Frank Gulluscio, the Democratic candidate for City Council running against Eric Ulrich in southwest Queens, has made education a centerpiece of his campaign. He has touted his credentials as a public school teacher, former Department of Education employee and district manager of a local community board, where he has worked on education issues.
One job conspicuously off his resume: A brief stint as president of his local school board in 1989 which ended in his dismissal, along with the entire board, by the chancellor after an investigation revealed that Gulluscio had earned his appointment as president in exchange for votes on other matters, including the installation of his campaign manager as an elementary school principal.
But interviews and a review of records suggest Gulluscio may have been far more involved than is apparent from the reports 20 years ago. Parents and other school board members blame him for failing to stop a culture that traded jobs and school budget dollars for votes.
Over the first four months of Gulluscio’s term, a “core
group” of school board members, led by two men who were later indicted, had
used the board as a “patronage trough,” according to investigators, doling out
portions of the district’s $97 million budget in exchange for political favors
and jobs.
Gulluscio was elected to the board in 1989, and his colleagues immediately voted to appoint him president, defeating an incumbent who had already been there for several years.
That vote, investigators later revealed, was orchestrated as part of a broader agreement to install Gulluscio’s campaign manager, George Eaton, as a principal in the district and hand out patronage jobs to political allies of the other three “core group” members.
“Those votes—the budget, the principalship and Frank’s presidency—were all tied together. And board members had conversations outside of the public meetings, and those votes were arranged prior to those meetings,” said Thomas Gebert, who served on the Board with Gulluscio.
Many of those conversations were covertly recorded by the superintendent, Colman Genn. In one typical conversation, for example, a corrupt board member told Genn, “I spoke to Frank quickly, he has no problem. I just got to lay it out in, uh, detail for him personally.”
In another, a teacher who had helped arrange for patronage jobs and worked with the bloc of corrupt board members recalled to Genn that he assured Gulluscio, after threatening to kick him out, “you’re still in the core group.”
Delores Bevalacqua, president of the Parent Teacher Association at the time, faulted Gulluscio for not doing more to stop the corruption, and for appointing his campaign manager to be principal over the objection of parents who wanted to see a longtime educator get the job instead.
Bevalacqua recalled that, after hearing whispers of a political arrangement, she asked Gulluscio, as board president, to ensure that parents would be consulted.
“'I’ll take care of it,'” she remembers him telling her at the time.
But according to investigators, the deal to install Eaton had been arranged months before the public vote, despite Bevalacqua’s protests.
“I do believe he was told how business should be run,” Bevalacqua said. “It turned out to be kind of like a sham. To the public, it looked like we were participating. But in private, these other things were going on.”
Once the commission went public with its report, and the schools chancellor suspended the entire board, the ramifications were widespread. Several people were indicted, and Eaton was removed from his post as principal. The board itself was placed under a trusteeship overseen by the Department of Education.
“The whole system was just terrible,” Gebert said. “In the few months that we were on the board, a lot of crap happened. And a lot of it happened on Frank’s watch.”
After initially agreeing to discuss his tenure on the board, Gulluscio and a spokesman did not return repeated calls for comment.
But for all that went wrong, Gebert said he could not be sure how the situation got started.
“Maybe he got caught up in his own ego. Maybe he just got caught up in the process. But his participation was to the detriment of the district,” he said. “Frank caught got up in the sense that, ‘Wow, because of my political astuteness or maneuvering, I became president of this board like that.’”
wasaPApresthen
