Former New York State Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. will spend five years in prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud charges.
Espada was sentenced Friday in Brooklyn.
The once-influential politician also was convicted in a separate case alleging he looted taxpayer-subsidized health clinics.
Espada operated the clinics in the South Bronx for three decades until prosecutors accused him of turning the network into a personal ATM.
Speaking before the sentence was pronounced, Espada offered no signs of remorse. He instead talked about the clinics’ history of providing care to poor New Yorkers.
(AP)
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2 Responses
If the last paragraph is correct, Mr. Espada has no understanding of what he did wrong. A non-profit clinic that gets money from the government for providing medical care for poor people is supposed to provide medical care for poor people. The non-profit clinic that he created with taxpayer money did that, but it also paid him and members of his family for doing nothing. That’s the problem. As it says in the Torah, you cannot give tzeddakah with somebody else’s money.
American justice: this guy gets five years and Rubaskin gets 30?