By Gus Saltonstall
A Brooklyn company was indicted Wednesday for running a fake construction safety school that was connected to the death of a worker on the Upper West Side in 2022, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
Valor Security & Investigations, including six of its executives and employees, was charged with enterprise corruption, forged instruments, and offering false instruments for operating a sham safety training school that issued safety certificates and cards to 20,000 people between December 2019 and April 2023, according to the DA.
The school issued these cards for a fee, instead of granting them after the 40 hours of mandatory safety training for people working on construction sites, the DA said.
During the three-year period, Valor Security & Investigations was the third largest granter of these safety certifications in the city, “issuing thousands of safety certificates and cards without actually providing any training.”
The company charged anywhere from $300 to $600 for the basic safety training cards, with many of the payments coming in cash, according to the DA’s office.
“In the construction industry, fraud can mean life or death – not only for the individuals working on the site, but for the general public that moves around them every single day,” District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a news release. “We allege that Valor Security & Investigations ran a fraudulent safety training school, falsely claiming that construction workers received the necessary training required to work on construction sites.”
On November 28, 2022, the lack of actual training turned deadly for Ivan Frias, 36, on the Upper West Side.
He died after falling from the 15th floor of a construction site at 263 West End Avenue, between West 72nd and 73rd streets.
Valor had filed paperwork certifying that Frias, who emigrated from Mexico, had completed 10 hours of safety training, including eight hours of fall protection, but no training was ever conducted, according to the DA’s office.
A trio of employees and the company were charged with reckless endangerment for their role in the death, “which may have been prevented had Mr. Frias received the safety training and learned about the requisite fall protection guidelines.”
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Such heinous negligence. Really tragic.
What is being done to see where the 20,000 people who got safety certificates and cards currently work and have them undergo proper training, to avoid additional tragedies?
I’m betting that the “school” kept few to no records (even if required to) and so…good luck to the “students,” and to us!
Civil enforcement (vigorous enough that it actually works) costs money, and no one wants to pay it. But transferring a few billion from NYPD to, say, DWCP would yield real net benefits to the city’s quality of life.
Horrible.
Horrible and how was there no oversight of a company giving out thousands of licenses?
As a licensed healthcare professional, I have to follow a process for getting and staying licensed that is very involved and tedious, as it should be!
NYC continues to live up to its reputation as corrupt when it comes to construction-which is beyond unfair to companies and people who work hard to be safe and compliant.
Are we to suppose that the decedent thought that he had been trained?
The guy who ran Valor, Alexander Shaporov (per NYT), who produced fake certificates on a days notice (certifying 40 hours of training, ha ha) has to be one of the most cynical, negligent, evil human operators in the city. All to buy a yacht and fancy cars. But the brokers for the construction companies, who bought those fake papers and let untrained people work, are close behind. When you immigrate to a country, as most of our predecessors did, where you work, who you work for, how they treat you, matters so much. Employers have a lot of short term financial incentive to treat people like trash when they can. To let them be injured or die. In the US, with tragedies like this, like the child laborers being injured in meat packing plants – we need to make examples of employers and demand they raise the bar. I remember my shock when this happened and I saw the memorial candles for this poor young man by the building. Gone at 36. I hope his wife gets what she needs. Good work, AG Bragg.
Time to make some civil laws into criminal ones. Hard time does cure many problems.
But you ignore the bigger concern: Have they rounded up all 20,000 workers with fake safety certificates and kicked them out of Dodge?