WHAT A HEEL: Reading, Writing And Ripping-Off
While working as a $200,000-a-year technology consultant to the NYC Board of Education, Willard Lanham, 58, (allegedly) embezzled $3.6 million from a billion-dollar school-wiring and Internet-access project over six years, and has been charged mail fraud and theft, reports The New York Times:
[Lanham] used layers of contractors and subcontractors to hide his scheme, and each of them profited a little from it, according to the federal complaint. He hired several people, including a brother, to work on the city contract, then billed another company for those hires, marking up the invoices. The company, for its part, charged Verizon or I.B.M., the two major vendors, more than what it had paid Mr. Lanham.
According to a report by Richard J. Condon, a special investigator for the city schools, Verizon and I.B.M., in turn, billed the Education Department, also marking up the amounts. Verizon marked up the bills by $800,000, and I.B.M. by $400,000, said Mr. Condon’s report, which he had forwarded to the federal authorities. “I.B.M. and Verizon, by their silence, facilitated this fraud,” the report said. …
Mr. Lanham, known as Ross, was hired as a consultant for the Education Department in 2000, part of a team charged with handling the installation of Internet cables and connections in city schools, as well as a cost-savings system to centralize the department’s telephone bill payments. By 2002, he had become the projects’ manager, in charge of a costly contract and many people, with seemingly no oversight. …
The federal complaint says that with the money he made, Mr. Lanham and his wife bought a Corvette, a Porsche and other equally expensive cars, and he tried his hand at real estate, building luxurious homes on a piece of land he owned on eastern Long Island.
Verizon and I.B.M. cooperated with the authorities, and neither has been implicated in the case. Verizon says it was “prepared to return any inappropriate profits” to the Education Department.
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