Exclusive | NYC green-job grifter owes nearly $1M to stiffed students, lawsuit alleges: This ends now
A green-job grifter recruited dozens of standout college students for summer work at his start-up, then stiffed them to the tune of nearly $1 million, according to a federal class-action suit.Mathata “Moe” Mpela — the Brooklyn-based founder of Nalane Green Solutions — hired more than 20 college and graduate students to help run his “Green Apprentice Program,” promising them between $22 and $40 an hour to mentor kids at Transit Tech high school East New York on green tech.But while the student workers from CUNY and Howard University bought into his idealistic mission “to empower communities, reduce environmental impact, and drive economic growth,” they claim the only thing they ever got from Mpela was a harsh lesson on the art of the con.“Some [students] relocated across the country, others turned down paying jobs and research positions to do the work,” according to court papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
“None of them have ever been paid a single dollar.”Mpela collectively owes the group around $950,000 in unpaid wages, according to their lawyer.Geovanni Luti, a 4.0 student from Howard, said he turned down a lucrative offer at Collins Aerospace to work for Mpela and moved from Texas to a rat infested Bronx apartment for the job.“I genuinely thought I’d be making a change, and I genuinely thought he was a man of vision who wanted to make an impact on the community by taking people from our community to do that,” Luti told the Post. Turns out, Luti said, he actually worked on grant proposals to fund Mpela’s not-so-bright idea to “manufacture EV chargers” in the basement of Transit Tech High School.“I found [that] to be extremely dangerous and unethical, especially since he wanted the Transit Tech students — because they’re at a technical school — to work on manufacturing them and then sell it to the market,” Luti said.“This is infrastructure that can kill people, and I had nobody supervising me.”Mpela, when a...