Philadelphia Man Gets 3 Years In Jail For Fraud Scheme

By JASON KOESTENBLATT

A former New Jersey Department of Transportation engineer has been sentenced to three years in prison after he and an accomplice solicited a Morristown railroad company to fraudulently inflate the cost of a project by more than $700,000, Acting Attorney General John Hoffman announced.

Gaudner Metellus, 36, of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty on Jan. 5, 2015 to second-degree official misconduct and forfeited his job. He is permanently barred from public employment and must serve at least two years before becoming parole eligible, Hoffman said.

Metellus and an accomplice, Ernest Dubose, 35, of Jersey City who is an attorney in New York, solicited representatives of the Morristown and Erie Railway, Inc. to inflate the cost of a state-funded rehabilitation project in Roseland, Hoffman said. The duo had the company submit an application under the State Rail Freight Assistance Grant Program in the amount of $1,421,510, when the cost of the project to rehabilitate the Eagle Rock Railroad Bridge was only $693,000, Hoffman said.

Metellus proposed that the company submit false invoices for rehabilitation work that would never be performed and agreed he would split the state grant funds with the company’s representatives, Hoffman said.

Officials at the railroad company alerted the Division of Criminal Justice about the alleged scheme and cooperated in the state’s investigation. Metellus and Dubose were arrested and charged on Sept. 23, 2010.

The arrest was made after an August 2010 meeting with a company official who secretly audio-taped the meeting between Metellus and the president of the railroad company in Morristown, Hoffman said. Company officials contacted authorities the following day.

Later that month, Metellus and Dubose met with the company’s representatives and handed over two checks in the amount of $10,000 and $315,000 made out to the New York attorney who was falsely working as a “consultant” on the project, despite not having any knowledge or skills to do so, Hoffman said.

Dubose then took the checks and disbursed them to himself and Metellus while the company awaited state grant funds in the amount promised by the DOT engineer.

Dubose was sentenced to six years in prison. Metellus also forfeited his state pension and retirement benefits. He has been suspended without pay since his arrest in September 2010.