Gino Menchini Technodyne Telecom Commish

Gino Menchini, Technodyne Lobbyist, and former NYC Telecom Commissioner

Agostino Cangemi's lobbying partner on the Technodyne-CityTime deal is Gino Menchini ; both men now work for National Strategies, LLC, a lobbying firm that performed recent lobbying work for Technodyne, one of the subcontractors implicated in the CityTime fraud scandal.

According to Mr. Menchini's biography, he was : "appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) and New York City’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). As the City’s CIO and DoITT Commissioner, he reported directly to Mayor Bloomberg and was responsible for the oversight and direction of IT and telecommunications activities for all of the City’s agencies."

In 2004, Mr. Menchini oversaw the motherload of IT contracts for that time : a $1 billion telecommunications and internet contract for the entire city. The amount of money tied to that telecom contract was described as a ''BONANZA'' (in all capital letters, according to The New York Daily News headline).

Naturally, Mr. Menchini is a very close and personal friend of Mayor Bloomberg. In 2005, Mr. Menchini was among those who attended the wedding of Miss Emma Bloomberg, Mr. Bloomberg's older daughter.

After he left his job as telecommunications commissioner, Mr. Menchini worked for a time with Northrop Grumman, one of the subcontractors on another controversial $2 billion Unified Call Taker-911 dispatch and emergency call system that is also known as the Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP) -- a deal that has already become the subject of review by New York City Comptroller John Liu.