A former MTA worker and an ex-state court officer will each spend 18 months in federal prison for teaming up to steal $777,000 in COVID loan money at the height of the pandemic.
Arthur Cornwall, 43, a former MTA signal maintainer from West Babylon, and Sean Williams, 42, a Valley Stream resident who used to work in Queens Civil Court until his arrest, pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy last June.
Long Island Federal Court Judge Joan Azrack handed down the sentences Wednesday.
The duo had set up corporations in 2019, the year before the pandemic, to make real estate investments, but those corporations had no employees and earned no profits, prosecutors said in court filings.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the federal government started offering Paycheck Protection Program and other loans to small businesses that had to close their doors — Cornwall and Williams saw an opportunity to fatten their wallets, according to prosecutors.
PPP loans would be forgiven if they were spent on job retention efforts and payroll costs.
Cornwall and Williams claimed, falsely, that one of their companies had eight employees and they were on the hook for $22,000 a month in salary payments, and another company had five employees being paid a collective $10,000 every month.
Those employees didn’t exist, and instead, the duo used it to pay off debts, take out cash, and pay kickbacks to co-conspirators. Williams also used the money to buy more than $33,000 in cryptocurrency and pay $110,000 in real estate purchases.
“The defendants’ theft of relief money, despite holding jobs with good salaries and benefits, so they could purchase real estate, cryptocurrency and pay off credit card bills with the stolen funds, is deserving of jail sentences,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Wednesday.
Defense lawyer Karen Charrington, who represents both men, described the duo in court filings as family men who turned to the scheme because they were underwater financially, “not out of malice or surreptitious premeditation, but out of haste, desperation, and quite frankly, foolishness to keep a sinking business afloat.”
