Built during the early 1930s, Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station is one of the country’s final railroad temples and still serves millions of passengers today as Amtrak’s third-busiest station. The federally-owned railroad awarded a $58 million contract in 2015 to Mark 1 Restoration to clean the station’s monumental limestone facade and restore its windows. A federal lawsuit filed last week alleges that Mark Snedden, the company’s owner, heaved lavish gifts at an Amtrak official for an additional $52 million in change orders, skyrocketing the deal’s value to over $100 million.
The value of the gifts provided to Amtrak’s project manager exceeded $325,000, according to the Engineering News-Record. The list of claimed bribes from Snedden and three Mark 1 vice presidents includes classics like over $7,000 in cash, cash, jewelry and expensive dinners, as well as a $4,700 purebred German Shepherd puppy and all-expenses-paid vacations to Ecuador and India. The filing claims that the Amtrak employee was able to upgrade a few of the gifts. After being given a $5,600 Tourneau watch, the project manager wanted a different timepiece and returned the Tourneau for an $11,000 watch.
The Amtrak project manager died while negotiating plea deal
Snedden is slated to be arraigned on federal bribery and false claims charges at the end of the month. The three Mark 1 vice presidents have already pleaded guilty to a single count of federal bribery each and are awaiting sentencing. Although the Amtrak project manager isn’t named in the lawsuit, the project manager was identified as Ajith Bhaskaran. He was charged with wire fraud in September 2020 for allegedly defrauding the Social Security Administration but died of a heart attack a month later at home while negotiating a plea deal.
While the Trump administration continues to let Elon Musk and his unqualified DOGE lackeys run rampant through the federal government, they should be tackling cases of real government waste like this. The 30th Street Station restoration was 90% funded by federal taxpayers. Contractors, like SpaceX, are willing to do anything to milk the federal budget. Last year, the Pentagon discovered that Boeing overcharged the Air Force by nearly 8,000% on spare soap dispensers on the C-17 Globemaster.
