Lying about concrete? That's low

William Rashbaum has an article in The New York Times about concrete testing:

Early last year, Manhattan prosecutors concluded that the New York area’s largest concrete testing company, Testwell Laboratories, had been systematically falsifying its results on many public and private construction projects. The eventual indictment of the company and several officers left close to a dozen government agencies, as well as private developers, scrambling to evaluate how much retesting was needed to ensure the strength of concrete on existing projects, and to find alternative labs to perform that work, and testing on current and future projects.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority chose as a replacement American Standard Testing Laboratories to evaluate the concrete on the $4.3 billion Second Avenue subway project, authority officials said. But now, according to several people briefed on the matter, American Standard is also under criminal investigation, suspected of having falsified reports and engaged in other improprieties. It is unclear whether the matters under investigation involve its $250,000 contract to test the Second Avenue subway concrete. No charges have been filed, but the Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to begin presenting evidence to a grand jury in the coming weeks, according to one of the people, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is still under way.
Richard Leff, a lawyer who represents the company and its owner, Alan Fortich, said, “American Standard denies any wrongdoing.” He also said Mr. Fortich had engaged in no criminal wrongdoing. He said he would not comment further because of the pending investigation.
Any indictments would be likely to force the transportation authority to search for an alternative to test the concrete on the Second Avenue subway and on another huge project, the $2.1 billion extension of the No. 7 line. American Standard began doing the testing on that project last month under a $140,000 contract.
Prosecutors are investigating another concrete testing company that has recently completed other work on the Second Avenue subway project, the No. 7 Line and the $516 million South Ferry terminal station, the people said. That company, Stallone Testing Laboratories, is now testing the strength of the concrete for the foundation of the $1.4 billion Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan, according to transportation officials.
Stallone’s lab director, William Bayer, also denied wrongdoing and said he had been under the impression that the investigation had ended with the deaths early last year of the company’s vice president, Miles Rostek, and its lab director, Jay Adam. “Both of the people involved in this specific investigation are gone from this earth,” Mr. Bayer said.
Construction industry experts say the inquiry, which grew out of the Testwell investigation, raised questions about the integrity of the testing industry in the metropolitan region. A central concern is whether a lab can afford to enter competitive bids if others operate more cheaply by falsifying reports.
A spokesman for the transportation authority said in a statement last week that the agency was aware of the testing issues and was working with its inspector general “to aggressively investigate any fraud that may have been perpetrated by these companies. We have independently tested all critical concrete with no problems discovered,” the spokesman, Jeremy Soffin, said in the statement referring to the work performed by the companies. “We will continue to independently test to ensure safety and accuracy.”
Construction managers on the transit jobs that involve the two companies have been instructed to take extra measures to check the work, another authority spokesman, Kevin Ortiz, said in an email message. “We are also looking at our alternatives if we determine that it is best to replace them,” he said.
A lawyer for the Stallone company, Luigi DeMaio, said it did not do the controlled testing on the projects, but the design mixes for the concrete, a process to ensure that the combination of cement, aggregate, water, sand and chemicals produces concrete of the desired strength. He said that all of the design mixes used came out to the indicated specifications and that none resulted in substandard concrete. “We have no idea what the D.A. is investigating because, in the case of my client, Stallone, we did not do the controlled testing on the projects they’re interested in,” Mr. DeMaio said.
The potential charges against the two companies could include scheming to defraud, and in the case of American Standard, enterprise corruption— the state equivalent of federal racketeering violations— and tax evasion, one of the people said.
Alicia Maxey Greene, a spokeswoman for the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, declined to comment. The office is investigating the case, along with the transportation authority’s inspector general, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the city’s Department of Investigation.
American’s lab director is a civil engineer who works for New York City Transit, but officials said that, as of May, he had permission to work at the company despite its status as a contractor with the authority.
Concrete testing is a basic safety measure at construction sites and is required by the city building code. While investigators found irregularities in tests conducted on a number of large public and private projects during the Testwell investigation, officials said they did not believe any falsified results created hazards because most of the concrete poured in New York is of a high quality.
The Testwell investigation did, however, reveal several construction flaws, prosecutors said when that case was announced, including at the Freedom Tower at ground zero, which was designed to use concrete that could withstand 12,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. Testwell, the prosecutors said at the time, certified in its reports that the concrete met that standard, but testing done later by the Port Authority found that it could only withstand 9,000 pounds.
After the Testwell investigation was disclosed last summer, the city’s Department of Buildings said it had begun retesting concrete at some construction sites where Testwell had worked. It is unclear what it planned to do if charges were brought against American Standard and Stallone.

Rico says someone from one of these companies should go into the concrete...