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Landscape contractor defrauds city for tree planting: workers

It’s a green thumb in the eye.

A Brooklyn-based tree-planting company that rakes in millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts isn’t planting all of the trees it gets paid for and routinely charges the city for work that never gets done, whistleblowers told The Post.

J. Pizzirusso Landscaping is one of several contractors employed by the city Parks Department as part of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Million Trees project.

Since 2007, when Bloomberg and Bette Midler planted the first sapling in The Bronx, Pizzirusso has raked in $12 million worth of contracts from the city to plant trees, according to the Parks Department.

Five current and former Pizzirusso workers claim their employer is ripping the city off. Attorney James Versocki, a former prosecutor with the state attorney general, believes the problem is widespread and is now calling on the city to investigate its landscapers more generally.

Among the allegations:

  • Work crews would take credit for planting trees that were already there — attaching tags to fool inspectors so Pizzirusso would get paid without having to do work. “We put new [inspection] tags on old trees,” a worker for Pizzirusso said. “The reason for the tags was so [the inspectors] could see what year the tree was planted. We would refresh the soil and put down new mulch so the tree looked like it was planted not so long ago.”
  • The company would claim it saw-cut into the sidewalk to plant a tree even if it didn’t — a move that allowed it to bill at a higher rate. “A lawn pit he’d [bill as] a new pit because we’d get paid more money for it,” said a whistleblower who helped prepare Pizzirusso billing records.
  •  Workers at Pizzirusso and elsewhere claim their bosses ordered them to vandalize dead trees so the city, not the contractor, would have to pick up the tab for their replacement. Dead trees are the contractor’s responsibility for two years after they are planted, but vandalized trees are the Parks Department’s problem. The total cost of planting a new tree is $1,450, the Parks Department says. Replacing a vandalized tree costs taxpayers $700.

“Workers are telling me that vandalism occurs almost regularly when there’s a dead tree,” Versocki said at a Feb. 25 hearing with the Parks Department, referring to claims by workers for other landscapers. “They run it over with the truck or they cut it down.”

Workers claim they can’t turn to their union, United Plant and Production Workers Local 175, because they fear complaints of employer wrongdoing will get back to their boss.

Roland Bedwell, Local 175’s business manager, denied that.

“Anytime there’s a problem, I fight for my men,” he said. “My doors are open.”

Workers also fear the union’s alleged organized-crime connections, an accusation Bedwell also vehemently denied.

“It’s just all bulls- -t,” he said.

But a former law-enforcement source and newspaper accounts support a connection.

“Anthony Franco is the administrator of their [benefit] funds. His father, Sal Franco, [has been identified as] a capo with the Gambino family,” said the source. “Anthony is a prime mover.”

Salvatore Franco — whom mob rat Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano identified in testimony as a Gambino member who gave John Gotti contractors’ kickbacks — was reportedly fired as the head of the Pavers and Road Builders District Council in 1998. His son, a reputed mob associate, then stepped into the role, only to be kicked out in 2006.

That same year, Anthony Franco co-founded the 496-member UPPW Local 175 and now runs its lucrative benefits plan.

Franco denied having any connection to the mob.

“It’s all nonsense,” he said. “Absolutely not true.”

Sal Franco, who has never been charged in connection to Mafia activity, could not be reached. Joseph Pizzirusso declined to comment.

Councilman Mark Levine, the Parks Committee chairman, promised to conduct his own inquiries and plans to hold a hearing on the matter.

“It’s really sobering and something we have to take deadly seriously,” Levine said in response to Versocki’s testimony. “We’re going to pursue this with the Department of Investigation for sure.”