LIRR track worker sentenced to 3 months for ‘feeding frenzy of overtime fraud’

By Molly Crane-Newman, New York Daily News

A Long Island Rail Road track worker was sentenced Tuesday to three months in prison for a scam described by a judge as “feeding frenzy of overtime fraud.”

Joseph Balestra was paid $348,000 by the MTA in 2018 — $241,000 of which was overtime. That made the 51-year-old the 12th-highest paid MTA employee that year, earning more than the authority’s chairman.

He was charged in 2020, along with four other LIRR workers, in a fraud conspiracy in which they covered for each others’ absences from work while still getting paid.

“I regard this crime as quite serious,” Manhattan Federal Judge Paul Engelmayer said. “To begin, your offense was a form of public corruption. It involved public employees plotting together to steal from the public. You and your co-conspirators engaged in a feeding frenzy of overtime fraud.”

Balestra must also make restitution in the amount of $109,641 — a figure prosecutors say represents the total amount of losses caused by the crew’s no-show shifts.

“The amount of overtime you claimed is eye-popping to the point nearly of physical impossibility,” the judge said.

An LIRR foreman, John Nugent, was sentenced to five months in prison in November.

Prosecutors wrote that Thomas Caputo, who was the 11th-highest paid MTA employee in 2018, was the most culpable of the crew. Caputo pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

In arguing for leniency, Balestra’s attorney wrote that sleeping on the job was widely accepted at the LIRR. The charges in the case, however, were for physical absenteeism from work — not sleeping.

“I loved the work that I did, and I loved that I could build a comfortable life for my family. Now, because of my greed and poor decisions, I’ve actually hurt my family and derailed our future,” the LIRR employee of 31 years wrote in a letter to the court.

Engelmayer said the scam gave hardworking civil servants a bad name.

“The extra money that you obtained by fraudulently claiming to have worked longer than you worked came from real people,” the judge said. “They are called taxpayers.”

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