NEW YORK (AP) -- A supervisor assigned to investigate fraud in New York City's child services agency was among four people charged with embezzling $450,000 meant for needy children.

Nigel Osarenkhoe, who supervised adoption payments for the Administration for Children's Services, "truly betrayed the trust" of the agency, said Rose Gill Hearn, commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation.

Osarenkhoe used his access to create phantom adoptions under aliases, thus obtaining adoption subsidies for himself, Hearn said at a news conference.

She said an investigation of the city agency that distributes $74 million a month in adoption subsidies and payments to not-for-profit foster care agencies revealed a "hornet's nest" of problems, beginning with poor financial accountability.

Hearn said Osarenkhoe was assigned to help investigate fraud last year after the city decided to examine the agency's adoption practices in the wake of the Judith Leekin case.

Leekin was sentenced Tuesday to 11 years in prison for stealing more than $1.6 million by making false claims that allowed her to adopt 11 disabled children in New York since 1998. After adopting the children, she moved to Florida and is accused there of abusing the children. She denies those allegations.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said the four defendants in this case were involved in two schemes: falsely posing as adoptive parents to receive subsidies or faking a bill for computer services and then authorizing its payment.

Two defendants, both foster agency workers, were arrested Tuesday when they brazenly went to pick up a $711,420 payment from the other official, Lethem Duncan, who by then had agreed to cooperate, Garcia said.

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Stealing from orphans!! There are times when I'd truly like to see the whipping post set back up in the middle of town....

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Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals, yet those ideals have never ceased to guide us. They expose our flaws, and lead us to mend them. We are the beneficiaries of the work of the generations before us and it is each generation's responsibility to continue that work. - Laura Bush

God is a conservative -

Ecclesiastes 10:2--"A wise man's heart inclines him to the right, but a fool's heart to the left."

Exactly!...

Bring back the stockade and sell rotten tomatoes for a dollar...

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"You get the respect that you give" - cnredd