Folks, organized crime operate a myriad of scams the only common denominator being garnering ill-gotten loot at the end. Paul Rioux at the Times Picayune outlines a time-honored scam in the construction industry albeit taken to its most brazen level as Fazzio is alleged in the his indictment to fictitiously billed Garner Services around $1MM with the help of Garner COO Mark Titus. Normally the way this scam works is a rogue employee of the contractor will assist a subcontractor in getting inflated bids by circumventing the procurement process and a kickback is paid at the end to the rogue employee by the sub in question. According to the government Fazzio and Titus took it to a whole new level and indeed having the COO of the contractor running the inside interference certainly helped that illicit process. I’ll add that Garner needs to work on its internal controls because hiding the payments likely involved cost shifting and other nefarious construction accounting tricks.
Of course the government has some time-honored tricks of its own and to the extent Fazzio is ass deep in business with Team River Birch and its management team of Fred Heebe, Jim Ward and his bro Butch (now stinking up the coast) squeezing his balls may be an easy shortcut to getting more dirt on the doings at River Birch, which we already know stinks worse than the landfill on a summer day and Fazzio certainly knows where all the bodies are buried.
When I get back to my office later today I’ll try to dig up the indictment via PACER but in the meantime Rioux’s story is well worth the read.
sop