New York has discovered that its highest paid employee is not the mayor, it’s a plumber. It seemed impossible until they checked their schedule.

In 1927, Al Capone’s accountants were not the ones who ended up putting him in court. They did it own financial records. When investigators began to review income, schedules and money movements, they discovered that the accounts told a very different story than the official one. Because many of the most striking investigations did not begin with a complaint, but with something simpler: carefully looking at a time sheet. The highest paid employee. The story begins last yeara time when, to everyone’s surprise, the highest-paid municipal employee in New York was not the mayor, nor the police chief, nor the head of the firefighters. No, it was Jakub Markowskia plumbing supervisor for the municipal public housing authority who entered $465,000. The figure immediately attracted attention because it practically placed him at the top of a workforce of some 350,000 public employees. A possible explanation and something more. The first investigations confirmed that a good part of that salary came from the crazy figure of almost 2,560 overtime hours accumulated during a single fiscal year. Translated into practice, it represents an average close to seven extra hours a day for an entire year, an extraordinary workload even for a service used to dealing with urgent breakdowns. However, when reviewing the municipal documentation an unexpected detail appeared: during that same period there was also at the head of two private companies plumbing workers who worked on dozens of jobs spread across some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city. It’s not the salary, it’s the time. That discovery completely changed the focus of the case. The New York Department of Buildings is now investigating whether the compatibility between both activities respected the regulations municipal and whether Markowski had the necessary authorization after being promoted in 2024 to a supervisory position related to fire safety. Not only that. Investigators are also analyzing whether he could exercise the direct supervision required by law in especially sensitive jobs, such as gas installations, while accumulating such a volume of activity. More and more doubts in the hours worked. The investigation also tries to clarify how their companies really worked. counted the new york times that, although Markowski was listed as a licensed plumber, several contractors recalled dealing primarily with another businessman, Robert Tarnawa, whose exact relationship to the work remains under scrutiny. Precisely this point is especially relevant because New York legislation requires that certain works be supervised directly and continuously by a licensed plumber. A case at the worst moment. The context doesn’t help either. The New York Housing Authority manages more than 240 residential complexes where nearly 300,000 people live and has a huge investment deficit for repair badly damaged buildings. In recent years, furthermore, the organization has been involved several scandals related to bribery, extortion and fraud overtime, which has increased scrutiny over any possible irregularities in the management of its resources. More questions than answers. To date, Markowski has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing and authorities insist that the investigation remains open. Nor has the details of the specific tasks that justified his thousands of overtime hours been made public, information requested by the own The New York Times through transparency legislation. What has become clear is that the story of New York’s highest-paid public employee has ceased to be that of an exceptional salary and has become that of an agenda that the authorities are examining minute by minute. As shared in the Times Attorney April McIver: “Allowing a single person to run a private plumbing company while serving as a city supervisor and logging more overtime than any other city employee is not only wasteful, it raises serious questions about the integrity, safety and oversight of the New York Housing Authority’s operations.” Image | sam valadi In Xataka | New York has launched its new and revolutionary garbage containers. Spain has been using them for years In Xataka | For decades we climbed this New York skyscraper without knowing that the screws that held it in place could not hold.

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