Six years, $1M retribution for Seminerio

He served his constituents for over three decades, and now he’ll serve six years in jail.
Disgraced Assemblymember Anthony Seminerio, who resigned in June of last year, was sentenced on Thursday, February 4 by Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald to six years in prison for defrauding the people of New York of his honest services while he was a member of the State Legislature.
“From 1999 through September 2008, Seminerio engaged in a scheme to defraud the public . . . by using a purported consulting firm, ‘Marc Consultants,’ to solicit and receive ‘consulting’ payments . . .,” read Buchwald’s findings.
During the sentencing, she described how Seminerio “accepted bribes and engaged in extortion as part of a decade-long scheme to use his office – both literally and figuratively – for personal gain and at the expense of the public trust.”
Seminerio, 74, pleaded guilty in June of 2009 to charges that he took nearly $1 million from hospitals, a school and other entities for actions he undertook as a member of the State Assembly. He allegedly used Marc Consultants – the consulting firm he ran for nearly eight years – to collect payments for actions he took as a state legislator.
Buchwald found that Seminerio did not perform “any bona fide consulting services that fall outside the scope of activities an elected official could readily be expected to perform on behalf of his or her constituents.”
In addition to the six-year jail sentence, Buchwald also ordered Seminerio to pay $1 million in forfeiture.
“I’m 74 years old,” Seminerio said in published reports following the sentence. “How much time have I left?”
His attorney, Pery Krinsky, told The Courier he had “no comment.”
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara praised the investigators and the work of the court.
“When an elected official such as Seminerio violates the public trust, it threatens the public’s confidence in our democracy,” Bharara said in a statement. “Seminerio was elected to serve the people, not himself. Judge Buchwald’s powerful words and sentence reaffirm the commitment to the fair and impartial exercise of governmental power. We will continue to work tirelessly to prosecute those who betray for private gain the people they are elected to represent.”
In the court’s findings it was revealed that Seminerio approached the founder of a consulting company with which he had been affiliated and demanded a portion of the profits. When the woman refused, the politician “retaliated by writing and calling many of [her] clients, telling them he was no longer associated with the firm, and pressuring some of them to stop paying [her] and instead hire Seminerio. [She] lost her client base and her company folded.”
Another “shakedown,” according to court documents, occurred when Seminerio pressured the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce to become a consulting client. “In January 2000, Seminerio met with [the Chamber] and warned that if [they] failed to hire him, Seminerio would block their efforts in the legislature in Albany. After this meeting, [the Chamber] agreed to hire [him] and paid a monthly fee for approximately two years to Marc Consultants.”
Additionally, Buchwald found, Seminerio used his influence to try to sway the acquisition of Caritas Hospitals, St. John’s Queens and Mary Immaculate.
“Seminerio called a senior New York State Health Department official and assured him that he had ‘a friend of me in the Assembly.’”
When the official said that he had been speaking to “a New York State Senator who supported the acquisition of the Caritas Hospitals by Parkway Hospital, which had previously refused to pay Seminerio consulting fees, Seminerio replied that he would rather see Jamaica Hospital, a client that had paid him nearly a decade’s worth of consulting fees, ‘get it.’”
Court findings say that Seminerio did not disclose to the official that
Jamaica Hospital had hired him, nor did he disclose that Parkway Hospital had refused to do so.
But there are some who feel Seminerio had their best interests at heart.
“He was very good to us,” said Simcha Waisman, President of the One Stop Richmond Hill Community Center. “He provided us with most of our funding for the kids.”
Waisman went on to say that the center always “proved [to Seminerio] where the money was going. His resignation took a big toll.”