Testimony ended Tuesday night in Garden City Park Fire Department proceedings against Second Assistant Chief Matthew Flood, five months after his suspension in October for allegedly falsifying attendance records.
Attorneys for the fire district and Flood presented reams of documents and firehouse surveillance footage as evidence.
Four current or former fire chiefs — including Flood and Robert Mirabile, who was chief of the department until the end of last year — gave hours of testimony.
After he closed proceedings Tuesday, hearing officer Peter Fishbein said he would give a recommended verdict to the fire district’s Board of Commissioners.
When a firefighter in the audience asked if Fishbein would make his decision available to the department’s members, he said it would only go to the board.
That wasn’t the answer the firefighter was hoping for.
“I don’t have a lot of faith in the Board of Commissioners,” he said.
Beneath the proceedings lied a tension between some of the Garden City Park Fire Department’s leadership and some of its members, who said they don’t trust Mirabile and the other officers who brought charges against Flood, their friend.
Since the disciplinary hearings against Flood began in January, the fire district argued he gave Roger Green and Sean Walsh — two of his closest friends — credit for more than a dozen fire calls to which they did not respond in an effort to make them eligible to run for a chief’s office.
While they conceded Green and Walsh got credit for the calls, Flood and his attorney, Robert Valli, argued he did not falsify any records, but was only entering call records into an electronic system based on paper attendance reports. Green and Walsh told him they didn’t want to run for office anyway, he said.
Green testified that he didn’t want to review records for the calls he allegedly got false credit for because he thought Mirabile’s actions were motivated by revenge.
Flood was third assistant chief at the time of the alleged attendance fraud and was responsible for maintaining attendance records and entering them into Red Alert, the fire department’s electronic record-keeping system.
Call reports are kept in a locked box to which Flood and at least six or seven other department members have a key, he said. Each report has a white paper original with three colored carbon copies attached underneath.
Mirabile, who started an investigation into the alleged fraud last summer, testified Monday night that Green’s and Walsh’s names were on several original call reports, but not on the paper carbon copies for those calls. In one case, their names were on neither the original nor the carbon copies, Mirabile said.
But Walsh and Green received credit for them in Red Alert, and Flood was listed as the person who entered their credits.
Surveillance video showed Flood signing Green’s name on a call report on Sept. 17. The signature matched those on the allegedly falsified reports, Mirabile said, indicating Flood had forged all of them.
But according to Flood’s account of that day, he and Green responded to a fire alarm on Denton Avenue that was unintentionally set off. Flood dropped Green at his nearby house so he could get his car, and returned to the fire station to complete a call report, he said.
He signed Green’s name on the report because he was personally with him on the call, he testified Tuesday night. Another angle of the surveillance footage played at a January hearing shows Green arriving at the firehouse later.
Flood denied ever altering call records for Green, Walsh or anyone else. He agreed with fire district attorney Chris Devane that anyone who does so should be punished harshly, and said he treats firefighters fairly as a chief.
“That’s something I pride myself on,” he said on the stand. “… I also pride myself on my integrity.”
Mirabile and current First Assistant Chief Michael Magas started investigating alleged attendance fraud in the summer after hearing a rumor from Timothy Nacewicz, the current chief of the department, that Green and Walsh were considering runs for chief offices, Mirabile said.
Firefighters must reach a 25-percent call attendance threshold to be eligible to run for office, Mirabile testified. They thought neither Green nor Walsh would be eligible to run based on their call attendance at that time, he said, so they decided to look at attendance records.
When they confronted Flood with the inconsistencies before the Oct. 22 Board of Commissioners’ meeting, he denied ever signing Green’s name to any calls and said he only enters information from the original white call reports, Mirabile said.
Mirabile said they told Flood surveillance footage showed him signing Green’s name on Sept. 17, and he replied, “No you don’t. No way. I never signed him in.”
The board voted to suspend Flood that evening.
Before that meeting, Flood heard a rumor Magas was looking at attendance reports and decided to look at the Red Alert system to see whether that was true. He found Magas had been examining attendance records, he said.
On Nov. 2, Mirabile directed Magas to go into the system and remove the Green’s and Walsh’s credits for calls to which they did not respond.
Separately, according to records presented as evidence this week, Mirabile’s username was logged into Red Alert and made 139 “edits” to call records.
Mirabile said Red Alert shows a record as “edited” any time someone opens it, regardless of whether changes are made.
Red Alert will also show changes were made by one user when another particular individual made the report. For example, when Magas removed the call credits Nov. 2, the Red Alert reports showed Flood’s name because he originally recorded the credits.
Mirabile said he doesn’t think he made the edits Oct. 29, and testified that he doesn’t know who did.
Several friends and allies of Flood’s in the audience for this week’s hearings said Mirabile, Magas and Nacewicz targeted Flood to prevent any opposition in last year’s chief elections, in which Nacewicz was elected chief of the department and Magas was elected first assistant.
Members lack faith in the department because Mirabile has past disciplinary issues, and many members question whether what he says is truthful, said one firefighter who did not want to be identified to avoid creating problems among firefighters.
“Most of the guys here want to see Mirabile and Magas kicked out of the department, because they’re a cancer,” he said. “We view them as a cancer to the department.”
Three firefighters indicated members cast a 27-5 no-confidence vote in Mirabile in November, when he was still chief of the department.
The vote essentially told Mirabile they thought he was not telling the truth, but the Board of Commissioners did not act on it, the first unidentified firefighter said.
In a phone interview, Mirabile said he took a 20-day suspension in December for an “administrative error” — he signed his name in the wrong place on a Nassau County grant application.
In 2005, Mirabile was removed from the department for writing a letter to then-chief Mike Rivers that Rivers thought “disrespectful,” Mirabile said.
More than 10 years ago, he said, he was suspended for signing in firefighters for a training event to which he thought they would arrive late. They never showed up, but Mirabile testified that he notified the chief. Green was chief of the department at the time, he said Wednesday.
“My disciplinary past is not the issue at hand here,” Mirabile said in the interview Wednesday. “That’s what the defense is using to say that I’m doing wrong now? It doesn’t really work like that.”
In 2013, Garden City Park resident Dawn Ward accused Magas of trying to forcibly enter her home while assisting Nassau County police in an investigation related to an altercation her son had at the Cellini Lodge Italian Festival that August.
The Board of Commissioners decided not to pursue disciplinary proceedings against Magas.
Mirabile said the department never cast a no-confidence vote. Members voted on a motion to remove him from his post without charges, he said, but it did not pass.
He said a 27-5 vote is “unrealistic” because at least 60 of the department’s roughly 100 members usually come to meetings.
Mirabile said he thinks the discontent comes from a small group of firefighters who “enjoy controversy rather than doing the job that we’re assigned to do,” and who resent unpopular decisions he made as chief.
“I will not sacrifice my integrity for popularity among the members,” he said.
Neglah Sharma contributed reporting.
