The widow of a former New York City school teacher has been accused of scamming the city out of $218,000 in pension payments. Money which she to collected in her husband's name—for 20 years after his death [PDF]. Did we mention that Janie Tice and her late husband Hyman Rosenberg were, eh, high school sweethearts who wed in 1981 while she was an 18-year-old student and he was a 57-year-old teacher at the school of Art and Design?
After Rosenberg and Tice were hitched they stuck around the city for a bit (she had to graduate!), but then a series of major health problems, including being legally declared blind, led Rosenberg to retire with a retroactive disability pension. The couple then moved to Augusta, Georgia, where Tice had family. A neighbor recalls the odd couple seeming quite happy: "Hy was a very interesting person. Janie seemed to be crazy about him," Jerry Murphy told the Post.
Rosenberg died in January of 1990 and technically his pension and benefits were supposed to go with him. But they didn't. Instead the feds allege that Janie forged her late husband's name and signature at various addresses in Georgia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania until 2010 when the Teachers Retirement System started to catch on. Interestingly, some of the forged forms seem to have been notarized by a Robert Stanley, Tice's second husband (he died in 2003).
"She got away with it for a long time and she finally got caught," said special schools investigator Richard Condon. Tice was arrested on March 8 in Pennsylvania, where she now lives.
