A construction safety company in New York City and 25 individuals were charged on Wednesday in connection with a yearslong scheme that falsely certified thousands of workers as having completed required safety training, including a worker who fell to his death, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.
The company, Valor Security and Investigations, and four people were also charged with recklessly endangering the life of the construction worker who died, Ivan Frias, who plummeted from scaffolding in November 2022. Six people who worked at Valor, including its founder, were additionally charged with enterprise corruption and criminal possession of a forged instrument.
In recent years, Valor rose to become one of the largest providers of job site safety training for construction workers in New York City. Between December 2019 and April 2023, the company certified 20,000 laborers had completed 40 hours of courses, according to the district attorney’s office. Laborers cannot work at most construction sites in the city without completing the training.
Valor and its founder, Alexander Shaporov, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney, said that prosecutors believe that most of the workers who were certified by Valor were never trained. Valor filed paperwork showing that Mr. Frias had received 10 hours of safety training, including eight hours of fall protection, but he never took the courses.
Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, along with investigators in the city’s Department of Buildings and Department of Investigation, said they uncovered a scheme in which Valor worked with brokers to help people acquire training certificates. The people charged included 19 brokers, who used Valor to produce the certificates within days, often overnight, the prosecutors said.
The buildings commissioner, James S. Oddo, said that the department had started an audit of Valor, which could lead to it losing its construction license. If that happens, the roughly 20,000 workers whom Valor certified would lose their certification.
Mr. Frias, 36, slipped off scaffolding at a residential building that was undergoing facade repairs, fell roughly 15 stories and landed on top of a sidewalk shed. Workers were repairing the exterior of the 22-story tower at 263 West End Avenue, near West 72nd Street, known as Riverside Towers.
The scaffolding on which he was working was missing some wood planks to stand on, city inspectors discovered. Mr. Frias was among 11 construction workers who died in 2022, according to the city’s Department of Buildings, an increase in job-site fatalities after a slowdown in construction at the start of the pandemic. Nine of the deaths were the result of falls. Seven workers died in 2023, the lowest rate in nearly a decade, the department said.
At the heart of the criminal case is a New York City law that went into effect in March 2021 that requires construction workers at major construction sites, including most mid-rise and high-rise projects, to complete 40 hours of safety training. The training, called Site Safety Training, includes an eight-hour course on fall prevention.
Valor was among more than 100 companies approved by the buildings department to provide the courses and certify that the workers completed them. From December 2019 to April 2023, Valor was the third largest training provider in the city.
Valor was started by Mr. Shaporov, who is also an investigator in the state’s Office of the Medicaid Inspector General. The city suspended Valor as a provider in April 2023.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Shaporov had more than $1 million deposited into a personal banking account while he was operating Valor, mostly in several-hundred dollar increments that were consistent with how much he charged for the certificates. Mr. Shaporov used that money to buy several homes, luxury cars and a yacht, they said.
After Mr. Frias’s death, the scaffolding company that employed him, Rennon Construction Corp., was fined $10,000 by the Department of Buildings for safety issues at the construction site, including insufficient planking and guardrails. Mr. Frias was wearing a safety harness but it was not tied to an anchor, the department said.
“Failure to have all those components resulted in walker falling to his death,” an inspector wrote in a citation. The company has not yet paid the $10,000 fine, according to city records.
A representative of Rennon Construction could not be reached for comment.
Rennon Construction still operates in the city and was not part of the indictment. Mr. Bragg declined to say on Wednesday whether Mr. Frias received his training certificate directly from Valor or through another entity on his behalf.
After his death, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration observed similar safety issues on scaffolding erected by Rennon Construction at other sites and issued nearly $139,000 in fines.
Inspectors observed people working on scaffolding that was missing planks and guardrails, some of them operating 60 feet above the ground without fall protection, the administration said. Rennon has contested some of the fines.
Last year, Mr. Frias’s widow, Brenda Torres, sued Rennon Construction, as well as two other companies that were operating at the site, for negligence in his death. Ms. Torres declined to comment on Wednesday.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
