State paid cop for 28 years after his death
Dead men can't cash checks.
But someone did for retired New Castle police Officer Joseph Zwiefel. And the New York state pension fund lost $346,000 by mistakenly sending him monthly checks for 28 years after his death, The Journal News has learned.
The checks stopped in 2005 after one was returned by the post office. But other than confirming the following year that Zwiefel was dead, the state Comptroller's Office did little investigating into where the money had gone and has since run out of time to recoup the cash.
His widow continued living in the couple's Orlando, Florida home but claims not to know what happened to the checks.
"Sheesh. That's a lot of money," Zwiefel's nephew, Robert of Patterson, said when told about the snafu. "They're paying beyond the grave now?"
Zwiefel retired on disability in 1942 after 18 years on the job. His nephew recalled that he was injured when he backed his patrol car into a tree.
The Journal News began asking the state Comptroller's Office about Zwiefel in the spring because his inclusion on a database of more than 350,000 state retirees provided to the newspaper suggested he was still drawing a pension at the age of 112.
Public records searches indicated that a Joseph C. Zwiefel had been living in Orlando – but also that he died in 1977 at the age of 75.
A spokeswoman for the comptroller said that Zwiefel had been mistakenly included among active pensioners, even though the checks had stopped nine years earlier.
Zwiefel had not chosen the retirement option that continues paying a beneficiary after a retiree dies. After repeated queries by the newspaper, the Comptroller's Office confirmed last week that Zwiefel's checks should have been cut off and revealed how much had been lost.
"Action should have been taken in 2005 when this matter came to the attention of the previous administration," said Nikki Jones, deputy press secretary for state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. She said the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution and civil recovery expired in 2010 and 2011, respectively.
While the retirement system has long checked social security records to determine whether pensioners have died, Zwiefel's death was missed because the pension fund had an incorrect social security number for him. That could have been because Zwiefel retired a decade before the retirement system was linked to social security, and it was his responsibility to provide his social security number, Jones said.
She said the retirement system now does monthly matches of pensioner information to social security records.
Zwiefel's first wife died in 1942, the same year he retired. Decades later, he married Geraldine Mesa. The couple bought a home on Dorado Avenue in Orlando in 1969. Following Zwiefel's death, his wife remained in that home until selling it in 2005, the same year his pension check bounced back to the state of New York.
Reached by telephone at her home in Orlando, Geri Zwiefel, now 85, told a reporter she had trouble remembering things. She was asked if her husband's pension checks had continued coming to their home after his death and whether she had cashed them.
"I don't think so. I didn't have any income," she said.
Robert Zwiefel, the nephew, said he had been close with his uncle's family when they lived in Chappaqua and he was growing up in Pleasantville. But he lost touch after Joseph moved to Florida and did not know he eventually had remarried.
While nobody ever went after the money lost in Zwiefel's case, Jones said DiNapoli has stepped up efforts to identify pension fraud, refer cases to law enforcement and seek restitution.
In July, a retired Suffolk County police sergeant, Terrance Hoffman, pleaded guilty to grand larceny, admitting he improperly collected more than $465,000 in pension payments while being paid $112,000 annually as a professor at Nassau Community College. And in August, a Florida woman, Graycelia Cizik, was charged with grand larceny for allegedly stealing more than $120,000 by depositing the pension checks of her uncle, a retired Port Authority employee, after his death in 1988.