In July 2009, Morris charged that Coney and an assistant each took extra payments of $9,998 from the tenant group's payroll fund. In March 2008, he said, Coney "paid herself . . . twice in one pay period" and was eventually compelled to return the money, according to the filing.
Coney said in a statement that she would not comment on the allegations, and Greene's lawyer, Clifford E. Haines, said he was still "evaluating" them.
In September, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia subpoenaed all of Coney's e-mails dating to 2005 as well as her organization's financial records and accounts of employees, dating to 2000.
The filing by Morris offers a window onto the operations of the secretive nonprofit, which gets roughly $500,000 a year in public funding to provide a variety of training and other services for the 81,000 PHA residents.
Morris said that when he told Greene about the double-pay incident, Greene spoke "of his concerns over bad press" and potential problems with an audit.
He said Greene sought to take away Coney's control of the tenant group's payroll, but she refused. Instead, Morris said, Coney was required to sign an agreement to repay the money.
According to the filing, Morris started noticing problems in early 2007, when he discovered that an unnamed Coney aide was dipping into the group's payroll account to cover mortgage payments.
"Mr. Morris uncovered this fraud and the next day confronted defendant Coney about the embezzlement scheme," the filing said. "Defendant Coney ignored the plaintiff."
Even the tenant organization's Toys for Tots Christmas program was raided, Morris charged.
He said in the filing that the program had bought high-end toys and that a Coney assistant was taking "some of the Xboxes and or PlayStations and giving them to her son - who was selling them on eBay."
