NEW YORK - Caught helping itself to 9/11 donations, the state Fraternal Order of Police has agreed to surrender more than $9 million to families of fallen cops and to a health-care program for Ground Zero responders, The Post has learned.
In a settlement with Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the FOP will distribute about $6 million to 72 families of law-enforcement officers who perished at the World Trade Center - about $83,500 for each family.
The FOP’s Empire State Lodge is also turning over $3.3 million to the WTC Medical Monitoring Program based at Mt. Sinai Hospital to test and treat cops sick with heart and lung ailments after working at Ground Zero.
“The families of officers who lost their lives in the line of duty on 9/11 undoubtedly deserve the funds donated to assist them,” Cuomo spokesman Jeffrey Lerner said Friday.
“And officers now experiencing respiratory and other illnesses because of their work in the cleanup at Ground Zero also deserve this long overdue distribution of funds.”
Tapping an outpouring of generosity after the Twin Towers attack, the FOP’s foundation collected more than $15 million in donations.
A solicitation on its Web site pleaded for help to “ease the financial burden of those officers who suffered catastrophic injuries and to the families of those who gave their lives trying to help others.”
But the FOP distributed only half the funds to the heroes’ families.
It socked away millions of dollars in annuities and spent money on itself, an AG probe found.
In May 2003, the FOP used $925,000 in donations to buy its lodge headquarters in Hicksville, L.I.
It also spent about $400,000 of WTC funds to pay off debts, and doled out more to non-related charities and other FOP lodges around the state, the AG found.
At the direction of ex-president Frank Ferreyra, a former insurance broker, the FOP invested $4.5 million in nine long-term annuities - without specifically putting them in the name of the WTC fund.
In the settlement, signed last month, the FOP “neither admits nor denies” the AG’s findings. Gregory Kuczinski, an attorney for the FOP, has insisted “nothing criminal or fraudulent took place.”
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