A bookkeeper has been indicted in Manhattan on charges he stole $2.4 million in one of the largest embezzlements in the history of corruption-plagued District Council 37, New York’s largest union of municipal employees.
Lloyd Clarke, 58, of The Bronx, had worked more than 20 years as the bookkeeper for Local 375, the Civil Service Technical Guild, which represents 6,400 architects, engineers, project managers and related professionals.
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said Clarke took most of the money from a union-affiliated fund called the Professional Employees’ Legal Service, which provides no-cost legal services to local members and their families in their real-estate closings, divorces and bankruptcy proceedings.
Clarke, a 20-year employee of Local 375 who made $68,660 a year, took the money in a kind of “shell game,” Morgenthau said. He’d steal money from one of the fund’s real-estate escrow accounts, then, when that money came due after a closing, he’d pay it back by stealing from subsequent escrow accounts.
Since November 1998, more than 30 DC 37 officials and associates have been charged with corruption, much of it direct embezzlements from union coffers.
Also yesterday, Morgenthau announced the guilty plea of Nathan Loeb, 51, of Brooklyn, on charges he evaded $690,000 in state and city taxes from his Lower East Side stores, Essex Street Camera and Electronics and S & X Enterprises. Loeb stole the money by skimming $13 million in income, which he then laundered through a check cashing company, General Credit, also under investigation, Morgenthau said.