Feds charge campus owner with fraud
By Tom Sharpe | The New MexicanPosted: 2/9/2012, 8:00 PM Mountain time
The owner of the campus of the former St. Catherine Indian School has been indicted on charges of obtaining nearly $11 million in federal contracts by making fraudulent statements to qualify for a program for disabled veterans.
Max R. Tafoya, 62, of Albuquerque and his son-in-law, Tyler Cole, 39, of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque each face up to five years in prison and $250,000 fines.
A federal grand jury on Wednesday issued an indictment against them on charges of conspiring to defraud the government, according to a news release from the Albuquerque office of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Veterans Entrepreneurship and Small Business Act of 1999 aims to increase the number of government contracts awarded to small businesses that are owned and controlled by military veterans with service-related disabilities.
According to the 11-page indictment, Tafoya, a veteran who does not have a service-connected disability, paid his stepbrother, Andrew Castillo, a service-disabled veteran and U.S. Forest Service employee from Tallahassee, Fla., to use his name as the owner of Tafoya's M.R. Tafoya Construction Inc. Castillo was not charged.
The fraudulent scheme allowed the company to obtain five contracts with the Veterans Administration worth $10,984,189 for work at national cemeteries in 2009 and 2010, according to the indictment.
The indictment charges that Cole, who is not a veteran, completed certifications stating that Tafoya Construction qualified for the disabled-veteran set-asides and that Tafoya and Cole "used various deceptive devices to create the appearance that Castillo was the majority owner and controller of Tafoya Construction, when in fact he did not own or operate the company."
In 2006, another Tafoya-owned company, New Mexico Consolidated Construction Services, bought the campus of the defunct St. Catherine Indian School on the north side of Santa Fe from the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who operated it from 1887 to 1998.
Tafoya's effort to sell 6 of the 18 acres to the Veterans Administration to expand the adjacent Santa Fe National Cemetery has been thwarted so far by the Historic Design Review Board, which has blocked his plan to move three small adobe residences on the property.
In the meantime, the Santa Fe City Council is seeking to buy the campus and its 19 buildings for $1.9 million so it can lease the property to the New Mexico School for the Arts, a public charter school. A lawyer for Tafoya has accused Mayor David Coss and the councilors of trying to pressure his client into selling the property for less than its value.
U.S. Attorney Kenneth J. Gonzales issued a written statement regarding the indictment on Thursday.
"These contracts are supposed to go to small businesses that are actually owned by service-disabled veterans, and not to impostors who break the rules and scheme to beat the system," he said.
Tafoya and Cole were not available for comment late Thursday.
Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.
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