Adams shooting craps hiring casino cop crony to EDC position

New York Times

Mayor Eric Adams has appointed a former New York City police official and close confidant as a paid senior adviser — while allowing him to keep his job as an executive at the Resorts World New York City casino in Queens, according to city officials and a person close to Resorts World.

Since May 31, the adviser, Timothy Pearson, a retired police inspector, has served as both a city official and the vice president responsible for overseeing security at the casino, which is seeking state approval to expand its gambling offerings in Queens. City support for its bid could prove pivotal.

On top of what he earns from the casino job, Mr. Pearson receives a city-funded salary through the nonprofit New York City Economic Development Corporation under an unusual arrangement that allows him to continue collecting his $124,000 annual Police Department pension.

State law prohibits city officials from simultaneously receiving a salary and a pension from the city. Mr. Pearson is able to do so because he is being paid by the development corporation, a nonprofit controlled by the mayor.

Initially, Mr. Pearson had worked on Mr. Adams’s behalf without pay during his mayoral transition last fall, and for the first five months of his administration before he was put on the public payroll as a senior adviser to the mayor for public safety and Covid recovery, said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Adams.

Mr. Adams’s administration has declined to answer other questions about the arrangement, including how much the city is paying Mr. Pearson. According to Mr. Levy, the Economic Development Corporation reached out to the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board on Mr. Pearson’s behalf. He said Mr. Pearson is following all applicable laws.

As of Tuesday, the board had issued no waivers of the conflicts of interest law to Mr. Pearson, records show.

“New Yorkers are lucky to have such a knowledgeable and experienced individual agree to serve and bring his expertise to the greatest city in the world, especially after he did the job without being paid a single dollar for months,” Mr. Levy said in a statement.

Mr. Levy said Mr. Pearson’s municipal job responsibilities had no overlap with casino policy, and instead included working with law enforcement to help improve the city’s public safety, the centerpiece of Mr. Adams’s mayoral agenda. Mr. Levy also said Mr. Pearson would recuse himself should any interaction between the casino and the development corporation arise.

 

Eric Ulrich is commissioner of the Department of Buildings

 

NY Post

Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday named an ex-City Councilman as his Buildings Commissioner and an ally of disgraced state lawmaker Hiram Monserrate to be the Big Apple’s next sheriff.

The two appointments came as Hizzoner traveled to California for a technology-related conference.

The new buildings chief, Eric Ulrich, was first elected to represent Queens at City Hall in a February 2009 special election and departed last year under the term limits law.

Adams initially hired him in January as a senior adviser, where he helped vet candidates for other key positions in the administration.

 

I, Eric

 

Patch

 A frustrated Mayor Eric Adams offered a simple defense over accusations of nepotism and cronyism in a spate of high-profile hires: "I'm the mayor."

"I'm going to hire the best people for the job that I've known throughout my years in government and their talents," he said Friday. "And the reason I can do that is because I'm the mayor. I'm the mayor of the city of New York, and it's going to take a while before people realize that I am responsible for building a team to end the inequality in our city."

But a rising chorus of critics have argued that Adams' hires — which included his brother Bernard Adams in a $210,000-a-year position — are questionable at best.

Shortly before Adams — again — defended his hires Friday, the New York Times reported a jail investigator accused new Department of Correction chief Louis Molina of telling her to "get rid" of 2,000 discipline cases against officers. She was fired by Molina — a move she believed came at the behest of the correction officers' union, the Times reported.

Adams' officials' closeness with powerful unions aside, other hires face questions over their ethics and qualificiations.

Close Adams ally Philip Banks now serves as a deputy NYPD commissioner, despite the fact he resigned after being named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal police corruption case.

Adams on Friday cast the criticism as unfair elitism, rather than stemming from concerns of potential corruption and cronyism.

"When other mayors hired their lower partners, they hired their people they knew from school that they came up through the ranks — how there was nothing to say about it?" he said. "But I have the audacity to hire blue-collar people, everyday folks who are union members, retired members, it's like, 'Who do you think you are putting these blue collar workers, these everyday people who came here to this country eked up through a living, went to school at night... who do you think you are think you could do that?'"

Meet Eric Adams agents of the city committee

 

Chancellor Porter allows assistant prinicpals who fostered culture of cheating at Maspeth High School to remain at their positions

NY Post 

 Let them work at Taco Bell.

Maspeth High School created fake classes, awarded bogus credits, and fixed grades to push students to graduate — “even if the diploma was not worth the paper on which it was printed,” an explosive investigative report charges.

Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir demanded that teachers pass students no matter how little they learned, says the 32-page report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, Anastasia Coleman.

“I don’t care if a kid shows up at 7:44 and you dismiss at 7:45 — it’s your job to give that kid credit,” the principal is quoted as telling a teacher.

Abdul-Mutakabbir told the teacher he would give the lagging student a diploma “not worth the paper on which it was printed” and let him “have fun working at Taco Bell,” the report says.

The teacher “felt threatened and changed each student’s failing grade to a passing one.”

The SCI report confirms a series of Post exposes in 2019 describing a culture of cheating in which students could skip classes and do little or no work, but still pass. 

Kids nicknamed the no-fail rule “the Maspeth Minimum.”

Chancellor Meisha Porter, who received the SCI report on June 4, removed Abdul-Mutakabbir from the 1,200-student school and city payroll in July pending a termination hearing set for next month.

But she left Maspeth assistant principals Stefan Singh and Jesse Pachter — the principal’s chief lieutenants — on the job.

Singh and Pachter executed the principal’s orders, informants said, and helped create classes to grant credits to students who didn’t have to show up — because the classes weren’t even held, according to the report. 

Abdul-Mutakabbir, Singh and Pachter all refused to answer questions by investigators, citing a right to remain silent, SCI says.

In addition, three teachers in the principal’s “clique” – a favored few who followed orders and got lucrative overtime assignments — also remain.

The Kings County consiglieres

NY Daily News

Brooklyn lawyers who decide who can get the crucial Democratic ballot line to run for prized judicial seats are getting jobs as legal guardians and referees from the very judges they’re charged with reviewing — and their law firms are appearing before those same judges in active cases.

Of the 25 attorneys listed as serving on the Brooklyn Democratic Party’s judicial screening panel in 2019, at least five have been given jobs as court-appointed lawyers by the judges they’re tasked with reviewing, the Daily News has learned.

Judicial screening panel members Helene Blank, Mark Longo, Betty Lugo, Melissa Bonaldes and Steven Finkelstein all took work in the last year from judges they’ve reviewed or could review in the future, an analysis of state court records shows.

Alex Camarda, a senior policy analyst at the good-government group Reinvent Albany, described that dynamic as problematic.

 “That certainly creates the perception of a conflict of interest,” he said. “The public should have confidence that judges are being selected on the merits rather than their position on cases involving party officials.”

Since 2018, Finkelstein has received 20 court-appointed referee assignments from Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Mark Partnow and six from Judge Lawrence Knipel, court records show.

From 2008 to the present, Finkelstein has raked in at least $271,000 from those and similar appointments, records show. He joined the panel in 2016.

Veteran lawyer Martin Edelman has served as the judicial panel’s chairman since 2004. He noted that several bar associations appoint its members and about one-third of the panel’s members are selected by Democratic Party district leaders.

Edelman, the former president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, said since state Supreme Court judges serve 14-year terms, members of the panel usually only review them once.

“The idea that we get to see the same judge year after year is simply not the case,” he said, arguing that if judges were trying to sway attorneys through doling out appointments, they would have to influence more than five lawyers to secure a majority of votes on the panel.

The panel’s judicial screenings take place the same year judges run for election or re-election. Partnow was re-elected to serve in Brooklyn Supreme Court in 2016, the same year Finkelstein joined the panel. Judge Noach Dear was elected in 2015, and Knipel was re-elected in 2012.

In the last two years, the three judges have directed 28 referee appointments to Lugo, 44 to Longo and 30 to Blank, records show. Blank and Longo have both served on the panel since around 2005, about 14 years, according to Edelman.

Lugo, who’s running for Queens district attorney, served on it in 2015 and 2017. She said she’s not serving on the panel this year, despite the fact that she’s listed on its roster. She said she’s “almost positive” she didn’t review Dear or Partnow as a member of the panel.

 Longo, an ethics lawyer and former president of the Brooklyn Bar Association, acknowledged he could see how observers might perceive the potential for a conflict, but said, “In this situation, it’s not the case.”