A Port Authority lawyer sent an explosive e-mail to higher-ups, charging that co-workers were accepting expensive dinners, limos and other questionable perks from vendors — and was fired four hours later.
And the boss who axed him was one of the people he was complaining about.
Jeffrey Yuhasz, 44, told The Post how he was earning $90,000 a year overseeing all insurance policies for PA construction projects when he uncovered supervisors allegedly treating themselves to $1,000 dinners, a seemingly endless supply of top-shelf booze and entertainment and chauffeured rides home — largely during whirlwind business jaunts to London and Zurich.
Yuhasz said some of the freeloading bosses were at the same time approving the PA’s purchase of bloated insurance policies with staggering premiums — deals that garnered exorbitant commissions for the very underwriters and brokers picking up their PA guests’ tabs.
Yuhasz was hauled into an office and fired — just four hours after sending out his blistering May 15, 2012, e-mail to higher-ups titled “Whistleblower Complaint.”
The woman who sent him packing was one of the very people Yuhasz had complained about.
She and two other supervisors named by Yahasz were eventually fired themselves.
“Basically, I’m saying, ‘Wait a second! I’m sitting here fired and everyone I whistleblew about has been fired?’ So where’s the pat on the back saying, ‘Thanks’?” Yahasz said.
Yuhasz said he was told that he was being sacked for “excessive absences.”
Lisa MacSpadden, the PA’s chief spokeswoman, suggested the curious timing of Yuhasz’s dismissal was little more than an odd coincidence and indicated that his information didn’t warrant whistleblower protection.
“Mr. Yuhasz was terminated for his poor job performance and an atrocious attendance record,’’ she told The Post. “A subsequent investigation by the independent Office of the Inspector General concluded that there was no evidence his termination resulted for any other reason.”
But Yuhasz says he was the victim of a deliberate act of retribution designed to punish him for exposing a pattern of corruption and incompetence that badly embarrassed the agency.
He admitted missing several months of work recuperating from a heart attack in the fall of 2011 and a concussion in the beginning of 2012 but claims he was not warned about his poor attendance record or put on probation.
He has since divorced, and the upheavals in his life caused him to descend into a lonely abyss of clinical depression and alcohol abuse, he said.
He moved back to his home state of Washington, where he is living with his mom and collecting public assistance.
He said that at one point, he tried to appeal his dismissal at a hearing before Susan Baer, the PA’s now-departing head of aviation.
He said she rebuffed his request.
Baer made headlines in The Post last week, when the paper reported that her retirement bash was originally scheduled to take place July 31 inside the iconic TWA Terminal, a city landmark at JFK Airport.
It has been moved to another venue amid concerns about the appropriateness of spending thousands of dollars on the event.