"Last of Philadelphia airport scammers will be landing in jail"

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Last of airport scammers will be landing in jail
S. Philly woman gets 15 months
By BOB WARNER
The Philadelphia (PA) Daily News


NEARLY 10 years after the discovery of a massive parking scandal at
Philadelphia International Airport, the last of 17 people convicted in
the scam was sentenced yesterday to a federal prison term.

Nancy Mazzuca, a 46-year-old South Philadelphia resident who used to
work as a supervisor in the airport parking lots, will spend 15 months
in jail for lying to a federal grand jury.

"The crime you have committed is an extremely serious one and undermines
our whole system of justice," said U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle
3rd, who presided last year at the trial where a jury convicted Mazzuca
of five counts of perjury.

Federal prosecutor Louis D. Lappen, who earlier won tax-evasion
convictions against the scam's ringleaders, said no additional charges
are expected - which is as far as the feds will go toward confirming
that the airport parking probe is over.

By various measures it was one of the biggest ripoffs in Philadelphia
history: the number of people involved (at least the 17 who were
convicted), the amount of money stolen from taxpayers (at least $3
million, and probably much more) and how long the scam lasted (from late
1990 until September 1994, without city officials catching on until the
very end).

The leader - now serving a nine-year prison sentence - was Anthony
Gricco, regional manager of Ampco System Parking, a private company
hired by the Philadelphia Parking Authority to run the mammoth airport
lots.

Hiring friends, relatives and acquaintances from South Philadelphia,
South Jersey and Delaware County, Gricco assembled a network of crooked
cashiers and supervisors who became experts at fooling the anti-theft
devices installed after a similar airport parking scandal in the 1980s.

Gricco's cashiers - scheduled to work on the busiest nights of the week,
in the busiest airport checkout lines - targeted passengers who had been
out of town for several days, owing $25 or more in parking charges.

Typically, the cashiers would take the parking stubs from departing
drivers and feed counterfeit tickets into their computer terminals,
indicating that the cars had been parked for less than 24 hours, owing
as little as $6.50.

The cashiers would charge the drivers what they really owed - $25 or $30
or more - but put only $6.50 into their cash registers, pocketing the
difference.

At the end of a typical evening shift, Gricco's brother-in-law, William
T. McCardle, drove around the airport collecting the illegal booty,
which sometimes exceeded $10,000 a night.

Once a week, Gricco would whack up the cash and distribute payoff
envelopes to all the participants - hundreds of dollars for the
cashiers, sometimes thousands for Gricco and his top assistants.

The scam was finally undone when the Parking Authority replaced its
airport operations manager in 1994 and two honest cashiers approached
the new official to tell him about the conspiracy.

Until then, the Parking Authority seemed clueless, in spite of multiple
signs that it was being defrauded.

After a similar scandal in the mid-1980s, the authority paid more than
$2 million for a new computer system, designed to prevent thievery,
including videotape cameras to check whether cashiers were entering the
right information as drivers checked out of parking lots. But the city
allowed the cameras to be disconnected - ostensibly because they could
be damaged by lightning.

Every night, Ampco recorded the license plates of every car parked in
the airport lots, supposedly to be compared to the license plates of
departing drivers. But apparently, no one did a comparison until the
summer of 1994 - when more than 300 cars were reported to have
"disappeared" in a single week.

In some places, heads would roll if a government agency missed such
massive fraud, continuing nearly four years. But not in Philadelphia.

The Parking Authority never disciplined any of its employees, not even
its former airport manager. No one from the Parking Authority was ever
charged with a crime.

"We've acknowledged that we missed some things," said the Parking
Authority's operations director, Linda J. Miller. "We're doing things
differently now. If we'd been doing them then, this would not have
happened."


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