New York

Santos Aide Who Impersonated McCarthy Staff Member Faces Federal Charges

Published

11 months ago

August 16, 2023

Santos Aide Who Impersonated McCarthy Staff Member Faces Federal Charges

A campaign aide to Representative George Santos who impersonated Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s former chief of staff was charged with wire fraud and identity theft in a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors said the aide, Samuel Miele, was behind “fraudulent fund-raising” emails and phone calls that were sent and made to more than a dozen potential campaign contributors.

In his solicitations, Mr. Miele, 27, claimed to be a “high-ranking aide to a member of the House with leadership responsibilities,” the indictment said. When Mr. Miele successfully obtained campaign contributions, he received a 15 percent commission.

He was arraigned on Wednesday morning in federal court in Brooklyn and pleaded not guilty, according to John Marzulli, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York. He was released on $150,000 bond.

The indictment, which was filed on Tuesday, does not name Mr. Santos, a first-term Republican representing parts of Long Island and Queens. Nor does it provide more details about the House aide Mr. Miele is said to have impersonated or the member with whom he is associated.

But The New York Times and other news outlets have previously reported that Mr. Miele impersonated Mr. McCarthy’s then-chief of staff in a bid to solicit funds for Mr. Santos’s campaign. Mr. McCarthy later confirmed those reports and said that Mr. Miele was fired after Mr. Santos learned of his actions.

“My staff raised concerns when he had a staff member who impersonated my chief of staff, and that individual was let go when Mr. Santos found about it,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters in January. A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy did not respond to a message seeking comment on Wednesday.

According to the indictment, Mr. Miele sent emails from an account with the Republican staff member’s full name and signed his messages using that person’s official title.

Mr. Miele was charged with four counts of wire fraud in connection with specific emails he sent between August and October 2021. He was also charged with aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison if he is convicted.

Mr. Miele’s lawyer, Kevin H. Marino, said in a statement that Mr. Miele “looks forward to complete vindication at trial as soon as possible.”

The case against Mr. Miele was filed by the same legal team that is prosecuting Mr. Santos in a separate case involving wire fraud. In a letter filed Wednesday, the lawyers advised the court that the two cases should be presumed to be related “because the facts of each case arise out of overlapping events.”

Mr. Santos, 35, was charged with 13 counts that include money laundering, wire fraud, theft of public funds and false statements following an investigation into his finances that began last year. He has pleaded not guilty.

His lawyer did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the indictment, Mr. Miele wrote an email to Mr. Santos in which he admitted “faking my identity to a big donor,” but added that he was “high risk, high reward in everything I do.”

Mr. Santos and Mr. Miele have worked closely together over the years. Between June 2020 and January 2022, Mr. Santos’s campaign paid Mr. Miele and a Florida company tied to him more than $90,000 for fund-raising efforts, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. A 2020 recount fund set up to aid Mr. Santos paid $15,000 more for consulting work.

Mr. Miele also collaborated with Mr. Santos on ventures extending beyond his campaign. Mr. Miele’s company was hired by Rise NY, a political action committee focusing on voter registration that was run by Mr. Santos’s sister. And it was contracted to do consulting work in 2021 alongside Mr. Santos’s start-up, Redstone Strategies, for the long-shot congressional campaign of Tina Forte, a Republican running to represent parts of the Bronx and Queens, Federal Election Commission records show.

For his part, Mr. Santos is also facing charges related to fraudulent appeals to donors. Prosecutors accused Mr. Santos and an unnamed associate in 2022 of working together to solicit at least $50,000 in donations for what the two falsely claimed was a super PAC.

Mr. Santos pocketed the money for personal expenses, prosecutors said, including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments.

Karen Zraick contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

New York

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Published

1 day ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

By Ana Ley, Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris

Ana Ley spent more than 12 hours at M.T.A. board meetings last week. Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and 25 of their colleagues spent the morning counting more than 22,000 cars.

July 1, 2024

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

Queens-Midtown Tunnel	50,600
Lincoln Tunnel	49,200
Williamsburg Bridge	27,900
Manhattan Bridge	24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel	23,100
Queensboro Bridge	21,700
Brooklyn Bridge	17,100
Holland Tunnel	15,400
All other entrances	118,000
Total	347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

Published

4 weeks ago

June 3, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

Published

1 month ago

May 31, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter