JFK guards dozing, Terror-targeted JFK Airport has become a giant slumber party for some of its security guards — who regularly doze on duty at key posts, according to a former boss and damning photos obtained by The Post.
Although the airport has been at the center of at least one terror plot — and an embarrassing security snafu involving a jet skier last summer — these disturbing infractions seem to mean little to the cadre of guards who catnap on the job, says the ex-boss, Stephen Jackson, 39.
“It was a regular occurrence finding the guards sleeping,” said Jackson, a former manager for FJC Security, which employs about 300 security guards at JFK Airport.
Jackson, an ex-Marine, began working at FJC in August 2011 and became a security-guard supervisor at JFK in December. He was fired May 28 after what he calls a campaign of harassment over everything from his whistle-blowing to his being Hispanic.
The married Staten Island father of four said he typically supervised between 58 and 65 guards over an eight-hour shift at JFK — and regularly caught about six sleeping on duty.
FJC guards earn starting salaries of $17.23 an hour with benefits — nearly $36,000 yearly, or about $6,000 less than the $41,975 annual starting salary of a rookie NYPD cop.
One FJC worker who allegedly found it difficult to keep his eyes open was Suhas Harite, 68. Jackson claims to have caught him sleeping twice while assigned to a remote post not far from Jamaica Bay.
The post is about 150 yards from where a stranded jet skier last August breached a 6-foot-tall fence that was part of the vaunted $100 million Perimeter Intrusion Detection System bought by the Port Authority from defense contractor Raytheon.
The hapless skier sauntered unchallenged across two airport runways and wasn’t detected until he approached someone for help.
That fiasco, revealed by The Post, led the PA to authorize hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime to beef up patrols. FJC added four posts in the area, Jackson said.
The remote location, however, proved irresistible for sleepy guards such as Harite, Jackson said.
In a 36-second cellphone video Jackson took in March and provided to The Post, a man he identified as Harite can be seen at the wheel of an FJC vehicle sleeping contentedly.
“Come on, buddy. Wake up!” Jackson is heard saying to the man as he repeatedly honks his horn.
“Beeping the horn, nothing. A plane’s taking off,” Jackson says in the video while still honking as a jet is seen and heard overhead.
Read more
Posts
