Mark Cohen, the court-appointed overseer for the city Fire Department, is looking like a million bucks these days. Or pretty close to it, anyway.
And you’re paying for it — thanks to Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas “Big Nick” Garaufis.
Cohen, the white-shoe-firm lawyer named by Big Nick to root out the FDNY’s alleged racial discrimination, just submitted his third bill for his firm’s services.
For March and April alone, it came to $191,688.14.
Combined with his previous invoices, that’s $855,768.77 for just six months’ “work.”
We say “work,” because it’s not at all clear what Cohen specifically does for all that dough. That’s because Big Nick has declared the details to be a state secret — with City Hall’s sole responsibility being to make sure the bills are paid.
For the record, Big Nick himself allegedly vets Cohen’s bills to determine if they are “regular and reasonable.”
Cohen is said to bill the city at an hourly rate of either $415 or $650, depending on which partner is doing specific work. Paralegal work is billed at $165 an hour.
But that, as the city Law Department has noted, is four or five times Big Nick’s own salary — and the whole point of naming Cohen was to have him do work that the judge himself “does not have the time to perform.”
Then there’s the matter of Big Nick’s longtime ties to Cohen’s law partner, Lawrence Gresser, a Queens deputy borough president under the disgraced Donald Manes. Big Nick himself was on the payroll of Manes’ successor, Claire Shulman, for nine years.
The city has challenged — and rightly so — just about everything Big Nick has done in his anti-FDNY jihad.
That includes his unjustified finding of deliberate racial discrimination, his appointment of a monitor and his withholding of Cohen’s hourly billing records.
All those motions are on appeal.
Sadly, Big Nick’s heavy-handed — or should we say mishandled? — control of the department probably won’t end anytime soon. And the bills keep piling up.
Given that Cohen is expected to be on the job for the next 10 years, that stands to be a mighty big pile indeed.