ASK YOURSELF WHY THESE NEW YORK SLICKSTERS MADE A $20,000 DONATION TO A MIAMI-DADE MAYOR!
Let's revisit a Post I did that has been on my mind. It is really bothering me. You might say do a public records request of the Mayor's calendar. Well, I did a public records request to Jack Osterholt on June 30th at 2:45pm on something else. I have not heard back. I copied the chair so I have proof it was sent. Not a peep back. That is a violation but that is not what I want to talk about today.
There were 2 expenses on Gimenez's known PAC, MIAMI DADE RESIDENTS FIRST, in New York City. One was for a 3 night's (at least) stay in June or for 3 rooms in the amount of $1,049.78 at the Empire Hotel. The other expense was for a one way cab ride to or from the airport I suppose. No food expenses, no cab ride back. The PAC posted a donation soon after from the owners of the Empire hotel, Amsterdam Hospitality (Podolsky Family) for $20,000.
There is feuding going on between the Homeless Trust and Cammilus House on housing the Homeless. There is not enough room. They are having the homeless sleep on mats under a porch at Cammilus and The Homeless Trust (Ron Book) is pissed. It is front page news. City of Miami Commissioner Mark Sarnoff and Ron Book are trading barbs. Who is going to offer a solution?
Coincidentally Amsterdam buys run down buildings and with public subsidies houses the homeless. They own about 40 buildings in the New York area bought through shell corporations.
According to New York Magazine:
The Podolskys take pains to keep a deniable arm’s length from the shelter business. It operates behind a firewall of arcane lease arrangements and interrelated holding companies, many of which have been placed in the maiden names of the brothers’ wives, Shirley and Sharon. “It may appear that it’s all in the family,” Satnick says, but he claims the structures reflect both the brothers’ status as “passive owners” and the wives’ interests as independent investors. “Stuart and Jay have much bigger fish to fry than what their wives are doing in their business.” (During a legal dispute over a hotel purchase in 1999, a court-appointed referee found it “credible” that Jay and Stuart were “the real players” in the disputed transaction and that their use of their wives’ maiden names in that instance “was to avoid state/city scrutiny” owing to their felony convictions.)
The Podolskys don’t deal with the city; they lease the shelter buildings to companies run by Alan Lapes, a building contractor who has long worked with them. “These buildings are not owned by Mr. Lapes,” Satnick says. “They are owned by the Podolsky family in one way or another.” But Lapes, a blustery guy, serves as a manager and a lightning rod. Over the years, his facilities have been investigated by the police (over criminal activity by a manager and tenants in a Times Square location the Daily News dubbed the “Hell Hotel”) and cited by the city comptroller’s office for safety violations and bookkeeping irregularities. In a recent e-mail, Lapes called those allegations “old [stories] that are on google and for the most part are not true” and said journalists should “look for the good in all of the hard work that I do to help homeless New Yorkers.”
AND:
The city government does not publicize the addresses of shelters, citing the privacy of its homeless “clients.” But a list obtained via a Freedom of Information request suggests the industry is dominated by a handful of competitors. There’s Shimmie Horn, whose father, a notorious slumlord, willed him an empire of hotels. There is a consortium of investors who administer a portfolio of tenement shelters from an unmarked office above a Brooklyn laundromat. Most players operate through shell companies and front men, obscuring their interests, and the Podolskys are particularly secretive. But the evidence suggests the family is among the largest shelter providers, and they are expanding aggressively.
Altogether, public records indicate that the Podolskys own or control close to 40 shelter properties, which house at least 1,300 homeless families, about 11 percent of the city’s total. (Families now make up the vast majority of the homeless population.) A calculation based on city records suggests that the Podolsky-related shelters have generated rents in the range of $90 million since 2010.
AND:
Hess, who earns at least $250,000 annually, has since capitalized on city demand for new shelters, boosting the nonprofit’s revenues to $57 million last fiscal year. DHS officials have said there is no conflict of interest in his dealings with the agency he ran for four years.
The Podolsky shelter business has two prongs. There are a dozen or so Manhattan hotels, some of which the Podolskys have owned since the Koch era. Then there is a collection of outer-borough residential buildings that operate as “cluster” sites—basically, apartments rented by the city to house homeless families. The city’s largest shelter cluster encompasses fourteen locations in the Bronx. All but one of the buildings are owned by the Podolskys.
The cluster shelters still typically open under per diem arrangements, providing minimal social services. In a deposition last year, Hess said that the approach circumvents a “rather lengthy and cumbersome procurement process,” allowing the shelter system to expand and contract “like an accordion.” But it’s controversial, because clusters usually operate with scant oversight. In a recent decision, a state judge likened the city policy to “a CIA black op, spending unbudgeted funds without apparent restraint.”
If you want the quotes to make sense, read the entire article but we are dealing here with unsavory business practices and maybe unsavory people. So, my point is, with the homeless housing front and center, why is Mayor Carlos Gimenez dealing with these New York "businessman," homeless housing specialists? Is he going to SAVE the day with his new pals that New York would like to rid themselves of? They are probably already here. Apparently they are good at hiding behind corporations.
2 of the 24 comments from the NEW YORK MAGAZINE article:
