Shuttered Rikers Island jail had secret lounge, stashes of unused NYC equipment (EXCLUSIVE)
Story by Graham Rayman, New York Daily News •
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Inside a shuttered Rikers Island jail, city investigators in November 2020 discovered a secret lounge with leather couches and a giant TV screen, caches of Correction Department equipment including 17 unused snowblowers — and a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
Who stashed the equipment and built the secret lounge? And why?
Department of Correction (DOC) workers are suspected of building the lounge in the James A. Thomas Center, a 90-year-old facility that was vacated in 2015 after being condemned because of extensive lead and asbestos contamination, the lack of a working fire safety system and other hazards.
The old jail was officially declared off limits to everyone after its closure.
But workers — believed to be correction officers and maintenance staff — used Correction Department plywood to raise a floor in the building, put down wall-to-wall parquet-style carpeting, installed a bathroom, and hacked into plumbing and electrical lines to snatch power and water, according to a December 2021 city Department of Investigation memo obtained by the Daily News.
The investigators found hundreds of thousands of dollars in Correction Department equipment purchased with taxpayer money, including 17 $2,000 snowblowers still with their factory tags and stacks of remote-controlled air conditioners still in boxes.
The investigators also found 339 unused lockers that cost $230,000 and untouched desks.
The items were in some cases hidden in a hallway behind a false wall made out of plywood blocked with equipment or in rooms behind doors secured with combination locks.
It was all unauthorized.
“No one had permission to even go in there,” a former investigator familiar with the case recalled. “It was crazy. That was one of the last things you would expect to see in a jail.”
Three years after the discovery, it’s unclear who built the secret lounge — and whether the Correction Department is adequately tracking the vast amounts of material and equipment it buys with taxpayer funds.
“Some (of the items) had been left so long they were obsolete,” the Investigation Department memo found. “The overall result was enormous waste. There was a complete lack of institutional oversight, and no apparent protocols to account for incoming and outgoing materials, equipment and property.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/shuttered-rikers-island-jail-had-secret-lounge-stashes-of-unused-nyc-equipment-exclusive/ar-AA1iiyTr
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