ACORN, the beleagured leftist outfit struggling to stay afloat in the middle of a hurricane of bad publicity, was hit with another minor storm early this week.
Yet another "organizer," formerly with the Brooklyn office, is accused of fraud, The New York Times reports.
Donnett Davis, the Times reports, "improperly received $500,000 in merchandise for a corporate rewards program with Verizon, the telephone company, through a complex fraud scheme that went on for more than four years."
The scale of the fraud of which Davis is accused is monumental. While working at ACORN, investigators allege, "she opened a corporate rewards program for Acorn’s 10 to 20 phone lines with Verizon, but put her name as the recipient to get the rewards herself, she told investigators."
Such was Davis' greed, the schools allege, that she added some 9,000 phone lines in the Department of Education to the rewards account. With millions of dollars of billings accumulating on her rewards account, the Times reports, "the trickle of reward points became a roaring torrent of gift certificates, L. L. Bean merchandise, and other free items, investigators said."
After ACORN fired Davis, she wangled a job in the city's Department of Education: the same department of education whose phone lines she attached to her Verizon rewards account. She worked as the "parent coordinator" for the Acorn High School for Social Justice in New York.
When Verizon discovered the fraud, the paper reports, Davis resigned her job with the schools.
Fraud and embezzlement are nothing new to ACORN. The leftist group reluctantly fired the brother of its founder when he was discovered to have embezzled as much as $1 million from the organization. That figure was later amended to $5 million. Over the summer, BigGovernment.com released a slew of video recordings in which ACORN officials coached undercover reporters how to open brothels and smuggle underage prostitutes into the country. ACORN workers also said they could help the pair commit federal tax fraud.
Those shocking revelations led Congress to end ACORN's federal funding. The Census Bureau fired ACORN as a partner in conducting the 2010 census, and the IRS ended ACORN's participation in its program for volunteers tax advisors.
Now, the organization is under fire yet again, this time because an employee hatched a brilliant scheme to defraud a major corporation. “She left no stone unturned,” the city schools' chief investigator told the Times.
Neither, likely, will the prosecutors handling her case.
