Charity probe settled
NEW YORK — A New York City minister who was the subject of an Associated Press investigation about misspent 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina charity funds has agreed to repay $1.2 million that he took from his congregation to buy an 18th-century farmhouse on seven acres in rural New Jersey.
The Rev. Carl Keyes and his wife, the Rev. Donna Keyes, who jointly led the Glad Tidings Tabernacle in Manhattan, signed a legal judgment Wednesday settling a probe by the New York attorney general into a series of questionable church financial transactions.
Those deals included an illegal loan the couple took from the church in 2008 to buy a house in Stockton, N.J., near the Delaware River, and $500,000 the church lent an anti-poverty charity controlled by Carl Keyes, called Aid for the World.
Some of that money, the attorney general’s office said, was used to buy the minister and his wife a BMW. According to the settlement, which was scheduled to be officially announced today, other funds were used to finance family trips to California, West Virginia, Africa and Florida, where the couple’s sons went to college.
Glad Tidings former executive director, Mark Costantin, agreed to repay $482,000 he still owed Glad Tidings on $1.2 million in loans he’d taken from the church, some of which were used to pay off the mortgage on his house in Chester, New York.
“Carl and Donna Keyes and Mark Costantin abused the trust of their congregants and used Glad Tidings Tabernacle as their personal bank,” said Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
