For two decades, he had the ear of mayors, governors and lawmakers from City Hall to Albany, New York, to Washington. He was a blunt advocate for his members and exerted extraordinary control over the city’s Correction Department, shaping policy and even influencing key management appointments in the city’s jails.
But on Friday, Seabrook stood before a federal judge and was sentenced to 58 months in prison, the final chapter in a remarkable fall from grace that began when federal prosecutors started asking questions about his handling of the union’s funds.
Seabrook, 58, was eventually convicted, in August, in a corruption trial. Evidence at his trial showed that he had steered $20 million from the union, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, into a risky hedge fund, in exchange for a promised kickback worth more than $100,000.
Ultimately, prosecutors said, Seabrook was delivered $60,000 in bills crammed inside a designer bag purchased from his favorite luxury goods store, Salvatore Ferragamo.
“It’s time Norman Seabrook got paid,” the union leader had told Jona S. Rechnitz, a wealthy real estate developer who had arranged for the payoff, according to Rechnitz’s testimony in the trial.
The hedge fund ultimately went bankrupt and the union lost $19 million of its investment, although the hedge fund’s former chairman, Murray Huberfeld, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy, has agreed to voluntarily return $7 million to the union, court filings show.
Before he was sentenced, Seabrook made an impassioned and defiant statement to the judge, saying he never intended for union members “to lose a dime” on the hedge fund.
“My life’s journey may have been interrupted, but it’s not over until God says it’s over,” he said.
Seabrook’s trial drew widespread attention, partly because of testimony that touched on corruption in the New York Police Department and on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fundraising efforts.
Prosecutors had asked the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, to sentence Seabrook to five years and three months in prison. His lawyers had argued that “a harsh sentence was not needed to serve justice.”
Seabrook’s first trial, in 2017, ended with a hung jury.
It was in 2013 that Rechnitz traveled with Seabrook to the Dominican Republic and suggested to Seabrook that he could make money by personally investing the union’s money in the hedge fund, Platinum Partners, according to testimony by Rechnitz, who pleaded guilty and testified for the government as a cooperating witness.
The union’s lawyers expressed significant concern about the investment, the government said in its sentencing memorandum to the judge. But over the next year, prosecutors said, the union, at Seabrook’s instigation, invested the $20 million, including $5 million drawn from the union’s basic operating account that serves as the union’s safety net.
Rechnitz later told Seabrook that the fund had underperformed and he would only get $60,000.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.