NYC Mayor Eric Adams: Just Move Along—Nothing to See Here…
New York City Mayor Eric Adams on the defensive.
By Bob Hennelly
Another weekend, another Adams administration bombshell served up late on Saturday night with an NYPD tweet from interim police commissioner Thomas Donlon that “federal authorities executed search warrants” at his residences and that they “took materials that came into my possession approximately 20 years ago and are unrelated to my work with the New York City Police Department.”
The terse but artful tweet closes with the assertion, “this is not a department matter, and the department will not be commenting.”
These days, there’s an increasing amount of compartmentalizing going on in City Hall and regular New Yorkers might wonder just what is the U.S. Department of Justice up to? At what point do federal prosecutors have to show their work?
That’s what U.S. Attorney Damian Williams from the Southern District started to do last week when he announced the indictment of former FDNY Chiefs Anthony Saccavino and Brian Cordasco for allegedly collecting $190,000 in bribes from 2021 up until 2023 in exchange for preferential treatment by the Fire Prevention Bureau.
Both men pleaded not guilty.
Earlier this month, the maelstrom of federal criminal probes swirling around the Adams administration forced Police Commissioner Edward Caban to resign after federal agents took his cell phone. And as Mayor Adams reminded reporters at last Tuesday’s off-topic press conference, it was only ten months ago the FBI seized his phones.
So far, federal law enforcement has searched the home of Winnie Greco, director of Asian Affairs, and also taken the phones of DOE Chancellor David Banks, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, and Timothy Pearson—a former member of the NYPD whose acted as a senior advisor to the Mayor.
None of the Adams administration officials has been charged with a crime.
Last Saturday, Lisa Zornberg, the widely respected former federal prosecutor, resigned from her sensitive post as Mayor Adams’ top lawyer as activity appeared to be accelerating around what the New York Times has reported as three criminal probes being pursued by the Southern District of New York and one being led by the Eastern District of New York.
In the City Newspaper’s inventory of ongoing investigations they layout five discreet federal probes and include Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former Adams building Inspector Eric Ulrich on corruption charges as well as prosecutions related to straw donations that were allegedly solicited for the Mayor’s 2021 bid.
At last week’s press briefing I asked Mayor Adams if he could understand why New Yorkers might be concerned about the multi-faceted probe.
“No, I don't understand,” he said. “Because if they had that same level of concern, then I would see it when I'm in the public, with all of the town halls. I don't know if you have a mayor that has been out among the public as much as I have. And I know what they're talking about. They're talking about public safety. They're talking about housing. They're talking about education. They're talking about the issues that impact them. They want to make sure that this city is going to provide a future for them.”
With Donlon’s tweet asserting that what the federal agents grabbed was “unrelated to my work with the New York City Police Department”—one would logically look up his extensive private sector employment history that puts him at the zenith of multi-national corporate finance where law enforcement and regulators usually arrive late to the party.
From a close reading of Donlon’s resume and clippings, we know he became an FBI agent in 1974 and rose up the ranks of the bureau over a storied 31-year career to have leadership roles at the National Threat Operations Center and New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. In those capacities he played a leading role in the investigation of both the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
According to the Riverdale Press, Donlon left government service to become head of global security of Credit Suisse from September 2005 until December 2008. His tenure there included the run up to, and through the great Wall Street mortgage meltdown. That crisis, driven by predatory and widespread deceptive trading practices, almost collapsed the global economy prompting well over 10 million foreclosures.
This white collar crime wave was civilly pursued at a snail’s pace with the end result a huge payout to the U.S. Treasury—but no personal criminal liability for the Wall Street campaign donor class.
In 2017, almost a decade later, the DOJ reached a $5.28 billion settlement with the bank for making “false and irresponsible representations about residential mortgage-backed securities, which resulted in the loss of billions of dollars of wealth and took a painful tolls on the lives of ordinary Americans.”
The settlement covered actions by Credit Suisse from 2005 until 2007. Communities of color, already hobbled by redlining, were particularly hard hit by the Wall Street crime wave that sparked a massive loss of generational wealth that helped spark an unprecedented acceleration of wealth inequality.
In 2013, a PBS Frontline documentary the Untouchables chronicled “one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis,” reported the Guardian newspaper at the time.
In 2022, the Guardian, working with a consortium of other news outlets, reported on a “massive leak” from inside the Swiss bank documenting its role in hiding the “wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes.”
“Details of accounts linked to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients all over the world are contained in the leak, which unmasks the beneficiaries of more than 100bn Swiss francs (£80bn)* held in one of Switzerland’s best-known financial institutions,” the newspaper reported. “The leak points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds.”
James Henry, a Yale Global Justice Fellow, investigative economist and journalist, told Work-Bites, “Credit Suisse was the second-largest Swiss bank that recently got merged into UBS because it failed in 2023. Basically, a lot of investors were pulling their money out after a really reckless period of really incredibly bad investments. I have been following Credit Suisse since the 1980s when they were laundering money for President [Ferdinand] Marcos of the Philippines.”
Henry continued, “They were ripping off holocaust victims who had never been paid the settlement they were owed—evading taxes and helping money laundering all over the planet. In Africa, a case I studied in some detail, they basically bankrupted the government of Mozambique in 2017 and bribed everybody in sight.”
Henry, along with Ralph Nader, has been campaigning to have the U.S. Department of Labor prohibit banks like Credit Suisse from handling U.S. pension funds when they run afoul of law enforcement and regulators.
“We’ve been all over the Department of Labor which has the obligation of keeping corrupt financial institutions away from U.S. pension funds which would be a good idea most Americans would support,” Henry said. “But the Department of Labor mainly gives waivers to these big banks when they get convicted of crimes.”
In 2009, Governor David Paterson made Donlon director of New York State Homeland Security. In 2010, he went through the revolving door again to take responsibility for security at BlackRock—the multinational behemoth that at the time had over $12 trillion under management.
In 2010, Vanity Fair described BlackRock “as the leading manager of Washington’s bailout of Wall Street,” including overseeing “the $130 billion of toxic assets that the U.S. government took on as part of the Bear Stearns sale and the rescue of A.I.G.”
In that same feature that profiled then CEO Larry Fink, Vanity Fair noted that “BlackRock was awarded key [government] contracts with no competitive bidding, in a process enveloped in secrecy, has also raised questions about Fink’s long standing relationships with senior government officials, particularly former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and [Tim] Geithner, his successor.”
Fink is a donor to the New York City’s Police Foundation.
The New York City Police Foundation was created as a nonprofit tax-exempt charity back in the 1970s so that it could raise money to spend on projects supporting NYPD reform and modernization efforts as well as helping improve its relationship with the broader community. Its first grant was a scholarship, and “when financial hardships threatened the Mounted Unit, the Police Foundation stepped in and donated every horse in the Mounted Unit for the next 20 years.”
Between the 1970s and 2016, the Police Foundation had raised more than $120 million on behalf of the NYPD from the city’s power elite. In one case, the government of the United Arab Emirates donated $1 million.
According to the latest annual report the non-profit brought in more than $10.6 million last year. Its latest gala cost over $1 million and brought in more than $5 million in revenue.
If the “One Percent” needed a local steering committee, the foundation’s board would easily fill the bill.
The 2016 gala at the Waldorf Astoria was hosted by Matt Lauer of “The Today Show” and honored Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America. Two years earlier, Bank of America agreed to pay $16.65 billion to settle Department of Justice allegations that it had sold billions of dollars of mortgage backed securities without disclosing the inferior quality of those offerings.
The Police Foundation’s close ties to Wall Street became an issue in November of 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street movement was forcibly removed from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan after nearly a month-long occupation aimed to protest the financial sector’s role in the nation’s growing wealth inequality.
Critics charged at the time that the NYPD had been unduly influenced by a $4.6 million gift from JP Morgan, via the New York City Police Foundation, that funded patrol car laptops as well as security monitoring devices that had been initiated a year earlier.
Advocates for the Police Foundation insisted there are no strings to these corporate gifts and that they are made only out of civic pride and to show support for the NYPD.
“This gift is especially disturbing to us because it creates the appearance that there is an entrenched dynamic of the police protecting corporate interests rather than protecting the First Amendment rights of the people,” Heidi Boghosian of the National Lawyers Guild, told Salon in 2011. The National Lawyers Guild had legal observers posted at all the large scale Occupy Wall Street marches. “They’ve essentially turned the financial district into a militarized zone,” Boghosian added.
Eugene O’Donnell, a member of CUNY’s John Jay College faculty and a former NYPD officer and prosecutor, told me back in 2016 there needed to be a bright line between public policing and corporations.
"We have to be sensitive to even the appearance of a conflict of interest,” O’Donnell said. “The integrity of the police department has to be priceless, so taking contributions from a JP Morgan puts that at risk. We are a super-rich city and we should publicly fund all police functions. You can't privatize the funding of police projects. It sends the wrong signal to the young cop who’s regularly given the speech about the danger of taking a free lunch when they are out in the community.”