Judge says contractor’s bribing of Amtrak manager with $320,000 in luxury watches, vacations represents a ‘tear in the fabric of society’

A former executive at a construction firm that helped restore 30th Street Station’s limestone facade was sentenced Tuesday to nearly five years in federal prison for securing his company’s role in the project by showering an Amtrak supervisor with bribes.

Donald Seefeldt, 65, of Wilmette, Ill., worked with his colleagues to provide more than $323,000 in gifts over three years to the Amtrak project manager, Ajith Bhaskaran, including luxury watches, vacations to India and Ecuador, limousine rentals, meals, and cash, prosecutors said. Others at Seefeldt’s firm, Mark 1 Restoration, even bought Bhaskaran a purebred German shepherd puppy and agreed to cover costs for its dog-training classes.

In exchange, Bhaskaran — who had the ability to approve or reject new expenses on the project — worked to secure approval for tens of millions of dollars in additional work for Mark 1. And although federal authorities do not dispute that Mark 1 completed legitimate work on the project, they said much of the graft provided to Bhaskaran was effectively covered by Amtrak and federal funding because Mark 1 had falsely inflated its invoices by about $2 million.

The result was a restoration project at a Philadelphia landmark that became awash in corruption — fraud that was committed not only by employees at Mark 1, but also by officials at another contracting company on the job.

The fallout is now reverberating in court.

Six people who worked on the project have pleaded guilty in recent months to federal charges connected to the scandal, including four from Mark 1. Seefeldt is that company’s first to be sentenced; the others are scheduled to learn their fates at hearings later this year.

(Bhaskaran had been charged with unrelated wire fraud in 2019 but died of heart failure a year later.)

During Seefeldt’s sentencing hearing Tuesday, he tearfully addressed his wife and the judge, apologizing for his actions and saying they were “so inconsistent with who I am as a person.” He asked to be sentenced to probation, saying he understood that he had made mistakes and wanted to be able to provide a better example for his family and community moving forward.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Grenell said Seefeldt helped usher in an “absolute overflowing river” of corruption at taxpayer expense. And U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone said Seefeldt’s conduct represented “a tear in the fabric of society,” pointing out that he made minimal attempts to stop a three-year bribery scheme that he knew was wrong as it was unfolding.

“If everyone did what you did,” Beetlestone said, “we would not have a civilization.”

The 30th Street renovation project was announced in 2015, when Amtrak signed a $58 million contract with Mark 1 to repair its limestone exterior and clean its majestic facade.

Bhaskaran oversaw the project and had significant power over its purse strings. And court documents said that Mark 1 executives quickly came to realize that if Bhaskaran was happy, their conditions on the job site — and their potential for future business — would improve.

Beginning in 2016, court documents said, Seefeldt and others at Mark 1 began providing Bhaskaran with thousands of dollars’ worth of food and entertainment, in violation of Amtrak’s rules prohibiting gifts. One of Seefeldt’s lawyers, Sergio Acosta, said Tuesday that Bhaskaran was the person who asked for the gifts, and that he threatened to make life difficult if the Mark 1 employees did not provide them.

Still, Grenell, the prosecutor, said Mark 1 executives were “more than happy” to acquiesce to Bhaskaran’s demands. And after several months of entertaining him, court documents said, Seefeldt and colleagues took Bhaskaran out to dinner and gave him a $5,631 Tourneau watch. A few weeks later, a change order Mark 1 requested was approved.

Seefeldt then received a text from his colleague.

“Dinner was worth it,” the message said.

As time wore on, court documents said, Seefeldt and other Mark 1 executives continued their wooing of Bhaskaran, providing a second, more expensive watch; paying for vacations to Ecuador and India; and writing a $4,775 check to an Illinois breeder of German shepherds, along with covering invoices for K-9 training services.

All the while, court documents said, Mark 1 was continuing to receive additional funding for the restoration work. In total, prosecutors said, Bhaskaran approved $52 million in new funding for Mark 1, and the company fraudulently overbilled the railroad by about $2 million.

The scheme began to fall apart in 2018, when Amtrak’s inspector general received an anonymous letter from a tipster suspicious about Bhaskaran’s behavior around the job site. That led to a yearslong investigation involving the FBI, Amtrak’s inspector general, and other federal agencies.

Seefeldt said that he cooperated with that probe, and that he had tried at one point to tell Bhaskaran that the bribes needed to stop.

But Beetlestone, the judge who sentenced him, was quick to point out that the effort was fruitless. After Seefeldt made one phone call to Bhaskaran calling for an end to the scheme, she said, it continued for another year — and Seefeldt took no additional steps to address what he knew was a problem.

“He did nothing,” Beetlestone said. “He just continued with the conspiracy.”