Newly elected District Leader and State Committee member Chris Owens is already proving his worth, publicly calling Vito Lopez's latest scandal "obscene."

Seems Vito Lopez is running his so-called no profits for the personal gain of his cronies. Of course this should surprise NO ONE familiar both with Vito Lopez and with the way these highly politicized "non-profits" are run in NYC. From the Brooklyn Paper:

Vito’s ‘Money Honeys’ get big salaries — subsidized by you
By Aaron Short - The Brooklyn Paper - 9/16/10

Assemblyman Vito Lopez, Brooklyn’s powerful Democratic party leader, steered more than three-quarters of a million dollars to both his campaign treasurer and his girlfriend, who work at the nonprofit he founded.

The treasurer, Christiana Fisher, is also the executive director of Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, a Bushwick-based social services organization that Lopez founded. Last year, she nearly tripled her salary, earning $659,591 compared with $234,234, almost six times the amount of her peer executive nonprofit leaders in Brooklyn.

The nonprofit’s Housing Director Angela Battaglia, who is not only Lopez’s longtime girlfriend, but a City Planning Commissioner, got a hefty 73-percent raise from last year, earning $329,910 compared with $190,609 in the previous year, according to the organization’s tax filings.

Battaglia pulls in $54,150 as a planning commissioner, a job that lets her vote on significant rezoning plans that often affect Ridgewood Bushwick...

Cronyism is part and parcel of Vito Lopez's corruption, rewarding not just his girlfriend, but also loyal cronies like now City Councilman Steve Levin with help getting elected. And the fact that the Working Families Party goes along with Vito Lopez and his cronies, as they did in several City Council races last year, is one of the reasons why I link WFP to the corruption in Brooklyn. They are at best enablers of the corruption and at worst beneficiaries of that corruption.

But Vito Lopez doesn't have it all his own way. He has lost some local elections recently and one person he opposed was Chris Owens. Owens won by a nice margin while Vito's hand picked crony, Steve Williamson, came in a distant third. Chris Owens owes Vito Lopez nothing and is already showing his independence and his worth. From the same article:

District Leader-elect Chris Owens called them “unethical, wrong and misleading the public.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s obscene!” said Owens, who has worked widely in the nonprofit sector. “An agency that can afford to pay an administrator $659,000 is almost on the verge of not being a not-for-profit. This is a rip-off of the public.”

Exactly...Vito Lopez's whole empire of corruption is a rip-off of the public. But to be fair, Vito Lopez is by no means alone in this. City Councilmen are notorious as well for non-profits that do almost nothing but funnel money to friends, family and cronies and allow other politicians the chance to buy and sell favors by funneling taxpayer money to the "non-profits" of other politicians. One particularly blatant and odious case was seen last year when former City Councilman Steve DiBrienza (who was looking to run for his old seat at the time) was found to be running a fake non-profit that seemed to do nothing but pay salaries to Steve DiBrienza's family and political cronies. And fellow City Councilman David Yassky funneled taxpayer money to DiBrienza's non-profit without even checking to see what the non-profit did (or didn't) do...at about the same time DiBrienza endorsed Yassky for Congress. Mere coincidence I am sure!

DiBrienza's non-profit did less for the community than even Vito Lopez's version of the same scam. At least Vito knows how to put on an effective facade. Gotta give the man credit. Vito Lopez knows how to put on a convincing and long term scam.

You can read more about the latest (of many) Vito Lopez scandals from the Daily News which also covered it. From that article:

A secret city report says Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez's nonprofit empire is riddled with fraud and incompetence - and it's stonewalling attempts to clean it up.

An internal Department of Investigation report obtained by the Daily News outlined at least $340,000 in fraudulent or fishy claims submitted to the city by the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council and affiliated groups - a chain of nonprofits founded by the state Assemblyman.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/09/15/2010-09-15_probe_fin...

All of which is business as usual in the Brooklyn run by the likes of Vito Lopez and Steve Levin. Let's hope the likes of Chris Owens can at least shine some light on the dark workings of the corrupt Democratic Party Machine in Brooklyn.