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LI lawyer to pay $60G to settle pension issue

BY ROBERT E. KESSLER | robert.kessler@newsday.com

June 4, 2008

A Long Island attorney has agreed to pay $60,000 to settle claims he improperly received health and pension benefits by being listed as an employee of two Nassau school districts, State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday.

The attorney, Gilbert Henoch, was in private practice at the same time he was reported to the state as an employee of the Hempstead School District from 1970 to 1996 and the East Meadow School District from 1980 to 1985, the attorney general said.

As a result, Henoch received unspecified health benefits from Hempstead and state pension benefits from both districts totaling $50,000, Cuomo said.

Henoch's is the first settlement by a Long Island attorney although upstate lawyers have previously settled their pension cases with Cuomo. Henoch will no longer receive any state pension, Cuomo said.

Cuomo announced the settlement with Henoch at a news conference in Albany, along with a bipartisan group of state legislators. He also announced similar settlements with a Maspeth, Queens, law firm and two of its attorneys, and an upstate law firm. All those involved in yesterday's announcement have agreed to settle for a total of $235,000, Cuomo said.

Henoch was among a number of private attorneys first identified in Newsday as receiving state pension credits after being improperly listed as public employees.

In his remarks, Cuomo said the problems "have been previously exposed ... only they haven't been resolved." This time, Cuomo said, a combination of settlements, prosecutions and legislation should permanently fix the problem. "The taxpayers have been ripped off enough," he said.

Henoch's lawyer Norman Bloch, said of the settlement: "Mr. Henoch, who is 75 years old, admitted no wrongdoing. The state said he received a pension in error, so he decided to return it rather than fight about it. Life is too short."

The superintendent of the East Meadow district, Leon Campo took a similar view. "This to me is an error; an error that has been made should be corrected," Campo said in a telephone interview. "I fail to see any criminality, as the attorney general has been implying. This is a practice that goes back to World War II" and had been approved by many past officials, he said.

But a former member of the Hempstead school board, Thomas Parsley, said the settlement was too lenient. "I think it's troublesome that an attorney can basically pay to get out of any wrongdoing they've done, and a common citizen, who doesn't have $60,000 to pay, would have to deal with prosecution," Parsley said.

Cuomo has credited Newsday reports with triggering his investigation.

The Maspeth law firm that settled is Aiello & Cannick. Cuomo said two of its attorneys had been improperly listed as "employees" of the Mount Vernon City School District. A spokesman for the firm or the attorneys could not be immediately reached.

Staff writer Eden Laikin contributed to this report.