Former Spring Valley Mayor Gets Four-Year Sentence in Bribery Case

Spring Valley’s former mayor convicted of taking bribes was sentenced Friday to four years in prison by a judge who said she had betrayed the residents of her troubled Rockland County village.

Noramie Jasmin, who in 2008 became the first Haitian-American to be elected as a mayor in New York, was also ordered to return $15,000 of her salary to the village and to forfeit her bribe receipts.

Jasmin was mayor in 2012 when an FBI operative gave her $5,000 and a 50 percent stake in a fake development project in exchange for her support.

The sting was part of a federal corruption investigation that has led to the conviction of six politicians including former state Sen. Malcolm Smith, who was found guilty of trying to buy his way onto the mayoral ballot.

Prosecutor Jessica Feinstein told federal Judge Colleen McMahon that Jasmin had shown “an extraordinary comfort with bribery and extortion.” She suggested a prison term of more than eight years.

McMahon said that would be “massively excessive for a fairly petty one-off scheme,” but she told Jasmin, “Your willingness to be sucked into this, your enthusiastic participation in it and your leadership of the little enterprise … are really depressing.”

The judge said Spring Valley residents “had faith in you, believed in you, looked up to you,” especially young women, “in a community where there are not a whole lot of role models.”

Spring Valley has high crime and poverty rates.

This article appeared in print on page 4 of the August 11th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.