Former Wharton Student Discovers Recession-Proof Industry

by Dan Haley | August 13, 2008 at 2:52 am

Things were looking up for former Wharton student and recent Columbia temp employee Chris Clemente in September 2005. For one, Clemente, 37, had just been released from prison after serving 15 years for heroin and weapons possession. But even better than his freedom--he allegedly discovered a new and promising illegal scheme! A friend tipped Clemente off to an MTA machine that was malfunctioning and giving out free fares, authorities said. Over the course of the next three years, Clemente and two others, Cary Grant (that's his real name) and Lisa Foster Jordan, allegedly stole more than $800,000 worth of MTA money from this Penn Station machine.

In a New York Post article, an MTA spokesperson explains how this mechnaical error probably happened:

The odds of [the suspects] stumbling on this were astronomical," MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin said. The scenario "would only happen if you used an active debit card but had insufficient money in your account and it was from a smaller, nonlocal bank.

In other words, if you were broke and had an account at a nontraditional bank, you too could have taken advantage of the MTA.

What could have possibly brought these three down? According to this Post article, it was a "routine agency audit." Yeah, I guess an audit conducted every three years is kind of routine.

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