City Comptroller Mark Levine on Wednesday launched a comprehensive audit of nearly a quarter-billion dollars in no-bid migrant shelter contracts the city awarded to a non-profit group called BHRAGS Home Care whose leaders have been indicted on corruption charges.
The group’s former president, Ronald Tirelus, and its former executive director, Roberto Samedy, were hit with federal charges in March, accused of embezzling more than $1 million from the group and shaking down subcontractors for bribes. At the time, the group was winning contract after contract with the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) to run shelters during the city’s 2022 migrant crisis.
“Today we began the process of auditing DHS’ financial oversight of a number of BHRAGS contracts,” a spokesperson for Levine told The City Reporter. “This audit will help us determine whether DHS’ oversight and control methods are adequate.”
Accusations of bribery involving BHRAGS first surfaced in December 2023, and DHS put the group into a corrective action plan in the fall of 2024, but the former Comptroller Brad Lander — who last month unseated Rep. Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary to represent lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn — did not open up an audit while serving as the city’s fiscal watchdog.
As The City Reporter recently revealed, more than a million taxpayer dollars steered to BHRAGS are unaccounted for, including $1.3 million the Brooklyn U.S. attorney alleges Tirelus and Samedy pocketed, and hundreds of thousands in payments DHS made to BHRAGS for security at the shelters that the security firm says was never paid.
Records show Homeless Services paid BHRAGS $1.1 million for shelter security, but Fort NYS Security claims it got a fraction of that. Prosecutors charged the firm’s president, Edouardo St. Fort, with paying bribes to Tirelus and Samedy to win the subcontract for migrant shelter security.
Levine’s team will look at all expired shelter contracts worth a total of $243 million that DHS awarded to BHRAGS between October 2022 and February 2024, checking to see that all reimbursements DHS paid BHRAGS “were reasonable and consistent with terms and conditions of the contracts, as well as agency and City oversight policy,” the spokesperson said.
And going forward, the comptroller will review DHS’ monitoring of all new contracts “to ensure those oversights are adequate.”
During the migrant wave that began in the spring of 2022 the administration of Mayor Eric Adams halted competitive bidding procedures and began handing out hundreds of emergency no-bid contracts for migrant-related services. More than 210,000 asylum seekers and other migrants were bussed to New York from Republican-led border states.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeless Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the planned audit.
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