Oceanside woman acquitted in Bellevue case

Farideh Tabaei sat inside her lawyer Stephen Scaring's office in Garden City Wednesday and smiled with relief - a feeling in short supply in recent years.

"I'm taking a couple of days to breathe," she said.

Tabaei, 55, a former Bellevue Hospital Center executive, was acquitted Tuesday of charges that she used her high-level job to pressure vendors for discounted furniture and supplies at her Oceanside home.

The investigation was launched in 2004 by former Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, and a grand jury indicted her on two misdemeanor charges of official misconduct in 2009. A Manhattan jury returned an acquittal in less than two hours Tuesday, Scaring said. A spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who prosecuted the case, declined to comment.

Tabaei was fired from her $199,000 position as senior executive director of facilities management because of the investigation. A spokesman for the hospital declined to comment.

Tabaei said she attracted the attention of the office of the Inspector General for New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation because, in her position, she was in charge of millions of dollars of hospital contracts.

That agency oversees the city's public hospitals.

Tabaei was renovating her home in 2004 when "the inspector general had checked to see who were contractors [on her house] who [also] worked at Bellevue," she said.

She bought tiles for her house from a Bellevue vendor, for which he billed her $3,000, Scaring said. Though there is no law prohibiting public officials from hiring contractors they are doing public work with in a private capacity, the inspector general's office alerted the district attorney's office, which claimed the work was worth more than $3,000, Scaring said. The contractor testified that Tabaei did not pressure him for a discount or favor.

Another Bellevue contractor who sold Tabaei six $276 chairs for $64 each had billed her at the wrong price, Scaring said, and she paid the balance when the error came to light.

Unable to find another job during the investigation, Tabaei has been unemployed for nine months. She has spent her career working at public hospitals but is weary after her ordeal. "I turned completely the whole place around, and this is what I get," she said of working at Bellevue.

"This has been devastating to me, emotionally and financially," she added.