Attorney General James Announces Guilty Pleas of Bronx Nonprofit and Executive Director for Stealing Millions of Dollars Intended for Homeless New Yorkers
NOV 22, 2021 | REPUBLISHED BY LIT: NOV 23, 2021
Millennium Care, Executive Director Ethel Denise Perry, Evaded Taxes,
Stole Over $2 Million from Homeless Shelter to Fund Lavish Shopping Sprees
NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the guilty pleas of nonprofit Millennium Care, Inc. and its executive director Ethel Denise Perry for tax evasion and theft of millions of dollars. Perry evaded taxes for years and stole more than $2 million to support her luxury lifestyle. The money stolen from Millennium Care was meant for the operation of a homeless shelter located at 980 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx.
“Stealing money that is earmarked for people experiencing homelessness is as immoral as it is illegal,” said Attorney General James. “This individual broke the law by failing to pay taxes while taking money from a homeless shelter in order provide a luxurious lifestyle for herself and her family members. Such actions will never be tolerated in New York, and I will continue to do everything within my power to hold those who take advantage of vulnerable communities accountable.”
Millennium Care operated a homeless shelter out of a 100-room hotel owned by Perry in the Bronx. Millennium Care received more than $10 million in funding from the New York City Department of Homeless Services to provide short-term housing services to homeless individuals. Between 2013 and 2016, Perry used Millennium Care as her own personal piggy bank and illegally took more than $2 million from Millennium Care for luxury shopping sprees at retailers such as Tiffany & Co. and Bergdorf Goodman, and to pay for her cars, gym membership, and other personal expenses. Perry also used the nonprofit to hire her brother, William Perry, and nephew, Jose Colon, and paid them far in excess of their reported salaries.
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Perry, knowingly and with intent to evade her tax obligations, grossly underreported her income in 2013, then failed to file taxes from 2014 through 2019. In 2018, Perry filed late returns for 2015 and 2016, but underreported her income for those years by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In New York County Supreme Court on Friday, Perry pleaded guilty to Criminal Tax Fraud in the Second Degree, a class C felony, and Millennium Care, Inc. pleaded guilty to Grand Larceny in the First Degree, a class B felony. Perry’s felony plea agreement bars her from nonprofit service, and requires her to pay the $1,138,208 that she owes in New York City and state taxes, penalties, and interest during a five-year probation sentence. Millennium Care, Inc. will pay a fine of $2,394,169 and will be dissolved for its participation in numerous regulatory violations and crimes, including failure to make required filings with the Office of the Attorney General’s Charities Bureau and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Contract Services. After the plea was entered Friday afternoon, the Court imposed the promised sentence.
The Attorney General’s Office thanks the New York State Department of Tax and Finance for their assistance on this case.
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“This is an appalling case of greed and callous disregard for those desperate for help, one that unfairly tarnishes all the charitable organizations throughout New York who do so much good,” said Acting Commissioner of Taxation and Finance Amanda Hiller. “By flouting her tax obligations, the perpetrator also deprived communities of critical funding for other essential public services. We will continue to work with all our partners in law enforcement to help ensure that justice prevails.”
Prosecuting the case is Assistant Attorney General Kevin B. Frankel of the Attorney General’s Public Integrity Bureau, with assistance from Legal Analyst Crystal Bisbano, under the supervision of Bureau Chief Gerard Murphy. The Criminal Justice Division is led by Chief Deputy Attorney General for Criminal Justice Jose Maldonado. The investigation was conducted by Investigators Bill Fitzgerald, Frank Tirri, and Ray Almodovar, under the supervision of Detective Supervisor Mike Leahy, with the assistance of Deputy Chief Auditor Sandy Bizzarro. The Investigations Division Unit is led by Chief Investigator Oliver Pu-Folkes.
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Eric Adams, N.Y.C.’s likely next mayor, wants to turn shuttered hotels into permanent housing for the homeless.
SEP 21, 2021 | REPUBLISHED BY LIT: NOV 23, 2021
Hotels in New York City that have been left empty by the pandemic would be converted into “supportive housing” that provides assistance to people struggling with mental illness or substance abuse and to people leaving the prison system, under a plan proposed on Monday by Eric Adams, who is likely to be the city’s next mayor.
More than 20 percent of the city’s hotels are now closed, a trade association says. At the same time, the city faces a homelessness crisis, growing sentiment against warehousing homeless people in barrackslike shelters and a lot of severely mentally ill people living in the streets.
“The combination of Covid-19, the economic downturn and the problems we’re having with housing is presenting us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr. Adams, who won the June Democratic primary for mayor, said as he stood outside a boarded-up hotel in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. “Use these hotels not to be an eyesore, but a place where people can lay their eyes on good, affordable, quality housing.”
Details of the plan were thin. Mr. Adams mentioned the possibility of 25,000 converted hotel rooms, but he said that he would focus on boroughs outside Manhattan, where the number of rooms in closed hotels is much smaller than that.
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He was not clear about whether there was any overlap between his plan and those that the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the former governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, have already begun to build 25,000 supportive housing units in the city by about 2030. A spokesman for Mr. Adams’s campaign said that Mr. Adams was also considering converting rooms in former hotels that have already become homeless shelters into permanent supportive-housing apartments, something that Mr. de Blasio has also discussed.
Mr. Adams said that creating studio apartments in existing hotels would be far cheaper and faster than building affordable housing from scratch.
During the mayoral primary, he was one of several candidates who called for creating housing in updated versions of single room occupancy hotels, or S.R.O.s, a form of housing once synonymous with seediness and crime that were torn down en masse in the late 20th century, but that has been making a comeback in other cities.
“I’m a big ‘modernized S.R.O.’ person,” Mr. Adams said. “We can create safe spaces particularly for single adults, which is an increased population.”
The nexus of hotels and homelessness has been a contested one during the pandemic. Early in the lockdown imposed to stem the spread of the coronavirus, thousands of people who had been living in dorm-style shelters were moved to hotel rooms, mostly in Manhattan where their presence led to complaints from some residents about harassment and sometimes violence. The city has since moved most of those people back to group shelters.
Several advocates for homeless people and for supportive housing endorsed Mr. Adams’s plan and stood with him at the news conference. “Adams can be the mayor who uses this inflection moment to change the trajectory on homelessness,” Laura Mascuch, executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, said in an interview. “We look forward to working with Adams to implement the strongest supportive housing program in the nation.”
Another advocate who Mr. Adams invited to speak was the formerly homeless man who goes by the name Shams Da Baron and who came to prominence last year as a de facto spokesman for the homeless people who were being put up in a Manhattan hotel. In New York’s primary, Mr. Da Baron had favored more progressive candidates over Mr. Adams, a former police captain. But on Monday he offered the candidate a warm hug and exhorted him to follow through on his plan.
“We are in crisis,” Mr. Da Baron said. “Do what is necessary to get people housed.”
