Grave robbers: leaders of Middle Village cemetery pillaged funds for personal benefit, AG says
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Sunken gravestone and toppled monuments fill All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village. Eagle photos by Byron Smith.
By Jonathan Sperling
The directors of a cash-strapped Queens cemetery misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars of the burial ground’s finances for their own personal gain, a new lawsuit filed by Attorney General Letitia James alleges.
All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village is one of the numerous burial grounds that comprise the cemetery belt that has straddled the Brooklyn-Queens border for more than a century. But unlike its neighbors, All Faiths’ longtime leadership, which includes Queens County Republican Board of Elections commissioner Michael Michel and a former Queens cop, allegedly pilfered millions in salaries, retirement benefits and more, “without any meaningful consideration of cost or controls,” according to the lawsuit.
Among those named in the suit was Daniel Austin, Sr., a former 104th Precinct cop who once told the Eagle that he had helped to bust the infamous “Son of Sam” serial killer in the 1970s. The Eagle first spoke to Austin in December 2018 after a tipster documented the cemetery’s derelict conditions, including toppled monuments, sunken gravestones and shattered mausoleum windows.
Though the tipster suspected vandalism was the culprit, Austin told the Eagle at the time that the downtrodden cemetery, which serves as the final resting place for over 540,000 New Yorkers, looked the way it did due to a chronic lack of cash.
“When you see monuments down, one thing you might be seeing is that there is no perpetual care. When the cemetery was incorporated on March 2, 1852, there were a lot of poor people,” Austin said at the time. “They had sections they opened up in the 1800s that they called ‘public sections,’ and people bought these graves for next to nothing. They didn't have the money for perpetual care.”
The AG’s lawsuit tells a different story.
Austin, Sr., who between 1990 and 2019 served as the cemetery’s chief executive and chairperson, allegedly received an almost $900,000 award from the cemetery days before a routine audit in 2014 by the Division of Cemeteries, which oversees the maintenance and preservation of burial grounds for all non-profit cemeteries in the state. The reasoning behind the award, as well as the Board’s approval of it, remain unclear, according to the suit.
In a phone call with the Eagle in December 2018, Austin, Sr. said that his own grandparents were buried at All Faiths.
Attorney General Letitia James.
Austin also helped to appoint defendants Anthony Mordente and his son, defendant Daniel Austin, Jr, to paid chief executive roles without vetting them based on any qualifications, according to the suit. Mordente, along with another defendant, Donald Pfail, allowed Austin, Jr. to serve as the cemetery’s president and director for almost nine months even after he allegedly stole tens of thousands of dollars through the cemetery’s payroll.
Austin, Jr. was also allowed to resign with a full pension while his father repaid a portion of the stolen money without interest or admission of wrongdoing, the suit states.
The suit also alleges that the cemetery closed on a loan to Michel’s daughters to the tune of $400,000.
When reached for comment Thursday, a receptionist at All Faiths told the Eagle that “no one is going to comment here” regarding the lawsuit. Daniel Austin, Sr. could not be reached for comment.
