A former senior Metro-North procurement official was sentenced to at least a year in prison for fixing lucrative Metropolitan Transportation Authority bids for a vendor in exchange for $70,000 in kickbacks.
for a vendor in exchange for $70,000 in kickbacks, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced Tuesday.
“This former Metro-North contract manager misused taxpayer dollars and railroaded a contracting process that should have been decided based on free competition,” said Bragg in a statement on Sept. 13. When it looked like WRS wouldn’t get the deal, he made sure the request for proposals was restarted allowing two companies to get the work instead of just one.
In 2017, while overseeing a contract to remove asbestos from Metro-North properties, including at Grand Central Terminal in Midtown, Berlangero leaked confidential information on two existing vendors to WRS, including their pricing, teeing up the firm’s successful bid for the $400,000 in remediation work.
Rodgers also deposited some $8,000 in cash in Berlangero’s credit union account and gave $10,000 to the transit chief’s brother-in-law for a car racing sponsorship.