March 31, 2009

Yanks community benefits fund benefiting administrator, not so much the community

Two from today's New York Daily News on the "community benefits fund" the New York Yankees set up by way of apologizing for taking away Bronx parks for at least four years:

• The New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund gave a 600-pound pitching machine (no, not David Wells) to a local high school, but the school can't use it: It's too big for their gym, and their local ballfield was displaced to make way for the Yanks' new stadium. "It took six men and a flatbed truck for them to drag it in here," All Hallows High School principal Sean Sullivan told the News. "If the Yankees had only given us a bus instead." The school asked the fund for $40,000 to replace the buses the school's teams use to travel to fields on the other side of the Bronx, but were rejected.
• And that was the good news. The News also reports that the lawyer the Yanks hired to set up the benefits fund is suing its chair, Serafin Mariel, saying Mariel deposited $800,000 in fund money in a non-interest bearing account in the bank he owns, and issued no-bid contracts to friends. Mariel, who wouldn't comment to the paper, was originally put in place by former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion; what ever happened to that guy, anyway?