Feds to Use MetroCard Data in Fraud Case Against Former MTA Employee

By Hellen Zaboulani

On Monday, Federal prosecutors revealed intent to utilize data from Metrocard swipes against a former employee suspected of cheating the system.

As reported by the NY Post, roughly 50 gigabytes of data has been tapped in the case against former subway maintenance supervisor Michael Gundersen, said Assistant US Attorney Paul Monteleoni at the court hearing. Gundersen, 42 of Manalapan Township, New Jersey, pleaded not guilty to an indictment returned against him in the hearing on Monday. Gundersen is accused of raking in big bucks for overtime work, when he was actually not even anywhere near his worksite. The case, in Manhattan federal court, which is being brought in collaboration with the FBI and the MTA Inspector General’s Office will aim to show based on evidence from his subway swipes that though Gundersen claimed to be on the clock, he was elsewhere at the time. “Cell site information … e-mails, mainly from his work e-mail account, building swipe records and MetroCard swipe records,” Monteleoni said describing the data feds would use.

Gundersen had made an astounding $385,000 in 2018, including $283,000 from 3,914 of overtime hours, as per prosecutors. For those figures to be accurate, it would mean that he would have had to work an average of over 10 hours of OT per day for all 365 days of the year. Gundersen was arrested in December on allegations that he billed the MTA for fraudulent work hours. Gundersen had resigned following his arrest. Gundersen, who was released on $100,000 bail, faces 10 years in prison if convicted. Feds say that during certain hours when he was clocked in at work, he was actually enjoying a concert in Atlantic City with hotel reservations and tickets, on a family trip to New York’s Hudson Valley and Williamsburg, Virginia, and even running a 5K race.

As per the Post, at the same time that Gundersen was arrested, four other MTA high-rollers were also cuffed for raking in annual OT payments of $240,000 or more. The other four men are all current or former employees of the Long Island Rail Road, who allegedly conspired together to cheat the agency out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in OT which they didn’t earn. Gundersen, John Nugent, 50, and Joseph Balestra, 51, were all still on the MTA’s payroll at the time of their arrests. The two other former employees, who were each charged separately were: Thomas Caputo, known as the MTA “overtime king”, who made a total of $461,000; and Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia, who raked in $305,477.