Firms with “shady” pasts helped build Brooklyn’s Barclays Center

Barclays Center
Barclays Center

At least seven separate construction companies that helped build the Barclays Center have previously been caught for bribery, fraud and other wrongdoings, DNAinfo reported. The subcontractors are now on New York City’s caution list, which provides warnings about past problems with contract bidders.

A total of four were on the caution list while they worked on Barclays, but private developers are not required to consult the list before making hires for a project.

One of the subcontractors is Bronx-based Felix Associates LLC, which performed utility work at the Barclays site up until July 2011 — just two years after a federal investigation found its president, Anselmo Saiz, had committed bribery. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison and fined a total of $100,000 for artificially inflating the firm’s construction contract costs between 2004 and 2008 and splitting proceeds with ConEdison inspectors with whom he conspired.

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Another example is Site Safety LLC, which worked as the Barclays safety manager during a 2010 demolition at A Building On Dean Street. The company is on the city’s caution list until 2020 due to principal V. Reddy Kancharla’s ties to Testwell Laboratories, a concrete tester that forged results on projects such as Yankee Stadium and the Freedom Tower. Kancharla himself falsified testing reports and was sentenced in 2010 to seven to 21 years in prison.

Though Forest City Ratner declined to make a statement regarding DNAinfo’s investigation, the company underscored the fact that private companies do not need to consult the caution list. [DNAinfo]  — Zachary Kussin