The Department of Homeless Services has finally pulled the plug on one of the city’s biggest shelter operators, CORE Services Group, after attempts to reform the tarnished operator failed, city officials disclosed Tuesday.
The move comes more than a month after the Post and other publications revealed the non-profit’s chief executive, Jack Brown, placed pals on the payroll and established a network of for-profit subcontractors, which he used as his personal cash cow.
CORE’s shelters will either be shuttered or transferred to new operators over the coming months — though no hard deadline was given for the end of operations.
“They had personnel that we felt were doing the wrong thing. People who are getting exorbitant salaries, we said, these things need to change,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said during his daily briefing when asked about the decision. “They did not change them, and now we’ve told them they’re out of business with us.”
“We’re talking about people in need — folks who are homeless. And this organization took advantage of those people, and they will no longer be doing business with the City of New York,” he added.
Brown’s combined compensation from the nonprofit and its affiliates reached $1 million annually, a fact discovered by city officials after they began to quietly review CORE’s operations in 2020, despite years of red flags about its operations.
But the non-profit kept scoring contracts — netting a total of $763 million in city contracts over the de Blasio administration’s eight years — until The Post and The New York Times published investigations virtually simultaneously that exposed Brown’s web of for-profit companies and extraordinary compensation.
It’s the latest contracting scandal to hit the city’s network of nonprofit shelter operators.
A Post review found that more than $4 billion of the nearly $16 billion let in DHS contracts over the last eight years went to a provider that’s faced allegations of wrongdoing.