got Morayo, stay by the chairs. >> because I said my neck and back kept me from working. >> you kept collecting disability while working security and fire safety jobs. >> Once is a mistake, twice is [music] a pattern. Scott Morayo filed disability paperwork swearing he couldn't work for over a decade, all while standing at the door of a strip club and managing [music] fire safety on New York construction sites. The federal government finally caught up with him. >> People see a job title and think they understand injury. >> You also failed to report the earnings that changed the benefit picture. >> You're making this waiting room sound like every form was written >> to steal >> He had told that lie for 16 years, and for 16 years no one had asked him to prove it. Scott Morayo was 53 years old, a former New York City police officer, [music] a retired Fire Department of New York firefighter, and a federal disability beneficiary who had sworn under penalty of perjury that he could not work. Federal agents had spent the better part of 3 years collecting the [music] paperwork that would put him in a federal prison. Pay stubs from a Manhattan strip club, W-2s from a fire safety [music] staffing company, time sheets from construction sites across five boroughs, $1 million in disability fraud charged across [music] three former first responders. Morayo's share alone would send him to the Southern District of New York. The number you just heard, stop and sit with it for a second. A man drawing federal disability checks every [music] single month while he stood post at a strip club door on Friday nights and managed fire safety on Manhattan construction sites during the week. Drop your [music] reaction in the comments below. Subscribe if this is your first time on the channel. The full story is somehow worse than the headline. Scott Anthony Morayo was born on the 4th of October, 1965, in the Stapleton section of Staten Island. His father, Vincent Morayo, worked 31 years for the New York City Department of Sanitation, driving a route that wound through Tompkinsville and Clifton six days a week. His mother, Rose, worked the lunch line at PS 31 on Daniel Low Terrace for 19 years. The family lived in a narrow two-story row house on Brownell Street, three blocks from the ferry terminal, in a neighborhood where almost every household had at least one cop, one firefighter, or one sanitation worker on the payroll. He was the kind of kid the recruiters loved before they ever met him. He played defensive end for the Curtis High School Warriors. He worked summers loading trucks for a beer distributor in Mariners Harbor. He carried a Cub Scout pin in a small wooden box on his dresser well into adulthood. When his guidance counselor asked him in his senior year what he wanted to do with his life, he wrote a single sentence on the index card she handed him. Civil service, pick one. He graduated from Curtis in June of 1983 and took the New York City Police Department entrance exam four months later. He scored a 78, well above the cutoff. He entered the Police Academy on 20th Street in Manhattan in February of 1984, three days after his 18th birthday celebration at a steakhouse in Travis. His academy class photograph shows him in the third row, second from the left, expression carefully neutral. Regulation haircut so fresh it still had the comb tracks in it. His first command was the 120, the precinct house on Richmond Terrace that policed the North Shore of his own island. He worked a patrol sector that included the streets he had grown up on. The neighbors waved at him from porches. The kids he had played stickball with at Tappen Park now ran when they saw the cruiser turn the corner. His sergeant wrote in his first year evaluation that Officer Morayo was, {quote} dependable, situationally aware, and showed strong promise for either continued patrol work or specialized assignment. But Morayo did not want a specialized assignment. He wanted to follow his uncle. His mother's brother, Anthony Pellegrino, had served 24 years with Engine Company 166 on Bradley Avenue. And at every family communion and Christmas Eve dinner for as long as Scott could remember, Uncle Tony had told the same stories about the same fires in the same booming voice. Scott had wanted to wear the bunker coat since he was 9 years old. By the spring of 1987, he had taken the firefighter exam, passed the physical, and submitted his paperwork to transfer agencies. He was 21 years old. On the 14th of July, 1987, Scott Morayo walked into the FDNY Probationary Firefighter School on Randall's Island in the Bronx and signed the roster as Probie Morayo, badge number 4602. He came out 15 weeks later as a fully credentialed New York City firefighter and was assigned to Engine Company 155 at 147 Hannah Street in the Concord section of Staten Island. He was 22 years old. His father drove him to the firehouse on his first day in the same sanitation truck he had been driving for 26 years. For the next 15 years, he did the work. He answered the bell on broken radiators and apartment fires and overturned tractor-trailers on the West Shore Expressway. He carried unconscious adults out of smoke-filled stairwells in the New Brighton public housing complex. He spent the morning of September 11th, 2001, at the firehouse table eating eggs when the first plane hit the North Tower. By the afternoon, he was at the pile on West Street with the rest of his company pulling debris with his bare hands. He came home that night to his wife on Steel Avenue and did not speak for almost an hour. He worked the pile for 62 consecutive days. He breathed the dust. He came home with it caked in his ears and the corners of his eyes. Every firefighter on that pile breathed it. And by the late winter of 2001 going into 2002, dozens of them were already filing claims for what was then being called World Trade Center Cough. In January of 2002, 4 months after the towers came down, Scott Maraglio walked into the FDNY medical office in Brooklyn and reported that he could no longer perform his duties due to chronic pain in his cervical and lumbar spine. He was 37 years old. He filed for federal disability and stopped working. The disability framework Scott Maraglio entered in January of 2002 is one of the largest and most carefully audited social programs in the United States government. Two parallel systems govern it. The first is the Federal Social Security Disability Insurance Program, administered by the Social Security Administration out of its main processing center in Baltimore, Maryland. The second is the FDNY's own line of duty disability pension, administered through the New York City Fire Pension Fund out of 2 Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan. To qualify for Social Security Disability, a claimant must demonstrate, through medical records, treating physician statements, and functional capacity evaluations, that he is unable to engage in what the statute calls substantial gainful activity. The phrase has a specific definition. In 2002, substantial gainful activity meant earned income above $780 per month. Today, that threshold is 1550. Any earned income above that figure, in any month, in any combination of jobs, must be reported within 10 days to the Social Security Administration field office. The claimant signs a form acknowledging this obligation. He signs it again every time he completes a continuing disability review, which the Social Security Administration conducts on a rolling schedule, typically every 3 to 7 years. Each review requires the beneficiary to recertify in writing under penalty of perjury under Title 18 of the United States Code section 1001 that he has not returned to work, has not earned income above the threshold, and has not concealed any material fact. The forms are not subtle. They list in plain language the felony penalties for false statements. They include a signature block above a line of text reading in bold capital letters, "Anyone who knowingly gives false or misleading information is committing a federal crime." The claimant initials each page. He dates each form. He keeps a copy for his records. Underneath the federal program runs the FDNY's own pension fund, which had paid Morio a tax-free three-quarter salary disability pension since his department physician signed off on his retirement in the spring of 2002. That pension was based on a separate set of records, but it relied on the same basic premise. A firefighter who could no longer climb stairs in turnout gear, could no longer carry a charged hose line up a stairwell, could no longer perform the physical demands of the job, would not be expected to perform comparable physical demands elsewhere. Both systems trust the beneficiary to be honest. Both systems audit only when an outside party gives them a reason to look. The Social Security Administration's earnings database in Baltimore quietly receives every W-2 filed under every beneficiary's Social Security number, but it does not flag the file unless a fraud investigator manually queries it. The FDNY pension fund relies on its own annual affidavit signed by the retiree attesting that he remains disabled. And for 16 years, no outside party gave either system a reason to look at Scott Morio. For the first 6 years after Scott Morio went out on disability, he stayed quiet. He attended his medical reviews. He filed his continuing disability paperwork. He told his treating physician, a chiropractor in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that his pain levels fluctuated between a six and an eight out of 10. He told Social Security he could not lift more than 10 lb, could not sit for more than 30 minutes without changing position, and could not stand for more than 15 minutes at a time. In September of 2008, 6 months after the financial crisis began draining the housing market on Staten Island and putting strain on the second mortgage Morio had taken out on the house on Steel Avenue, he walked into a club called Sapphire on West 20th Street in Manhattan and asked for a job working the door. He was 43 years old. The general manager hired him on the spot. He started the following Friday night at 7:00. The job was straightforward. He checked identification at the velvet rope. He moved bachelor parties through the foyer. When patrons became unruly, which happened most nights, he escorted them through a back service corridor and out into the alley behind 21st Street. He wore a black sport coat over a black T-shirt, an earpiece coiled into his collar, and steel-toed boots. He worked Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 7:00 in the evening until 4:00 in the morning, 9 hours on his feet, lifting men twice the size of average patrons by their belts and collars when the situation required it. The club paid him on a W-2. It withheld federal taxes. It generated quarterly wage reports that flowed automatically to the Social Security Administration's earnings database in Baltimore. The reports were filed under Scott Morayo's full legal name and his correct Social Security number. They sat in the database for years untouched because no one in the SSA field office in St. George had any reason to query them. In July of 2012, Morayo added a second job. A staffing company headquartered in Lower Manhattan that supplied fire safety personnel to New York City construction sites had been advertising on Craigslist for licensed fire safety managers and certified fire guards. Morayo held both certifications kept current through his FDNY background and he applied. The staffing company put him on its rolls within a week and sent him out on his first assignment 10 days later. The work was on paper almost a parody of his disability claim. Fire safety managers walk construction sites. They climb ladders. They inspect standpipe risers on every floor of a high-rise build. They carry 20-lb dry chemical extinguisher units up flights of unfinished stairs. They sign hot work permits and supervise welders and stand for full 8-hour and 10-hour shifts in steel-toed boots and hard hats. Fire guards, the lower tier role, do the same physical patrolling for fewer hours and less money. Morayo did both. The staffing company moved him between assignments based on the day's demand. Between July of 2012 and the federal indictment in April of 2018, Morayo worked on construction sites at five different addresses across Manhattan and Brooklyn. A residential tower on Rector Street in the financial district. A medical office build-out on East 42nd Street in Midtown East. A school renovation off Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint. A hotel project two blocks from Madison Square Park, a condominium conversion on Hudson Street in Tribeca. The staffing company filed W-2s for him every year. The strip club had filed its W-2s for 6 years before that. Both employers reported his wages to the Internal Revenue Service. Both feeds went to the same SSA earnings database. For every one of those years, Morayo also signed a continuing disability questionnaire swearing he had not worked. He listed his monthly earned income as zero. He listed his occupation as retired and disabled. He initialed each page. He dated each form. He kept his copy. And every month, the federal disability check landed in his joint checking account at TD Bank on Forest Avenue. And the FDNY disability pension landed there beside it. And Scott Morayo drove his pickup truck across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Manhattan to clock in for a shift he had told the federal government he was physically incapable of working. He was not subtle about it. He used his own name on every employment application. He used his own Social Security number on every payroll form. He gave his real address. He cashed his paychecks at the same TD Bank branch where his disability deposits hit. He told his neighbors he was working private security. He told his cousin he was making side money in fire safety. He never bothered to hide any of it because for 16 years, no one had ever asked. The investigation that ended Scott Morayo's 16-year arrangement did not begin with Scott Morayo. It began with a different former first responder in a different borough with a different scheme. And Morayo's name came out of the audit trail like a splinter the agents had not been looking for. In the late spring of 2016, the Social Security Administration's Office of the Inspector General received a tip from an anonymous caller through its national fraud hotline. The caller stated that a retired NYPD detective living in Massapequa, on Long Island, was collecting federal disability benefits while running a private investigations firm that had been quietly registered in his wife's name. The detective had been on disability for over a decade. He was, the caller said, working 60 hours a week and driving a leased Mercedes. The inspector general's New York field office opened a case. Agents subpoenaed the detective's wife's business filings. They pulled his cell phone metadata. They put him under surveillance from a parked van outside his office on Sunrise Highway, photographing his arrivals and departures 3 days a week for 2 months. The pattern was unmistakable. The case was solid. But when the case agent ran the detective's known associates through the disability fraud filter, looking for cooperators and shared schemes, the search returned three additional names attached to two open employment threads. Two were retired NYPD. One was retired FDNY. The retired FDNY name was Scott Anthony Marraio of Staten Island, badge number 4602, federal disability beneficiary since January of 2002. And the SSA earnings database had been quietly logging W-2 income under his social security number for the better part of a decade. The case agent pulled Marraio's file. The file was thick. The medical reviews were clean. The continuing disability questionnaires were complete and signed. And the W-2 column, which the file did not include, but which the agent now ran through the master earnings database, showed reported income from a Manhattan adult entertainment establishment beginning in September of 2008 and reported income from a fire safety staffing company beginning in July of 2012. Both streams active. Both streams ongoing. Both streams completely absent from anything Scott Morio had ever told the Social Security Administration. The agent printed the earnings report. He printed Morio's most recent continuing disability questionnaire, signed and dated 4 months earlier, listing his monthly earned income as zero. He placed both documents side by side on his desk in the Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. He took a photograph with his phone for the eventual exhibit binder. Then he picked up the phone and called the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. The call took 11 minutes. By the end of it, Scott Morio had become a federal target. He did not know it. He would not know it for another 21 months. He continued to work his shifts. He continued to sign his disability paperwork. He continued to deposit his federal checks. And 11 floors above Foley Square, two bankers boxes were already being assembled with his name on the lid. We are heading into the legal proceedings now. If you want to see exactly how the federal system handled a former first responder who stole from a disability fund for 16 years, hit subscribe. We break down every detail through trial and sentencing. These cases do not get the coverage they deserve. The Southern District prosecutor assigned to the case was Assistant United States Attorney Daniel Pearlstein, a 6-year veteran of the office's public corruption unit. He reviewed the earnings printout, the signed disability questionnaire, and [snorts] the FDNY pension records, and he authorized the agents to begin building the full evidentiary picture. What they built took 19 months. They subpoenaed Morio's bank records from TD Bank on Forest Avenue, traced the W-2 deposits from Sapphire and from the staffing company into his joint checking account, and matched the deposit dates and amounts against the employer's payroll runs to the penny. They pulled timesheets from the staffing company showing Morayo signing on as fire safety manager at construction sites on Rector Street, on East 42nd Street, on Hudson Street, and on Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn. They pulled the strip club's payroll system and confirmed his Thursday, Friday, Saturday schedule going back to September of 2008. They obtained the surveillance footage from two of the construction sites. On a Tuesday in March of 2017, Morayo was recorded climbing four floors of an unfinished residential tower on Rector Street carrying a 5-lb clipboard and a 20-lb dry chemical extinguisher. He climbed the stairs steadily without stopping, without visible distress, and conducted a 40-minute floor-by-floor inspection. The footage was timestamped, geotagged, and clean. On a Friday 3 weeks later, surveillance from a fixed camera across the street from Sapphire on West 20th Street showed him at the door from 7:04 in the evening until 3:46 the following morning, on his feet for the entire shift. Physically escorting two patrons out the side service exit at 1:20 in the morning. They obtained statements from his co-workers. The shift manager at Sapphire confirmed that Morayo had worked at least three shifts a week every week for nearly 6 years and had never missed a shift due to back or neck complaints. A site superintendent at the Rector Street tower confirmed that Morayo walked 20 floors of an active high-rise build twice a day every day he was on shift and had once helped reposition a fallen length of standpipe that weighed roughly 70 lb. They obtained his pay stubs, every single one of them. Pay stubs from the strip club going back to September of 2008. Pay stubs from the staffing company going back to July of 2012. Hundreds of documents, each one bearing his full legal name, his social security number, the address on Steel Avenue, and the gross and net breakdown of wages he had told the federal government he was not earning. That was the smoking gun. It was not a wire. It was not a cooperating witness. It was Scott Marraio's own paystubs generated by his own employers on the dates he had worked the shifts he had told the Social Security Administration he was physically incapable of working. The paystubs alone stacked on AUSA Pearlstein's desk in two banker's boxes totaled more than 38,000 pages. The total fraud calculated across both the SSDI overpayments and the FDNY pension implications exceeded $411,000 in Marraio's case alone. Combined with the other two defendants in the indictment package, the broader case crossed $1 million in fraudulently obtained disability benefits. AUSA Pearlstein presented the case to a federal grand jury on the morning of the 25th of April 2018. The indictment came back signed and sealed before lunch. The arrest team arrived at the house on Steel Avenue at 6:52 on the morning of the 17th of April 2018. Four agents from the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General, two from the FBI's New York Field Office, and two NYPD detectives assigned to the federal task force. They knocked. Marraio answered the door in a gray FDNY sweatshirt and athletic shorts holding a paper cup of coffee, his wife standing two steps behind him in the hallway. The lead agent identified himself. Mr. Marraio, we have a federal arrest warrant for you. We need you to step outside, sir. For what? Theft of government property, false statements to a federal agency. We need you to step outside, sir. This is about the disability thing. We can discuss it at the office, sir. Right now, I need you to step outside and put your hands behind your back. My back is real. I want that on the record. My medical records are real. Sir, we are not having that conversation right now. Step outside. Moraio set the coffee cup down on a small table beside the door. He looked at his wife. He looked at the agents on his porch. He looked at the unmarked Crown Victoria parked across the driveway. Then he turned, placed his hands on the door frame, and let the agent walk him through the cuffing procedure. My back is real. I am telling you my back is real. Sir, let's go. He did not say anything else. He was walked to the vehicle, placed in the back seat, and driven to the federal building at 26 Federal Plaza for processing. He was fingerprinted, photographed, and held in a holding cell on the fifth floor for 4 hours while his attorney was contacted. He was arraigned that afternoon before a federal magistrate in courtroom 5B and released on a $100,000 personal recognizance bond, surrendering his passport. He was 53 years old. He had not been in handcuffs since the academy practice exercises of 1984. When he walked out of the federal building that evening, a Daily News photographer was waiting on the steps. The photograph that ran the next morning showed Moraio in his gray sweatshirt, head down, hands jammed into the pockets of his shorts, walking toward Broadway. The headline above the photograph read, "FDNY hero hid jobs at strip club." He never read the article. The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York on the 25th of April, 2018, charged Scott Morraio with one count of theft of government property in violation of Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 641, and one count of false statements to a federal agency in violation of Title 18, Section 1001. He faced a maximum of 15 years in federal prison and full restitution. His defense attorney, a former federal prosecutor named Marcus Allerton with an office on Court Street in Brooklyn Heights, negotiated for 7 months. Allerton's argument was familiar to the Southern District. His client had been a first responder. He had served on the pile after September 11th. He had real medical conditions documented by real physicians, even if those conditions had not prevented him from earning a paycheck. Allerton requested a non-custodial sentence with home confinement and full restitution. The prosecution rejected the request. AUSA Perlstein, in his sentencing memorandum filed on the 11th of January, 2019, wrote that the defendant's conduct represented, quote, a sustained, calculated, and deeply cynical exploitation of a federal safety net intended for citizens unable to earn a living. Perlstein noted that the defendant had signed 16 separate continuing disability questionnaires across the period of the fraud, each one containing material false statements, each one initialed and dated by the defendant in his own hand. Morraio pleaded guilty on the 22nd of October, 2018, to both counts of the indictment. He stood before United States District Judge Valerie Caproni in courtroom 4A at 500 Pearl Street and acknowledged on the record that he had concealed his earnings from Sapphire and from the staffing company, and that he had done so knowingly, repeatedly, and with the intent to defraud the United States government. His allocution lasted 4 minutes. When the judge asked him whether anyone had forced or pressured him to enter the plea, he said no. When she asked him whether he understood that he was admitting to a federal crime, he said yes. Sentencing was set for the 23rd of January 2019. The victim impact portion of the proceeding included a written statement from the regional commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who wrote that every dollar Morayo took represented a dollar that did not reach a beneficiary genuinely unable to work, and that the agency's caseload at that time included applicants who had waited as long as 28 months for an initial determination because of resource constraints on the program. Three of those applicants, the commissioner noted, had died during the wait. Judge Caproni addressed Morayo directly before pronouncing sentence. Mr. Morayo, you took an oath in 1984 when you became a police officer. You took another in 1987 when you became a firefighter. Both of those oaths involved the protection of the public. The conduct you have admitted to today is a violation of both. You knew what the forms said. You initialed them. You signed them. You signed them 16 times. And every time you signed one, you stole from people whose backs are actually broken. She sentenced him to 1 year and 1 day in federal prison, 3 years of supervised release, and full restitution in the amount of $411,000 to the Social Security Administration. The additional day on the sentence was not punitive. It made him eligible for a good time credit under federal sentencing guidelines, which would reduce the actual term he served to approximately 10 months. He was designated to Federal Medical Center Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts, a low-security federal correctional facility with medical capacity for inmates with documented health conditions. He surrendered on the 18th of March, 2019. His FDNY pension was forfeited pending administrative review by the New York City Fire Pension Fund Board of Trustees. The board moved within 60 days to reduce his line of duty disability award to a standard service pension, eliminating the tax exemption, and reducing the monthly payout by roughly 38%. The house on Steel Avenue was refinanced to cover the restitution. He was released in January of 2020. He returned to Staten Island. The neighbors on Brownell Street did not put a sign on the lawn. The neighbors on Steel Avenue did not throw a welcome home party. He was 61 years old when the supervised release period ended. The pay stubs that had ended his career still sit in two bankers boxes in a storage room at the United States Attorney's Office in Manhattan. 38,000 pages of evidence that a man who had told the federal government he could not work had, in fact, been working the entire time. That case was hard to sit with, but the case on your screen right now is somehow more brazen. 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