Nycha Investigation: Employees Drank on the Job and Had Sex With Subordinates

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/nyregion/nycha-investigation-.html

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When the entire 40-person staff of a public housing development in the Bronx was quietly reassigned in August, resident leaders offered an unlikely explanation for the staff transfer: They claimed workers had been engaging in alcohol-fueled sex parties on the job.

The allegations were disturbing, even by the standards of the controversy-prone New York City Housing Authority, which has come under fire for its mismanagement, cover-ups and general state of crisis.

City investigators began to look into the sensational claims last year and, on Tuesday, the city’s Department of Investigation said that its monthslong investigation found no signs of sex parties.

However, the investigation revealed troubling evidence of “a culture of misconduct, employee mistreatment and favoritism” led by two former managers of the Throggs Neck Houses, a 29-building complex that is home to more than 2,500 low-income New Yorkers.

The report was only six pages, but it painted a damning portrait of an egregious work environment where managers routinely retaliated against subordinates, rigged contracts and destroyed appliances meant for residents. They also clocked overtime without working extra hours, and drank alcohol and held on-site parties.

A spokeswoman for the mayor said Nycha was seeking to dismiss the two managers accused of misconduct in the report. But critics said the findings were emblematic of widespread systemic failure at the housing agency and insufficient oversight of the city’s 325 housing projects where 400,000 people live.

Below are some of the report’s most startling findings.

The report described a hostile workplace where two managers, Brianne Pawson and Wallace Vereen, bullied and threatened employees, and openly boasted about the power they wielded.

Ms. Pawson, the daughter of Charles Pawson, who was in charge of maintenance at Nycha-run buildings before retiring over the summer, began working at the Throggs Neck Houses in 2016, and once said in front of staff members that one worker “should rape” another worker, the report said. On a separate occasion, she said she wanted someone to break the legs of an employee whom she suspected of filing a complaint against her.

The two would give better work assignments to employees “in their clique” and retaliate against those they did not like, once forcing a longtime groundskeeper into retirement. Mr. Vereen, who became the development’s housing manager in 2017, once said he ran Throggs Neck “like a jail,” according to the report.

Neither Ms. Pawson nor Mr. Vereen returned calls or messages on Tuesday.

Both managers were involved in sexual relationships with several of their subordinates and “improperly favored their paramours in work-related decisions,” according to the report.

One employee told investigators he was given twice the work when he ended a consensual relationship with Ms. Pawson. Another employee, according to the report, said Mr. Vereen would retaliate against female employees who refused to have sex with him.

Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, said that Nycha suspended both managers in September and placed them in “nonsupervisory, office positions.”

“This blatant misconduct is appalling and completely unbefitting of any Nycha employee, especially those in supervisory roles,” Ms. Lapeyrolerie said.

Alcohol was prevalent during working hours, the investigation found.

Ms. Pawson would routinely send a worker to buy alcohol at a nearby store to hold parties at one of the development’s offices, the report stated. Employees told investigators that Ms. Pawson frequently walked around the development sipping from a plastic cup filled with alcohol and Red Bull and that Mr. Vereen sometimes smelled of alcohol.

Indeed, a bottle of vodka, wine and chilled shot glasses were found in an employee refrigerator after the staff shake-up. A caretaker was also arrested on drunken-driving charges after crashing into a police car after she punched out of work at Throggs Neck last summer, the report said.

Ms. Pawson also abused overtime rules and sometimes allowed her workers to clock in, leave for their eight-hour overtime shift and return to clock out, the report found. The managers also cut the power cords of residents’ refrigerators in an attempt to frame an assistant superintendent whom they wanted to force out, according to the D.O.I. report.

Ritchie Torres, a city councilman who grew up in the Throggs Neck Houses, said the report highlighted the lack of oversight over the city’s sprawling public housing system.

“The failures at Throggs Neck are no abstraction to me,” said Mr. Torres, a vocal critic of the housing agency. “They’re deeply personal. There was a clear culture of abuse, but the question I have is how such abusive an environment could go unnoticed for so long.”