Ex-FDNY fire chief faces up to 5 years in prison as he pleads guilty in $200K bribery scheme
A retired FDNY fire chief accused of taking bribes to fast-track safety inspections faces up to five years in prison after admitting Tuesday to his role in the yearslong scheme.
“I plead guilty, your honor,” Brian Cordasco, 50, said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court, just three weeks after being accused of leveraging his high-ranking post at FDNY’s Bureau of Fire Prevention to, alongside his fellow chief Anthony Saccavino, scoop up nearly $200,000 in illicit payouts.
Cordasco and Saccavino worked with a middleman — retired smoke eater Henry Santiago Jr. — to help real estate developers, high-end restaurants and dozens of other “clients” skip to the front of the inspection queue for a fee, court papers say.
“He would expedite such matters in a way that was unavailable to the general public,” prosecutor Daniel Wolf said in court on Tuesday.
Wearing a dark suit and glasses, Cardasco calmly admitted during the half-hour hearing that he knew that his role in running what the feds have called a two-year bribery scheme was illegal and wrong.
He then copped to a single count of conspiracy to solicit and receive a bribe — marking the first public guilty plea in the wide-ranging corruption cases engulfing Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.
Cordasco faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison when he’s sentenced on February 19. But his lawyers say they’ll push District Judge Lewis Liman to be lenient, in light of of the retired firefighter’s decades of service.
“This is his only transgression in life,” his defense attorney Frank Rothman told The Post last week.
Cordasco has also agreed to forfeit $57,000 under the terms of his plea deal, prosecutors said.
Santiago Jr., the middleman, pleaded guilty to one count of bribery conspiracy in September, court records show. The case against Saccavino is still pending.
There’s no indication that Cordasco’s case is directly related to the unprecedented corruption charges that Adams is facing, and the bribery scheme spanned the mayoralties of both Adams and Bill de Blasio, court papers allege.
But the charges bear a similarity to one key allegation in Adams’ bribery and fraud case – that Adams, as defacto mayor-elect, leaned on the FDNY to ignore safety concerns with the Turkish consulate building in Manhattan after receiving alleged bribes from Turkish businesspeople and a Turkish diplomat.
The case is also being brought by the Public Corruption Unit of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is the same unit prosecuting Adams.
The feds unsealed their latest City Hall indictment in the middle of Tuesday’s plea hearing – a case charging recently-ousted Adams aide Mohamed Bahi with witness tampering and destruction of evidence.
