The Public Safety Committee's second investigative hearing on alleged overtime and kitchen abuse in the East Meadow jail ground to a halt as Sheriff Officers Association President Michael Adams cited a violation of union members' state civil rights.

Proceedings were stalled before jail personnel supervisor Dorothy Garage could be shown overtime slips containing the personal information of 84 county workers.

Committee co-chair Lisanne Altmann (D-Great Neck) told The Westbury Times that the hearings were being suspended indefinitely. "We're going to take a step back and let some other agencies of government work their way through," she said. "We feel that we've done our job uncovering what is going on in there."

While Altmann and others, including Presiding Officer Judith Jacobs (D-Woodbury) and co-chair Legislator Joseph Scannell (D-Baldwin) attempted to expose "gross mismanagement and corruption" at the jail, Republican Legislator Salvatore Pontillo called their findings "insubstantial," and chastised Altmann for drawing conclusions to suit her own purposes. "We have no testimony as to a fraudulent and corrupt system," he said. "We have testimony as to a system which can be improved."

The Jan. 27 testimony of jail cook Jerry Laricchiuta addressed alleged illegal kitchen abuses.

Responding to Altmann's questions regarding reputed "shopping" trips by jail staff to the pantry, Laricchiuta said that, yes, it was accepted practice for staff members to bring back food from the storeroom to isolated areas of the compound. But, he added, "I have never seen anyone put anything into a shopping bag and take it home." Coffee and paper goods were the most popular items taken, he said.

To another of Altmann's questions, Laricchiuta said that he did once see a correction captain fill the trunk of his car with food and drive off. But, when questioned further, he explained it was sometimes necessary to transport food to distant areas of the complex, and loading food into a vehicle would be a reasonable and legitimate means of doing so.

Laricchiuta also responded to queries about $250,000 worth of cookies and crackers that was supposedly approved by the Legislature last year for inmate consumption. His answer was that the inmates are never fed cookies and crackers. At this point, Pontillo put in a request to Scannell to have the dollar amount of the purported expenditure put before the committee in an accurate fashion. "It's a big number to be bandying about," he said, "and I think we should be accurate about it."

Finally, a string of questions about "runaway" overtime practices revealed that the kitchen is understaffed, according to Laricchiuta. "We are short-handed down there," he said. "We lost 10 cooks since 1996 through retirement and promotions. The county has to bring more cooks into the jail. That is the answer to cutting overtime." The county did hire over 50 corrections officers in Oct. of 1999 in an attempt to curb overtime accrual.

When asked to summarize why some cooks earn $20,000 a year in overtime, while others earn only $4,000, Laricchiuta was emphatic that distribution of overtime, particularly in the past three or four years, has been fair and equal. "I'm offered as much overtime as anyone," he explained. "I just refuse to work it, which leaves the others with the opportunity to earn more."

"You have to look at overtime as a pie," he said. "The idea should be for the county to make that pie smaller."

Altmann later expressed her pleasure with County Executive Thomas Gulotta's nomination of Edward Reilly for sheriff of the East Meadow facility. "It looks like we have a very good appointment for sheriff," she said, adding that she hoped the former chief of the New York City Department of Corrections would "stop some of the stuff that has been going on" at the jail.