Lawyers for the mastermind behind the massive CityTime payroll scandal argued to overturn his bribery and fraud convictions before a federal appeals panel Monday.
“The evidence was insufficient to prove [Mark] Mazer’s intent to participate in the charged $600 million fraud scheme against the city of New York,” Mazer’s attorneys wrote in court papers in advance of the arguments before the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys for Mazer and co-defendants Dimitry Aronshtein and Gerard Denault answered questions from a panel of federal appeals judges sitting at St. John’s University of Law in Queens.
When Manhattan federal-court Judge George Daniels sentenced the three men to 20 years behind bars in 2014 each for the massive municipal-payroll-project rip-off, he blasted them for “a classic tale of greed and corruption.”