ST. LOUIS • A St. Louis alderman is seeking committee hearings to investigate how two St. Louis parks officials were able to scheme and steal nearly half a million dollars in city funds over eight years without detection.
The officials — Thomas “Dan” Stritzel, the chief park ranger, and Joseph Vacca, the deputy parks commissioner — pleaded guilty last month in federal court of a scheme that involved the complicity of at least two companies doing business with the city. The companies overcharged the city for services and passed the money back to a sham company controlled by Vacca and Stritzel, avoiding detection by city audits.
City officials representing Mayor Francis Slay said there was nothing they could do to prevent the thefts because they involved the department’s senior officials and the complicity of bona fide vendors. But they said on Tuesday they are working to put into place additional safeguards.
Now, Ward 21 Alderman Antonio French has called for an aldermanic committee, the Parks and Environmental Matters Committee, to hold hearings to investigate the “circumstances and failures that led to Stritzel and Vacca’s indictment.”
“The very least we could do is ask the people in authority to come in and explain,” French said.
French raised questions over which companies were involved and whether they are still doing business with the city.
Ward 17 Alderman Joe Roddy, who chairs the committee, said he will bring the request up at a meeting next week.
“It’s probably good for us all to know what at least happened out there and how to fix it,” Roddy said. “Generally, I tend to be pretty accommodating when the legislative body wants to ask questions.”
Stritzel and Vacca admitted to approaching a city vendor in early 2005, claiming the Parks Division needed equipment “that was not provided for or allocated” in the budget. The vendor, identified as “G.S.S.,” issued inflated monthly invoices to the city and passed the excess money to a company that Vacca and Stritzel controlled with the help of a longtime Stritzel friend.
Also, from 2007 to 2011, Stritzel and Vacca submitted more than $150,000 in false invoices for the supply and repair of hand-held radios from another company created by Stritzel’s friend.
In August 2010, Vacca approached yet another vendor, identified as “B.F.N.,” and said the division needed unbudgeted radio equipment. The indictment says that vendor submitted eight invoices, which included sham charges and undelivered materials, that were inflated by $29,670. “B.F.N.” passed along the excess money to the company controlled by Vacca and Stritzel.
The friend hasn’t been charged and was listed in redacted court documents by his initials. No one from companies “G.S.S.” and “B.F.N.” was charged with wrongdoing, and the company names were listed only by their initials. In all, some $464,722 was stolen, according to the charges.
Vacca has retired from his job. Stritzel has been fired. They will be sentenced in federal court on Dec. 12.
U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan said on Tuesday that the fraud would have been hard to detect.
“If you have multiple high-level officials in a scheme it probably won’t be detected by the normal checks and balances,” Callahan said.
Callahan said he didn’t expect any further charges. “There was no complicity in a criminal enterprise by anyone else,” Callahan said. He said the businesses involved “were duped” by the indicted parks officials into thinking that “they were just helping them overcome bureaucratic obstacles.”
Maggie Crane, the spokeswoman for Slay, referred questions on Tuesday to Eddie Roth, the city’s director of operations. So did St. Louis Parks Director Gary D. Bess, who appeared before an aldermanic committee earlier this year and said, “There is more to come, possibly.”
Bess said in a text message on Tuesday that he was in a hearing and couldn’t talk.
Roth said the city ended its contract after the indictments with one of the companies, a security firm, and is reviewing its contract with another, a landscaping company.
“We’re still trying to determine their level of complicity,” Roth said. “We’ve heard some things that they were not as complicit.”
Roth said the parks department has reduced the number of employees who can sign off on expenditures to just the director and the commissioner.
“We’ve also been in conversations with (city Comptroller Darlene Green’s) office to understand what added checks might be possible,” Roth said.
He added: “The city has been burned by this. There is not a lot that you can do when it is top people doing the conspiring.”
Roth said he welcomes an aldermanic inquiry. ”We’ll see if they have any better ideas than what we’ve been able to gather already from the comptroller,” Roth said.
He added: “If it is just going to degenerate into a political show trial, then it will just be a waste of time and trivialize the city’s victimization in this case.”
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