Five MTA Employees Charged After $1M LIRR and NYC Transit Overtime Fraud Scheme

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Mr. Thomas, federal program fraud, $461,000 in 2018 [music] compensation, 3,800 overtime hours claimed while you were >> Once is a mistake, twice is suspicious.

[00:00:09]Thomas Caputo did this [music] 3,864 times in a single year and left a paper trail for every single one of them.

[00:00:17]>> You're not allowed to I gave 30 years to that railroad, and you were going to stand here and tell me about overtime?

[00:00:20][music] Go ask the MTA why they approved every single one of those hours without one question.

[00:00:24]>> 3,864.

[00:00:28]That was the number of overtime hours Thomas [music] Caputo claimed in a single calendar year, 2018.

[00:00:35]$461,000 [music] in total compensation.

[00:00:39]The highest-paid employee at the entire Metropolitan [music] Transportation Authority, an agency of 70,000 workers, and his title was not chairman.

[00:00:48]It was not president. It was chief measurement officer of the Long [music] Island Rail Road.

[00:00:54]By the time federal investigators finished aligning [music] his payroll records against his cell phone location data, the man on this footage would be standing in front of a federal judge in the Southern District of New York listening to a prosecutor [music] describe what those hours actually represented.

[00:01:09]Quick question before we [music] get into this one. How many hours do you think a person can actually work in a single day?

[00:01:16]Not theoretically, [music] practically.

[00:01:19]Now, picture a senior public employee claiming the equivalent of 50 [music] hours of work inside every 24-hour day, every single day, for an entire year, [music] and getting paid for every minute of it without a single question from the agency.

[00:01:33]Drop your number in the comments.

[00:01:35]And if you're not subscribed yet, hit the button now.

[00:01:39]We cover the cases the news cycle moves on from, and the institutions never want to revisit.

[00:01:44]>> [music] >> And there's a new one every week.

[00:01:47]Thomas Caputo was born in 1963 in Floral Park, Queens, on the western edge of the Long Island Rail Road system he would spend his entire adult life inside.

[00:01:58]His father worked as a heating and cooling installer for a small union shop in Hempstead. His mother kept the books for a Catholic parish on Tulip Avenue.

[00:02:07]The Caputo household was three brothers and one sister in a vinyl-sided Cape on a quarter-acre lot, two blocks from the LIRR's Bellerose station.

[00:02:17]Trains ran past the kitchen window every 22 minutes during weekday rush hour.

[00:02:22]By the time Thomas was 8 years old, he knew the difference between an M1 multiple unit and a diesel push-pull just from the sound of the brakes.

[00:02:32]He graduated from Sewanhaka High School in 1981.

[00:02:36]Average grades, varsity bowling team, one citation for skipping civics class to watch the Belmont Stakes on a transistor radio in the parking lot.

[00:02:46]The yearbook entry next to his picture said he was, in the order the editors used, consistently cheerful, reliable in a pinch, and the kind of friend who would help you move a couch but charge you a six-pack.

[00:02:59]He spent the summer after graduation pouring concrete for his uncle's small commercial paving company in Valley Stream.

[00:03:06]He earned $6.75 an hour and learned, by his own account given years later in a deposition, that he never wanted to do construction work outside in August again.

[00:03:17]In October of 1984, at the age of 21, Thomas Caputo filed his initial application with the Long Island Rail Road.

[00:03:26]The application packet was 11 pages, printed in two-tone blue on the railroad's letterhead, and it asked him to identify any family members currently or previously employed by the agency.

[00:03:38]He listed one, an uncle on his mother's side, a signalman based out of Jamaica Yard.

[00:03:45]The hiring panel interviewed him on a Tuesday morning in November. He was hired the following Monday as a probationary track laborer. Starting wage of $9.12 an hour, assigned to a maintenance of way gang working the Babylon branch.

[00:04:00]His first supervisor, a 58-year-old foreman from Massapequa, wrote on his 90-day evaluation that Caputo was punctual, quiet around the older men, and showed good instincts for the geometry of the track.

[00:04:14]He noted, with the careful neutrality of railroad evaluation language, that the young man did not yet understand the overtime culture, but would learn.

[00:04:24]That sentence, buried in a personnel file the federal government would obtain 36 years later as part of a grand jury subpoena, would read in retrospect like a line of foreshadowing nobody on the panel could have written on purpose.

[00:04:38]The Long Island Railroad in the mid-1980s was an institution still organized around the rhythms of the industrial Northeast.

[00:04:46]Hourly employees worked their base shifts, then bid on overtime through a seniority-based system that allocated the highest-paid hours, third-party contractor supervision, weekend track work, snow and ice response to the men who had been on the property the longest.

[00:05:03]Caputo learned the system from the inside.

[00:05:06]He worked his base shift. He showed up for the overtime he was assigned, and he watched the foreman above him drive home in pickup trucks they had paid cash for.

[00:05:16]He met his future wife, Christine, at a wedding reception in Lynbrook in 1987.

[00:05:22]She was a dental hygienist working for a practice on Sunrise Highway.

[00:05:27]They married in June of 1989 at St. Catherine of Siena in Franklin Square.

[00:05:33]Their first daughter was born in 1991.

[00:05:36]Their son followed in 1994.

[00:05:38]The family bought a four-bedroom split-level in East Northport in 1996 with a 30-year mortgage and a driveway long enough for two cars, a boat, and the bass fishing rig Caputo bought from a co-worker in 1998.

[00:05:54]He made foreman in 2001.

[00:05:56]The promotion came with a salary bump, a take-home railroad vehicle assigned to his crew, and access to the supervisory overtime tier.

[00:06:05]The shifts that paid time and a half base, double time after 16 hours, and triple time on holidays.

[00:06:12]His evaluation that year described him as experienced, detail-oriented in the field, and respected by his crew.

[00:06:20]The same evaluation, with the same careful institutional neutrality, also noted that he had begun to demonstrate strong familiarity with the overtime claim process and the supervisory attestation procedures associated with third-party contractor work.

[00:06:36]In 2009, the LIRR promoted Caputo to the senior technical position that would define the rest of his career.

[00:06:43]Chief Measurement Officer. Responsible for the track geometry inspection program across the entire 122-mile system.

[00:06:52]The role was specialized. It required certification on the railroad's measurement vehicle equipment, familiarity with Federal Railroad Administration track safety standards, and the institutional [snorts] standing to sign off on the inspection reports that determined when sections of track required maintenance, when they required repair, and when they required service slowdowns to protect the riding public.

[00:07:14]It also gave him something the agency's overtime control architecture had not anticipated. It gave him supervisory authority to volunteer for, claim, and self-attest the overtime hours he worked supporting third-party contractor projects across the network.

[00:07:31]The same man who decided when the track needed inspection was the man who decided when he had inspected it.

[00:07:37]The same signature that authorized contractor work was the signature that confirmed his presence at the work site.

[00:07:44]By 2014, by the federal investigation's eventual reconstruction, Thomas Caputo had become the single most prolific overtime claiming employee in the recent history of the Long Island Rail Road.

[00:07:57]Nobody at the agency at that point had reason to ask why.

[00:08:02]The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is the largest public transit agency in the United States.

[00:08:08]It moves more than 8 million passenger trips on an average weekday across its constituent operating agencies.

[00:08:15]New York City Transit Subway and bus systems, the Long Island Rail Road, the Metro-North Rail Road, the bridges and tunnels of the MTA Bridges and Tunnels Division, and the regional commuter networks that knit the New York metropolitan area together.

[00:08:30]The agency employs more than 70,000 workers.

[00:08:34]Its annual operating budget exceeds 19 billion dollars.

[00:08:38]Its overtime spending by the time the federal indictment in this case was unsealed in late 2020 would exceed 1 and a third billion dollars a year on its own.

[00:08:48]The Long Island Rail Road, the operating agency at the center of the Caputo case, runs 124 stations across Nassau and Suffolk counties and Queens, moving roughly 300,000 passenger trips per weekday on a normal pre-pandemic schedule. The system's track infrastructure, 620 miles of main line and yard track, 12 interlockings, four electrified third rail substations within the relevant period, required continuous inspection, maintenance, and capital reconstruction.

[00:09:21]Most of that work could not be performed during revenue service hours.

[00:09:24]It happened at night, on weekends, on holidays, and during the deliberate single-track outages the operations department scheduled months in advance.

[00:09:34]The work was supervised.

[00:09:37]Federal Railroad Administration rules required that track maintenance activity on an active commuter railroad be overseen by a qualified railroad supervisor, a foreman, an assistant supervisor, or for the most technical track geometry work, a chief measurement officer.

[00:09:55]The supervisor's job was to ensure that the work was performed to specification, that safety protocols were observed, that the track was returned to service in a condition consistent with FRA standards, and that the third-party contractor was credited only for work actually performed.

[00:10:12]The supervisor's presence was required.

[00:10:15]The supervisor's signature was required.

[00:10:17]The supervisor's claim of hours worked was by the LIRR's internal procedures during the relevant period self-attested.

[00:10:25]That last detail is the operational vulnerability the federal indictment would eventually describe in plain language.

[00:10:32]A foreman or chief measurement officer who volunteered for a Saturday night contractor supervision overtime shift filled out a paper time sheet at the end of the shift.

[00:10:42]He wrote down the hours he had been present. He signed the time sheet.

[00:10:46]The time sheet went to payroll. Payroll cut the check.

[00:10:50]There was no biometric clock-in at the work site. There was no GPS tracking on the supervisor's vehicle. There was no independent verification by the contractor, by a second LIRR employee, by any electronic system that the supervisor had actually been physically present during the hours he had claimed.

[00:11:09]The system ran, in operational terms, on the assumption that senior railroad employees who had spent decades on the property would not steal from the agency that employed them.

[00:11:20]The assumption had held for most of the LIRR's history.

[00:11:24]By the mid-2010s, in the specific corner of the supervisory overtime tier that Thomas Caputo and his four co-defendants occupied, it had stopped holding.

[00:11:34]The earliest claims the federal investigation eventually attached to Caputo personally came from the 2014 fiscal year.

[00:11:41]By that point, Caputo was 50 years old, five years into his chief measurement officer tenure, and had been with the LIRR for 30 consecutive years.

[00:11:51]His base salary that year, before overtime, was approximately $112,000.

[00:11:58]His total compensation for fiscal year 2014, with overtime included, was approximately $276,000.

[00:12:07]The overtime line, on its own, was already larger than his base salary.

[00:12:13]Nobody at the agency flagged it.

[00:12:15]The mechanism, as the federal indictment would eventually describe it, was straightforward.

[00:12:21]The LIRR posted overtime opportunities through an internal bid system, third-party contractor supervision shifts for upcoming construction work, mostly weekends, mostly overnight, mostly at outer system locations where the contractor was performing track rehabilitation work on sections of the system that could be taken out of service without disrupting weekday commuter operations. Caputo, with his chief measurement officer seniority and his clean disciplinary record, was at the top of the bidding ladder.

[00:12:50]He volunteered for the shifts. He was assigned the shifts. He filed the timesheets confirming he had worked the shifts.

[00:12:59]The shifts ranged from 8 hours to 16 hours per assignment.

[00:13:03]Caputo, by the federal indictment's eventual count, was claiming, in some weeks, more than 90 overtime hours on top of his regular 40-hour base.

[00:13:14]A workweek of 130 hours, sustained for periods of consecutive weeks.

[00:13:20]The math, examined in isolation, would have raised institutional questions in any normally functioning audit cycle.

[00:13:28]It did not raise them, in part because the LIRR's audit cycle for senior supervisory overtime claims during the relevant period was, by the federal indictment's later description, structurally incapable of catching the kind of discrepancies the Caputo claims contained.

[00:13:44]By 2016, Caputo's total annual compensation had crossed $340,000.

[00:13:51]By 2017, it crossed 390,000.

[00:13:55]By 2018, the calendar year that would eventually become the federal indictment's centerpiece, Thomas Caputo's total compensation from the Long Island Rail Road reached $461,000.

[00:14:08]That figure made him, by every available payroll record, the highest-paid employee in the entire MTA system.

[00:14:16]Higher than the president of the LIRR.

[00:14:18]Higher than the chairman of the MTA.

[00:14:21]Higher than every senior executive across the agency's 70,000-person workforce.

[00:14:27]The overtime hours that generated that compensation, by Caputo's own time sheet submissions, totaled 3,864 hours over the 12-month period. 3,864 hours inside a calendar year that contains 8,760 total hours.

[00:14:45]Divided evenly across the year, Caputo was claiming to have worked, on top of his regular 40-hour per week base shift, an additional 10 and 1/2 hours every single day, 365 days a year, with no time off for holidays, weekends, vacation, illness, or sleep.

[00:15:04]The math, examined as an exercise in physical possibility, did not work.

[00:15:09]The math, examined as a payroll record on a self-attested time sheet system with no independent verification, paid out without objection for the entire 12-month period.

[00:15:20]The locations the federal investigation would eventually establish as the actual physical positions of Caputo's cell phone during those claimed work hours were not LIRR construction sites.

[00:15:31]They were, in the largest single concentration of weekend overnight hours, bowling alleys.

[00:15:38]Caputo was, by long-standing personal habit, a member of multiple bowling leagues across Nassau and Suffolk counties, and the cell phone location records covering the 2018 calendar year would eventually show his phone parked at AMF Babylon Lanes, at Maple Family Centers in Rockville Centre, and at a half-dozen other lane houses across Long Island during dozens of overnight Saturday and Sunday hours he was simultaneously claiming on his LIRR time sheets to be supervising third-party contractor track work at outer system construction locations.

[00:16:12]The other defendants ran parallel patterns.

[00:16:14]Joseph Russo, 56, and LIRR foreman who retired in October of 2019, claimed overtime hours during which his cell phone data placed him at his own Long Island residence. John Nugent, 50, and LIRR foreman still employed at the time of the indictment, showed the same residence during claimed work hours pattern.

[00:16:34]Joseph Balestra, 51, also still employed at indictment, did the same.

[00:16:40]Michael Gunderson, 42, the NYC Transit Authority supervisor who ran the parallel scheme through his own agency's overtime architecture, had a variation on the theme.

[00:16:51]His cell phone records placed him at family vacation destinations during hours he was claiming to be supervising NYC Transit infrastructure work.

[00:16:59]The five of them, by the federal indictment's eventual aggregation, collected more than $1 million in fraudulent overtime compensation across the indictment period.

[00:17:09]The federal investigation indicated, in the prosecution's later statements, that the actual scope across the broader MTA system likely substantially exceeded what the December 2020 indictment captured.

[00:17:21]The Caputo case did not open from inside the Lear.

[00:17:24]It did not open from inside the MTA.

[00:17:27]It opened in the standard architecture of modern transit corruption investigations, from outside the agency entirely.

[00:17:35]In April of 2019, the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscal policy think tank based in Albany, published a report on Metropolitan Transportation Authority payroll data for the 2018 calendar year.

[00:17:49]The Empire Center's SeeThroughNY database, which compiles and publishes payroll information for New York public employees, had identified an anomaly at the top of the MTA's 2018 earnings rankings.

[00:18:01]The highest-paid employee in the entire agency was not the chairman.

[00:18:05]Was not the president of any of the operating agencies.

[00:18:08]Was not any senior executive. It was a Long Island Rail Road chief measurement officer with a base salary of approximately $112,000, who had received in total annual compensation $461,000.

[00:18:24]The Empire Center report named the employee Thomas Caputo.

[00:18:28]The story moved into the New York City and Long Island regional press the same week.

[00:18:33]The Daily News ran it. Newsday ran it.

[00:18:36]The New York Post ran it.

[00:18:38]The phrase MTA overtime king entered the regional vocabulary almost immediately.

[00:18:45]The story moved from there to the State Senate's Standing Committee on Transportation, which held hearings on MTA overtime practices in the late spring and summer of 2019.

[00:18:56]The hearings produced a sustained political and media pressure on the agency that the agency's leadership had not faced before.

[00:19:04]The governor's office demanded answers.

[00:19:06]The MTA board demanded answers. The press demanded answers. The office of the MTA Inspector General, the agency's own internal accountability office, an independent watchdog established by state law and headed at the relevant time by Inspector General Carolyn Pokorney, a former federal prosecutor with the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, opened a focused investigation into the LIRR overtime claims that had generated Caputo's 2018 compensation.

[00:19:37]The investigation, conducted across the summer and fall of 2019, gathered the LIRR's internal overtime claim records, the relevant timesheets, the contractor records for the third-party projects Caputo had claimed to supervise, and the documentary trail of supervisory attestations that had moved his claims through the agency's payroll system. The investigation produced a finding the MTA Inspector General's Office had not anticipated.

[00:20:03]The records did not show ordinary overtime abuse.

[00:20:06]They did not show the routine padding of hours that internal auditors at large agencies routinely identify and recover.

[00:20:14]They showed something the Inspector General's Office did not have the institutional standing to fully resolve through internal administrative process.

[00:20:22]They showed, in pattern after pattern, hours claimed during which the documentary evidence the office could access suggested the supervisor had not been physically present at the worksite at all.

[00:20:34]The Inspector General's Office, by the standard protocol governing public corruption findings of that magnitude, referred the case to the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

[00:20:45]The federal investigators who received the referral, career public corruption prosecutors operating out of the Southern District's headquarters in Lower Manhattan, working with FBI New York Field Office agents specializing in public employee fraud, had access to investigative tools the MTA Inspector General's Office did not.

[00:21:03]They had subpoena power for cell phone location data. They had subpoena power for credit card transaction records.

[00:21:10]They had the architecture in operational terms to reconstruct the parallel record sets that would eventually establish, with documentary precision, what the bowling alley hours represented in the LIRR's payroll database.

[00:21:23]The federal investigation, opened in late 2019 and conducted across the following 12 months, was built on a specific evidentiary architecture.

[00:21:32]For each of the five eventual defendants, the investigators reconstructed three parallel records covering the relevant period. The first record was the MTA's own overtime claims database.

[00:21:44]The record showed, for each specific shift, Caputo and the others had claimed the date and time of the shift, the LIRR or NYC Transit project the shift had been assigned to, the third-party contractor the shift was supervising, the location of the work site, the supervisor's self-attested confirmation that the hours had been worked, the dollar amount paid out, and the payroll system identifier that had moved the claim from timesheet to paycheck.

[00:22:11]The database was complete.

[00:22:13]The agency had kept it for years.

[00:22:16]Nobody, before the federal investigation arrived, had ever cross-referenced it against anything else.

[00:22:23]The second record was cell phone location data.

[00:22:26]The FBI obtained, through federal subpoenas served on Caputo's wireless carrier and the carriers serving the four co-defendants, the historical cell site location information for each defendant's personal cell phone covering the indictment period.

[00:22:40]The data showed, in 15-to-30-minute granularity, where each defendant's phone had been during the hours claimed on the overtime timesheets.

[00:22:48]Caputo's phone at the AMF Babylon Lanes parking lot. Caputo's phone at Maple Family Centers in Rockville Centre.

[00:22:55]Caputo's phone at his East Northport residence.

[00:22:58]Caputo's phone at restaurants, at family functions, at locations across Long Island that were not LIRR construction work sites, and that bore no relationship to the third-party contractor projects he had claimed to be supervising.

[00:23:11]The third record was credit card transaction data and supplementary documentary evidence.

[00:23:18]The investigators obtained the credit card statements covering the indictment period and aligned the transaction records against the claimed work hours.

[00:23:25]Restaurant charges at locations distant from the claimed work sites during the claimed work hours.

[00:23:30]Gas station charges at locations inconsistent with travel to the claimed work sites.

[00:23:35]Bowling league dues paid on the same dates the time sheets claimed contractor supervision.

[00:23:41]For Gunderson, the NYC Transit defendant whose pattern centered on family vacations rather than bowling, the credit card record included hotel charges, airline tickets, theme park admissions, and rental car receipts at out-of-state destinations during weeks he was claiming overtime hours on NYC Transit infrastructure projects in Manhattan and the Bronx.

[00:24:02]When the three records were aligned, the discrepancies were systematic.

[00:24:06]They were not occasional.

[00:24:08]They were not the kind of irregular pattern that might suggest a misremembered time sheet entry or a clerical error in the payroll system.

[00:24:16]They were, in the federal indictment's eventual aggregation, sustained over multi-year periods, consistent across hundreds of individual shift claims, and structurally incompatible with the physical possibility that the supervisors had actually been at the work sites during the hours they had claimed.

[00:24:34]The third-party contractor records, when the investigators obtained them, added a fourth confirming layer.

[00:24:40]The contractors had kept their own sign-in logs for the supervisory personnel assigned to their projects.

[00:24:47]The logs showed, for many of the shifts Caputo and the others had claimed, that the supervisor had either not appeared at the work site at all or had appeared only briefly, far short of the multi-hour shifts the Lear timesheets recorded.

[00:25:01]The contractors had not flagged the discrepancies at the time because the contractors were not responsible for verifying the supervisors' hours. The contractors were responsible for performing the work the Lear had contracted them to perform.

[00:25:15]The verification was, in the structural premise of the Lear's supervisory overtime architecture, the Lear's responsibility.

[00:25:23]And the Lear, until the federal investigation arrived, had never performed it.

[00:25:28]Quick break before we get into the takedown.

[00:25:31]If you've made it this far, you already understand what this case actually is.

[00:25:36]A story about a system that ran on trust, and what happens when the people inside that system decide the trust is a vulnerability.

[00:25:44]Hit subscribe if you want more of this kind of coverage. We post a new federal fraud case every week, and the next one is already in production.

[00:25:53]The unsealing of the federal indictment came on December 3rd, 2020.

[00:25:58]The arrests were coordinated. Agents from the FBI's New York field office, working in concert with MTA Inspector General investigators, approached the five defendants simultaneously at their respective Long Island residences in the early hours of the morning.

[00:26:13]Thomas Caputo was at home in East Northport.

[00:26:16]The federal agents knocked on the front door of the four-bedroom split-level the Caputo family had owned since 1996.

[00:26:24]He answered the door in a thermal shirt and jeans holding a coffee mug.

[00:26:29]The lead agent was a 15-year veteran of the Bureau's public corruption squad.

[00:26:34]The conversation was brief.

[00:26:36]Agent, Mr. Caputo? Caputo, Yeah.

[00:26:40]Agent, We're with the FBI. We have a warrant for your arrest. Federal program fraud, 18 USC 666, multiple counts. We'd like you to step outside.

[00:26:53]Caputo did not say anything for several seconds. He looked at the agent. He looked past the agent at the second vehicle in the driveway.

[00:27:00]He looked down at the coffee mug in his hand. The federal indictment, which had been signed 3 days earlier by a grand jury sitting in the Southern District of New York and unsealed that morning by acting United States Attorney Audrey Strauss, >> [snorts] >> contained the cell phone location records, the credit card transaction data, the third-party contract contractor sign-in logs, and the Lear payroll database. The four parallel record sets that established, in documentary terms, what the bowling alley hours represented.

[00:27:31]Agent.

[00:27:32]Mr. Caputo, did you understand what I just said?

[00:27:35]Caputo.

[00:27:36]I heard you.

[00:27:38]Agent.

[00:27:39]Are you willing to step outside, sir?

[00:27:41]Caputo.

[00:27:43]My wife is asleep upstairs.

[00:27:45]Agent. That's fine. You can put on a coat. We'll wait.

[00:27:50]Caputo set the coffee mug on the small table inside the front entry.

[00:27:54]He retrieved a coat from the hall closet. He walked outside.

[00:27:59]The federal agents took him into custody on the front lawn of the house he had bought in 1996 with the salary of an Lear foreman who had not yet learned to claim 10 and 1/2 hours of overtime every day, 365 days a year.

[00:28:14]He was placed in the back of the second vehicle.

[00:28:17]The other four defendants were taken into custody at their respective Long Island residences within the same operational window.

[00:28:25]The five defendants were arraigned in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on December 3rd, 2020.

[00:28:33]The indictment charged each of them with federal program fraud under 18 U.S.C.

[00:28:39]section 666, the federal statute that criminalizes theft from an organization receiving federal funds, applicable to the MTA because the agency receives substantial federal transit funding through the Federal Transit Administration. The maximum sentence under the statute is 10 years per count.

[00:28:57]The defendants pleaded not guilty at the initial appearance.

[00:29:01]They were released on bond on conditions that included surrender of passports, restrictions on travel outside the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, and the standard pre-trial services supervision attached to a federal public corruption case of this magnitude.

[00:29:17]Acting United States Attorney Audrey Strauss in the press conference that accompanied the indictment described the conduct in plain language.

[00:29:26]These defendants, senior LIRR and New York City Transit employees, allegedly made themselves some of the highest paid employees at the entire MTA by claiming extraordinary, almost physically impossible, amounts of overtime.

[00:29:41]Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. of the FBI's New York Field Office added the operational detail that would carry the case in the press for the next 18 months.

[00:29:52]In the case of at least one defendant, the excessive compensation he received from the MTA was equivalent to purportedly working 10 additional hours a day, every day, for 365 days.

[00:30:07]The MTA's institutional response came within hours.

[00:30:10]Tim Minton, the agency's communications director, issued a statement on behalf of MTA leadership.

[00:30:17]The alleged conduct by these MTA employees is an egregious betrayal of public trust.

[00:30:24]The agency moved in the months following the indictment to implement the operational reforms that had been under internal discussion since the Empire Center report 18 months earlier.

[00:30:36]Biometric clock-in requirements for field supervisors working overtime shifts, GPS tracking on supervisor vehicles assigned to third-party contractor projects. Mandatory pre-approval by a second supervisor for any overtime claim above specified hour thresholds.

[00:30:53]Enhanced audit cycles conducted by the MTA's internal audit office and the office of the Inspector General in joint protocol for any employee whose annual overtime claims exceeded a defined ratio of base salary.

[00:31:06]The criminal proceedings moved on the standard federal timeline.

[00:31:10]Across 2021 and into 2022, the five defendants facing the documentary weight of the cell phone records, the credit card data, the third-party contractor logs, and the LIRR's own payroll database were convicted and sentenced.

[00:31:26]Thomas Caputo, the man the regional press had named the MTA overtime king, was sentenced in 2022.

[00:31:33]The convictions, the sentences, and the restitution orders closed the federal accountability for the five-person ring the December 2020 indictment had captured.

[00:31:44]The broader institutional question, the one the Caputo case became the foundational example for, did not close with the sentencing.

[00:31:53]The MTA's annual overtime exposure, by subsequent reporting through 2022, reached 1 and a third billion dollars across the agency.

[00:32:02]The New York State Senate's Transit Oversight Committee's continued, through subsequent legislative sessions, to examine the agency's overtime control architecture.

[00:32:13]The office of the MTA Inspector General continued, under the protocols Carolyn Pokorny's tenure had established, to refer overtime fraud findings to federal prosecutors when the documentary evidence warranted federal action.

[00:32:26]The image that endures in the MTA reform literature is the one the federal indictment placed at the structural center of the case, a senior Long Island Rail Road chief measurement officer on a Saturday night in 2018 was not at a third-party contractor's worksite supervising track rehabilitation work on the commuter railroad he had been employed by for 34 years.

[00:32:50]He was at a bowling alley in Babylon, 2 miles from the LIRR's Babylon branch mainline with the cell phone in his pocket recording in 15-minute granularity the location data the federal investigators would eventually use to establish with documentary precision what the $461,000 in 2018 compensation actually represented.

[00:33:13]The MTA runs on labor. Labor on overtime runs on trust. And trust, by the federal indictment's allegations, was the operational vulnerability the Caputo ring exploited until cell phone records, credit card transactions, and a federal grand jury in Manhattan finally established what the bowling alley hours were on the agency's payroll database.

[00:33:35]This case ran on math nobody at the agency would do.

[00:33:39]The next case on your screen ran on a lie nobody at the agency would question.

[00:33:43]Click it now.