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Hammerman takes stand
Former CB manager defends bogus pay-raises in court
Photo by Kevin Duggan
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By Aidan Graham and
Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A former Gowanus community
board manager testified
in Brooklyn Supreme
Court on June 11 that he believed
he had permission to
use his colleagues’ signatures
to grant himself multiple
pay-raises.
Craig Hammerman, the 27-
year former district manager
of Community Board 6, faces
up to seven years behind bars
after using the John Hancock
of two former board chairmen
in multiple letters to the city
to secure salary bumps.
Hammerman took the stand
before Supreme Court Justice
Donald Leo to tell the jury that
he had been authorized to use
the signatures for community
board business, as he did in
four bogus letters to the city,
between May 2015 and October
2017, which increased
his salary from $105,180 to
$121,931.
“I believed I had the authority
to act on my own,” Hammerman
told the jury. “I didn’t
think I had to ask.”
One of the letters was purportedly
signed by former-
Chairman Gary Reilly, who
acknowledged to the jury
on June 7 that he had given
Hammerman a scan of his signature.
He said he assumed
that Hammerman would only
use it for everyday business
matters such as refilling office
supplies or corresponding
with liquor license applicants
the board deals with on
a regular basis.
“I thought it was implicit
that it was for the sake of convenience,”
Reilly told prosecuting
attorney Adam Libove.
Reilly admitted that the
two men never discussed formal
limits on Hammerman’s
use of the signature, but told
the jury that he had been unaware
of his involvement in
salary decisions.
“I didn’t know that I had
anything to do with raises at
the time,” he said. “It never
came up.”
Yet in May 2015, the Of-
Hammerman dodged cameras on his way out of the
courtroom, with his lawyer Joyce David.
fice of Management and Budget
— the agency in charge of
allocating the city’s funds —
received a letter, which was
supposedly signed by Reilly,
asking for a five percent increase
in salary for Hammerman
and two other board employees,
according Eileen
Galarneau, the city rep who
approved the raise.
During trial testimony,
Reilly said he had never heard
about that letter, and that he
neither wrote nor signed it.
Hammerman conceded
that he did not get Reilly’s
express authorization for the
letter, but said he felt that it
was within his purview to use
the signature to essentially
grant himself a raise.
“It was tradition, custom,
and practice of the board to
pass along raises without explicit
approval of the board,”
he said.
Reilly, an attorney, had
served as the chair of the board
— a quasi-governmental body
of volunteers which covers
Gowanus, Park Slope, Carroll
Gardens, Cobble Hill, Columbia
Waterfront, and Red Hook
— for little more than a year
in 2015 and stepped down the
following year when he moved
upstate, he told the court.
After his resignation, Reilly
was succeeded as chairman
by Sayar Lonial, whose signature
appears on three other
pay-raise related documents,
which Lonial also knew nothing
about.
Members of the civic group
discovered their manager’s
scheme during an internal
review, which eventually
led to the District Attorney
Eric Gonzalez launching
a case against him in May
2018, this paper reported at
the time.
The internal review came
while Hammerman was on a
six-month hiatus after he was
arrested in 2017 on stalking
charges, which officials later
dropped.
The presiding judge barred
prosecutors from questioning
Hammeran about the stalking
arrest at his trial testimony,
during which he claimed that
his pay-raise actions were
meant to benefit the board’s
two other paid employees —
the assistant district manager
and the office manager.
“I wanted to make sure that
my staff members received it,”
said Hammerman. “It was almost
immaterial to me.”
But despite Hammerman’s
stated uninterest in his personal
salary increase, he stood
to gain substantially.
The four total sham documents
lead to a $16,751 annual
salary bump, which also
increased Hammerman’s city
pension by almost $10,000
per year, an official with the
city’s retirement system told
the court.
Hammerman’s retirement
benefits swelled from $60,499
to $70,134, which he is set to
receive every year from the
age of 62 until his death, according
Bruce Farbstein of
the city’s Employee Retirement
System.
The district manager is one
of the few paid positions on
the board that is made up almost
entirely by volunteers,
including the chair.
During their various turns
on the witness stand, Reilly
and Lonial seems to differ
on whether Hammerman deserved
the raise in the first
place.
Lonial claimed told the
court that, if asked, he would
not have signed off on Hammerman’s
raise request. By
contrast, Reilly said that he
thought that Hammerman did
a good job as district manager,
something he put in writing
on Hammerman’s LinkedIn
page in 2011, where wrote that
the board was lucky to have a
manager with such longtime
experience.
“I can’t emphasize enough
how important it is to the work
of CB6 to have a District Manager
of Craig’s caliber. We
are lucky to have him,” Reilly
wrote on the business-oriented
social media site. “Craig possesses
a wealth of institutional
knowledge on the issues affecting
our community, the
history of our neighborhoods,
and the paths to navigate in
the City’s bureaucracy.”
By the end of his tenure,
Hammerman was the thirdhighest
paid district manager
of all 18 community boards
in the borough, surpassed
only by Community Board
18’s Dottie Turano, who raked
in a staggering $154,725 in
2017, and Community Board
1’s Gerald Esposito, who collected
$126,882.
The average salary for
managers across the five boroughs
was $92,000 at the time,
according to Galarneau.
Hammerman’s trial is
ongoing. If convicted by the
jury, Hammerman would
face seven years in prison at
sentencing for the pay-raise
scheme.
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