Paul Moe didn’t show up for work that often, but he will be showing up for his incarceration. On Monday, March 26, Moe, a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association and the general foreman for a shipping company at Port of Elizabeth, N.J., was sentenced in Newark federal court to two years in prison and three years of supervised release for collecting a nearly $500,000 annual salary for an ostensibly full-time job performed part-time. He also was ordered to pay $749,000 in restitution. Moe had been convicted by a jury in October on 14 counts of wire fraud following a July indictment. The actions follow a joint probe by the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards, Office of Inspector General and Employee Benefits Security Administration, plus the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor.
Court records indicate that Moe, now 66, a resident of Atlantic Highlands, N.J., during September 2015-March 2017 collected a nearly $500,000 annual compensation package for a full-time job. The trouble was that he was a part-time person. He showed up at the job site for as few as eight hours a week, often leaving the state or even the country during his many absences. To collect his $9,300 weekly paychecks, he persuaded co-conspirators to submit false time sheets on his behalf. On some days he was credited with as many as 16 hours of overtime. The Department of Labor, eventually alerted to the situation, determined that he had obtained his salary under false pretenses. It then handed the case to the Justice Department. Moe would be arrested and indicted last July 20. His attorney insisted that he was framed, but a jury, following a 10-day trial, decided otherwise.