A Mahopac man who faked safety inspections on natural gas pipeline welds across New York City and Westchester County was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison, with a federal judge also ordering him to pay more than $64 million in restitution. Michael Vasconcellos, 45, admitted he and a co-conspirator claimed to have checked hundreds of welds they never actually reviewed, letting potentially defective gas lines go into service undetected for years.
U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel handed down the sentence in White Plains federal court, according to Patch.com. Vasconcellos pleaded guilty on April 21 to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud, admitting he worked alongside Liam Treibert, a 30-year-old resident of Wendell, North Carolina, to falsify inspection records tied to Con Edison's pipeline network.
A Scheme Built on Recycled X-Rays
Vasconcellos and Treibert were supposed to inspect welds on natural gas pipelines being installed throughout New York City and Westchester County, work that stretched from at least 2016 through 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Those checks existed for a simple reason: to catch weld defects before pipelines went live, since a faulty weld can lead to gas leaks or explosions. Instead, prosecutors say the pair lied about having inspected hundreds of welds they never actually reviewed, then created fraudulent paperwork to cover their tracks, per the same federal account.
The method at the center of the fraud is known as radaring. Rather than X-raying each weld individually, the two men radiographed a single weld twice and passed off one copy of the film as belonging to an entirely different weld, federal officials said. Gothamist reported the scheme similarly, describing how the pair performed X-ray testing on one weld and then substituted the same image for other welded connections.
Con Edison Footed the Bill, Then Paid Again to Fix It
Con Edison paid for hundreds of these sham inspections, believing its pipelines had passed critical safety tests that Vasconcellos and Treibert never actually performed, prosecutors said. Once the fabrication came to light, the utility was left facing enormous cleanup costs. The scheme ultimately cost Con Edison more than $64 million in remediation, the DOJ found, forcing the company to retest and repair pipeline work that had been falsely certified safe for years.
Con Edison has since said it identified and is addressing known weld irregularities linked to third-party contractors, telling Gothamist it has put enhanced monitoring in place. The utility's statement did not quantify the scope of that remediation beyond the figure cited by federal prosecutors.
Prison Time, Restitution, and Supervised Release
Along with the 30-month prison sentence, Seibel ordered Vasconcellos to serve three years of supervised release once he's out, and to pay restitution exceeding $64 million, matching the remediation costs prosecutors say Con Edison incurred. The case was brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which has characterized the fraud as directly undermining a safety process designed to prevent gas leaks and explosions.
Federal investigators arrested Vasconcellos and Treibert in August 2025 following the probe into falsified inspections. The scheme's timeline has drawn some discrepancy in coverage: Crain's New York Business referred to it as a nine-year pipeline safety scheme in its reporting, while other accounts, including the DOJ's own description, place the affected work between 2016 and 2023.
The case echoes a separate 2020 matter out of Pennsylvania, in which a radiograph technician admitted to falsifying natural gas pipeline testing results on roughly 77 occasions after the original X-rays came back flawed, according to Justice Department records. That case, like this one, centered on the same underlying risk: pipeline welds certified as safe without ever having been properly checked.
