A state judge yesterday ordered a city finance investigator charged with bribery to surrender his passport – because he may flee to his African chicken farm.
“He goes often there,” Assistant DA Josh Hanshaft told Justice Neil Firetog in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
When Losiny Sirleaf, 48, of Ocean Avenue in Ditmas Park, was busted last month, authorities said they had caught him red-handed on video and audiotape taking $400 in bribe money after he promised to whittle down a Gravesend restaurant’s $8 million tax bill.
He’s been indicted on a charge of bribe receiving in the third degree, to which his lawyer, Jonathan Svetkey, entered a not-guilty plea yesterday.
Sirleaf, who stood by silently in court yesterday, was busted during a wide-ranging tax-evasion probe into more than 20 Brooklyn eateries suspected of concealing income to avoid paying about $26.5 million in taxes, authorities have said.