SYRACUSE -- An environmental lab was indicted Friday on charges it gave contractors fake test results to cover up shoddy asbestos removal projects in local homes, colleges, and businesses.

A 16-count indictment from a federal grand jury accuses Certified Environmental Services Inc. of Syracuse of a decade-long scheme involving false air quality results that allowed contractors to mislead about a dozen building owners into believing asbestos had been properly and fully removed.

"The air monitors were giving them false air results to cover up rip-and-runs," Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Benedict said.

"Laboratory reports were being generated and given to building owners to tell them that there was at or below detectable levels in their buildings," Benedict said. "In other words, 'It's clean. You can go back in.' In a lot of instances, that was utterly not so."

Five CES employees named in the indictment are charged along with the company with Clean Air Act violations, mail fraud, and making false statements to special agents of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Gabriel Nugent, a lawyer representing the company, said CES disagrees with the allegations.

"The indictment is an inappropriate attempt to criminalize what is at best a regulatory matter," Nugent said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Nugent said CES had no reason to believe its clients were subjected to any health risk.

According to the indictment, among the places asbestos was left behind were: a sorority house at Syracuse University, a furniture warehouse, the building housing Syracuse television station WSTM, a medical office building, a reading room at the Kellogg Library in Cincinnatus in Cortland County and a Jobs Corps building in Oneonta. No Cayuga County sites were listed in the indictment.

CES also falsified lab reports at about 30 other properties in central New York, including several dormitories and academic buildings at Syracuse University and Le Moyne College, according to the indictment. But in those cases the asbestos was removed properly, Benedict said.

Benedict said CES engaged in the conspiracy with several contractors in central New York but declined to say how many. They have not been charged.

The case is the third major asbestos fraud case in central New York in the past five years. The most serious was in 2004, when Alexander Salvagno and his father, Raul, were sentenced to 25 and 19 years in prison, respectively. Those are the longest prison terms in U.S. history for criminal violations of federal environmental laws.

The Salvagnos, who were ordered to pay $23 million in restitution, were convicted of setting up a bogus testing lab that falsified 75,000 tests for 1,555 projects. The victims included a nuclear power plant, a children's museum, a brewery, hospitals, banks, churches and schools.