Man Pleads Guilty in Marshals Service Bribery Conspiracy

The former president of a security firm providing guards for federal courthouses nationwide pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to bribe a U.S. Marshals Service employee and trying to win business by giving illegal gratuities to officials of the agency.

Nicholas Pastoressa of Central Security Systems Inc., which has done $123 million worth of guard business with the marshals since 1988, faces up to 10 years in prison and $500,000 in fines for conspiracy and tax evasion.

The assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, Julie Copeland, who is prosecuting the case, declined to identify the Marshals Service employee and officials who allegedly received the bribe and gratuities. She described the continuing probe into the largest scandal to involve the agency in recent years as “very sensitive” and said it was “broadening.”

William Dempsey, a Marshals Service spokesman, would not say if the employee and officials are still with the government.

The Times disclosed on Oct. 2 that the Staten Island, N.Y.-based company, which provided guards for the sprawling 9th Circuit that covers California and eight other Western states, had been temporarily suspended from contracting with the federal government and was under FBI investigation.

That ban was lifted Nov. 13, Dempsey said. He noted that the firm is now under new management that is cooperating with the investigation--a joint effort by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative division. Pinkerton Security & Investigative Services replaced Central Security in the Western United States, but Central Security now is eligible to bid for future contracts, Dempsey said.

Besides the bribe to the Marshals Service employee, the alleged conspiracy, which purportedly operated from January, 1985, to June, 1992, also involved paying an unidentified individual outside the agency between $35,000 and $75,000 for his “assistance and influence” with various government officials, according to the two-count criminal charges.

These payments were structured to evade the Bank Secrecy Act’s requirements that payments of $10,000 be reported.

As part of the conspiracy, the U.S. Marshals’ employee secretly helped the company prepare the firm’s guard service bid proposals for 1988 and obtained confidential data about competitors’ bids. The conspiracy also called for Pastoressa and others to give Marshals Service officials gratuities for official acts they performed. In August, 1990, the charges specified, Pastoressa paid $1,600 for limousine service for a Marshals Service official.

Under the alleged plot, Pastoressa and his co-conspirators devised a scheme to defraud the City of New York by underreporting the income of retired New York and transit police officers who worked as guards.

This allowed them to evade restrictions on income they were allowed to earn above their disability pensions, according to the charges to which Pastoressa pleaded guilty.

The scheme involved paying part of the retired police officers’ income to relatives who were placed on the firm’s payroll but did not actually work there.

In the second count of the criminal charges, Pastoressa admitted evading nearly $43,000 in federal income taxes for 1988 by reporting his and his wife’s taxable income as $108,382, although it actually exceeded $240,000. Pastoressa also admitted wire and mail fraud.