The scandal surrounding the left-wing activist organization ACORN has spread to New York, with employees at its Brooklyn office caught on video helping supposed ladies of the night get loans for their dream houses of ill repute.
Rather than reminding the women that prostitution is dangerous and illegal and advising them to change their careers, counselors at the social-services group shockingly offer suggestions on how they can launder their earnings.
“Honesty is not going to get you the house,” a loan counselor at the offices told two activists posing as a mortgage-seeking pimp and prostitute.
“You can’t say what you do for a living.”
ACORN workers in two other cities, Baltimore and Washington, DC, had already fallen hooker, line and sinker for the hidden-camera sting operation by two conservative activists.
Four ACORN employees have been fired as a result of the earlier videos, and last Friday the Census Bureau severed its ties with the group, whose members had been hired to do canvassing during the 2010 census.
Mayor Bloomberg spoke out on the controversy today.
“Prostitution is illegal in this state and I don’t know why they would — why an organization like ACORN, who’s trying to encourage voter turnout and voter registration, why they’re getting involved in any of that stuff,” Bloomberg said. “But clearly it’s not appropriate and they shouldn’t have been doing it. Whether they broke a law or not I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to the legal (authorities).”
The Brooklyn DA’s office announced today it would be investigating the group.
In an unrelated outrage, ACORN was accused of widespread voter fraud during the 2008 presidential election by helping unqualified voters to register.
As in prior videos released by the filmmaking team of James O’Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, employees of the group — which specializes in housing and voter activism — were eager to dispense advice on gaming the system and skirting the law.
“You know, what goes on in the house we don’t care,” one counselor said. “We just help you with the mortgage.”
O’Keefe and Giles were garishly dressed as a stereotypical pimp and prostitute. O’Keefe was decked out in excessively snazzy flesh-peddler couture, and Giles, going by the name “Eden,” wore almost nothing.
The ACORN workers were not the slightest bit judgmental or put off by the request for help in getting financing for a brothel.
Counselor Volda Albert freely offered financial advice to the young couple, and held back on giving out any life advice.
“I can’t tell you don’t do it, because you won’t listen to me,” Albert said.
For tax and banking purposes, and to establish a legitimate income and credit history, Giles was told she needed to start saying she was a “freelancer.”
“Don’t say that you’re a prostitute thing or whatever,” she said.
Albert also suggested that Giles open two accounts at separate banks, depositing no more than $500 each a week to ensure few eyebrows are raised.
As for the rest of the money she earned from turning tricks, Albert told her to hide it away.
“When you buy the house with a back yard. You get a tin . . . and bury it down in there, and you put the money right in, and you put grass over it, and you don’t tell a single soul but yourself where it is,” she said.
Albert even had advice on protecting O’Keefe from getting tied by authorities to Giles’ prostitution.
Her illegally obtained revenue could be given to O’Keefe through an intermediary, and then he could use it for a down payment on the house by applying for a “no doc” loan.
In the earlier videos, counselors offered similar suggestions to a “prostitute,” telling her to list her occupation as “performance artist,” and even offering advice on how to claim as dependants underage girls recruited for the business.
Milagros Rivera, the Brooklyn office administrator advised Giles, “don’t get caught — it’s against the law what you are doing, and there’s a chance you’ll get caught.”
Before bidding them good luck, Albert offered two final suggestions.
“Save for a rainy day,” she said. “And live well.”
O’Keefe, who majored in philosophy at Rutgers University, said he and Giles funded the project themselves. This kind of undercover, guerrilla tactic is the “future of investigative journalism and political activism,” he said.
Inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” Saul Alinsky’s bible for rabble-rousing, more often associated with the left, O’Keefe said he has been targeting and exposing the “absurdities of the enemy by employing their own rules and language.”
“If you can make impossible demands on your enemy, you can destroy them,” he said.
So he began using a hidden camera “in a location I’d rather not disclose” and started visiting ACORN offices around the Northeast.
As with a series of videos O’Keefe made in 2008, in which Planned Parenthood employees agreed to earmark his donations for the abortions of African-American babies, he said he expected ACORN would yield maybe “a few gotcha moments.”
“But we never imagined they would all comply — it’s just disgusting they didn’t just throw us out of the office,” he said.
In a statement released Saturday, ACORN said that it could not defend the actions of its employees but that what O’Keefe and Giles did was criminal.
“And, in fact, a crime it was — our lawyers believe a felony — and we will be taking legal action against Fox and their co-conspirators,” the statement said.
Fox News aired the Baltimore and Washington tapes.
O’Keefe said, “ACORN wants it both ways.”
“You can’t fire the employees and then say I have defamed them,” he said.
jeremy.olshan
@nypost.com