fair in the city — and it’s supposed to be in the name of charity.
Every one of this year’s 250 street fairs is required to have a nonprofit or community-based sponsor that gets a cut of the cash paid by the sunglasses vendors and pashmina peddlers.
But The Post found that some of these organizations are dubious at best and, according to authorities, fraudulent at worst. Even when community boards question the legitimacy of such groups, the city bulldozes ahead and rubber-stamps them.
In the end, shady charities get cash but the real winners are the for-profit promoters of the fairs who use the charities as cover.
The city gets a 20 percent cut of the fees vendors pay to participate, which start at about $225 a booth for food sellers. The city took in $1.4 million in 2011. But there’s no rule as to how much the promoter gives to the charities, which could wind up getting a pittance. The city says that’s “a private contract entered into by the sponsor and the producer.”
The Post found:
* The International Immigrants Foundation was able to close 14 blocks of Sixth Avenue last summer, despite being sued in 2010 by then-state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for fraud. Cuomo accused the organization and its leader, Edward Juarez, of defrauding immigrants of hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to support Juarez’s extravagant lifestyle. Juarez was accused of using money from a related nonprofit to pay for a Midtown rental apartment, luxury car, car insurance, parking space, cellphone and travel and meal expenses.
* The city’s Street Activities and Permit Office gave the OK to a nonprofit called the International AIDS Prevention Initiative for a July 7 SoHo street fair despite concerns raised by Community Board 2 over the organization’s viability. In fact, the group lost its tax-exempt status, has no phone number, has not updated its Web site since 2005 and failed to file required paperwork with the attorney general. The charity now comprises one man who travels the world displaying pieces of the AIDS quilt.
* The Brazilian Day festival draws thousands of people to Sixth Avenue every September for food and music. But the nonprofit sponsor, the Brazilian American Cultural Center, exists solely to put on the fair. There is no cultural center — just a for-profit travel agency owned by the director of the nonprofit.
* Community Board 2 turned down the Stonewall Veterans’ Association — made up of those who participated in the famed 1969 gay-rights demonstrations — in February, questioning “the size and viability of this organization and the uses of the money raised by this fair.” But the city gave it the permit anyway. Williamson Henderson, the head of the group, said it gets about $3,500 from the street fair and raises awareness of the start of the gay-rights movement.
* The Global Role Models Fund had its tax exemption revoked by the IRS on June 9, 2011, because it failed to follow federal filing rules. It’s unclear what cause the organization is supposed to support. The group has no Web site and is not registered with the state attorney general, but still got a permit to hold a street fair.
Brad Hoylman, the ex-chairman of Community Board 2, said when it comes to the city’s approval process, “nobody seems to be minding the store.”
“There seems to be very little scrutiny, if any, at the city administration level of organizations that sponsor street fairs, many of whom are legitimate but some are questionable,” said Hoylman, who is running for state Senate.
The charities “provide a rationale for maintaining a flawed system,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank that has studied street fairs. He said the cookie-cutter events have very little to do with the neighborhoods they’re in and whose streets they clog.
The city says it’s trying to reduce the impact of the street fairs by combining events and not giving out permits for new fairs. Promoters were asked last year to reduce the number of fairs by 25 percent.
The city requires only the barest of documentation to prove an organization is a nonprofit and qualifies for a permit. The groups need only to be registered with the state Department of State. But the department does not monitor whether a nonprofit is still in business.
So charities such as the International AIDS Prevention Initiative, even if they never file tax forms or other paperwork, can slide by. The group, once a viable charity with an office on Varick Street, has reaped the proceeds of an annual street fair for 19 years. This year’s event occupied four blocks of SoHo on July 7.
Jeff Bosacki, who says he heads the organization, manned a booth and distributed violet-colored fliers with a nonworking phone number.
Bosacki, who now lives in California, insisted to The Post that he conducted the charity’s work by traveling the world and showing the AIDS-quilt panels as a form of “art therapy” for people with the disease.
He says he gets about $5,000 from the fair, which was produced by Mardi Gras Festival Productions. The organization, in business since 1975, is one of the city’s three major street-fair promoters.
Mardi Gras, which will put on 60 street fairs this year, also produced the June 4, 2011, fair along 14 blocks of Sixth Avenue for the International Immigrants Foundation.
Joe Giovanni, the head of Mardi Gras, refused to talk to The Post.
The court case against the immigrant organization is ongoing and it’s unclear if the charity is still open. Its Midtown office is shuttered. Community Board 5 recommended that the group receive a permit, which was granted by the city. The Mayor’s Office said the charity showed proof of “active nonprofit status.”
“The courts have ruled street fairs are a form of protected free speech, so there’s no discretion to disapprove if a nonprofit group meets all rules, as this group did,” said mayoral spokeswoman Evelyn Erskine.
Meanwhile, residents in neighborhoods plagued by street fairs question why the city is allowing fairs benefitting bogus charities to continue.
“If it’s a bona fide group, we can suck it up,” Pete Davies of the Broadway Residents Coalition in SoHo. “If it’s not going to a worthy cause, I would say it’s totally incorrect. It’s wrong.”
Bowles said the entire street-fair system should be remade with better oversight of nonprofits and more diversity in the events.
“I think it’s a shame that we’re perpetuating a system that the vast majority of New Yorkers feel is very flawed,” he said.