Public Works Director Luis Mollinedo called Davis' allegations 'offensive.'
During an interview from behind bars last week, Stanley “Muscles” Davis claimed Water Works technicians received kickbacks from contractors called in to make emergency repairs.
Davis, the brother of Mayor Tony Mack, is serving six years in prison for corruption, admitting in court last year he took on at least three private plumbing jobs on city time and with Water Works equipment. At one home, he took cash from an undercover county detective in exchange for the work, he said.
Public Works Director Luis Mollinedo said the Water Works is increasingly reliant on outside contractors because it is understaffed. He called Davis’ allegations “offensive.”
The Water Works spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on the contractors, and Davis said the technicians have the opportunity to benefit from awarding the profitable emergency work.
“They have the discretion of what contractor to call,” Davis said.
Water Works employees said the choice of contractors for emergency work is limited to an approved list, and most of the companies on it have been working for the utility for more than a decade.
Davis, who worked as a foreman for 12 years before his arrest in December 2010, said he would occasionally have to call in for help with larger jobs. His supervisor would secure the manpower through a water technician, who would place a call to a contractor.
“He would have a list of three or four contractors: Dolci — Ted Dolci — Henkels & McCoy, Waters and Bugbee and Jingoli,” Davis said. “Depending on what the size, the scope of the project was.”
“If I have a $300,000 job what you think that does for him?” Davis asked.
Tim London, one of the water technicians Davis named as taking money, said the allegations are false, and that Jingoli, Waters and Bugbee and Dolci have been doing contract work for Trenton Water for the majority of his 22 years on the job.
Davis, London said, is simply applying his own world view to the jobs of others.
“Because they always assumed the techs had control over the contractors, and we don’t,” he said.
Edmund Johnson, a water technician who frequently butted heads with Davis, said what Davis described is impossible.
“For him to even say that is asinine,” Johnson said.
The water technicians do not handle money, and the list of approved contractors is created by the general superintendent of water, he said.
“So there is no way to say you’re going to get money from them,” Johnson said. “It’s impossible.”
A Times analysis of city contract logs for the last three years reveals large sums of work, some on an emergency basis where public bidding is not used, given to Waters and Bugbee and Ted Dolci Inc. However, Jingoli received just two city contracts during that time, and Henkels & McCoy none at all.
Dolci Inc. donated $1,000 to the election fund of Davis’ brother the mayor on June 1, 2010. Since the beginning of 2011, the company has received at minimum $291,000 in city contracts, at least one of those awarded on an emergency basis. Ted Dolci Sr. could not be reached by phone at his office yesterday.
Between the beginning of 2011 and August 2013, contract logs showed a total of $618,900 in work awarded to Waters and Bugbee. Not part of that amount is a $4.4 million contract awarded to Waters and Bugbee in July 2011 was for the city’s Gateway construction project and not connected to the Water Works. In January of that year, however, Waters and Bugbee won a bid worth more than $314,000 to repair roads that were torn up for the water utility.
Jingoli received one contract on an emergency basis in May where the amount was not specified, and a $37,871.99 contract in March 2011. London said both Jingoli and Henkels & McCoy have scaled back work for the water utility in favor of more construction jobs.
A representative from Waters and Bugbee had not returned a call for comment by press time.
“This is the business that the water department is in,” Davis said. “It’s been like that. It just kept getting worse and worse.”
Davis offered no proof to back up his allegations about the water technicians, merely saying it was possible for the engineering office to give the contractors the inside track on work. He said he believes those kickbacks are solely on the level of water technicians and do not go higher in the Water Works or city chain of command.
“I think it went just as far as the water techs,” he said. “That’s as far as it went, because it couldn’t go any further. All the other aspects of this could not go any higher than that because it doesn’t get any higher than that.”
During his time at the Water Works, Davis publicly feuded with Johnson, who at the time was a union vice president, and London. Johnson and London were targeted for termination, demoted and eventually fired for disciplinary reasons. Now with their jobs back, Johnson and London have opened an administrative case against the city, arguing they were targeted for bringing concerns about Davis’ illicit activity to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office. London could not be reached for comment last night.
In his interview, Davis denied taking large sums of money for performing private water hookups, saying he did those jobs to help homeowners.
“I made enough money just out of overtime,” he said. “My average check was sometimes $8,000 (biweekly).”
He said theft of scrap — which he referred to as “spoils” — was rampant at the yard where the Water Works offices are located on Courtland Street, sometimes in concert with other, unnamed contractors.
He continued his feud with Johnson and London, saying their jobs were targeted after London did not shut a valve on Pennington Avenue in 2010.
“And that created a water problem in Hamilton,” Davis said.
“I told my brother, if he had done what he was supposed to do we wouldn’t have that problem,” Davis said. “He should be fired, he must be incompetent, if he can’t do what you told him to do.”
“At that instance, my brother said, ‘We’ll fix that when we don’t have nobody else not doing what they was told to do,’” Davis said. “He decided to eliminate and privatize the water techs’ job, but unfortunately he couldn’t privatize the whole department, so he had eliminated three jobs: Edmund, Tim London, John Patten, were the least in seniority up there.”
London said he accidentally closed the wrong valve, but immediately remedied the situation.
Patten could not be reached for comment last night. And in response to a claim made by Patten during an Office of Administrative Law hearing for Johnson and London’s case earlier this month, Davis said he never kicked his supervisor out of an office to use for himself.
“I never had any of my personal effects in there, like if I come there, like if I work all night, or all day I would go in the office and leave the door open,” he said. “It was just like an abandoned office, nobody was doing it, so I went in. I didn’t chase him … out. He just wouldn’t go in.”
From his current home at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in Burlington County, Davis is open about the crimes he’s admitted to. But he had a message for anyone at the Water Works participating in corruption.
“You should be locked up,” he said last Friday. “You should be in here with me.”
Contact Alex Zdan at azdan@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5705.
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