Critical concrete safety tests were not performed at nearly 100 construction projects over the past decade, Manhattan prosecutors said yesterday.
The projects included sites at three airports, two public schools, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the Lincoln Tunnel, and some of Ground Zero’s biggest rebuilding projects — the Freedom Tower, 7 World Trade Center, and the Trade Center memorial and transit hub.
Building, MTA, schools and Port Authority officials said the concrete is being retested at all sites and has proven safe, thanks to the general practice of overbuilding for strength as well as to redundancies in the testing process.
Stallone Testing Labs — indicted on fraud charges yesterday — was to conduct tests at only one level of the process, the designing of the specific “recipe,” or ratio, of sand, cement, and chemicals needed for a particular job, officials said.
Still, Stallone’s wholesale fabrication of safety tests that were never conducted tears at the “safety net” of precautions, said Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau. And at some of the affected projects — the Freedom Tower, the Goldman Sachs Building, 11 Penn Square and the Second Avenue Subway — Stallone’s alleged failure to strength-test the “recipe” was followed by a second, larger company’s alleged failure to strength-test the actual poured concrete.
The indictment of Stallone and its lab director, William Bayer, 69, of Bronxville, is part of the same ongoing DA and city Department of Investigations probe that resulted in charges last fall against that second concrete-testing company, Testwell Laboratories.
Testwell’s execs are scheduled to be tried in November on fraud and racketeering charges. But racketeering charges couldn’t be brought at Stallone. Two of its executives dropped dead of heart attacks in January, two months after a search warrant was executed at the company’s Port Chester headquarters, leaving only Bayer above ground to be prosecuted — and one person does not a racket make.
“This case exposes yet another crack in the foundation of the concrete-testing industry in New York City,” said DOI Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn.
Bayer’s lawyer, Luigi DiMaio, insisted Stallone did all the required tests. “What I think is that the District Attorney’s Office has such an abysmal lack of understanding of the concrete industry that what it’s saying makes no sense,” the lawyer said.