Nearly six months to the day of her arrest, a former East Hampton Town Building Department employee took a deal with Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei in Riverhead Wednesday, pleading guilty to all 10 counts of bribery and official misconduct she was facing in exchange for a sentence of 840 hours of community service, five years of probation, and a $29,200 fine.
Evelyn Calderon, who had been a principal office assistant in the Building Department, will be sentenced on Dec. 2.
It was not the outcome the district attorney's office had hoped for. Kevin Ward, the bureau chief of the Suffolk County district attorney's Public Integrity Bureau, explained that significant jail time had been requested by the D.A.'s office but that Edward Burke Jr., Ms. Calderon's lawyer, had brokered a deal directly with Justice Mazzei.
In court Wednesday, she stood before Justice Mazzei with her head held high and tears in her eyes as he laid bare the crimes she would plead guilty to moments later.
For his part, Justice Mazzei seemed unmoved by his own decision, saying, "If you get caught spitting on the ground even Mr. Burke will not save you from going to jail."
Asked if she was happy with Mr. Burke's representation, Ms. Calderon responded somberly, "Yes."
"Well, you should be," the justice retorted, saying that Mr. Burke had convinced him that community service was an appropriate penalty, even while the district attorney asked for jail time. "You should be kissing the ground he walks on."
Ms. Calderon was suspended from her job as a principal office assistant last year while the district attorney's office launched a quiet investigation into potential misconduct in the Building Department.
Her co-defendant, Ryan Benitez, who worked in the department as a building inspector until he resigned earlier this year, is expected in appear in county court Thursday, but Mr. Ward would not comment on the details of the hearing.
The two were each charged with five counts of third-degree bribe receiving, a felony, and five counts of official misconduct, a misdemeanor, for a scheme in which they were said to have taken cash from contractors in exchange for expediting certificates of occupancy and building permits.
After a bribe was paid, "Calderon would allegedly prioritize a bribe-paying contractor's application even though she was supposed to process applications in chronological order," reducing the wait time from months to just days, according to the district attorney's office in April.
In court Wednesday, Patrick Rooney, an assistant district attorney, outlined each instance in which Ms. Calderon accepted a bribe from a contractor between June 2024 and January of 2025. The bribes ranged from $1,500 to $3,500, according to Mr. Rooney.
The D.A. said in April that after Ms. Calderon received payments in the form of Zelle transactions from the contractors, she would "on the same day, sometimes within minutes, pay Mr. Benitez. He would then allegedly schedule and conduct the inspection expeditiously in order to issue the building permit to the contractor."
Those contractors were said to have testified to a grand jury and were not charged with any crimes themselves. Mr. Ward said outside the courtroom Wednesday that his office viewed the contractors "as witnesses" and confirmed that to date no charges have been filed against them.
"I miss my job," Ms. Calderon said outside the courtroom Tuesday before the details of the plea emerged. She said her life has been upended and her hope to work as a park ranger was dashed when she was informed that the charges would prevent that. She had worked for the town for over 20 years when she was placed on paid suspension.
Ms. Calderon said she hopes to do her community service with local groups like Organizacion Latino Americana.
"With today's guilty plea, Ms. Calderon is being held accountable for her actions. What she did was a serious breach of the public's trust and completely unacceptable," East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said by email Wednesday.
"When these concerns came to my attention in September 2024, I immediately directed town officials to investigate. That review uncovered serious misconduct, and the town brought it directly to the Suffolk County district attorney's office."
Ms. Burke-Gonzalez went on to suggest that the current struggles facing the beleaguered department were exacerbated by the bribery scandal.
"The damage caused by Ms. Calderon's conduct is still being felt today. She undermined the important work of the Building Department and directly caused the backlog we are still working to clear. I want to be very clear: Our current Building Department staff did not create this backlog, they inherited it. They have been asked to solve problems they did not cause and have continued to work through an enormous volume of cases while under constant public scrutiny," she said. "I am proud of the people working in our Building Department today."