American Paving & Masonry Corp., of Glen Cove, barred from doing business with NYS following wage scheme

A Glen Cove paving company that violated New York minimum wage requirements was barred Thursday from contracting with the state for five years and ordered to pay $171,000 in restitution to workers forced to pay kickbacks on money owed to them from several Long Island public works projects.

Angelo Stanco, 59, of Glen Head, the owner of American Paving & Masonry Corp., who was charged in September with six counts of grand larceny, forgery and failure to pay prevailing wage, pleaded guilty last month to a petit larceny charge under a settlement agreement with the Nassau County District Attorney.

Supreme Court Justice Helene Gugerty sentenced him to a 1-year conditional discharge Thursday morning.

The judge also sentenced the company to a 3-year conditional discharge. The 18 employees harmed in the scheme have been paid $171,278 in restitution, according to prosecutors.

Further, American Paving may not bid on another state contract until May 23, 2029, under the plea deal.

“This defendant not only failed to pay his employees their fair and rightly owed prevailing wage but further victimized and bullied workers by shaking them down for checks they received as compensation from the State and threatening their future employment if they did not hand the checks over,” Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly said. “Today, Angelo Stanco and American Paving finally made these workers, and employees from various other projects, whole with a restitution payment of more than $170,000. Angelo and American Paving will continue to pay for their deceit, as they are barred from work on public projects for the next five years.”

Stanco declined to comment on the scheme but said he was being unfairly targeted.

“Why do you guys have to do this to people who have been in the business 41 years?” he said after the hearing. “All I know is that there’s a God in heaven and he’ll be the one doing the judging.”

In a statement, Stanco's lawyer, Vito Palmieri, said: “He was misadvised, and he made mistakes. He admitted to those mistakes, and he took responsibility for them. He just wants to put this bad scenario behind him.”

Stanco's arrest last year came less than a week after New York State penal law was updated to add wage theft to the definition of the larceny statute, allowing Stanco to be charged with a crime. The new law permits prosecutors to add up the stolen wages for the entire workforce to determine the charge — from petit larceny for under $1,000 to a Class B Felony for wage theft over $1 million.

Stanco’s crime goes back to 2018 when he admitted that American Paving & Masonry Corp. underpaid workers on the Sands Point and Brookville projects in two stipulations filed with the New York State Department of Labor, Public Works Bureau. The labor department collected more than $100,000 in back wages and sent it to the employees.

Prosecutors say Stanco then demanded the workers give him a cut of the restitution, which came out to $42,595.

Investigators discovered an additional $128,682 in prevailing wage violations on other municipal projects in Long Island, including Glen Cove School District and the villages of Great Neck, Great Neck Plaza, Flower Hill, Roslyn, Roslyn Harbor, Freeport, Lawrence, Cedarhurst and Hewlett.