When New York City officials needed someone to disinfect the apartment of its first Ebola patient, they found someone who seemed to be made for the job. Sal Pane boasted decades of experience cleaning up extremely dangerous materials, including anthrax in 2001. Ebola was his time to shine. “This is our Michael Jordan moment. The fourth quarter,” he told USA Today. “When everyone else says no, we show up.”
But when Pane and his Bio-Recovery crew showed up at Dr. Craig Spencer’s home, they brought a truck bearing permit numbers that belonged to a dead man. Pane had duped the dead man’s grieving sister into selling that truck, she said, as well as the company name. Pane then claimed the dead man’s years cleaning up anthrax sites and other danger zones as his own — despite the fact that the dead man’s family, friends, and former co-workers said they had never known him to work with Pane.
Soon after Spencer’s apartment was first cleaned, BuzzFeed News reported that Pane — who has referred to himself as the “chief safety officer” of the firm New York City hired to clean up a lethal pathogen— is a convicted felon and former mortgage scammer.
But now, further investigation has revealed that Pane has a long and colorful history of telling falsehoods. An examination of his past legal troubles and his current operation has found that he has a playbook: He uses fake names and makes false claims to inflate his credentials, gains credibility from media interviews in which he speaks of lofty ideals and glittering successes, and along the way accumulates a trail of people who feel he exploited them when they were vulnerable.
His story illuminates how, with enough audacity, a scammer can even land a job that’s critical to public safety.
Pane and Bio-Recovery have claimed to have certifications from the EPA and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. But BuzzFeed News could not find any evidence of this. Bio-Recovery’s state permit to haul medical waste expired in 2012, before Pane was associated with the company.
Some of Pane’s claims border on the ludicrous, such as his supposed decades of experience. “Twenty-seven years,” he told one radio station. “Not my first rodeo.”
Twenty-seven years ago, Pane would have been four years old. Bio-Recovery did not exist.
The city says it is reviewing “this situation,” but officials have defended Bio-Recovery’s work cleaning Dr. Spencer’s apartment. The company was hired because “they had the requisite skills in blood and body fluid assessment and cleanup,” said Sam Miller, a city health department spokesman. The state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene checked on Bio-Recovery’s work after it was done, the spokesman said, “and found the cleanup was successfully performed and executed.”
But New York may have been saved by Ebola itself. Deadly though it is, Ebola does not live for long on dry surfaces such as door handles and countertops. If an unqualified company had botched the cleanup of a hardier pathogen, then those viruses might have survived, infected other people, and sparked an outbreak.
“The risks are high if you don’t know what you’re doing,” said Ian Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. “You could become infected and set up a whole new chain of transmission that extends into the community.”
Lipkin gave the SARS outbreak as an example. "You have thousands of people that become infected from a single individual," he said.
In a brief phone interview, Pane said he did not run Bio-Recovery but hung up before BuzzFeed News could ask about most of the points in this article. He did not respond to a detailed letter emailed to two addresses associated with him. The letter was also emailed to Bio-Recovery and an intermediary.
Before he ended the phone call, Pane bristled at questions about his past. “There’s real news out there,” he said. “Grow up.” He insisted that this article would not deter him. “It’s not going to change the fact I’m going to keep going to work every day and helping families,” Pane said. “Enjoy your smear campaign.”
AmeriMod Modification Agency president Salvatore Pane Jr. in his office.
Photograph by Howard Schnapp
Salvatore Pane Jr. first made his name during a different crisis. In 2008, during the height of the economic meltdown, Pane began giving interviews — to all three major U.S. television networks, to Telemundo, and to Wall Street Journal podcasts — as a self-proclaimed mortgage expert. He also appeared in local media and wrote a commentary in the Long Island Business News . One 2008 article said Pane had been a mortgage broker for 10 years. He was 25 years old.
He did have an impressive-sounding title: president of Amerimod, a company that promised loan modifications to families having trouble paying their mortgages. In an infomercial, he declared that company’s mission was to help those in need: “When someone calls us, they are in trouble.”
The company grew quickly, and Pane apparently encouraged a light-hearted atmosphere. A Crain’s New York story describes Pane “riding around the office on a Segway scooter drinking Red Bull and exhorting agents to bring in customers.” A former employee told Crain’s that every time someone hit certain targets, “we’d go out on the floor and hit a gigantic brass gong hanging from the ceiling.”
Pane and Amerimod also deployed a number of different misleading or illegal tactics to acquire customers. They advertised a success rate of between 90% and 100%, even though by Pane’s own accounting the rate was about only 43%. They devoted much of their advertising budget to Spanish-speaking customers, then provided loan contracts that were only in English. And they took in up-front fees, then ducked their customers once those fees were collected.
The New York attorney general’s office took notice, and filed a civil suit. In August 2009, a judge issued an injunction against Amerimod, ordering the company to stop its illegal practices immediately. Later, Pane was found “personally liable for engaging in fraudulent and illegal acts.”
When BuzzFeed News first asked Pane in October about the lawsuit, he claimed that it had been filed against his father, who has the same name. When BuzzFeed News noted that a New York Times article from the time had given an age that matched his and not his father’s, he corrected his statement to say the suit had been brought “against my father and me.” Court documents identify the junior Pane as the “President, CEO, sole principal and shareholder” of Amerimod. The documents do not mention Pane’s father.
Though the judge had issued an injunction, Pane still had a court battle to fight, on whether Amerimod would be forced to pay restitution, and whether Pane himself would be on the hook for that money.
But by then, Sal Pane was in a different kind of trouble.
Queensboro Correctional Facility
On an early Wednesday morning in March 2009, a police officer in the Long Island town of East Garden City pulled over a gray Toyota four-door that was speeding and didn’t signal a lane change. When he walked up to the driver’s window, the officer saw bloodshot eyes, heard slurred speech, and smelled alcohol.
The driver told him his name was Mikal Sachana. He claimed to be a district attorney in Suffolk County, with a date of birth of Nov. 17, 1978. But he was unable to produce a driver’s license. The officer told the driver that giving false information to an officer was against the law, and put him under arrest for driving under the influence.
“Don’t do this,” the driver said. “I’m married and have a kid and owe a hundred thousand dollars out in law school and my father died in 9-11-2001.” (Pane told BuzzFeed News he had been speaking about an ex-girlfriend’s father: “Yes, he died on 9/11,” Pane said.)
The driver also claimed to know two of Long Island’s more prominent politicians, Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi and Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy. “I have both their numbers in my phone,” he said. The officer did not budge, and put him in the back of his police car.
After the arrest, officers went through the man’s wallet, and found a New York State driver’s license: On it was the name “Salvatore Pane 2nd.” The license had been suspended following two previous drunk-driving convictions.
Pane took the case to trial. He was re-arrested when he drove to court, because his license was still suspended.
The jury found Pane guilty of false personation, driving while impaired, and felony aggravated unlicensed operation of a vehicle. He was sentenced to between one and three years in prison.
Pane was released in March 2011, having spent a total of nine months behind bars. At some time after that, by Pane’s own account, he began to turn his life around. He also changed his name, from Sal Pane to Sal Pain — to get away from a stalker, he said. BuzzFeed News could find no record that he changed his legal name, and Pane did not respond to a letter that asked him for details of his name change.
He still fought his mortgage scam case, though in February 2012 a judge approved a request from his own attorneys to withdraw from the case. Those attorneys, the judge noted, said Pane had intentionally given them incorrect contact information.
In February 2013, it came time to hammer out how much Pane and Amerimod owed their nearly 3,000 customers. The attorney general asked for $5.26 million in restitution payments. Now representing himself, Pane declared that he believed that restitution should be between $300,000 and $500,000. He still claimed a 90% success rate.
The judge hired a “special referee” who granted the attorney general’s amount. She also levied an additional $7.25 million in civil penalties, for a total of more than $12.5 million. The referee also found Pane personally liable for the restitution and penalties.
It’s not clear when Sal Pane got into the business of cleaning up dangerous chemicals.
In an interview for BuzzFeed News’ first story, Pane said he had worked for a company called All Island Bio-Recovery going back to 2001. When contacted for this article, he hung up before he could be asked about his experience in the industry, and he didn’t respond to subsequent questions sent by email.
State records show that an All Island Bio-Recovery Inc. was founded in April 2010, but it’s not clear who that company belongs to — it’s registered to Corporation Service Company, a company based in Albany that does processing for other companies. Messages left at the company were not immediately returned.
Ron Gospodarski’s trajectory is much easier to trace. He founded Bio-Recovery in 1998, in Queens, after working for years as a paramedic. Having witnessed many gruesome scenes, he had figured out that there was a need for somebody with some specific expertise to clean it up.
It was a small company — Ron and a handful of employees, according to former employees including his right-hand man, Manny Sosa. Ron was known to go out on every call, usually with Sosa. In videos on the Discovery Channel and elsewhere Gospodarski and Sosa are seen driving out to calls, including one where an overweight man had died on his couch.
Police remove evidence from ABC News headquarters after an anthrax scare October 15, 2001 in New York City.
Mario Tama / Getty Images)
In late 2001, soon after 9/11, people in the offices of several politicians and major media companies opened mail that contained traces of anthrax. Gospodarski was called on to help decontaminate the offices of ABC Studios. He collaborated with the owner of a similar company based in Ohio, run by a man named Fred Schutt. Contacted by BuzzFeed News, Schutt said he could not remember a man by the name of Sal Pane who worked on anthrax — nor did he recognize a picture of him.
Gospodarski was president of a national trade group, the American BioRecovery Association, for several years in the mid-2000s, said Dale Cillian, who became president after him. Cillian spoke with Gospodarski at least once a week, and they were close friends. “Ron told me everything,” he said. Cillian knew about Gospodarski’s co-worker, Manny Sosa, but never heard of anyone by the name of Sal Pane. Gospodarski “would just be livid if he knew what was going on,” Cillian said.
Cillian described Gospodarski as an honest man in an industry where integrity is sometimes in short supply. “Ron did things right, you know,” he said. “He didn’t overcharge.”
In a video from 2011, the camera follows Gospodarski and Sosa as they enter the homes of people in Queens and Long Island who had died of natural causes. He talks of how strange it feels to be a “voyeur” into the final moments of a person’s life. In one apartment, he starts doing the dirty dishes in the sink. He tells the camera that there was one thing about his job that affected him more than any other: “It’s very, very sad when someone dies by themself.”
Gospodarski got sick around 2011 and started looking frail. In April 2013, he died at the age of 51. He left behind two brothers and two sisters, and his dog, Skippy. Instead of flowers, his family asked that memorials be made in his name to a firefighter crew in the Buffalo area, where he was from, and the Ridgewood Volunteer Ambulance Corps, in Queens. He left everything in his will to his sister, Fran Gospodarski Senko.
About a month or two later, Fran got a call from Sal Pane.
Pane (right) at the building where Dr. Craig Spencer lives in New York October 24, 2014.
Mike Segar / Reuters
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/11c6aBp
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