The New York Times reports that federal prosecutors have moved to revoke Pedro Espada’s post-conviction bail after learning that he and his family received all of the $600,000 in proceeds from the liquidation of the non-profit Soundview Healthcare Network that Espada founded and controlled:
Bank records show that one day after Soundview deposited the money from the sale, Alejandro Espada obtained cashier’s checks and distributed more than $350,000 to relatives, companies that the family controlled and his father’s lawyers, according to court documents. The former senator himself received a $40,000 check. (The remaining portion was distributed to Soundview employees.)
Before the sale, all of Soundview’s bank accounts were in the red or nearly empty, and the company owed more than $2 million to creditors, including medical supply companies, and about $1 million to the Internal Revenue Service. None of those received money from the sale, prosecutors say.
What Espada (and other New York state politicians) don’t seem to fully understand is that federal prosecutors usually aren’t idiots and (unlike some state prosecutors) aren’t predisposed to cutting favors for dirty state politicians.
