South Asian Indian jailed for stealing $10M from fund to identify 9/11 remains still holding on to cash

Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks, ex-city worker Natarajan Venkataram says that he’s sorry he stole millions of dollars meant for identifying the remains of trade center victims. He’s just not sorry enough to turn over $400,000 sitting in his bank account in India. The city has recovered $7 million of the $10 million that he and an accomplice stole, but he went to court to hold onto this final portion of his ill-gotten gains. The city medical examiner’s office got millions of dollars from the feds to help identify the remains of nearly 3,000 victims. Venkataram, then a manager dealing with the medical examiner’s computer system, and his girlfriend, Rosa Abreu, siphoned off millions via shell companies and fake contract bids. When Venkataram learned that probers were on to him, he transferred $1 million to his Indian bank accounts, prosecutors say. Arrested in 2005, Venkataram pleaded guilty to embezzlement and money laundering. He got 15 years in jail; Abreu got six. Venkataram also was ordered to pay $2.9 million in restitution. Hoping to retrieve even more, the city sued him and won an $8 million judgment in 2009. “We’ve been using that judgment to collect any other money that we can find of his,” city lawyer Eric Proshansky said. The city — led by the Department of Investigation — has recovered nearly $7 million from the scheme, including $6 million from an overseas company. “DOI’s work helped identify how the funds were routed so they could be recovered,” DOI Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn said. Probers discovered a bank in India containing about $700,000. The bank froze the money in 2006, but Venkataram’s sister sued in India to get the money. In September 2010, U.S courts barred Venkataram and his reps from touching the money. Venkataram’s court filings have ranged from contradictory to misleading, Manhattan Federal Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote. He claimed that much of the money deposited in his name belonged to relatives and “should not be seized or forfeited.” In June 2011, the bank transferred $223,000 to the city, records show; approximately $400,000 remains in the account. Law Department spokeswoman Kate O’Brien Ahlers said that the city is relentlessly looking for the rest of the money. “It may or may not be out there, but if it is out there we’re certainly going to do everything we can to find it,” she said.