Two high-ranking New York Fire Department officials were arrested and charged with accepting bribes for giving preferential treatment to certain real estate projects.
Brian Cordasco and Anthony Saccavino are accused of soliciting and receiving bribes related to projects in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn, the New York Times reported. The allegations concern incidents that took place between 2021 and 2023.
According to the indictment, the scheme ran through a retired firefighter, identified by the Times as Henry J. Santiago Jr., who was not charged in the indictment. Expeditors, representing building owners, hired Santiago’s consulting firm, in some cases because they were steered to it by Cordasco and Saccavino, the No. 1 and No. 2 officials at the Bureau of Fire Prevention.
Santiago told the expeditors that for an extra fee, he could use his connections in the FDNY to speed up approvals that normally took two months or more. Prosecutors cited examples including a fine restaurant in Manhattan, an apartment building in Brooklyn and two hotels near JFK Airport.
By sharing 60 percent of his fees — which ranged from $4,500 to accelerate a fire alarm inspection to $16,000 for the two Queens hotels — with Cordasco and Saccavino, Santiago was generally able to get his clients’ projects approved within two weeks. One JFK hotel approval still took five weeks because, even with the department heads expediting it, the process is so cumbersome.
Prosecutors said the bribes they uncovered exceeded $190,000 — more than $100,000 for Saccavino and more than $90,000 for Cordasco — and covered about 30 apartment buildings, hotels, restaurants, bars and other properties. The project addresses were not made public, and it is not clear if the property owners and commercial tenants or their expeditors knew the real reason for their fast approvals.
Typically, fire inspections are done in the order that requests for them come in. Waiting for approvals can cost developers and businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some checks and balances in the process were eliminated in the name of streamlining the process, which made the bribery scheme easier for Cordasco and Saccavino to carry out, prosecutors said.
The scheme was unrelated to a separate priority list for approvals known as the City Hall list or DMO list, for Deputy Mayor’s Office, about which Cordasco complained to colleagues, according to the indictment.
The scandal came to authorities’ attention a year ago when Santiago had a falling out with the two FDNY officials and reported the illicit payments to a senior FDNY chief, who informed the city’s Department of Investigation.
Federal agents and city investigators searched the homes and offices of Cordasco and Saccavino in February. The two, whose salaries are about $260,000, were placed on modified duty, where they remain. They also lost their positions with the Bureau of Fire Prevention.
They were charged were bribery and bribery conspiracy, honest services wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, and making false statements to the FBI. Authorities found discussions of the bribery operation in a group chat involving the three participants, and also discovered Zelle payments to Santiago and to business accounts associated with the FDNY officials. In some cases, bribes were paid in cash in classic New York style: during meetings at steakhouses.
Cordasco and Saccavino, who could not be reached by the Times for comment, were expected to make their first court appearances Monday afternoon.
There’s no known connection between the indictment and the four other corruption investigations dogging Mayor Eric Adams, though the optics are another hit to his administration.
Adams is facing a federal probe of his 2021 campaign fundraising. That investigation is examining whether Adams pressured the FDNY to sign off on a high-rise consulate for the Turkish government. Adams has not been accused of wrongdoing.
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