Two New York City postal workers were busted doing the exact opposite of their job description. One of the USPS employees, who was only on the job for about a month, admitted to throwing away garbage bags full of mail because he was overwhelmed by the holiday delivery schedule; another guy stole around $1,000 in gift cards.
Reports NBC New:
Investigators began looking into James Hayden, a full-time mail carrier, when a Florida woman filed a complaint on Aug. 31, stating that the $100 Visa gift card she mailed to her son in Red Hook, Brooklyn, never reached him, according to a federal criminal complaint. Authorities tracked the gift card and found it had been used throughout Red Hook about four days after it was mailed.
Surveillance footage from those transactions showed a man wearing a USPS uniform making the purchase, and a supervisor at the Red Hook post office identified the man as Hayden.
Another complaint about a missing Amazon gift card also matched the purchases on the stolen card to Hayden, according to authorities.
In an interview with investigators, Hayden admitted he’d been opening and stealing mail for about a year, looking especially for envelopes he thought might contain gift cards. He estimated taking about 50 gift cards from mail over the past year, profiting about $1,000.
The second worker, Daniel Darby, was hired in November. Darby was charged for throwing away approximately 1,000 pieces of mail. According to the criminal complaint Darby was “overwhelmed by the quantity of mail he was responsible for delivering on Dec. 2.”
He acknowledged opening some of the mail before throwing it away. The mail was found stuffed in a trash cans on his route in Ozone Park, Queens.
The two were arraigned Tuesday (Dec. 29) with Hayden being released on $75,000 bond. and Darby on $50,000 bond.
Both have been suspended without pay.
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Photo: screenshot
