Ex-NYU official admits she stole public money to build swimming pool at her home
A former New York University administrator admitted Tuesday that she spent $80,000 in public money intended for minority- and women-owned businesses on a swimming pool at her Connecticut home, part of a broader $3.5 million fraud that she had orchestrated, officials said.
The former administrator, Cindy Tappe, made the confession while pleading guilty to second-degree grand larceny, court records show. Under a plea deal with the Manhattan district attorney, she will be sentenced to five years’ probation and must pay $663,209 in restitution to cover the full amount of money she used for personal expenses.
Ms. Tappe’s “fraudulent actions not only threatened to damage the quality of education for students with disabilities and multilingual students, but denied our city’s minority and women-owned business enterprises an opportunity to compete fairly for funding,” said Alvin L Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, said in a statement.
Deborah Colson, Ms. Tappe’s attorney, said in a statement that her client “deeply regrets her misconduct.”
“She accepted responsibility for her wrongdoing in open court and will pay restitution in full prior to sentencing,” Ms Colson said. “After that, she looks forward to putting this matter behind her.”
Ms. Tappe, 57, of Westport, Conn., implemented the plan from 2012 to 2018 while she was director of finance and administration at the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and Transformation of Schools, or Metro Center, at NYU.
The center, a nonprofit organization within the university’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, was founded in 1978 and has a mission to increase equity in public education.
Ms. Tappe’s plan, according to officials, included $23 million in state grants awarded to the center for two programs: one aimed at helping school districts improve outcomes for students learning English and another aimed at addressing the disparity in students in special education.
The terms of the grants required that some of the money go to women- and minority-owned businesses, which would administer the programs. Ms. Tappe, prosecutors said, sent $3.5 million of the money through various subcontractors, who made their own cuts and then sent about $3.4 million to shell companies she created.
Some of that money was spent on legitimate expenses related to grants and to reimburse university employees for costs incurred or services provided.
But with the help of shell companies, Ms. Tappe spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal expenses, including the pool, other home improvements and daily living expenses, prosecutors said.
The plan unraveled after an NYU program director confronted Ms. Tappe in 2018. She left her job at the university that year and the theft was reported to the State Education Department, which referred the matter to the state comptroller’s office. After conducting its own investigation, the office referred the case to Manhattan prosecutors.
John Beckman, a university spokesman, said in a statement that NYU officials were “deeply disappointed that Ms. Tappe abused the trust we placed in her in this way.”
“She stole from everyone — the taxpayers, the university, the people the Metro Center was supposed to help,” Mr. Beckman said, adding that NYU was “glad the case has been resolved.”