Procida Tile owner pleads guilty in Suffolk tax case

Tile company owner Frank Procida pleaded guilty in State Supreme Court in Riverhead Monday to second-degree grand larceny in a scheme in which he collected more than $1 million in sales tax and kept it.

Procida also pleaded guilty to a charge of offering a false instrument for filing.

Appearing before Justice Robert Doyle, Procida made the pleas in a deal that requires him to pay $1.6 million in restitution, spend 30 days in jail and be on probation for five years.

The plea came after a 57-count 2009 indictment charging theft of more than $1 million in state and county sales tax revenue from 2003 to 2009.

Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota said a yearlong investigation of Procida Tile by investigators from his tax crime unit and the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance led to the indictment of Procida, 48, of Bay Shore.

Procida also had faced charges of failing to file tax returns. If convicted on the initial charges, he would have faced up to 25 years in prison.

In the scheme, each of the Procida stores in Coram, Patchogue, Deer Park and Lindenhurst had a different corporation that changed every six months to a year, so tax records never caught up with them. But the flipping of corporations caught the attention of investigators. Two of Procida's corporations named in the indictment, FCP Corp. and DP Tile Corp., also each entered a plea of guilty to offering a false instrument for filing.