A Forest City Ratner executive whose cozy relationship with state Sen. Carl Kruger is featured in a new criminal complaint against the Brooklyn politician personally lobbied a Yonkers councilman hours before a controversial vote that later led to bribery charges against a councilwoman.
Yonkers Council Majority Leader John Murtagh Jr. said FCR Vice President Bruce Bender leaned on him in 2006 to change his expected vote opposing a controversial FCR development. The meeting was set up hours before a Yonkers council vote by then-Yonkers Republican Party chairman Zehy Jereis.
Bender, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, was the point man for FCR’s efforts to win the Yonkers council’s approval for the $630 million 81-acre “Ridge Hill” retail, commercial and residential development there.
Murtagh told The Post that Jereis called him “hours before the vote” and asked him to meet at a Yonkers Starbucks.
When he arrived, Jereis, who was with Bender, warned Murtagh that Councilwoman Sandy Annabi “is going to vote ‘yes,’ so this is going to pass, and it would help me politically if I vote in favor of it also,” Murtagh recalled.
Murtagh said he refused, adding, “I don’t make decisions like that, to do so would be political suicide.“ Jereis in Oct. 2006 was given a one-year, $60,000 real estate consulting contract by FCR in what prosecutors claim was a payoff by the company for getting Annabi to drop her opposition to the development.
Jereis had no experience in the real estate business and never submitted monthly work reports to FCR until March 2007 when the feds began dropping subpoenas as part of the Yonkers investigation, prosecutors said.
Last year, Annabi was charged by federal authorities with accepting more than $166,000 in bribes to vote in favor of Ridge Hill and another Yonkers development.
A Forest City spokesman said the firm “cooperated fully with the U.S. Attorney’s investigation in Yonkers. Neither the company nor any of its employees were found to have behaved in an inappropriate manner.”
FCR’s many New York City projects include the $4 billion Atlantic Yards development for Brooklyn.