Categories for Investigations

Jun 13

2024

Double trouble involving Buffalo cop

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A Buffalo Police vehicle parked on Niagara Street. Photo by Garrett Looker. Buffalo Police Officer Kiam Gunn knows the law from both sides of the badge. Before becoming a cop in 2018, Gunn, 44, was arrested at least five times on charges ranging from drug possession to assault. He’s also gotten in trouble while a police officer. During his six years on the force, Gunn has been the target of six internal affairs complaints. Two were upheld, resulting in discipline. Gunn was suspended without pay for 45 days in May 2022, after witnesses reported seeing him smoke marijuana at Delaware[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Dec 20

2023

IDAs look to dish out housing tax breaks

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This story was produced by Investigative Post and New York Focus and based on interviews with 30 lawmakers, officials, advocates, lawyers and developers, as well as a review of data and historical records. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push for more housing has been interpreted by industrial development agencies as a green light to ramp up controversial tax breaks for developers. The state’s 107 IDAs have never been explicitly authorized to subsidize housing and some lawmakers say that’s for a reason: Housing creates few permanent jobs compared to the industrial and commercial projects the agencies were designed to support. When IDAs do[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Dec 14

2023

‘A Crazy System’: How arbitration returns abusive guards to New York prisons

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This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on  Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. The Marshall Project is distributing this story via Investigative Post, the (Albany) Times Union and New York Focus. A guard working at a Hudson Valley prison pummeled a 19-year-old shackled by the legs to a restraint chair. An officer at a facility near the Canadian border denied food to a man in solitary confinement 13 times over a week. Outside Albany, a guard told a prisoner, “That’s how you get dumped on your fucking[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Nov 20

2023

License plate readers target minority neighborhoods

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Buffalo police have quietly installed license plate readers at 41 intersections in the city, two-thirds of them located in neighborhoods populated predominantly with people of color.  Buffalo police, in response to a Freedom of Information Law request for the department’s policies on license plate readers, wrote that they’re used for “law enforcement investigative purposes only.” While it’s unclear how the department now is using readers, police in the past used mobile readers to issue traffic tickets, at considerable profit to the city.  Unlike many other cities, neither the police nor Mayor Byron Brown, their commander in chief, have made the[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Oct 19

2023

OTB shells out millions for lawyers and lobbyists

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The Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. has shelled out nearly $2.2 million for an army of 19 law firms and lobbyists over the past five years in an effort to fend off investigators, lawmakers and plaintiffs. The spending has eaten into the profits sent to the 17 counties and cities that own the public gambling agency, including Erie, Niagara and Monroe counties and the cities of Buffalo and Rochester. From 2019, when expenses started to take off, through last year, spending on lawyers and lobbyists cut OTB’s revenue sharing to municipalities by 10 percent. While some spending could be expected,[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 18

2023

Wastewater from industrial park could violate federal law

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Updated Oct. 4 at 3:02 p.m. Oak Orchard Creek is considered Orleans County’s “lifeblood.” Flowing south to north from Genesee County wetlands to Lake Ontario, it provides trophy salmon and trout a place to feed and spawn. The creek draws fishermen, $30 million in tourist spending and around $100,000 in county revenue each year. “Oak Orchard Creek is a huge — a huge — part of the fishery … it’s gigantic,” Lou Borrelli, captain of a fishing charter boat, told Investigative Post. “Generally speaking, most of the fish are going to be affected by the water quality, because if it does[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Sep 14

2023

City Hall clerk paid not to work

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In February 2016, the City of Buffalo accused a clerk in the fire department of tampering with the payroll in order to pad her checks. Since then the former Jill Parisi — now appearing on city payroll records under her maiden name, Jill Repman — has collected well over a half million dollars while on paid administrative leave, awaiting a resolution to the disciplinary charges against her. For six of those seven-and-a-half years, she has held a second job in the private sector, managing payroll for a local healthcare company. According to the city’s law department, there was never any[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Aug 21

2023

New York lax on wage theft collections

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ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Documented reports on  special interests in politics. Saprina James was hopeful when she received a letter in 2019 about her wage theft claim against her former employer. The letter said the New York State Department of Labor had substantiated her claim and ordered Mugisha F. Sahini and his company, Riverside Line, to pay her more than $70,000 in back wages. “I was feeling good that the government was on my side, and that I would soon get[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post