A New York real estate broker was sentenced to nine months of house arrest this week for paying a former shelter operator hundreds of thousands of dollars in a yearslong bribery scheme to profit from city funding meant for homeless people.
The broker, Sheina Levin, 61, owned a real estate company in Brooklyn. As the ranks of homeless people swelled in the city in recent years and the need for shelters grew more urgent, she paid a prominent shelter operator, Victor Rivera, more than $830,000 in kickbacks so his organization would lease property she controlled, federal prosecutors said.
Mr. Rivera, the former chief executive of the Bronx Parent Housing Network, pleaded guilty last year to federal crimes related to the bribery scheme and was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison . Mr. Rivera’s financial entanglements with Ms. Levin, as well as wide-ranging accusations of sexual assault and harassment against him, were first revealed in a New York Times investigation in 2021 .
Ms. Levin was sentenced on Wednesday after pleading guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud for her role in the pay-to-play scheme, which stretched from 2019 to 2021.
“Her felony conviction and the sentence imposed today show that those who put personal greed ahead of the needs of vulnerable city residents will face serious consequences,” said Jocelyn E. Strauber, commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, which investigated the case with agents from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.
In court filings, Ms. Levin described how Mr. Rivera first solicited bribes from her while they were working together to sublease several buildings she controlled in the Bronx as homeless shelters.
As the subleases were being arranged, Mr. Rivera demanded that he personally receive a cut of Ms. Levin’s rental profits, and she complied, she said.
“I knew that doing so would enable the subleases to go forward and that these payments were improper,” Ms. Levin said. “Mr. Rivera knew that I would make a profit on these arrangements due to my direct lease agreements with the owners of those properties.”
Prosecutors said Ms. Levin disguised the payments to Mr. Rivera as consulting fees to a bogus company run by his son, and that he used the kickbacks to make mortgage payments on his home.
After Mr. Rivera helped found the Bronx Parent Housing Network two decades ago, he built the organization into one of the largest shelter operators in New York, netting $274 million in city money from 2017 to 2021. But as the money flowed in, Mr. Rivera treated the nonprofit group as his personal domain, The Times found, collecting an annual salary of $453,000, driving a Mercedes-Benz leased by the organization and steering millions of dollars in contracts to friends and associates.
Mr. Rivera demanded kickbacks from some of those associates as well, including a construction company and a security guard firm, according to prosecutors. But the bribes he received from Ms. Levin, his one-time partner in a separate housing venture, were the most substantial.
The felony charge Ms. Levin pleaded guilty to carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. But prosecutors recommended that she be sentenced to house arrest and two years of supervised release because they said she made “sincere efforts” to aid the investigation into Mr. Rivera.
She also agreed to forfeit more than $790,000 and pay more than $838,000 to the Bronx Parent Housing Network.
In a statement, Ms. Levin’s lawyer said Mr. Rivera “manipulated her dedication to servicing the homeless population into supporting his own personal corruption.”
“Ms. Levin acknowledges her terrible mistake in going along with Victor’s demand for kickbacks,” said the lawyer, Michael Farkas, “and she is committed to making full amends for her conduct.”
