QUEENS — A former Queens job center supervisor was sentenced to nearly two years in federal prison Friday for helping to steal $1.8 million from taxpayers through schemes that included using food-stamp benefits to purchase and resell Red Bull, officials said.
Cherrise Watson-Jackson, 45, was supervising a job center in Jamaica in 2012 when she got recruiters to enlist people to apply for public assistance. The EBT cards would then be used to buy large quantities of the energy drink from BJ’s Wholesale Club, which were then resold to neighborhood grocery stores.
"This [Human Resources Administration] supervisor leveraged her access to City information to steer cash to herself and associates, ultimately gaming the system of approximately $1.8 million,” Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters said in a statement.
"DOI's working partnership with HRA allowed law enforcement to expose and stop this scheme, and others, and for the vulnerabilities within HRA's case management to be corrected."
Watson-Jackson also defrauded taxpayers by fraudulently registering people as landlords so they could receive emergency rental subsidy checks through the city’s One Shot Deal, which helps people pay back rent to avoid eviction.
The former supervisor, who was making an annual salary of $63,241 when she resigned in June after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, will also have to pay $1,809,811 in restitution and $1,809,811 in forfeiture.
Watson-Jackson started working for the Human Resources Administration in 1993 and ran the scheme from 2012 through 2013.
She was busted with 11 other people who were involved in the scheme in December 2015 and was sentenced to 23 months in prison.
Her lawyer, James Neuman, sent a letter to Judge John G. Koeltl requesting that Watson-Jackson be housed in a medical facility near New York that can treat her medical conditions including asthma, hypertension and sleep apnea, according to court documents.
Neuman did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
