(The following story by Steve Ritea appeared on the Newsday website on August 13.)
NEW YORK — The MTA said yesterday it has fixed a glitch on ticket vending machines at Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal that, for at least three years, allowed a Roosevelt couple and a Manhattan man to obtain free transit passes they allegedly sold for nearly $800,000.
“It was sort of a freak incident that someone looking to steal from the MTA happened to stumble on this extremely obscure glitch,” said Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Jeremy Soffin.
Police have arrested Cary Grant, 40, and Lisa Foster Jordan, 37, of 6 Royal Ct. in Roosevelt, along with Christopher Clemente, 37, of 160 Morningside Ave. in Manhattan, and charged them with grand larceny and possession of stolen property.
Soffin said the glitch was exposed in September 2005 when Jordan, using a legitimate debit card from a small California-based bank, First Republic, found the Penn Station machine gave her a free ticket. First Republic has about 50 branches nationwide, seven in New York.
The account linked to the card had insufficient funds and, although the bank sent a warning, the machine dispensed a ticket.
During a software upgrade, the LIRR found a large volume of transactions on two debit cards linked to Jordan’s account and notified MTA Police, who arrested her in May during a sting operation at Penn. Court documents say during the arrest, police found a list of tickets she was purchasing for buyers.
Grant and Clemente, who also allegedly used the debit cards to buy MetroCards and LIRR tickets, were arrested last week.
Asked why it took almost three years to discover the glitch, LIRR finance chief Mark Young said although the railroad reconciles charges with transactions each week, “unauthorized” purchases were not included on a computer-generated list, since that term typically means a ticket was never sold.
Other banks were also subject to the software defect, Young said, and the LIRR later found 990 such transactions since 2004, valued at about $74,000. He said these appeared to be accidental, as none involved the same card for a significant number of tickets.
He said LIRR attorneys are pursuing reimbursement from the software vendor, Scheidt & Bachmann of Germany.
Clemente, a former student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, was arrested in 1990 on drug and weapons possession charges and spent almost 15 years in prison. He became entangled in the alleged ticket scheme not long after his 2005 release.
His Bronx attorney, Zachary Giampa, said Clemente has been working in the human resources department at Columbia University and is serving as a prison and hospital chaplain.
Grant’s attorney, James E. Toner of Mineola, said his client worked part time for a local home improvement contractor.
Jordan and her attorney could not be reached.