A Gambino-linked construction official was arrested yesterday and charged with stealing as much as $2 million from the Deutsche Bank building demolition – taking kickbacks in the form of cash, jewelry, Caribbean vacations and Mercedes-Benz and BMW luxury cars.
Yesterday’s grand-larceny charges against John Galt Corp. official Robert Chiarappa, 45, of Brooklyn, were the first officially revealed fruits of a yearlong probe into mob-influenced corruption at the death- and delay-plagued site.
Sources said two project vendors were quietly arrested recently in the ongoing probe into Gambino-family shenanigans at the site, with more indictments to come.
The investigation was launched after two firefighters died in a 2007 fire during demolition work on the 9/11-damaged skyscraper.
“It’s definitely going to ripple out,” one prober said, declining to guess how many arrests are pending.
The mob investigation’s scope was hinted at in something Chiarappa himself told investigators last year, according to court documents: “I wondered when you guys were coming to see me – you were talking to everyone else.”
It was in turning over rocks after the deaths of firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino that investigators uncovered Chiarappa’s massive alleged scheme – a purported rip-off of federal Housing and Urban Development funds described by investigators as an invoice-padding racket.
Chiarappa was the purchasing agent for Galt, a company hired by the building’s owner, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., despite being run by two former heads of the now-defunct, Gambino-run Safeway Environmental Corp.
Chiarappa worked his scheme from at least September 2006 to October 2007, prosecutors said, when the LMDC fired Galt from the $200 million toxin-abatement and deconstruction job two months after the fatal fire.
He convinced vendors to submit false and exaggerated invoices for equipment and other materials, then signed off on the invoices, said Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Chiarappa pleaded not guilty yesterday. He faces up to 15 years in prison.