A Bronx assemblyman on Gov. Cuomo’s transition team attempted to shower his pet organization with hundreds of thousands in taxpayer cash even as federal investigators were closing in on the questionable group.
Democrat Peter Rivera steered almost $2.2 million in government dough to Neighborhood Enhancement for Training and Services since 2000, including nearly $400,000 in member items after the feds launched a probe in 2008 that led to last week’s indictment of NETS Executive Director David Griffiths.
But Rivera, 63, had few answers when investigators quizzed him about Griffiths, his campaign treasurer and former law partner.
The lawmaker told them he had no knowledge of the group’s day-to-day dealings and didn’t even know if Griffiths drew a salary, according to court papers.
But not only was NETS wholly financed by Rivera’s pork, it also shared space with his law firm, Rivera & Suarez, at 7 Hugh Grant Circle in Parkchester. Griffiths worked for both the law firm and the nonprofit.
Rivera even paid $35,000 out of the firm’s own funds to divide the office in 2001 to make room for NETS, according to architect Timothy Nanni and contractor Giovanni Cupelli. The barely functioning organization claimed it spent $29,266 in rent between July 2007 and June 2008 for the space.
The relationship between Rivera and the nonprofit was so cozy that the architect was under the impression that the lawmaker was running NETS when he was hired to design the group’s community center and headquarters in a converted synagogue on Virginia Avenue.
“I thought that it was Peter’s thing,” Nanni said, “that if they got the community center going, that would be a feather in his cap as a politician.”
But Nanni’s Virginia Avenue blueprints are just dusty scrolls. He said that he was paid between $60,000 and $70,000 for his designs but that the project never got off the ground. Griffiths stopped communicating with him in 2006.
“It just died,” Nanni said of the project. Cupelli also said he performed basic work but never completed a total overhaul.
Rivera secured a $400,000 grant from the Dormitory Authority in 2001 to buy the former synagogue and three years later heaped on another $400,000 state agency grant for renovations, $354,384 of which was actually paid to the group.
But the taxpayer-financed space is an empty shell. A peek through a rusty mail slot on its flimsy wooden doors reveals a squalid space where a handful of dust-caked computers sit amid garbage. No renovations are readily evident.
The only thing that has changed is the value of the site, which has vaulted to $830,000, according to city records.
Rivera told The Post he didn’t know about conditions at the mothballed center and hadn’t visited it “in several years.”
That didn’t stop the lawmaker from funneling money to NETS.
The law firm gave at least $322,416 to NETS for operating expenses, and Rivera told investigators he didn’t know the total amount of the no-interest loans or whether they had been paid back.
NETS last received state money in December 2008, which should have been claimed on a 2009 tax return. The group never filed one.
The money trail might be of interest to the feds, who told The Post the investigation is “ongoing.”
Meanwhile, an Albany job for Rivera, who had recently bragged that Gov. Cuomo was eyeing him for a state appointment, appears dead, sources said.
Additional reporting by Frederic U. Dicker