Jonathan Mendelsohn
Long Island special education teacher Marina Golfo, 49, was able to convince the NYC Department of Education to give her three months of paid leave while she was in prison. Golfo was arrested for defrauding taxpayers with the Early Intervention Program. The program is supposed to help support developmentally disabled children.
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In 2021, Golfo was charged with stealing approximately $156,000 from the parents of her underaged clients by submitting fake invoices for therapy sessions she never had. Golfo was sentenced to three months in prison for healthcare fraud but was not let go of her job as a speech therapist.
Scammer Marina Golfo Still Got Paid in Prison
While in prison, Golfo was able to dupe her employers into thinking she wasn’t in prison, but rather just severely ill. From prison, Golfo filled out an online request for an extended amount of sick leave with pay, and it was approved while she was locked in the slammer. Her request included a doctor’s note, which may or may not have been fake.
Golfo attempted to get her sentence reduced in a similar way, claiming that she suffered from health risks that made COVID-19 a major threat to her and said that she was the caretaker of her elderly parents. This attempt was denied and Golfo had to serve her entire prison sentence, but the Department of Education must have missed the memo that the teacher was in jail, and gave her a quarter of her salary, which was just shy of six figures.
Golfo received sick pay for almost her entire prison sentence before she was released on December 1, 2021. Golfo was officially fired from the Department of Education for her scam in January of this year, but she claims she was indeed sick and she didn’t think it mattered where she was located. Special Commissioner Anastasia Coleman is asking that Golfo return the sick pay she received while she was incarcerated, stating, “Her actions were clearly more deliberate than she acknowledged to investigators.”
