90 Days In Jail For Ex-Postal Worker Who Got Bribes

DETROIT (WWJ/AP) - A former Detroit-area postal worker is expected to spend the next three months in prison, following a sentence for taking bribes from a contractor who fixed mail trucks.

Denny Robinson of Brownstown Township also must perform 100 hours of community service under a sentence ordered Thursday by federal Judge Avern Cohn.

Robinson pleaded guilty last fall after being accused of accepting $75,000 in cash, cars and free vehicle service from Joe Fawaz, the owner of Metro Diesel. In exchange, Robinson and others sent vehicles to the Detroit garage for repair.

Robinson had the responsibility to decide whether work on Postal vehicles would be performed by USPS employees or sent out to private contractors. He also had the responsibility to decide which private contractor would be used for work sent outside of the USPS.

Robinson is related by marriage to Fawaz, whose Metro Diesel garage got more than $13 million in business from the Postal Service for work repairing and maintaining Postal vehicles.

Fawaz paid bribes to postal employees for about 8 years before helping investigators in 2010. Assistant U.S. Attorney David Gardey said Robinson, on a secretly recorded video, calls his $2,000 payments from Fawaz a "regular thing." Robinson indicated that some trailers needed to be sent to another contractor because "it looks bad" if Metro Diesel fixes all of them, according to the government.

Robinson was one of five people convicted of sending trucks to Metro Diesel in the bribery scheme.

Fawaz was never charged and his cooperation helped his wife get a light sentence in an unrelated fraud case involving kickbacks paid to mortgage brokers. Instead of prison, she was sentenced to eight months of house arrest and four months in a halfway house.

Catch up on this case, here.

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