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Video: United Homeless Organization Gets Shamed
By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 28, 2009
Modified Oct 28, 2009
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By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 28, 2009
Modified Oct 28, 2009
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Arnold Diaz, who famously exposed the Drunken Negro Cookie baker in his engrossing Fox 5 SHAME segment, is back to send another victim into a shame spiral. This time it's the president of the United Homeless Organization, which sets up tables on seemingly every street corner soliciting donations for the homeless. If the operation had ever seemed a little shady to you, well, it probably is. Diaz digs up the questionable tax filing from the group's president, Steven Riley, and confronts him in Union Square about it. Things get shamelessly physical.
Diaz also learns that each table worker has to pay Riley $15-$25 per shift to man the donation table, and there are several shifts per day at approximately 50 tables around Manhattan, suggesting that Riley may pull in $1,500 a day, more than the charity reports. But what does the group actually do with the money? Diaz takes a hidden camera around to various donation tables asking that very question, and is told that the money goes to everything from soup kitchens to rehab programs. Some of it goes straight to the volunteers, many of whom used to be homeless.
The volunteers also say they provide the homeless with handy directories of various outreach centers, but, hilariously, none of the tables visited by Diaz actually had any extra copies of the directory to hand out. The organization's website is now down, but you can now find them in Diaz's Hall of Shame, "for deceiving donors about where their money goes."
Tagged
arnold diaz
fox 5
homeless
nyc
shame
soup kitchen
uho
united homeless organization
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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