Google Maps
A longtime employee of John Jay College of Criminal Justice has been indicted on charges she stole roughly $710,000 from the school over more than seven years, prosecutors announced this week — money that was supposed to go to students in one of the college’s career-development programs.
Advertisement
Cadelie Neat, 60, worked as the accounts payable manager at John Jay, the CUNY college at 524 West 59th Street. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, her job put her in charge of requesting stipend checks for students in the college’s Academic Preparation Program for Law Enforcement, known as APPLE Corps — a program meant to guide young people toward careers in public service, leadership, and the study of policing and community relations across the city.Instead, prosecutors allege, she used that access to invent a payroll of her own. Between December 2018 and April of this year, the office says, Neat generated more than 260 stipend checks by recycling the names of current and former students and, when those ran short, simply making up students who did not exist. Most of the checks, prosecutors say, were routed to her own home, where she deposited them into personal bank accounts at ATMs around Manhattan. The money allegedly went toward travel, dining out, and home repairs.
The case was referred to prosecutors by the office of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, part of a pair of indictments announced Tuesday that together account for nearly $1 million in alleged fraud against the state. “When you defraud the State, you steal from all 20 million New Yorkers,” District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in announcing the charges.
The New York Post noted the obvious irony — that a college devoted to fighting crime had, if the allegations hold, been quietly hosting one in its finance office for years. The scheme, per the indictment, ran for more than seven years before it came apart.
Advertisement
The college, for its part, is saying little. A John Jay spokesperson told amNewYork that the school takes any misuse of public funds seriously and is cooperating fully with investigators, but declined to comment further — including on whether Neat is still employed there — citing the active criminal case and the personnel matter behind it.John Jay’s main campus sits at 59th Street and Tenth Avenue, at the southern end of the neighborhood. The indictment is only an accusation; Neat has not been convicted of any crime, and the charges remain to be tested in court.
Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
