Vehicle E-47, a Jeep Cherokee owned by the New Rochelle Board of Education, has found its way home after many years “lost” over at 5 Edgewood Park in New Rochelle. The Jeep is now being kept at 51 Cliff Street at nights and weekends, as per district policy
In April, Talk of the Sound reported that Salvatore “Sal” Porretto, a working-foreman in the Buildings & Grounds department at 51 Cliff Street working under Vincent “Jimmy” Bonanno, the supervisor and John Gallagher of Aramark, was making personal use of Vehicle E-47. Poretta, according to sources, had making personal use of E-47 for many years, parking the vehicle in front of his home at 5 Edgewood Park in New Rochelle and even using the Jeep to run a private snowplowing business in the winter.
After the story first ran, Anthony Pirrotti, Jr., an attorney representing Porretto, claimed the article was “patently false” and libelous and demanded that the article be “immediately” taken down. Pirrotti did not respond to our request to identify “specific statements” in the article that he believed to be false nor, to date, taken any legal action with regards to the article.
The New Rochelle Board of Education has appeared to have endorsed this conduct by Aramark employees and the district employees working under them, going so far as to extend for another a three-quarter million dollar no-bid contract with Aramark Education. This despite full awareness of flagrant violations of district policies and criminal activity by employees working under Aramark and the knowledge that Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak Organisciak, Assistant Superintendent John Quinn and the board’s own attorney, Jeffrey Kehl tried to sneak through a sweetheart deal for three highly-paid Aramark employees in a board resolution designed to put John Gallagher, Anthony Rigos and James Purdie, all Aramark employees, on the district payroll and make them pension eligible. Resolution 12-266-1 on March 27, 2012 would have violated the district’s contract with Aramark and would have opened up the board to claims for three counts of tortious interference for inducing the Aramark employees to violate their employment agreements with Aramark. The resolution would have authorized the administration to pay the three Aramark employees along with three district employees for work on a TV pilot for ABC Television that was filmed at Isaac E. Young Middle School in March. Sources tell Talk of the Sound that none of the six people were present at the school that weekend so that the invoice to the Disney film production company would have been a falsified business records for the purposes of defrauding Disney.