Westchester County is suing to get back its money for 31,000 counterfeit face masks it bought from a known fraudster.
The county is demanding $207,000 from Jason Brand and Essential Manufacturing Corp. of Melville, Suffolk County, in an Aug. 2 complaint filed in Westchester Supreme Court.
In May 2020, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Westchester issued a request for bids for face masks for the county’s Office of Emergency Management. The county specified 3M masks, “the gold standard,” according to the complaint, for protection against airborne pathogens.
Jason Brand submitted a bid for Essential on June 6, 2020.
He had incorporated the company on April 20, 2020, according to a state corporation record, just a few weeks before the request for bids was issued.
Westchester paid Essential $206,995 ”“ $6.75 per mask ”“ for 1,533 boxes with a total of 30,660 masks.
This past February, 3M issued a fraud alert about counterfeit masks, according to the complaint, and 3M later verified that the masks from Essential are counterfeit.
3M advised the county not to use the masks. Some had already been distributed, according to an internal county email included in the lawsuit exhibits, but none had been used.
The complaint does not disclose whether county officials vetted Brand or Essential Manufacturing before buying the masks.
If officials had checked on Essential’s operations, for instance, they would have seen that the manufacturing company’s physical address was Jason Brand’s $1.2 million, 5-bedroom house in Melville.
Had they done a Google search on Jason Brand, they would have discovered that he had been implicated in a massive insurance fraud.
In 2014, state attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman indicted Jason Brand, 35, and his father, Alan Brand, 64, for looting Narco Freedom, a nonprofit organization that received $40 million a year from Medicaid to provide substance abuse treatment to thousands of New Yorkers.
In 2015, a superseding indictment was filed. Jason Brand and his company, Daso Development, were charged with enterprise corruption, insurance fraud, grand larceny and conspiracy.
Narco Freedom stole at least $27 million from the Medicaid program according to the attorney general, and the Brands syphoned off millions of dollars to pay for extravagant lifestyles.
Jason was paid nearly $100,000 for a no-show job at Narco Freedom, for instance, and the charity provided him with luxury cars.
Jason Brand also operated B&C Management, a shell company that billed Narco Freedom for services it never provided, according to the indictment. DASO Development was used to restore a flooded treatment facility in Brooklyn, and then the Brands filed a false insurance claim for the work.
In 2018, Schneiderman announced that everyone had been convicted, but the press release does not say on which charges Jason Brand was convicted or how he was punished.
Westchester accuses Jason Brand and Essential Manufacturing of fraud, breach of contract, breach of warranty, and breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.
Brand did not respond to an email asking for his side of the story.
Westchester is asking the court to rescind the purchase order and award the county $206,995.
