How the restoration of Philly’s historic 30th St. Station became a corruption bonanza

In the summer of 2018, Amtrak officials invited the media to 30th Street Station for a tour of the rail operator’s work on a yearslong project to restore the historic neoclassical building’s facade.

Construction workers had replaced 950 limestone panels, treated windows to mitigate the impact of a potential explosion, and restored or replaced more than 2,000 windowpanes.

“This is an iconic building in Philadelphia, and making it beautiful is going to increase the citizens’ pride,” Ajith Bhaskaran, the Amtrak manager overseeing the project, told the gathered reporters. Although the taxpayer-funded project’s cost had nearly doubled to $109 million, the price tag was worth it, he said, “because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do this work.”

What Bhaskaran did not say at the time was that in exchange for signing off on all that extra work, he had seized a singular opportunity to line his own pockets.

Just a day before that August media tour, according to court documents, Bhaskaran e-mailed executives at Mark 1 Restoration, the Illinois contractor leading the project, with an update on a $9 million contractual amendment he had authorized: “CEO approved.”

That same day, Aug. 6, Mark 1 vice president Lee Maniatis signed as a co-applicant to lease a New York City apartment for Bhaskaran’s daughter — meaning that if she didn’t pay rent, the contractor promised he would cover it. About a month later, Maniatis bought Bhaskaran two tickets to see Bruno Mars perform at the Wells Fargo Center for more than $2,000.

And that was just a snippet of what prosecutors now call an elaborate bribery scandal spanning more than three years and involving two contractors on the restoration project — a conspiracy that led to Bhaskaran pocketing gifts worth about half a million dollars.

The windfall included meals at Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse in Center City, trips to Ashton Cigar Bar, jewelry, vacations to India and the Galápagos Islands, payments to service a Mercedes-Benz SL500, entertainment in Atlantic City, and a purebred German shepherd puppy — all paid for by executives at Mark 1.

The feds put the total value of that graft at $323,686 — expenses authorities say were effectively covered by Amtrak because Mark 1 submitted falsely inflated bills overcharging the rail operator by $2 million.

Another contractor, Vega Solutions Inc., paid Bhaskaran $150,000 in cash bribes; gave him credit cards he used to charge more than $10,000 on airfare to India, cigars, and women’s clothing; hired his girlfriend and a family member; and provided two Ford Explorers.

In return, Bhaskaran helped Vega submit false invoices to Amtrak for work it did not perform and get reimbursed for illegitimate expenses, including the $34,557.44 it cost to lease and insure the vehicles. All told, prosecutors say, the contractor defrauded Amtrak of $786,247.50. Vega was owned and run by two siblings, one of whom now blames the other.

Meantime, even as he was living large on his benefactors’ dime, Bhaskaran was allegedly bilking the Social Security Administration out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits intended for his former in-laws — who had died years earlier. Bhaskaran, who controlled his family’s finances, was accused of using the money to rent a three-bedroom home in Cherry Hill after he used bogus bank documents to obtain the lease.

Now, years later, some of those who took part in the corruption scheme are being held accountable.

Five people who worked on the project have pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to the bribery conspiracy, and two have already been sentenced. A sixth executive — Mark Snedden, 69, owner and president of Mark 1 Restoration — was charged in late March with conspiracy to commit bribery and is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.

Bhaskaran was charged with wire fraud in 2019 but died of heart failure a year later. He was 56. His daughter — who was never accused of any wrongdoing — declined an interview request for this article.

To understand the scale of the graft Bhaskaran helped usher in while rehabbing one of the city’s most iconic buildings, The Inquirer reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings and conducted interviews with more than a half-dozen people familiar with the case.

Amtrak, for its part, is aware that its capital improvement projects can be a magnet for corruption. In a 2023 report, the agency’s inspector general said such investments can provide “criminals with a lucrative target for fraud.”

And in this case, a spokesperson said the company “took swift and definitive action to terminate the employees and contractor involved” and “continues to cooperate with the investigation.”

Amtrak also said it has since improved oversight of contract management “in an effort to protect the company from fraud, waste or abuse.”

The scheme was exposed by an anonymous tipster, who in 2018 alerted Amtrak’s inspector general that Bhaskaran had recently hired Vega Solutions to work on the site. Not long afterward, the tipster said, Bhaskaran was driving around in a new Ford Explorer.

“I would like to bring to your attention,” the tipster wrote, “to some ethical and possible criminal behavior by one of your employees.”

Built during the Great Depression in the style of a Greek temple — with Corinthian columns 72 feet tall — 30th Street Station opened in 1933 as what one observer later called a “monument” to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s corporate power.

Today it is Amtrak’s third-busiest station, handling more than 5 million passengers last year.

Seeking to repair the building’s limestone exterior and clean its facade, the national rail operator — a for-profit corporation whose majority stockholder is the federal government, and which receives more than $1 billion in annual federal subsidies — signed a $58 million contract in December 2015 with Mark 1 Restoration.

The union masonry firm, founded by Snedden in 1994, had restored state capital buildings and other landmarks across the country.

Snedden, of Munster, Ind., had done well for himself. He owned homes in several states, including Hawaii.

Overseeing the project was Bhaskaran, an engineer who had joined Amtrak in 2014 after spending several years as a city-employed project manager at Philadelphia International Airport. He grew up in India and spent most of his adult life there until the early 2000s, when he moved to the United States and eventually became a lawful permanent resident.

Early on in the 30th Street project, Mark 1 executives established a chummy relationship with the man they called AJ, who was responsible for approving or rejecting invoices. And when Bhaskaran began making unusual requests of the company — such as asking that Mark 1 pay for artwork he could hang in his job site trailer — the executives noticed that doing so buoyed their relationship with the man who effectively signed their checks.

In March 2016, Mark 1 project manager Thomas McLaughlin e-mailed his colleague Maniatis an internal Amtrak presentation that he had obtained from Bhaskaran.

“AJ, Shared this with me last night. Keep it tight between us,” McLaughlin wrote. “Don’t want him to know u have info. (caught him at a weak moment last night) When r u coming into Philly? … Steak dinner, cigars and whiskey…”

“Plan on steak Tuesday night baby,” Maniatis replied, adding a smiling face. By June — just six months into the contract — Bhaskaran and Mark 1 executives were already discussing how to secure more money from Amtrak.

“Hey guys I was with AJ all night last night,” Mark 1 vice president Donald Seefeldt wrote in a June 22 email to his colleagues. Bhaskaran, he wrote, “wants to process as much as possible in one change order and I’m trying to see how much additional money I can get thrown in on top of each to cover winter work costs.”

That fall, Bhaskaran asked Amtrak to approve an additional $13.4 million for the project.

Meantime, Bhaskaran was maneuvering behind the scenes to help another firm — Vega Solutions — win a $1.3 million contract to oversee Mark 1’s work.

The small firm was controlled by Sandeep Hardikar, an engineer who lived in Voorhees. But on paper its owner and president was his sister, Madhura Atitkar. The arrangement allowed Vega to compete for contracts designated for women-owned businesses.

Hardikar had met Bhaskaran in 2015 while working on another project. Hardikar — who, like Bhaskaran, grew up in India and moved to the U.S. as an adult — was impressed with the Amtrak manager, who had graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology.

To help Vega qualify for the 30th Street Station contract, Bhaskaran reduced the insurance requirement from $10 million to $2 million. It was awarded the contract in August 2016.

Three months later, Bhaskaran used Hardikar’s credit card to buy airfare for a $4,437 round trip to India.

In late 2016 Bhaskaran made perhaps his most audacious request yet. He spoke approvingly of Maniatis’ luxury watch and told the Mark 1 executive he would like one for himself.

So in January 2017, while Mark 1 was awaiting final approval on its request for $13 million in additional funds, Maniatis and his colleague Seefeldt took Bhaskaran out to dinner and presented him with a $5,631 Tourneau watch. Within days, Mark 1 was notified that Amtrak had approved the new project funds.

“[d]inner was worth it,” Maniatis texted Seefeldt on Jan. 19. A few days later Maniatis shared the news with his boss, Snedden, the owner, adding: “$ ding.”

If Mark 1 executives believed such conduct was acceptable — the equivalent of using corporate money to cultivate a client — they were soon told that government projects were different. That same month, agents with the office of Amtrak’s inspector general confronted Mark 1 project manager McLaughlin over $125 worth of gift cards from Buffalo Wild Wings and other restaurants that he had given an Amtrak contracting official.

The agents explained that Amtrak rules prohibit contractors from providing gifts in exchange for favorable treatment. McLaughlin retrieved the gift and said it was simply a “gesture to have a safe and happy holiday season” — not a request for any favors — and pledged “a situation like this will never happen again.”

That restraint did not hold — in part because Mark 1 executives feared what might happen if they defied Bhaskaran, who at times shut down the job site and threatened to fire the firm.

A couple of months later, at Bhaskaran’s request, Mark 1 officials bought him a more expensive watch, then in June spent thousands of dollars on round-trip tickets to Ecuador for the Amtrak manager, his paramour, and his daughter. The contractor also footed the bill for lodging and a cruise excursion to the Galápagos Islands, made famous by British naturalist Charles Darwin’s 1835 visit that helped shape his theory of natural selection.

The trio stayed at La Selva Amazon Ecolodge & Spa, a hotel located in the rainforest within Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve. The lodge offers expansive views of the jungle and activities including the opportunity to “liberate” newly hatched charapa turtles into the Napo River and trips to a protected forest that is home to toucans, sloths, and pink river dolphins.

Back in the United States, Bhaskaran started demanding monthly cash bribes from Hardikar, the Vega contractor, ranging from $4,000 to $8,000.

“Deposited May payroll and extra 8000,” Atitkar texted her brother, Hardikar, on June 22, 2017. The next day Bhaskaran deposited $8,000 into his bank account.

That summer, Bhaskaran started renting a home in Cherry Hill. Within a few months he had a new companion. In November Maniatis wrote a $4,775 check to Mittelwest, an Illinois breeder of German shepherds.

When Maniatis e-mailed his expenses to Snedden, the owner asked: “what is the charge for philly for about 4,700 dollars[?]”

“dog,” Maniatis responded. Snedden approved the expense. Over the course of the next several months, Bhaskaran had Mark 1 officials pay invoices covering K-9 training services for the dog, named Matcha.

That December, Bhaskaran returned the favor, asking Amtrak to approve an additional $5 million in expenditures for the restoration project, with most of that allocated to Mark 1. At the end of the month Maniatis paid for Bhaskaran’s vacation to India.

It all started to unravel a few months later, on March 13, 2018, when Amtrak’s inspector general received an anonymous letter. “I am currently a worker at the Philadelphia 30th street exterior facade project,” the letter said. The tipster wrote Bhaskaran had requested and at times demanded expensive dinners from contractors and instructed them to “disregard” Amtrak’s rules.

“His rules are the only ones that matter,” the letter said.

Thus began a yearslong investigation by the inspector general’s office, the FBI, and other agencies. They obtained bank and phone records, emails, and Google location data tracking the suspects’ whereabouts, and interviewed witnesses and confidential sources.

Agents also conducted physical surveillance — snapping pictures of Bhaskaran with the German shepherd, for example, and trailing him in September 2019 as he and Mark 1 vice president Khaled Dallo traveled to Atlantic City in a white Hummer limousine for a night on the town as they checked into the Ocean Casino Resort and hit the Palm Restaurant and Golden Nugget casino.

The executives left a trail of evidence. For example, on Dec. 31, 2018, Maniatis e-mailed Bhaskaran four tickets totaling $766 to a New Year’s Eve party at Stratus, a rooftop lounge at Kimpton Hotel Monaco on Chestnut Street. “This purchase was noted on Maniatis’ American Express card, listed on his expense report for Mark 1, and compensated by Mark 1,” FBI Special Agent Lauren Carter later wrote in an affidavit for a warrant to search the company’s headquarters.

Other emails showed what investigators saw as evidence that Bhaskaran and Mark 1 executives believed the contractor was sending Amtrak inflated bills. “He [Bhaskaran] said we all know mark 1 is significantly over billed on the job and that he’s been very fair with our Change Orders,” Seefeldt wrote in a February 2018 email to Snedden.

Still, as prosecutors were secretly watching their every move, the Amtrak manager and Mark 1 executives went out of their way to speak publicly about what they dubbed a special, family-like bond.

Bhaskaran “provided great leadership and cast a vision on the job,” vice president Seefeldt said in a glossy video Amtrak posted on YouTube in November 2018.

Bhaskaran highlighted the team’s collaboration: “I found that I can completely trust them. They were like friends along this travel.”

Amtrak removed the video from public view after this article was published online Thursday, but an archived version of it remained on the internet. Amtrak did not respond to a request for comment.

And although prosecutors acknowledge that Mark 1 did complete legitimate work on the project, Bhaskaran’s treatment of the company nonetheless stood out. From January 2016 to September 2019, Bhaskaran approved all 47 invoices submitted by Mark 1. By contrast, Bhaskaran rejected every invoice for additional funding from an architecture firm working on the train station project.

That firm, to investigators’ knowledge, had not offered Bhaskaran any gifts.

On Nov. 14, 2019, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mark 1’s Illinois headquarters, seizing financial records, cell phones, Amtrak documents and other items.

The same day, Bhaskaran was arrested and charged with wire fraud for conduct unrelated to the 30th Street project. When Bhaskaran signed a lease on his Cherry Hill home in 2017, prosecutors say, he falsely represented to the landlord that he had a roommate and produced a fraudulent bank document to support that claim. Authorities said he hatched the scheme to overcome his “very bad” credit history.

In an interview with investigators, Bhaskaran “confessed in large part” to that crime — and also admitted he had accepted bribes from Amtrak contractors, prosecutors said in court papers.

Authorities also learned that Bhaskaran since 2010 had received $252,604 in Social Security benefits intended for his former in-laws, who died in 2010 and 2011. Bhaskaran divorced in 2011 but continued to manage his family’s finances and concealed from his ex-wife that he had failed to disclose her parents’ deaths to the government in order to keep the benefits flowing, prosecutors said.

“Greed and deceit have fueled the defendant’s criminal behavior and permeated every aspect of his life,” then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason P. Bologna wrote in a court filing.

In September 2020 prosecutors updated their indictment against Bhaskaran to include the Social Security fraud charges. He pleaded not guilty.

Bhaskaran died the following month. The regional medical examiner in South Jersey found that the cause of death was heart disease, according to the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office.

Since then, the prosecution of a half-dozen other defendants has moved slowly through the courts.

Hardikar and Atitkar — the siblings who ran Vega Solutions — pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery and fraud. Atitkar was sentenced last year to three years of probation and a fine. The terms of her brother’s sentencing were sealed by a court order. Prosecutors have said Hardikar paid full restitution of $786,247.50.

Hardikar, a husband and father of two adult children, “deeply regrets” his conduct, his lawyer John J. Pease told a judge, adding that it came at a time when Hardikar was dealing with his father’s declining health. The “corrupt and diabolical” Bhaskaran “shook [Hardikar] down for payments and threatened to destroy his ability to do any work for Amtrak in the future if he did not go along with the schemes that Bhaskaran created,” Pease said in a court filing.

The contractor’s sister, Atitkar, a wife and mother of two adult children who lives in Gaithersburg, Md., is “deeply ashamed and embarrassed by her conduct,” said her lawyer, Kush Arora. The lawyer said Atitkar was overly deferential to her brother, an error she came to realize while cooperating during the investigation.

“What was particularly difficult for her was providing information about her brother, as her instincts her entire life had been to support and protect him,” Arora wrote in a court filing. “… She has had to come to terms with knowing she may not be able to trust again for the rest of her life.”

Mark 1 executives Maniatis, Seefeldt, and Dallo over the last year have each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. They are scheduled to be sentenced this spring.

Snedden, the owner of Mark 1, was charged with similar offenses in March in a criminal information — as opposed to an indictment — which prosecutors typically use when a defendant plans to plead guilty.

Attorneys for all four men either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

“Every dollar of federal funding lost to fraud is a dollar less to put toward legitimate programs and projects,” then-U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero said when announcing one of the guilty pleas in February. She added that prosecutors “will continue to hold accountable those who try to pad their pockets at taxpayers’ and the U.S. government’s expense.”

One mystery that may never be answered is why the now-deceased Bhaskaran was so explicit about seeking gifts from his contractors — and how he believed he could get away with flaunting the rewards so openly.

When he was arrested in 2019, court documents say, Bhaskaran had four luxury cars in the driveway — including the Vega Solutions-leased Ford Explorer Platinum — thousands of dollars in cash in the house, and several fake identification documents saved on his Amtrak-issued computer.

Hardikar’s case, at least, offers a glimpse of why those making the bribes felt they had little choice but to continue. Bhaskaran controlled the purse strings, and angering him risked being cut off from a career-defining project.

Hardikar “believed he was in too deep,” his lawyers said, “and had nowhere to turn.”

Staff writer Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.

This story has been updated to include comment from Amtrak.