So a convicted felon behind bars after 20 years on the lam is allowed to throw two catered parties in a city lockup — and those responsible only lose two weeks’ vacation?
That’s ridiculous.
As The Post’s Dan Mangan and Reuven Blau reported yesterday, financial-scammer Tuvia Stern last December threw a catered bar mitzvah for his son — complete with fancy china, a singer and a band — at the downtown lockup known as the Tombs.
Then Stern hosted his daughter’s engagement party there four months later.
Both times, taxpayers footed the overtime bill for the guards.
So how did Stern — who fled to Brazil and spent 20 years there before finally being nailed for a $1.7 million grand-larceny scam — get away with it?
Well, for one thing, he had a real rabbi: politically juiced Rabbi Leib Glanz — who got Imam Umar Abdul-Hamid, the assistant corrections commissioner for ministerial services, to sign off on it.
(Abdul-Hamid was suspended for two weeks back in 2006 after The Post disclosed that he’d given a speech denouncing “Zionists of the media.”)
The jail’s warden, George Okada, and two department chiefs, Peter Curcio — who reportedly overrode the deputy warden’s objections — and Frank Squillante, also were in on the deal.
So what did outgoing Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn do about it?
Well, as The Post reports today, DOC Chief of Department Carolyn Thomas, who conducted an internal probe, recommended that Glanz be fired and that the others all be demoted or suspended.
But Horn handed out a wrist-slap: Glanz got suspended for two weeks. The other four lost two weeks of vacation.
Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t saying much yesterday, other than that the parties “should [not] have taken place.”
Ya think?
He’s ordered a DOI investigation.
That probe had better result in a smaller Corrections Department payroll.