Embattled Rep. Gregory Meeks ended weeks of dodging yesterday, taking to TV to insist he’s in the dark about the gone-missing money from a Hurricane Katrina charity fund he championed.
In his most extensive remarks since a series of Post stories investigating New Yorkers Organized to Assist Hurricane Families (NOAH-F) — the Katrina fund-raising arm of a local development corporation he helped create — Meeks was adamant that poring over the books was not his job.
Watch the entire interview on NY1
“There is no connection,” Meeks said on NY1’s “Inside City Hall.”
“I was not in charge of administering the funds. It was a community organization.”
Later he said, “When community people come and say they want to do good things and they want me to lend my name to it, that’s exactly what I would do . . .
“It was never set up for me to oversee. I’m a member of Congress!” he bellowed.
EDITORIAL: MEEKS’ LAME EXCUSES
His disavowal came after weeks of dodging comment — including canceling a previous NY1 interview — after The Post broke the story that NOAH-F had doled out only $1,392 of the at least $31,000 it had raised for Katrina victims.
Five years after promising that “every dime” of the money raised would go to the hurricane’s refugees, Meeks said he was just as curious as anyone else about where the funds had gone.
“I, like you, want to know where the money is,” he told NY1.
Federal prosecutors are also wondering, and have launched a probe into NOAH-F.
Meeks said the feds haven’t contacted him.
Shortly after the catastrophic 2005 hurricane devastated the Gulf Coast, Meeks told reporters that the NOAH-F funds would help out 30 families who had lost everything.
But after the initial story detailing the unaccounted-for cash, The Post tracked down Louis Rainey, a former Democratic political official in Louisiana whom Meeks had tapped to help identify critically needy families there.
Meeks aide Candace Sandy was given a list of families. But Rainey told The Post they “never saw a dime.”
Rainey said Meeks’ staffers “came down here, sold a good story and didn’t deliver.”
After intense scrutiny following The Post’s reports, Meeks earlier this month suddenly said the funds went instead to help hurricane victims who had relocated to a Radisson hotel in Queens.
His team later said they were referring to his own office’s work at the hotel, not the fund’s.
However, a story in yesterday’s Post — in which several charity organizers and victims were interviewed — found little evidence of any NOAH-F relief work at the Radisson.
Still, Meeks invited the NY1 reporter to his office to look at his files of work his congressional staff did at the hotel.
Meeks and another Queens Democrat, state Sen. Malcolm Smith, helped create New Direction Local Development Corp., the charity that ran NOAH-F.
The NOAH-F Web site urged donors to make contributions to Meeks, Smith and Assemblywoman Barbara Clark on behalf of the victims. Those three happily posed with an oversize $10,000 check from a fund-raiser.