Black city workers reportedly harassed with 'Judas' slurs, urine in coffee cup

The City Council's former hand-picked inspector general on Tuesday shined more light on the hate-filled culture in the city's Department of Water Management laid bare in racist, sexist and homophobic emails that triggered a high-level housecleaning.

The investigation by Faisal Khan's "Project Six" focused heavily on a veteran chemist at the Jardine and Sawyer Water Purification plants who remains on the job despite a decades-long history of complaints that he discriminated against and intimidated African-American co-workers.

Those incidents include writing the word "Judas" on the calendar of a black co-worker who dared to report the alleged harassment; placing makeshift crosses in front of the lockers of complaining African American employees; and putting copies of Mein Kampf, the autobiography of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, on the desks of black co-workers.

During a previously undisclosed 2009 incident, the chemist was further accused of "urinating into a coffee cup … (he then) placed the cup into an oven to dry it out and replaced the cup on the desk" of a black co-worker so he would drink from it.

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