Former Gov. David Paterson was a paid consultant to the Brooklyn company that sparked a scandal when it flipped the Rivington House nursing home for a $72 million profit, The Post has learned.
The former governor was “on call” for Allure Group managing partner Joel Landau during talks for the takeover of a second nursing home, a Brooklyn facility that is also being converted into luxury housing, a source close to those negotiations told The Post.
That deal is under investigation by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
“Whenever Joel had a problem with the state, he’d say, ‘Let me call the governor,’” the source said.
A Paterson spokesman said the ex-governor “had Joel Landau as a consulting client in the past, but he hasn’t worked with him since early 2014.”
He added that Paterson and Landau “never discussed” Allure’s lobbying to secure a deed switch, allowing it to sell Rivington House on the Lower East Side for a whopping $116 million.
As Mayor Bill de Blasio has become embroiled in the burgeoning scandal, the city’s comptroller, the Department of Investigation and the state Attorney General are probing the deal in which city bureaucrats lifted a decades-old deed restriction on 45 Rivington St. that mandated the Lower East Side property be used only for non-profit, residential-health care purposes.
At the same time Landau, 35, was laying the groundwork for his Rivington House windfall, he was also working to convert the Cabs Nursing Home, a 170-bed facility in Bedford-Stuyvesant, to luxury housing, the source said.
In December 2013, Landau submitted an application to the state Health Department to run the Brooklyn nursing home. By June 2015, NNRC Holdings LLC, part of the Allure Group, paid $15.6 million for the property. Six months later, Landau submitted plans to the state DOH to shut down the facility. By that time, only 35 residents remained.
The state approved a final Cabs closure plan on Feb. 12 of this year, and “the last resident was discharged on March 15, 2016,” according to the DOH.
But even before the closing was finalized, a Brooklyn-based contractor — 270 Nostrand LLC — submitted plans to convert it a residential property last October.
Despite plans to convert the building, Allure Group maintained that they were committed to the nursing home. When a patient-care advocate contacted the company last summer after rumors of Cabs’ imminent closure, he was told the nursing home would remain open.
“They’re supposed to notify us and have a public meeting,” said Richard Danford, director of the city’s Long Term Care Ombudsman Program. “None of that happened.”
A source said this was par for the course. “Joel [Landau] is not in the nursing home business,” he said. “He’s in the money business.”
Landau, whose company operates six nursing homes in Brooklyn and Harlem, owed more than $6 million in taxes to the city on his nursing home properties.
Last week, after The Post reported on the tax bill, the company paid the $853,795 in taxes it owed on the Cabs property, a Finance department official said.
Allure still owes $5.2 million in back taxes on the Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Brooklyn.
Landau refused to comment.