Wage Against the Machine

Two Lower Manhattan hotels have been become entangled in an indictment from New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance, alleging that a construction contractor stole more than $1.7 million in wages from laborers hired to help build the structures, along with another $7.8 million in unpaid insurance premiums, which Mr. Vance’s office says the company fraudulently evaded.

	The Marriott Courtyard Hotel that recently opened at 133 Greenwich Street

The Lower Manhattan hotels are the 30-floor Courtyard New York Downtown Marriott, which recently opened at the corner of Greenwich and Thames Streets (in the Financial District) and the 39-story Marriott Courtyard & Resident Inn now under construction at Pearl and Platt Streets, near the South Street Seaport.

Mr. Vance announced Wednesday (in conjunction with Governor Andrew Cuomo and the City’s Department of Investigation) an indictment that accuses the owners of Parkside Construction — which oversaw concrete and masonry work at both hotels, along with five other large projects, elsewhere in Manhattan — of altering records to reduce the number of hours for which construction workers would be paid, while also paying other workers with checks that were accounted for as expense reimbursement, to avoid withholding tax. Using these stratagems, Mr. Vance says, “the defendants stole more than $1.7 million from at least 520 workers who were not compensated for work that they performed.”

The Marriott Courtyard and Resident Inn at 215 Pearl Street

In a second tier to the scheme, Mr. Vance alleges that Parkside concealed $40 million in payroll in order to set premiums for workers’ compensation insurance at artificially low levels. In this way, the indictment argues, Parkside evaded more than $7.8 million in insurance premiums that it would otherwise have been required to pay.

“Amid Manhattan’s luxury building boom, sometimes it’s all too easy to overlook the human beings behind the scaffolding,” Mr. Vance said on Wednesday. “Construction workers are responsible for some of the most dangerous jobs in the City, and whether they’re working thousands of feet up in the air or twenty feet below ground-level, they deserve to be paid fairly and fully for their work.”

Mr. Vance’s investigators note that the seven projects listed in the indictment accounted for income to Parkside of more than $100 million, which appears to mean that nearly ten percent of that total was allegedly either stolen from workers, or embezzled from insurance companies.