Pollock' s non-profit group, Community Law Advocates, was formed to advocate on behalf of poor tenants and their families. Pollock and two co-defendants, CLA's assistant director Marla Lopez and Bronx property owner Eric Gladstein, allegedly used CLA as a front to steal money from a program designed to prevent welfare recipients from being evicted for failure to pay rent.
Pollock, who also secretly co-owned two apartment buildings in the Bronx, would allegedly submit false claims for emergency rent money for tenants in her buildings as well as others with whom she was affiliated in the Bronx. The "social service profiteers" would, in turn, kick back 10% to Pollock and CLA. Pollock's two apartment buildings, 974 Sheridan Ave. and 1819 Weeks Ave., have been cited for numerous housing code violations.
"This was about as cynical a crime as you can imagine," says NYS Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. "At the very time Pollock was supposed to be helping the poor with their housing problems, she was using her positions with the city and her non-profit group to abuse the system, steal from taxpayers and line her pockets and those of her partners. Tenants were being used... as pawns in this fraudulent scheme."
The emergency rent money, known as "Jiggetts relief," is only available to state-approved community organizations like CLA and the Legal Aid Society. The indictment alleges that at least 66 times between October 1998 and December 2000, the defendants submitted false emergency housing applications to the city and state through CLA.
In other news, Hale House did less than satisfactorily when Rosie O'Donnell's foundation, For All Kids, investigated it. Hale House has raised over $40 million since Clara Hale's death in 1992 and experts are wondering what the organization has done with the money. According to Hale House's website, Mother Hale housed 22 infants in her apartment in 1970. Today, the entire Hale House complex--including the original five-story brownstone and the buildings on Manhattan Ave. and W. 113th Street--houses only 18 children.
The latter two buildings were sold to Hale House for $3 million in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the organization was given $6 million in city funds to renovate them. Instead of housing mothers recovering from drug addiction and their children, these apartments have been rented to working- and middle-class families for $550 to $800 per month. Tenants report that Dr. Lorraine Hale, Mother Hale's daughter, would sit in on interviews and set their rent.
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