A former Metro employee was sentenced Tuesday for his role in a scheme to defraud the transit agency.
Kirby Smith, who was an assistant superintendent at Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, is sentenced to 14 days incarceration and two years supervised release and is ordered to pay restitution to the agency in the amount of $174,054, according to a press release from the WMATA Office of Inspector General. The investigation was conducted jointly by the OIG, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, and the FBI.
Smith pleaded guilty to violating federal law regarding the supplementation of a government official’s salary. He and Brian Carpenter, a former NFL player who played in Washington in the 1980s, conspired to defraud Metro of more than $300,000. Carpenter pleaded guilty in July to orchestrating the conspiracy.
Carpenter owned a Leesburg-based company, The Flintstone Group, that facilitated the sale and distribution of janitorial products. He established a relationship with Smith and devised a plan in which Smith let him charge Smith’s WMATA-issued credit card, which he received as part of his job with Metro’s maintenance and custodial services division, for supplies that were never delivered, per the release.
Carpenter then kept a sizable portion of the amount charged from the sales, and Smith got cash payments for allowing Carpenter to charge the card. Overall, Metro spent at least $310,000 on products it never received.
To get around Metro’s internal credit card controls, Carpenter processed transactions from Smith’s WMATA-issued credit card via at least 10 different companies. He also presented investigators from OIG with altered invoices that made it look like he had ordered or substituted all of the products charged.
A second Metro employee was mentioned in connection with the scheme, according to an earlier press release. The agency’s OIG did not immediately respond to DCist’s request for comment on that employee’s role.
The Washington Post reported in December that the agency’s inspector general started investigating the scheme over five years ago, when the Metro employees allegedly put cleaning supplies in station supply cabinets, to make it look like the products were delivered.
Carpenter is due to be sentenced in December and faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
This was a joint investigation involving the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, Federal Bureau of Investigation – Washington Field Office, and WMATA Office of Inspector General.
