Two convicted sex offenders and scores of other felons and criminals were hired to referee city public high-school games without drawing notice for years, a never-made-public probe reveals
Remarkably, most of the rogue referees — whose crimes included rape, sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl, selling PCP and other felonies — had been flagged as unemployable by the Department of Education, but were still hired to officiate because their status wasn’t communicated internally.
The agencies responsible for the stunning lapse in screening — the DOE and its sports division, the Public Schools Athletic League — to this day have never told parents or the general public that they had hired fearsome criminals to work among schoolchildren.
Even the city agency that uncovered the epic foul-up — the office of Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon — didn’t include the report among the 12 it made available to the public last year.