Metro

Nonprofit pays for sax

Famed saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s company blew the cash and didn’t pay back taxpayers.

Harmolodic, a recording studio owned by Coleman and his son Denardo, stopped making payments on a $200,000 loan it received from a politically powerful Harlem nonprofit, The Post has learned.

The taxpayer-backed Business Resource & Investment Service Center claimed it could not even find Coleman to get the money, despite the 2007 Pulitzer-winning jazz musician’s international reputation and a Web site littered with contact numbers for him.

The failed loan and the seemingly lackluster effort to collect it raises more questions about BRISC and its parent nonprofit, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), a favorite charity of Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel.

UMEZ, funded with $249 million in federal, state and city money, and its small-business loan program have already come under fire in recent months:

* UMEZ fired senior loan officer Ellingston Clark after The Post revealed two weeks ago that he processed a $150,000 loan for his landlord, a Harlem businessman.

* Kelvin Crucey, the senior VP for finance at UMEZ and the principal officer of BRISC, pleaded guilty in federal court last month in a $250,000 tax-refund scheme tied to a tax-preparation business he ran on the side. He was fired last month.

The loan to the Colemans was another effort to expand development in Harlem. But the studio made less than $5,000 in payments on the 2002 loan, which was written off five years later.

Coleman was later located and deposed as part of the BRISC lawsuit to get the money back, according to a spokesman for the non-profit. But the group still claimed in a loan performance report filed in June with the Empire State Development agency that it could not find Coleman.

An attorney for Ornette Coleman refused to explain the failed loan other than to say the suit was thrown out in July 2007.

The loan was one of 21 written off by BRISC since 1997. Of $8.3 million in loans the group has given out, $2.6 million was written off as of June 30.

BRISC contends that it anticipates the loan failures because it is providing “higher-risk loans.”

melissa.klein@nypost.com