A former bookkeeper at District Council 37, the city's largest municipal union, was arrested yesterday and charged with stealing more than $2.4 million from the union to help build a real estate empire in the Bronx, prosecutors said.þþThe bookkeeper, Lloyd Clarke, 58, worked for more than 20 years for Local 375, which represents city-employed architects and engineers and other professionals.þþMr. Clarke, who earned $68,660 a year at his job, stole the money by writing checks to a Bronx real estate development company he owned called Jam-Am Development Corporation, said the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau. That company — founded with Mr. Clarke's original $500,000 theft from the union — now owns 11 apartment buildings in the Bronx worth more than $7 million, Mr. Morgenthau said, and once owned 16.þþMr. Clarke used several methods to conceal thefts, including making false entries in the union's books and transferring money among various union checking accounts, prosecutors said. Mr. Clarke also employed a kind of kiting scheme, using fresh installments of money from union members to pay off older deposits he had stolen, Mr. Morgenthau said.þþThe union discovered the theft last summer after hiring an auditor, who found that Mr. Clarke had taken out an ÿunauthorized loanÿ of $500,000 from the union years earlier, prosecutors said.þþThe union fired Mr. Clarke and alerted prosecutors, who discovered that the theft was much larger in scale, and ran from July 1996 to July 2003, Mr. Morgenthau said. In addition to stealing from Local 375, Mr. Clarke had stolen even larger amounts from its legal services group.þþMr. Clarke was charged with grand larceny, which is punishable by up to 25 years in prison, prosecutors said. Alan Abramson, a lawyer for Mr. Clarke, declined to comment on the case.þ
Source: NY Times
