A federal grand jury has indicted a longtime Town of Oyster Bay official for allegedly failing to report more than $2 million in consulting fees over a six-year span, authorities said.
Frederick Ippolito, the town’s commissioner of planning and development, was arrested Friday and charged with six counts of tax evasion. He is scheduled to be arraigned at Central Islip federal court before Judge Kathleen Tomlinson.
“The public expects their elected and appointed officials to obey the same laws as it does,” said Shantelle Kitchen, special agent-in-charge of the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit in New York. “They must meet their tax obligations just like the people they serve.”
Federal prosecutors said the 76-year-old Syosset man received the consulting fees from Old Bethpage-based Carlo Lizza & Sons, Paving, Inc. and a principal of that company, then willfully failed to report the fees on his personal tax returns or the tax returns of entities he controlled from 2008 to 2013.
Ippolito is the president of CAI Associates, LTD, a consulting and snow removal business, and a former officer of CAI Restaurant, Inc., which used to own Christiano’s, the Italian restaurant that Billy Joel was said to have wrote a song about.
If convicted, Ippolito faces a up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 on each count.
Oyster Bay town officials did not immediately return a call for comment.
