(Robert Kalfus)
MONEY FOR NOTHING: Donald Kerik (top) at court yesterday to testify in the trial of Frank (bottom left) and Peter DiTommaso, who are charged in connection with favors for disgraced Bernie Kerik (inset).
It sure is sweet being Bernie Kerik’s little brother.
The disgraced ex-NYPD commissioner’s younger sibling got a jaw-dropping five months’ severance when he quit a $90,000-a-year job at a waste-management firm less than a year after getting the gig with Bernie Kerik’s help, the sibling testified yesterday.
Interstate Industrial Corp. co-owner Frank DiTommaso “let me quit,” Donald Kerik told jurors, using the odd turn of phrase as he described resigning after the March 2000 indictment of Larry Ray, the best man from Bernie Kerik’s wedding, who also worked for the firm.
Asked in Bronx Supreme Court by prosecutor Omer Wiczyk if he then received severance, Donald answered: “Five months . . . At full salary.”
However, despite quitting because of his supposed qualms about Ray’s criminal case affecting both Interstate’s business and his brother’s reputation, Donald Kerik said he later returned for a six-month stint at Interstate’s Long Island facility when DiTommaso asked him to.
“I was happy to come back and work for him,” Donald, 46, testified at the perjury trial of brothers Frank and Peter DiTommaso, who are charged with lying to a federal grand jury by denying that New Jersey-based Interstate paid for $165,000 in renovations to Bernie Kerik’s Bronx apartment.
Bernie Kerik, 57, is serving a federal prison sentence for crimes related to those renovations, which occurred when he was the city’s Correction Department boss. He is expected to testify later in the trial.
“I love him. He’s my brother,” Donald told jurors.
Prosecutors subpoenaed Donald Kerik to show how he landed a job with Interstate in 1999, after Frank DiTommaso, 53, hired Bernie Kerik’s close pal Ray to handle probes by regulators who were investigating suggestions that Interstate had mob connections.
Around the same time Donald got the job at Interstate, Bernie Kerik was lobbying the city’s Trade Waste Commission to grant the waste company a transfer-station license despite a prior finding that the firm was not fit to do business in New York because of alleged mob connections.
Wearing jeans, a black polo shirt and his red hair in a buzz cut, Donald Kerik testified how he worked as a young man just out of high school as a K-9 officer for the Passaic County, NJ, Sheriff’s Office, and later worked in the carting industry in New Jersey.
In the spring of 1999, Donald said, he met with Frank DiTommaso and Bernie Kerik at a Milburn, NJ, cafe.
“I don’t recall who called who,” Donald told jurors — but after several follow-up meetings, he was offered the job managing Interstate’s yard in Staten Island.