A former Suffolk County computer technician who was arrested in 2021 in connection with a cryptocurrency mining operation in the County Clerk’s office has pleaded guilty to two felony counts, according to court records and the Suffolk DA’s office.
Christopher Naples, 46, of Mattituck, who had been on paid administrative leave since the operation was uncovered and he was arrested four years ago, pleaded guilty Thursday to grand larceny in the third degree and official misconduct, according to the records.
The arrest stemmed from search warrants executed in August 2021 that found 46 cryptocurrency mining devices hidden in six different rooms at a county data center in Riverhead, Newsday has reported, including under removable floorboards and an electric wall panel. The devices put such a demand on the county’s electrical system that they set off alarms after raising the datacenter’s temperature by 20 degrees.
Tania Lopez, a spokeswoman for District Attorney Ray Tierney, on Friday said Naples’ plea “represents a just outcome in a case where the defendant stole approximately $6,000 in electricity from Suffolk County.”
Two other charges, of computer trespass and public corruption, were dropped as part of the plea, which also required that Naples resign from his 25-year government position. He also must make “full restitution to Suffolk County, and pay the county an additional sum of approximately $70,000 to cover costs and expenses related to this investigation,” Lopez said in an email.
Naples “will also be forever barred from working in another government position in the State of New York,” Lopez said.
Christopher Naples, a former Suffolk County computer tech who has pleaded guilty to two felonies in connection with an alleged Bitcoin mining operation in the County Clerk’s office, is shown in Mattituck on March 29, 2023. Credit: Newsday
Naples’ lawyer, William Keahon, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the four years the charges have been pending, Naples, who was first hired by the county in 2000 at age 21 and rose to assistant IT manager of the clerk’s IT department, received an annual salary of between $147,502 and $150,065, according to state payroll records. In addition to salary during that time, he would also have received county medical benefits, sick and vacation day accruals approaching $100,000 and credits for a pension as a 25-year county employee.
Michael Martino, a spokesman for Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine, said, “We are pleased that Mr. Naples has been held accountable for his actions. Those who would improperly use taxpayer-funded resources for personal benefit should be on notice that their actions have consequences.” Romaine took office in 2024, and has implemented a series of computer system reforms since then.
Newsday in 2023 reported that elements of Naples’ cryptocurrency operation were known to officials in the county Department of Information Technology as early as 2017, but nothing was done to stop it. In court records, one employee, Christopher Rizopoulos, who worked for Naples in the clerk’s IT department, told detectives investigating the case, “I wanted to notify someone. However, I was really concerned about repercussions from Chris Naples. I didn’t want him to seek revenge.”
The case against Naples was held up by a massive cyberattack on Suffolk County’s computer networks in September 2022, and suspicions by some public officials of links between the Bitcoin mining scheme and the larger breach, which shut down many county systems for months. But no direct links were ever established.
Naples name came up repeatedly in hearings and testimony in a Suffolk County Legislature investigation of the cyber breach begun in 2022, but in the end the report blamed primarily a long list of known system vulnerabilities and a “failure of leadership,” Newsday reported.
“However,” the final report noted, “it has been plausibly suggested that Mr. Naples was distracted from his work by the Bitcoin mining and, thus, may not have been taking appropriate steps to maintain and upgrade the County Clerk’s IT environment prior to his September 2021 arrest, which may have contributed to the threat actors gaining access to the County’s environment.”
At a December 2022 news conference, former County Executive Steve Bellone suggested that Naples, “the architect of the clerk’s IT environment,” delayed implementation of a vital security upgrade for the clerk’s system because, the theory went, Naples feared it could lead to discovery of the Bitcoin mining.
Naples’ lawyer, Keahon disputed that theory at the time, charging that Bellone will “do everything he can to shift the blame.”
Lopez of the DA’s office on Friday said it “bears stating that, contrary to public statements by prior county officials, there is no evidence that this defendant’s actions were in any way connected to, or responsible for, the cyberattack on Suffolk County government in September 2022.”
The prosecution of Naples was begun under former Suffolk DA Tim Sini, who in announcing the arrest in September 2021, said the county “will not tolerate county employees, who are already on the public payroll, to steal taxpayer money and illegally use government resources for the own personal gain.”
Newsday reported that Suffolk’s former cybersecurity testified he suspected Bitcoin mining was taking place in the data center in 2017, and other employees discussed seeing and photographing the equipment in the months before Naples’ arrest.
“Within hours of the devices being shut down, the temperature in the room dropped 20 degrees,” Sini said in 2021. “So not only was this operation being paid for with thousands of dollars of taxpayer money, but it also put the county’s infrastructure at risk. The defendant also had to bypass the county’s internet security protocols in order to get these devices online, which could have potentially jeopardized the security of the county’s network,” Sini said in 2021.
Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.