ALBANY — For the second time in 15 months, Albany’s Common Council voted to appoint a member of the city’s troubled Community Police Review Board without being aware of extensive legal problems in his past — a direct result of what appears to be the failure to conduct the sort of basic background check that had been promised by officials after the previous controversy.
This time, the surprise involves new review board member Michael Logan’s federal guilty plea in 2013, acknowledging his role in a sprawling fraud scheme, crimes that resulted in a two-year prison sentence and a $250,000 forfeiture order. After the Common Council learned about that conviction Tuesday as a result of the Times Union’s inquiries, Logan was told he would not be allowed to do any substantive work on the board until he had undergone a background check — a review that apparently never happened before the council voted him onto the panel.
Logan’s conviction was related to his work as a manager for TestQuest Inc., a company that received millions of dollars in public funds to provide tutoring services in under-performing public schools in New York City. A May 2014 news release on Logan’s sentencing from the office of Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Logan had been responsible for managing TestQuest’s Supplemental Educational Services tutoring program at two schools…