October 2, 2005
Hisses for Dr. Tassone
NY TIMES

Frank A. Tassone's plea bargain last Monday for his role in the systematic plundering of the Roslyn schools was a vivid example of why punishments for white-collar criminals can seem so dissonant and dissatisfying. Dr. Tassone, the former Roslyn school superintendent, pleaded guilty to stealing $2 million of the $11 million that officials estimate was looted from the school district, and agreed to cooperate with the district attorney, Denis Dillon, who has several defendants to go before he is done with this scandal. In return, Dr. Tassone, who has promised to pay back his share of what has been called the biggest theft from a school system in American history, will probably face only 4 to 12 years in prison, not a maximum of 25. Hapless pot smokers have done more hard time than that.

Dr. Tassone said he was sorry, but he wrapped his apology in a gauze of self-pity and euphemism. "These egregious errors have irrevocably damaged, if not destroyed, my career in public education," he said. "I cannot adequately explain the pain my errors have caused me."

The hisses and shouts in the courtroom showed what some Roslyn parents think of Dr. Tassone's pain, and of the deal he struck with Mr. Dillon. It's easy to see why hard-working mothers and fathers would resent the lush life Dr. Tassone bestowed upon himself, and how maddening they would find his use of the exculpatory passive voice, lumping years of stolen meals, vacations, luxury-car loans and $1,000-a-day cash withdrawals into the benign, all-purpose "error" category.

But the bitter pill of misapplied justice may go down easier if one takes the longer view, and puts the problems of Roslyn and Long Island's other scandalous school districts into perspective. This is not to sugarcoat a shocking abuse of public trust, but to draw some consolation from its consequences - people heading to prison and an energized and somewhat-better-financed state comptroller's office continuing its effort to audit school districts across the state.

The state still needs to come up with more money to finance the comptroller's office, but at least regular school audits are back, after having been suspended years ago in a short-sighted budget-cutting move. School boards, stunned by the scandals and a wave of rejected budgets, have enacted spending controls and put policies in writing. In some cases, audits have found local school boards performing their duties with professionalism and skill.

And the fact remains that the well-educated, college-bound children of Roslyn do not seem to have suffered much. What parent there would want his or her child to change places with a boy or girl down the road in Hempstead, for example, where the school board is morbidly dysfunctional, test scores are rock-bottom and the damage from years of educational malpractice differs by several orders of magnitude?

The shameful story of Dr. Tassone embodies the truths hidden in more than a few clichés - about following the money, watching the watchdogs and getting what you pay for. It is sad that the taxpayers of Roslyn have paid such a high price for this hard lesson, but its benefits are beginning to be felt. We hope they will endure long after Dr. Tassone becomes an ex-con and the obscure answer to a trivia question.

Dr. Tassone: For the Record
To the Editor:

Re "Hisses for Dr. Tassone" (editorial, Oct. 2):

I am no longer going to remain quiet when lies and distortions are written about me. First, I was not systematically "plundering" the Roslyn schools. Second, I pleaded guilty to taking $1.1 million, not $2 million. Much of that money was spent on school expenses yet to be reviewed by the district attorney.

To say that I was "wrapped" in "a gauze of self-pity and euphemism" is insensitive and mean-spirited. My last year has been quite painful: I lost my job, reputation, career and licenses, and I could receive a prison sentence of 4 to 12 years.

I don't believe for a minute that "hapless pot smokers have done more hard time than that." I know of drug dealers and child molesters who have served far less time.

My "lush life" you write about included 14-hour days for many years while I moved the district forward and met the many goals of the Board of Education.

The "stolen meals" you write about included breakfasts, lunches and sometimes dinners away from my family with representatives of the N.A.A.C.P., a columnist, the high school guidance department, the Board of Education, and Matthew Shepherd's parents and other guest speakers I brought to Roslyn.

I had no luxury car loans, but was given a car allowance toward my car, and the vacations you write about were in most cases speaking engagements or trips to the Harrow School in Britain, with whom we had a faculty exchange program.

I hope the hard-working mothers and fathers in Roslyn also remember how much the schools improved as a result of my leadership. Their real estate values have increased like nowhere else in the country primarily because of the schools. The student population increased by 33 percent during my 12 years in the district.

I am not a danger to society; drug dealers and rapists are. I was given erroneous advice by the auditor and the assistant superintendent for business. And I never made $1,000-a-day cash withdrawals.

Frank Tassone
New York
The writer is the former Roslyn school superintendent.

To the Editor:

While your Oct. 2 editorial about Dr. Frank Tassone recognized correctly some important societal benefits that will emerge from this scandal, the characterization of the disposition of the criminal charges was unfair.

The reference to "hapless pot smokers" doing more than 4 to 12 years in prison displays unfamiliarity with the criminal justice system in New York. A person would have to possess more than 10 pounds of marijuana to receive such a sentence. That is hardly "hapless conduct."

The imposition of a 4-to-12-year sentence on a 60-year-old individual who has waived all his rights to trial and appeal, forfeited $2 million without civil litigation and agreed to cooperate in an important continuing investigation is hardly "misapplied justice."

I suggest that this disposition successfully balanced the need to punish the defendant, return the money stolen from the children of Roslyn and advance the investigation into the wrongdoing of others.

Denis Dillon
District Attorney, Nassau County
Mineola

More Embezzlement Findings Made Public
By Joe Scotchie

LINK

As the investigation into the Roslyn School District embezzlement scandal deepens, more eye-opening revelations continue to be made public.

One finding by Nassau County officials concerns alleged check-paying procedures. Another has to do with two British vacations taken by Dr. Frank A. Tassone, the district's former superintendent.

The Nassau County District Attorney's office recently filed court papers, which claimed that checks written to school vendors for the Roslyn district went, in fact, to credit card bills. Published reports said that Dr. Tassone compiled most of the bills.

The court papers claim that up to 178 checks were allegedly embezzled by school district officials. Such activity took place between May 2000 and August 2002. Published reports noted that the checks totaled $1.1 million and went to pay for furniture, jewelry, meals, hotels, cruises, and airline tickets, plus rent for Dr. Tassone's Manhattan apartment and bills from a local dry cleaner. County prosecutors believe there is up to $7.8 million in suspicious expenses to be examined.

In addition, court papers contend that Dr. Tassone, once he learned he would be arrested, attempted to hide his assets by transferring $300,000 into a securities account, one that had been opened in his two sisters' names.

Once he was implicated in the scandal, a state Supreme Court justice froze Dr. Tassone's assets. Some of the assets of his sisters have also been frozen.

In addition, investigators have unearthed travel records from Majestic Travel, a Lindenhurst travel agency that reveals two trips made to Great Britain by Dr. Tassone. One trip took place in 2001. Published reports did not reveal the date of the other trip. The total bill for the two trips was $52,767.48. Published reports state that Dr. Tassone traveled on the Concorde and once in London, stayed at a $1,800-per night hotel suite. All bills, court records claim, were paid by the Roslyn School District.

On June 4, Dr. Tassone was relieved of his duties as superintendent by the school board, mainly over conflict of interest between Dr. Tassone and WordPower, word processing company that had been a vendor for the school district since 1993.

One month later, on July 6, Dr. Tassone was charged in First District Court in Hempstead on charges of grand larceny, first degree. Dr. Tassone pleaded not guilty to such charges and was released on a $50,000 bond. The grand larceny charges are a Class B Felony and punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

County investigators continue to tell the media that similar charges against more district employees and contractors could be in the offering. So far, only one other former district employee, Pamela Gluckin has been charged. On Sept. 20, Ms. Gluckin will appear in Nassau County Criminal Court in Mineola as part of grand larceny charges brought earlier against her.

How it all started:

A Suspicious Clerk and a School Scandal
By PAUL VITELLO, NY TIMES, Published: October 6, 2005

LINK

It was a clerk at a Home Depot store in Selden, on Long Island, who raised the first alarm three years ago about what one state official later described as the nation's largest school system embezzlement.
The clerk thought it odd, prosecutors said on Wednesday, that a man with a Roslyn school district credit card was buying construction material at the Home Depot store in Selden, 35 miles east of Roslyn. There are many Home Depot stores in between. But even more odd was the address to which the stuff was being delivered, in Center Moriches, 50 miles east of Roslyn.

The clerk's phone call to Roslyn officials was the first hint of a scheme that the authorities say resulted in the embezzlement of $11 million in school money, led to the arrest of top school administrators and inspired State Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi to describe the Roslyn scandal as 'the largest, most remarkable, most extraordinary theft' from a school system 'in American history.'

John McCormick, 40, the man prosecutors say was using that Roslyn school credit card, and to whose home that construction material was shipped, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with grand larceny. Prosecutors said he had been given the card by his mother, Pamela Gluckin, the former assistant schools superintendent for business, who is accused of stealing more than $4 million from the district over a period of years.

At a news conference on Wednesday, the Nassau County district attorney, Denis Dillon, said Mr. McCormick used his card to buy $85,000 worth of construction material from Home Depot stores in Selden and other Long Island towns, all of it paid for by the Roslyn school district, and all of it used by Mr. McCormick in his private contracting business. An audit by Mr. Hevesi's office found that Mr. McCormick's card was one of 74 school credit cards in unauthorized circulation among family and friends of Mrs. Gluckin and other school employees charged in the fraud.

Mr. McCormick faces a maximum of 15 years in prison. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in the county's District Court, and was released without bail.

Mr. McCormick's mother and his cousin, Debra Rigano, who is accused of stealing about $780,000, face grand larceny charges. Another major defendant, Frank A. Tassone, the former school superintendent, pleaded guilty last month to comparable charges. He agreed to pay back what he stole, an amount prosecutors place at $2 million, and will receive a 4-to-12-year prison term when he is sentenced on Nov. 29.

The authorities consider the Roslyn embezzlement scandal extraordinary in several respects, not only for the size of the theft, but for its having eluded the attention of prosecutors for as long as it did.

The Home Depot clerk's phone call, for example, the tip that Assistant District Attorney Peter Mancuso now identifies as 'where it all began,' was made three years ago, in October 2002.

But instead of leading directly to a criminal investigation, the tip was checked first by the school system's auditor, Andrew Miller. Mr. Miller reported his findings to the superintendent at the time, Dr. Tassone. Dr. Tassone took the matter to the Roslyn School board with a dire warning. He told them that the school district's reputation would suffer immensely if the matter became public, several board members have said.

So, though Mr. Miller's audit identified $250,000 allegedly stolen by Mrs. Gluckin and her son, a sum later found to be a small fraction of the actual loss, the school board decided to allow her to repay that amount and to resign in October 2002.

The true scope of the fraud did not begin to emerge until February 2004, when members of the school board, the district attorney and several local newspapers received copies of an anonymous letter alleging that Mrs. Gluckin and Dr. Tassone had been involved in a long-term embezzlement of school funds, and that the amount of the theft was in the millions. With citations and specific allegations that lent it credibility, the letter led to simultaneous investigations by various authorities. The author of the letter has never been identified.

In addition to indictments against Dr. Tassone, Mrs. Gluckin, Mrs. Rigano and Mr. McCormick, the investigation led to a 26-count criminal indictment last month against Mr. Miller, the auditor, on charges of falsifying school business records to help cover up the thefts. Others may yet be indicted, Mr. Dillon said. In the matter of unauthorized Home Depot purchases alone, he said, Mr. McCormick's alleged $85,000 theft accounts for only a part of $587,000 in unauthorized purchases made from various stores in the chain with Roslyn school credit cards.

That so many purchases over a period of about six years raised only one clerk's suspicion or roused only one to make a phone call probably added to the long wait before the fraud was exposed, prosecutors said.

'It's rare for people to extend themselves in a matter in which they have no interest,' said Mr. Mancuso, the assistant district attorney, who did not identify the Home Depot clerk he named as 'the one who made this whole thing start to unravel, the one who took that step no one else did.'

He said he was grateful for the uncommon character of that clerk.