A federal judge has allowed the lawsuit of a prominent NYPD critic who alleges police officials leaked details of her sexual assault to move forward, bucking the city’s attempts to have the case tossed.

In a decision last month, U.S. District Judge Frederic Block sided with advocate Dana Rachlin on several counts, allowing her lawsuit to proceed with allegations that the police department allows untraceable “ghost access” to sensitive case files, including records on the 2017 sexual assault she reported to the NYPD. 

Rachlin, who once had close ties to high-ranking NYPD officials including former Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, and worked closely with officers at several Brooklyn precincts, has spent the past two years locked in a bitter legal fight with the city.

Her suit names a number of former NYPD officials who gained prominence during the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, including Maddrey, Kaz Daughtry, who later rose to the positions of deputy police commissioner and deputy mayor, and John Chell, another top official who later was appointed chief of department.

“I survived an assault only to be retraumatized by NYPD members using private information to retaliate against me for speaking critically about police brutality,” Rachlin told The City Reporter. 

In a lengthy response to Rachlin’s amended complaint filed on Aug. 3, city Corporation Counsel Steven Banks, a Mamdani appointee, denied Rachlin’s allegations and everything related to purported “ghost access” to NYPD files. An NYPD spokesperson didn’t return multiple requests for comment. Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesperson for the Law Department, declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

Rachlin and the city’s lawyers are due back in court Sept. 30. 

Former Friends

For several years before her falling out with the NYPD, Rachlin had worked inside Brooklyn precincts with her nonprofit, NYC Together, targeting neighborhood youth with the goal of diverting them from the criminal justice system while mending strained police-community relationships. 

When Rachlin was sexually assaulted in 2017 after a gala for her nonprofit, Maddrey, then an assistant chief leading the NYPD’s Brooklyn North command, met her at the hospital and persuaded the activist to file a police report, her suit says. Rachlin alleges Maddrey assigned Daughtry, who was then a detective, to personally investigate the assault. 

Only a handful of officers knew of the incident. Rachlin initially participated in a “controlled call,” where investigators had her phone the alleged assailant on a recorded line, according to NYPD records she obtained that were viewed by The City Reporter. She later decided not to proceed with the investigation, fearing a drawn-out legal process. 

Later, Rachlin’s relationship with the NYPD soured as she grew increasingly critical of what she saw as heavy-handed policing methods in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests.

That disagreement came to a head over the leadership of Deputy Inspector Craig Edelman, who commanded Brownsville’s 73rd Precinct, where Rachlin often worked. Edelman’s tactics were catapulted into the nationwide spotlight after an officer shoved a female protester to the ground, smashing her head on the sidewalk, during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, while he stood by and watched.

MORE: Current and Former Police Officials Targeted in Raids by NYPD and Feds

As public pressure mounted on then-Mayor Bill de Blasio to take action, Edelman was transferred to a Gun Violence Suppression Unit.

Maddrey had warned Rachlin in a text message that there would be “a lot of blow back from this,” as many within the department linked her to the campaign to oust Edelman, according to text messages previously reviewed by The City Reporter. 

Rachlin was soon barred from entering precinct station houses where she had previously worked with youth, and her lawsuit alleges she received a message through a subordinate of then-Deputy Chief John Chell that top officials could “humiliate her at any time.” 

In the months that followed Edelman’s reassignment, Rachlin charges, she learned of rumors that she had falsely reported a rape. Anonymous letters were distributed inside a secure locker room at the 61st Precinct station house in Sheepshead Bay, where she had worked closely with police officers and youth, and mailed to an assistant chief in the Brooklyn North command, according to her complaint. 

In her original suit, which The City Reporter covered in 2024, Rachlin posited that a member of the NYPD had reviewed her 2017 sexual assault complaint, as the anonymous letters contained confidential information about the investigation.

But in the years since, Rachlin and her attorneys obtained a record of the “access log” to that sexual assault complaint through a Freedom of Information lawsuit. 

‘Immutable’ Logs

NYPD policy requires the department to maintain “immutable audit logs” any time its case management system is queried, and all files are password protected to assure they are “used for legitimate law enforcement purposes or other official business of the NYPD.” The suit points to examples where police officers have misused access to these databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, or neighbors.

The access log in Rachlin’s case, reviewed by The City Reporter, showed dozens of instances in which officers on the Special Victims Unit, and later from various oversight units, reviewed her case. 

But to Rachlin’s surprise, the log didn’t include the name of a high-ranking officer in Greenpoint’s 94th Precinct, who she watched access her file when she requested a copy of it back in 2017.

Rachlin and her attorney say they were then informed by a law enforcement source investigating Rachlin’s claims that NYPD systems allow for “ghost access” or “no-peek access” to the case management system. They laid out their allegations about “ghost access” in an amended lawsuit filed in April. 

“Ghost access offers cover for individuals looking to retaliate against critics and whistleblowers, stalk victims of domestic violence, curry political favor, serve as mercenaries for ICE, interfere with investigations, or carry out personal vendettas,” said MK Kaishian, Rachlin’s attorney. 

Rachlin’s amended lawsuit seeks to force the NYPD to end the alleged “ghost access” and establish a policy to restrict access to sensitive information. She is using what’s called a Monell claim, which allows a person to hold a government agency or municipality accountable for a particular policy that violates constitutional rights.

City attorneys in March moved to stop representing Maddrey in the case, saying that an Internal Affairs Bureau investigation concluded the NYPD’s former top uniformed official had violated policy by failing to report Rachlin’s comments when she initially described rumors about her sexual assault spreading within the department.

Once one of the most powerful members of the NYPD, Maddrey resigned in late 2024, following allegations from a subordinate that he coerced her into giving him sexual favors in exchange for overtime pay. His home has since been raided twice by federal agents, though he has not been charged with any crimes. 

Maddrey sued the city in June for refusing to pay his attorney fees. His attorney didn’t return a request for comment.

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A New York punk scene legend was killed by a mail truck while walking home after performing at an East Village watering hole on Friday night. 

Chester “Chet” Mazur was a “torchbearer for sleaze rock,” one friend said, a staple of an ‘80s and ‘90s underground music scene laden with black leather, late-night pierogi and the camaraderie of penniless performers. At 66, he was still playing alongside his band, The Rasslers, in downtown dives until the day he died. 

James Simmons, 61, was charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident, according to the NYPD. Mazur had finished playing a set at Otto’s Shrunken Head, a tiki bar on East 14th Street, early Saturday and was a block away from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment when he was struck by the mail truck. When the identity of the victim was discovered, punk rockers flooded social media to commemorate Mazur’s legacy. 

Dave Giffen, a guitarist for the rock band Alice Donut and executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, retold a running joke among Mazur’s friends: If you ever wanted to find him, you could just “walk into any of the the cool dive bars in New York City and ask who’s seen Chet, and invariably somebody in the room would be like, yeah, I just saw him.”

Mazur, a native of Buffalo, first experienced notoriety as a Columbia University undergraduate. He scored an A on a paper about a Rolling Stones album — in a class known for an instructor who refused to give A’s. Giffen, a fellow student, heard about the paper and got to know Mazur. Soon, he began working as Alice Donut’s road manager.

“He didn’t have a driver’s license, didn’t have great vision, was not really great with money, but was such an interesting and lively conversationalist that when you’re on a 14-hour drive, Chet is who you want in shotgun,” Giffen told The City Reporter on Monday. (He’d just gotten off the phone with Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra to tell him the news.) 

When the band didn’t have money to book hotels while on tour, Mazur would chat people up in the crowd, scoring couches for the team to crash on, Giffen said. 

Richard Marshall, a member of Alice Donut in the early ‘90s, recalled Mazur’s bizarre performance art, which he unleashed on the audience as the band’s opening act.

“He was this character who kept trying to take his own life and failing at it, and the piece was full of a lot of philosophizing about that experience, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I thought it was genius, actually,” Marshall said in an interview. “He got booed on occasion, but some of the audiences absolutely loved it.”

Eileen Connelly, a member of the all-girls rock band Thrust, which was active in the early ‘90s, remained friends with Mazur for decades after he served as an on-stage dancer for her concerts. He had a crush on one of the band members, she said, and was more than willing to participate. But aside from his often eccentric and hardly-ever family-friendly performances, she said, Mazur was “highly intellectual.” 

With his distinctive nose and grimy t-shirts, Connelly and her friends were “pretty sure” that Mazur was the inspiration for Butthead from the ‘90s animated hit “Beavis and Butthead.” (A representative for “Beavis and Butthead” creator Mike Judge couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.)

Tallahassee Throwdown

Mazur went through life working odd jobs, making art, and saying yes to just about everything, friends told The City Reporter. In the last years of his life, he’d secured an apartment on West 55th Street and a job with the city’s child welfare agency, which he called “meaningful” but boring because it wasn’t music, his niece, Mary Mazur, told The City Reporter.

Several members of Alice Donut recalled an afterparty in Tallahassee, Florida, that turned into a brawl, and how Mazur stepped in to protect the band when the cops were called. 

“They said, ‘Give us some ID.’ And the only piece of ID he had was a New York City public library card that had been burnt in half because his apartment had just had a fire, and he was, I think, in fact, homeless at that point,” Giffen said.

Michael Jung, another guitarist for Alice Donut, added that Mazur tried a “Homer Simpson-style” retreat into the bushes after giving the cops his charred library card. 

“He was one of the sweetest, kindest, gentlest people I’ve ever known,” Marshall, who stayed in touch with Mazur for more than 40 years, said. “Aside from all his artistic and cultural contributions, he was just a sweet, caring, thoughtful, loving human being.”

Mazur, was always “on the margins” of New York City, Giffen added. A memorial for the punk rocker is in the works, but until then, the sticky walls of East Village dive bars hold onto decades of his friendship, stories, songs and monologues. 

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Jennifer Peña raced home from middle school on a Friday afternoon two weeks before Christmas 1999, trying to beat her 3:30 p.m. curfew at her family’s Soundview apartment in The Bronx.

She still remembers glancing at the clock. 

3:14 p.m. 

Inside, her adoptive mother, Antonia Peña, lay on the floor, facing the living room couch. Her father, Carlos Peña, was a few feet away.

Blood was everywhere.

The family’s new dog bounded into Jennifer’s arms.

Then she turned to the friend who had walked home with her and told her not to come inside. The two girls sprinted down the hallway and into a stairwell.

Jennifer, who was 13 at the time, called her brother-in-law, Serge Ruggio, sobbing so hard he struggled to understand what she was saying.

Jennifer was taken downstairs to the superintendent’s apartment. Hours later a local news broadcast confirmed what no one had yet told her: Her parents were dead.

“You always watch the news stories, and you’re like, ‘Wow, that sucks,’ but then you never really think that it’s going to be your story,” she told The City Reporter. 

More than 26 years later, Jennifer Peña is being forced to relive that afternoon.

Jose Colon, the man who murdered her parents, is asking Gov. Kathy Hochul for clemency that would free him from prison after nearly three decades. Colon was 17 — just four years older than Jennifer — when he pulled the trigger.

Colon has an unlikely supporter in his bid: The now-retired judge who sentenced him to 30 years to life in prison now believes the punishment he imposed was too harsh.

Colon’s clemency petition sits at the intersection of several volatile and contentious debates: how society should punish teenagers who commit violent crimes, what role rehabilitation and remorse should play after decades in prison, and when mercy is appropriate for someone convicted of murder. 

“Generally, we incarcerate for three reasons: to incapacitate someone, to deter crime and for retribution,” said Cara Drinan, a professor at Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law who specializes in juvenile sentencing. “When it comes to youth crimes, none of these rationales support lengthy sentences.”

The Colon case is one of hundreds in New York where people serving long sentences for crimes committed in their youth are seeking clemency. Supporters contend decades behind bars justify a second chance. They also cite research showing the risk of a released inmate committing a new crime drops sharply with age.

“It’s rough, because as a Christian, I am told that he should be forgiven, you know, to let it go for my own personal sake, so I do adhere to that,” Jennifer said. “But as far as second chances go, it’s hard because he took a lot. He took more than just two lives. He ruined the lives of a whole family.” 

‘I Was Terrified’

Jennifer had been adopted by the Peñas as a toddler after first arriving in their home as an emergency foster placement. The couple regularly opened their apartment to children removed from abusive homes, her brother-in-law Ruggio said, and eventually adopted Jennifer as their own.

The killings upended everything. 

Jennifer stopped going to school for a time and eventually was adopted by her sister Emmy and her husband Ruggio. She struggled with depression, distrust and recurring nightmares. She never received any meaningful counseling.

The nightmares were the worst.

“I was terrified that he would come find me, because I’m the one that called the police,” she said. “That’s still something that bothers me.” 

Another worry: Colon was a member of the Latin Kings street gang, which had members in New York and Florida. 

“How do I know he’s not going to come after me and my family?” she asked. “That could be farfetched, but that’s what my brain thinks about.” 

The family eventually moved to Florida. Jennifer joined the Air Force, where she said she “felt safe,” before leaving for medical reasons. 

“So since then I’ve just kind of been living,” she said, “always looking over my shoulder, in a sense, looking over my kids’ shoulders too.” 

‘I Don’t Have the Answer’

Jennifer has spent more than two decades trying to understand how one afternoon changed her life.

Jose Colon has spent nearly three decades trying to understand why he shot her parents.

Recently, he sat in a sparsely furnished conference room with no air conditioning inside Sing Sing prison in Westchester County.

His eyes welled up as a reporter told him about Jennifer’s ordeal. 

“I have a daughter now and would never want her to see something like that,” he told The City Reporter during an extensive interview inside the 200-year-old prison. 

Bald and soft-spoken, Colon sounds more like a middle-aged father than the teenager prosecutors described nearly three decades ago.

Colon said he and his accomplice, David Rodriguez, didn’t even have bus fare that rainy Friday. They slipped onto a Bx39 through the back door.

Colon knew the Peñas’ apartment building well. His aunt lived there and he knew the basement entrance was often left unlocked.

A week earlier, he had tagged along with a friend who had bought jewelry from Carlos and Antonia Peña, who used a folding cart to sell inexpensive baubles to local shops and buyers. Antonia, who was battling cancer, also babysat the couple’s grandchildren. 

Rodriguez rang the Peñas’ doorbell and asked for a random, fake person, Ashley. 

For a moment, Colon “froze,” as he and Rodriguez talked it over by the staircase after the Peñas at first failed to open the door, he recalled.

Rodriguez tried to persuade him to leave — twice. 

Colon, armed with a sawed-off .22 caliber rifle, ignored his pleas and kicked through the door as Antonia opened it, shooting her in the stomach. Carlos, startled, came out of the bedroom in the back with his coat on. 

Colon shot him in the neck.  

Colon and Rodriguez then went to the kitchen where the family’s money and jewelry cart were stored. 

“We put everything that was on the table into a bag,” Colon recalled, adding that he shot Antonia a second time on their way out.

Right after, he got “lightheaded,” his vision turned yellow and he became nauseous. 

“I knew immediately that I had fucked up,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain the feeling.” 

That night, they went to a Sweet 16 birthday party, where Rodriguez gave his girlfriend one of the stolen rings and talked about the murder with friends.

Police arrested Rodriguez and Colon the next day. 

“A lot of people called the precinct because of us,” Colon said. “Sometimes I sit here and think about that. Did I just think it was business as usual? That nobody cares?” 

“I went to the extreme for no reason at all,” he added. “I just don’t have the answer. I don’t want to make something up either.” 

‘It Was Fights Every Day’

Colon never went to trial and admitted to police he was the sole shooter responsible for the immigrant couple’s death. 

His grandfather, who was his stand-in father figure, didn’t talk to him for the next five years.

The murder was the culmination of a childhood marked by instability, untreated mental health struggles and repeated separation from the adults in his life.

Colon was born in The Bronx to a 15-year-old mother. His biological father left when he was two years old. For much of his early childhood, Colon was raised by his grandparents while his mother worked long hours. He said he later had a tumultuous and often violent relationship with his stepfather.

Around age six, Colon began experiencing involuntary facial and hand tics and explosive outbursts. Doctors diagnosed him with Tourette syndrome and prescribed him medication, but the side effects were difficult to manage, according to medical records included with his clemency petition. Over the next several years, he was evaluated by multiple neurologists and psychiatrists, suspended from school repeatedly and eventually placed in special education.

Colon said the tics made him the target of relentless bullying, leaving him depressed, ashamed and increasingly angry. He clashed with classmates, teachers and family members.

“Every year, I was in a different borough,” he recalled. As a rare Latino student during a stint at a Brooklyn elementary school, “It was fights every day, fights every day, fights every day.”

His mother would take the train with him to school when he was enrolled in Manhattan. But as soon as she left, he’d just take the opposite train back to The Bronx, he recalled.  

“I’d take the train from Parkchester to the Brooklyn Bridge,” he remembered. “I’d be on the train all the time.” 

When Colon was 13, his mother filed a Person in Need of Supervision petition, and a family court judge sent him to a residential treatment school in Westchester County, where he remained for more than three years. 

“I’ve never made it back home,” Colon said from Sing Sing as his eyes became watery. 

He viewed the placement as abandonment by his mother. Colon returned home at 15, but stayed only a few months before his stepfather forced him out. Following a juvenile assault conviction, he spent nine months at Spofford Juvenile Center, a notorious facility that closed in 2011. Mike Tyson, the famous boxer, did time there as a young person. 

A ‘Chilling’ Confession

When Colon was released at 16, he relied on friends’ families for a place to sleep.

One of those friends was David Rodriguez. Colon had moved in with Rodriguez’s family just a week before the robbery that ended with Carlos and Antonia Peña dead.

Colon’s clemency application argues that his troubled childhood wasn’t the only factor overlooked during his prosecution and sentencing. After Colon pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in exchange for a sentence of 30 years to life, a new attorney unsuccessfully sought to withdraw the plea, arguing critical mitigating evidence of Colon’s psychiatric history and treatment had not been presented to the court. 

The application also argues that State Supreme Court Justice William Mogulescu misinterpreted Colon’s demeanor after the killings. Mogulescu described Colon’s videotaped confession as “chilling” because he appeared emotionless, viewing it as evidence of a lack of remorse. Colon’s attorneys now contend his flat affect reflected psychological detachment and the still-developing brain of a 17-year-old rather than an absence of remorse.

Supporters say Colon’s prison record tells the story of a man who bears little resemblance to the teenager who burst into the Peña family’s apartment.

His clemency application points to a cognitive behavioral program he created to help prisoners confront the harm they caused and mentor teenagers in hopes they avoid making the same choices he did.

While locked up, Colon earned his GED and enrolled in college, earning an associate’s degree in behavioral science earlier this summer. 

His disciplinary record, however, reflects a more fraught path. 

State Department of Corrections records show Colon accumulated numerous infractions during his first two decades in prison, including several violent incidents that resulted in solitary confinement. His last serious infraction came in 2021, after what he described as a fight in self-defense. According to his clemency application, he has remained infraction-free for the past five years. 

Today, Colon works as a clerk in Sing Sing’s education department, where he mentors other incarcerated students, oversees the prison library and helps manage academic records.

His clemency application also points to repeated commendations from prison staff, including for helping extinguish a fire set by another inmate,  volunteering in the prison’s hospital and helping clean cells during the COVID-19 pandemic, when 45 state inmates died from the coronavirus. 

Colon’s supporters say perhaps the clearest evidence of who he has become isn’t found in certificates or commendations but in the family he built from inside prison walls.

He married Janette “Jeannie” Colon in 2011, after the two rekindled a friendship that dated back years. More than a decade later, they reconnected after Colon began writing to her with questions about the Yoruba religion. The letters turned into phone calls, then prison visits, and eventually a relationship.

Colon, who has no biological children, became a father figure to Jeannies’ young daughter Bryanna from behind prison walls. He sent her drawings and birthday cards, carved out time for every phone call and helped make parenting decisions, according to his wife. 

“He won Bryanna’s heart over, just like mine,” she wrote in his clemency application. “We were simply meant to be a family.”

His clemency application faces steep odds. 

Since first taking office in August 2021, Gov. Hochul has granted clemency — in the form of a sentence commutation — to 19 people. She’s currently running for re-election. 

An ‘Excessive’ Sentence?

Justice Mogulescu, now retired, remembers little about the plea negotiations that unfolded in his courtroom more than 25 years ago.

What he does know is this: He would not impose the same sentence today.

“I believe that the sentence of 30 years to life imposed on a 17-year-old was excessive,” Mogulescu wrote in a letter supporting Colon’s clemency application.

Mogulescu said Colon’s extensive mental health history was not fully presented to him before sentencing because prosecutors and defense attorneys had already negotiated a plea agreement.

“It was not my place to kind of say, ‘What are you, some kind of asshole?'” he told The City Reporter, describing his reluctance to second-guess the defense counsel’s strategy.

Since Colon’s sentencing, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized children should be treated differently from adults in criminal punishment, citing research showing adolescents are more prone to impulsivity, risk-taking and poor judgment.

Asked whether he regrets the sentence today, Mogulescu didn’t hesitate.

“It hasn’t been a highlight of my life,” he said. “I think it’s appropriate for that sentence to be adjusted.”

Under current New York law, however, judges have no power to revisit a sentence once it’s imposed. Only Hochul can shorten it through executive clemency.

That’s one reason supporters of a proposed law called the Second Look Act want judges to have the authority to reconsider lengthy prison sentences after people have served years behind bars.

“This is exactly the kind of case second look legislation was designed for,” said Marta Nelson, director of the Sentencing Reform Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice. Colon committed the crime at 17, an age when research shows people are more impulsive and susceptible to peer pressure, she said. The question decades later is whether continued incarceration remains “in the interest of justice.”

Nelson, who reviewed clemency cases during the Cuomo administration, said the question is whether “the sentence is still appropriate for who this person is now.”

The case also underscores how little support many victims receive once the criminal case ends.

For example, Colon wrote a letter years ago accepting responsibility for the killings and expressing remorse through the state’s Apology Letter Bank, which allows incarcerated people to submit notes that victims or their families can choose to receive if they wish. 

But Jennifer said she never knew Colon’s letter existed. 

Under DOCCS policy, victims are notified only if they are registered with the agency’s Office of Victim Assistance.

She also said no one ever told her about New York’s restorative justice programs, which allow victims and offenders to voluntarily meet in a carefully facilitated setting if both sides agree — though she isn’t sure she would ever want such a meeting. 

Not everyone believes Colon deserves another chance.

Serge Ruggio, Jennifer’s brother-in-law, who became her guardian after the killings, says Colon should spend the rest of his life behind bars. To him, no amount of rehabilitation can erase what happened that afternoon in The Bronx.

“To the day I die, I will fight this,” Ruggio, a former NYPD homicide detective, told The City Reporter.

Ruggio said the robbery showed planning, not youthful impulsiveness. What happened next has stayed with him for more than a quarter-century.

According to Ruggio, after shooting Carlos and Antonia Peña, Colon and his accomplice stepped over their bleeding bodies, rifled through the apartment and stole the folding jewelry cart Antonia used to sell inexpensive trinkets in neighborhood beauty salons and flea markets in the weeks before Christmas.

Jennifer discovered the bodies about 90 minutes later.

“She was hysterical,” Ruggio recalled. “I could barely understand what she was saying.”

Ruggio rushed from Manhattan, arriving before detectives assigned to the case. He said years of investigating violent crime did little to prepare him for seeing members of his own family lying dead.

“What I saw was horrendous,” he said. “I was a homicide detective. But seeing your own family there was different.”

Ruggio said he has no objection to clemency in appropriate cases. He pointed to people serving lengthy drug sentences and others whose punishments no longer fit today’s standards.

But, he said, this case is different.

“This wasn’t a burglary that went bad,” he said. “This was a brutal, premeditated double murder.”

For Ruggio, the question isn’t whether Colon has changed — it’s whether that change can ever outweigh the devastation he left behind.

Ruggio recalled spending the weeks before Christmas planning two funerals instead of celebrating the holidays. He remembered having to tell his young children that the beloved grandparents who watched them while he worked would never be coming home. He watched his wife, Emmy, struggle with grief for years, consumed by questions of what she might have done differently that day.

Emmy never fully recovered from losing her parents, Ruggio said. She died years later after battling cancer, leaving Jennifer and the rest of the family carrying scars he says will never disappear.

Ruggio said he hopes Colon has found remorse and faith during his decades in prison. But he drew a sharp distinction between redemption and clemency.

“That’s between him and God,” Ruggio said. “I hope he does find remorse. I hope he does find God. But as for clemency, this is not a clemency case.”

Even if Hochul rejects the petition, Colon is expected to become eligible for parole in 2029, when Jennifer Peña and Serge Ruggio will again have an opportunity to register opposition if he applies to the state Parole Board for supervised release.

Michael Jacobson, a former New York City corrections commissioner and a leading criminal justice scholar, said he understands why victims’ families often oppose clemency and believes their voices should carry significant weight.

But, he said, the government represents “a variety of interests” and ultimately has to decide not only what a person deserves, but what purpose continued punishment serves.

“At some point, the state has to ask itself the question: What’s the point after 25 years?” Jacobson said. “He’s already had an unbelievable amount of punishment.”

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In the predawn darkness of Sept. 4, 2024, city and federal law enforcement agents knocked on the heavy wooden door of the ornate Hamilton Heights townhouse Schools Chancellor David Banks and his then-fiancée, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, called home.

Agents with the FBI and city Department of Investigation confiscated their cellphones that morning as part of a broader corruption investigation targeting the top levels of then-Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.

Banks and Wright would soon resign their powerful positions as revelation after revelation made clear the investigation went far beyond the couple. Banks’ brothers — Philip, a deputy mayor and former top police official, and Terence, a consultant — also had their phones seized, as did then-Police Commissioner Edward Caban. Philip Banks and Caban also resigned amid a wave of scandals that saw Adams himself indicted on separate federal corruption charges.

That was then. 

In recent months, Banks and Wright — now husband and wife — have a different type of visitor arriving at their home: guests on “The Beacon and Blueprint,” a podcast the couple has hosted over the last several months out of their living room.

For the formerly powerful couple, their re-entry into public life indicates they believe the dark clouds of scandal are behind them — despite the fact that prosecutors in the offices of U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg continue to investigate members of the Adams administration, sources familiar with the probes said. 

Which is why it was a surprise when Banks told The City Reporter that Bragg and another top law enforcement official in the state, Attorney General Letitia James, have agreed to come on their show.

“We’ve known these folks for a long time. I’ve known Alvin Bragg for years. We haven’t had him on but he’ll be coming on,” David Banks said in an interview. “Tish James is agreeing to come on.”

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Since its debut in February, many high-profile New Yorkers have appeared on the show, including former City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (currently Gov. Kathy Hochul’s running mate for lieutenant governor), City Comptroller Mark Levine and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.

The contrast between the back-then of investigators seizing cellphones and now, when the pair are attracting a wide variety of New York City elected officials to their show, presents an interesting dynamic.

Will Manhattan DA Appear?

Bragg’s situation is the most unusual. He is currently prosecuting three of Eric Adams’ top aides on bribery charges, including the mayor’s former chief advisor, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his former building commissioner, Eric Ulrich, and Jesse Hamilton, the longtime friend whom Adams appointed to handle the city’s leases.

All of these indicted cases remain active and Bragg has made clear his investigation of the Adams administration is ongoing.

The City Reporter tried to get Bragg to comment on how his participation on “The Beacon and Blueprint” would reflect on his continuing pursuit of corruption, given law enforcement’s past interest in the show’s hosts. His spokesperson, Danielle Filson, confirmed Bragg and other DAs were in talks about appearing on the show, but she declined further comment.

Grant Fox, a spokesperson for James, the state’s top law enforcer, declined to discuss Banks’ assertion she’d agreed to come on the show.

A spokesperson for the Hochul-Adams campaign, Matt Jensen, also declined to answer The City Reporter’s inquiry about Adrienne Adams’ appearance on the podcast.

In an interview, Banks said he would not discuss anything about the FBI and DOI probe that rocked his tenure as schools chancellor. But during an appearance on NY1 with journalist Errol Louis where Banks and Wright appeared as guests, Louis brought up the wave of scandal that swept Adams’ City Hall and how the couple navigate questions about that today.

‘Swept Up’

Banks admitted “it was a little bit of a cloud when we left, but that cloud was something that we could not control. We were kind of swept up in a larger set of circumstances that was happening around us, and that’s very unfortunate when that happens, particularly when you’ve had a stellar career and it’s been spotless for decades. 

“Sometimes these things are out of your control and you just do the best that you can and keep moving on,” he told Louis.

These many months later, the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has yet to formally close the investigation of Banks and his brothers. As recently as last fall, sources familiar with the investigation told The City Reporter, witnesses were still being questioned about whether Terence Banks had improperly tapped into his brothers’ influence to benefit clients of a consulting firm he formed at the start of Adams’ term.

The Consultant Brother

The behind-the-scenes interaction between the siblings during their time in power has been documented by The City Reporter via emails, records and interviews.

When he was chancellor, David Banks met with the CEO of one of Terence Banks’ clients, a tech firm called 21StCentEd, and later appeared in a promotional video for the company in which he was identified as chancellor of the city school system. After hiring Terence Banks, 21StCentEd snagged 138 smaller no-bid contracts with the city Department of Education worth $2 million in total.

Emails from September 2022 obtained via the Freedom of Information Law show Terence Banks forwarded to his brother David a proposed mentor program from a firm called Lockstep Ventures that wanted to work with the Department of Education. He made sure to include First Deputy Mayor Wright in the conversation as well.

Emailing Lockstep executives, Terence Banks — seeming to speak for the chancellor and Wright — wrote, “I have included the Deputy Mayor and the Chancellors team on this thread. We are very interested about the opportunity to collaborate on this project. Please suggest a few dates so that we can see what works for all. We have some suggestions to share that may complement your proposal to ensure success.”

David Banks declined to answer questions about these interactions with his brother’s clients.

‘No Reason to Avoid Them’

NY1’s Louis, who also appeared as a guest on “The Beacon and Blueprint” and has been friends with the Banks family for decades, noted in an interview that David Banks and Sheena Wright remain in a kind of legal limbo.

“They haven’t been cleared. They haven’t been charged,” he observed. “And as far as I know, they haven’t been interviewed [by law enforcement]. This could go on for years. You have to decide to deal with people, because they’re interesting people with a podcast … or you kind of condemn them to exile until the U.S. attorney figures out what he’s going to do.”

He added, “There was so much funky stuff that went on between Eric Adams and that office. I have no idea what’s going to come of this. Until that’s resolved, I see no reason to avoid them.”

Comptroller Levine, whose job includes rooting out corrupt practices in city government, also saw no reason to avoid Banks and Wright. He appeared on a June 30 episode, telling the couple, “We want to make sure there’s no fraud in government and that things are working well.”

Asked about the circumstances under which the show’s hosts left City Hall, Levine said through a spokesperson: “We were invited to have a public conversation about our work and how we are addressing the affordability crisis affecting so many New Yorkers. We do not have information beyond what has been publicly reported, nor do we have a comment related to the hosts.”

The subject of Banks and Wright’s interaction with law enforcement surfaced — at least by implication — during the podcast’s first episode on Feb. 24. The topic was Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and one of the invited guests, Rev. Kirsten John Foy, brought up Adams.

Adams was indicted on bribery and campaign finance fraud charges in September 2024 but escaped trial after the Trump Justice Department intervened, in part to win Adams’ cooperation in the federal administration’s mass deportations. Discussing how Adams’ downfall contributed to Mamdani’s rise, Foy said Adams “dragged down a whole lot of good people, present company included.”

“He hurt a whole lot of Black people,” Foy said, to which Wright responded, “Uh-huh.”

Banks then agreed, in part, with Foy’s take on the mayor who’d appointed him to run the nation’s biggest public school system.

“Eric Adams, while the administration accomplished a range of things, I think Eric was a disappointment to a lot of people and I think you’re right, in terms of how it set a context for Zohran Mamdani to emerge.”

“The Beacon and Blueprint,” in a sense, is an attempt by Banks and Wright to rewrite the narrative. Both had long careers before City Hall: Wright as head of United Way of New York City, Banks as founder of Eagle Academy, a network of all-boys high schools he ran for years before Adams named him chancellor.

‘We Still Have a Voice’

Signal Co. No. 1, the company producing the podcast, didn’t immediately respond to a query about the size of its audience. “The Beacon and Blueprint” has just over 2,300 followers on Instagram.

On NY1, Banks claimed that after he and Wright left City Hall, some leaders in the Black community and other elected officials approached them and said: “We still need to hear from you.”

“We still have a voice and we still want to serve our communities,” Banks added.

Nevertheless, Banks and Wright so far have said little about their time in the Adams administration, where they entered with relatively unblemished resumes and exited under a pall. When Louis asked, “People want to hear what went on at City Hall. Are we going to hear anything on that?” Wright did not directly respond.

“We were there for three years,” she said. “It was a lot in three years. It did feel like dog years. But there was a lot we learned from that experience … and a lot that we accomplished.”

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The post Two Years After Federal Raids, an Eric Adams Power Couple Seeks Podcast Fame appeared first on The City Reporter.

New York’s courts are reckoning with a second consecutive summer of strikes by public defenders and legal staff at a constellation of private nonprofits who are represented by the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys-UAW Local 2325. 

The ongoing strikes at Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and Bronx Defenders are much smaller than the stoppages by seven organizations that rocked the court system last summer. But the strikes this summer have been markedly acrimonious, with no clear end in sight, and carry the potential to hobble criminal, family and housing courts in Manhattan and The Bronx. 

The nonprofits that provide free legal representation to low-income defendants rely significantly on taxpayer funds. This year, the City Council agreed to boost spending on organizations providing constitutionally mandated defense by approximately $32 million, an increase of about 12.5%. The union says that funding should more than cover its demands for raises and benefits at Neighborhood Defender Services and Bronx Defenders, but negotiations remain stalled.

This is familiar territory for staff at Bronx Defenders: They’re in the unprecedented position of going on strike for the second consecutive summer, after management proposed what the unions described as considerably higher raises for its staff attorneys than its social workers, some of whom are currently juggling caseloads of upwards of 50 clients.

On Tuesday, the Neighborhood Defender staff union filed formal charges to the National Labor Relations Board that, among other things, accused the organization’s leadership of offering “financial incentives” to employees who crossed the picket line. The organization’s unionized staff at its offices in San Marcos, Texas, and Detroit, Mich., who are also on strike, joined the complaint. 

Jesus Infante, NDS’ chief administrative officer, did not immediately respond to The City Reporter’s request for comment.

Talks resumed on Wednesday afternoon. Tony Chiarito, a Bronx Defenders spokesperson, said the organization is “hopeful that we can arrive at a fair and equitable contract that meets these realities.”

Though staff at both organizations share much of the same responsibilities and offer similar services, they have different issues at their respective bargaining tables. 

Key to the bargaining dispute at Neighborhood Defender Services is management’s proposal to for the first time force staff to contribute to healthcare costs; coupled with a proposal of yearly 1% cost-of-living increases, the union says management’s offer amounts to a pay cut.

The two sides have been bargaining regularly since their strike began on July 24, but are no closer to reaching a resolution on the issue of healthcare, said Jahnavi Bhaskar, a senior staff attorney and union member.

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“It is really the cost of living increase and the healthcare costs that they are trying to impose on our members that are the reason we are on strike,” she said. “All other issues are resolvable.”

Neighborhood Defender has said that its healthcare proposals are “highly competitive, both increase employee take-home pay, and both provide zero in-network deductibles and zero co-insurance healthcare options.”

Meanwhile, Bronx Defenders staff claim that management is proposing to decouple its attorney and social work staff into separate wage tiers — which would lock social work staff out of the substantial salary bump the organization is offering its lawyers.

Jessica Coffrin-St. Julien, an attorney with the organization’s immigration unit, said that Bronx Defenders’ offer amounted to a $10,000 starting salary bump for attorneys while cutting social workers out of the same perk. Under the current agreement, social workers and attorneys earn the same starting salary. Any changes to that arrangement, she said, is a nonstarter for the union.

“We understand the need to recruit and retain attorneys who can provide the best representation for our clients,” she said. “But we do not believe that should come at the expense of our social workers, who do life-saving work.”

The organization’s social workers, particularly in the immigration unit, work substantial case loads that are out of step with their legal peers. The immigration unit has more than two dozen attorneys on staff, each with about 10 to 12 cases; that same unit only has two social workers on staff, who each currently represent upwards of 50 of those clients. 

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Ashley Guzman and Denise Herrera, the immigration unit’s only two nonmanagement social workers, told The City Reporter that management’s proposal was demoralizing.

“I felt undervalued,” said Herrera. “It feels like management is trying to divide us, when we all deserve to be fully compensated.” Guzman added that among the organization’s total 30-plus social workers: “We’re all pretty united on the issue” of pay parity with attorneys. 

In a statement published when the strike began on July 27, Bronx Defenders executive director Juval Scott said the raises it proposed for social workers, which would bring their starting salaries to $88,100, would place those employees “well above the statewide average for their profession.” 

Scott also acknowledged the City Council’s funding boost, but said it “is not enough to meet every union demand.”

Leaders of Neighborhood Defender Services and Bronx Defenders have said senior, nonunion attorneys will pick up cases from striking attorneys. A spokesperson for the state Office of Court Administration said the agency is “closely” monitoring the situation.

“While we always hope that our courts and those they serve experience no disruptions, our entire judicial system remains committed to ensuring full operations should any arise,” the spokesperson, Al Baker, said in a statement. “For now, of course, the courts remain fully open.”

Two other legal organizations servicing low-income clients in Brooklyn and Queens courts ended a six-day strike last week after securing a deal on raises and benefits, capping a rocky two years.

The former head of Queens Defenders, Lori Zeno, on Tuesday was sentenced to 43 months in prison after pleading guilty in Brooklyn federal court in February to embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the organization to fund luxury shopping sprees, vacations, and other freebies.

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The post Why Bronx and Harlem Public Defenders Walked Off the Job appeared first on The City Reporter.

The Justice Department announced a $3.85 million settlement with an embattled union and several of its affiliates over allegations they improperly pocketed millions in COVID-era hardship funds.

The International Union of Journeymen and Allied Trades (IUJAT) and the Home Healthcare Workers of America (HHWA), as well as two other affiliates and the unions’ welfare fund, allegedly applied for millions in Paycheck Protection Program loans — even though they knew that their status as labor unions made them ineligible for the taxpayer-funded benefits, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said Monday.

Many small businesses, including some nonprofit organizations, were eligible for the funds — but labor unions, despite their nonprofit status, were explicitly carved out of the program, which was meant to prevent widespread layoffs during the COVID lockdown.

But the journeymen’s union and its affiliates applied for the funds anyway, even over the objections of a federal representative who was in contact with their bank, according to DOJ. The unions unlocked more than $3.3 million in federal loans, which were eventually fully forgiven.

“The Paycheck Protection Program was created to help eligible small businesses weather the economic strain of the pandemic through forgivable loans,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement. “The defendants here applied for and received millions of dollars in taxpayer funds for which they were not eligible. This Office is committed to protecting taxpayer dollars and recovering public funds that flow to those who do not qualify.” 

Zachary Fink, a spokesperson for IUJAT and HHWA, said that the settlement “is not an admission of liability.”

“We chose to settle because it was the most responsible way to avoid the cost, distraction, and uncertainty of continued litigation,” Fink said. “We remain committed to preserving resources for our greatest asset, which is our membership.”

A Controversial Union

The Home Healthcare Workers of America is one of New York’s fastest-growing unions, its growth coinciding with a rapid expansion of Medicaid-funded care for the elderly and people with disabilities at home in New York.

A 2024 investigation by The City Reporter found that the organization circumvented union elections in order to fuel its massive growth; has direct ties with anti-regulation lobbying efforts; and that the family that controls it and its sister unions amassed substantial compensation packages off the dues of some of the lowest-paid workers in the city — with one union officer taking home $1.4 million a year. 

The Home Healthcare Workers’ parent union, the International Union of Journeymen and Allied Trades, and its affiliated unions are notorious within the labor movement for cutting in on other unions’ organizing drives and signing workers to management-friendly contracts. 

Established by Congress as part of a $5 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the Paycheck Protection Program, administered by the Small Business Administration, offered full forgiveness for eligible borrowers. The program has been rife with abuse and fraud since its inception in April 2020.

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Within seconds, nearly a dozen teenage detainees pour out of their cells and converge on Kalief Browder.

Surveillance footage from 2010 captures the relentless beating inside a Rikers Island housing unit. The attack was possible in part because the cell doors, like hundreds of others throughout the city’s jail system, had failed to lock.

Browder, who was 16 at the time of the beating, became a tragic icon for jail reform after he spent three years jailed on Rikers Island awaiting trial for allegedly stealing a backpack. He died by suicide after his release. 

Sixteen years later, roughly 1,550 cell doors remain broken inside two Rikers jails, a high-ranking correction official told The City Reporter.

“If you’re a staff member and everybody can get out of their cells at night, that’s scary,” Vincent Schiraldi, a former corrections commissioner, said in an interview. “That’s scary for you, and that’s scary for the incarcerated people.”

The persistent security failure has become one of the latest challenges confronting court-appointed remediation manager Nicholas Deml, who this month ordered the Department of Correction to develop a new “security plan.”

Under his directive, jail officials must document every broken door in every housing area by Sept. 1 and submit a procurement and replacement schedule a month later detailing the order in which the doors will be replaced, how much it will cost and how the work will be funded.

The plan also requires the city to provide monthly progress reports and immediately notify Deml if funding, procurement or other problems threaten to delay the repairs.

According to the high-ranking correction official, roughly 750 broken doors are in the Otis Bantum Correctional Center and another 800 are in the George R. Vierno Center.

Deml’s report didn’t disclose exactly how many doors are broken, how much it would cost to repair them, and when that would be totally done. 

A Department of Correction spokesperson said the agency has allocated $23 million to replace cell doors.

“Safety underpins everything we do,” spokesperson Latima Johnson said in a statement. “That’s why the DOC is actively replacing cell doors across Rikers Island while preparing for the transition to a safer, smaller and more humane borough-based jail system.”

The emphasis on broken doors mirrors years of criticism from Steve Martin, the federal monitor overseeing the department’s treatment of juvenile detainees.  In a January report, Martin called properly securing cell doors “one of the most fundamental, yet most critical elements of correctional security” and noted that fixing them was the first requirement of a court-ordered security plan imposed in 2021. 

More than four years later, he wrote, correction officers still do not consistently secure doors, contributing to a broader breakdown in basic jail operations. Staff also routinely fail to supervise housing units, enforce rules, conduct regular tours, control contraband and intervene before conflicts escalate into violence.

“The patterns discussed in the Monitor’s prior reports remain an accurate description of the jails’ dysfunction today,” Martin wrote, adding that the department’s failure to carry out basic security practices “fundamentally breaches” its responsibility to keep people in custody safe.

While the Department of Correction is run by Commissioner Stanley Richards, a mayoral appointee, different aspects of the long-dysfunctional city jail system are overseen by no less than three federal monitors as well as Deml, the remediation manager, all of whom were appointed amid lawsuits targeting endemic constitutional violations on Rikers Island.  

‘It Was Bedlam’

The Rikers door crisis is decades old. 

During the final year of the de Blasio administration, Schiraldi said, the department launched an emergency effort to replace hundreds of broken cell doors as violence surged and staffing levels collapsed.

Schiraldi said he worked almost daily with then-First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan — now serving Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the same role — and senior corrections officials to quickly hire a contractor to replace as many doors as possible.

“The doors were popping open. It was bedlam,” Schiraldi recalled. “Staff were calling in sick. The place was super violent. The culture was terrible. You have to understand the doors in the context of all of that.”

Even as crews replaced doors, Schiraldi said, many quickly broke again because officers often failed to stop detainees from jamming or damaging the locks.

“As quickly as we were replacing the doors, people were doing the things that would break them,” he said. “Staff were failing to address that, and the doors were breaking.”

‘Too Far Gone’

Schiraldi said fixing the hardware alone won’t solve the problem.

“You have to change the culture,” he said. “You fix the doors, and staff aren’t engaged, and incarcerated people don’t believe in what’s happening in the department, and the doors are going to get broken. Conversely, nobody’s going to believe in what’s happening in the department unless you can fix the doors.”

Schiraldi pointed to the 2010 assault on Browder as one of the clearest examples of the danger. In surveillance video of the attack, Browder is cornered inside what appears to be a secure area before another teenager kicks open a door, allowing a group of detainees to rush in and assault him.

Zachary Katznelson, executive director of the Independent Rikers Commission, which is pushing for the faster and more efficient closing of Rikers, said repairing the doors is necessary but ultimately won’t solve the deeper problems posed by the aging jail complex.

“Jail doors absolutely need to lock, but the ugly reality is the Rikers jails are too far gone to be truly safe,” Katznelson said. “They are literally falling apart and terribly designed. We need the new borough-based jails to enable DOC to provide proper physical security.”

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Hundreds of workers representing low-income defendants in Brooklyn and Queens walked off the job Thursday morning, after failing to reach a deal with management on wages and benefits before an 8 a.m. strike deadline.

Approximately 500 lawyers, case managers and staff at Brooklyn Defender Services and Queens Defenders have been locked in negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement for months. 

Their union, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys UAW Local 2325, has been demanding raises, more sick days, the return of its remote-work policy and better benefits. Though the strike is in effect, workers were not picketing Thursday due to the poor air quality brought on by the Canadian wildfires.

The two sides bargained for hours into dawn on Thursday in an effort to avert a strike that could impair criminal, housing and family court across the city’s two most populous boroughs. A spokesperson for the state Office of Court Administration said that courts remain operational and open — “for now.”

“While we always hope that our courts and those they serve experience no disruptions, our entire judicial system remains committed to ensuring full operations should any arise,” said the spokesperson, Al Baker. “As in the past, the [Unified Court System] continues to closely monitor these developing circumstances and hope the parties can forge meaningful resolutions.”

Brooklyn and Queens Defenders staff have been working under an expired contract since June 30. Another Local 2325 shop, Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem — where Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier is on leave from her day job as a researcher — is also under an expired contract, but its staff have not walked off the job.

Bret Brintzenhofe, a senior defense attorney and Brooklyn Defenders union member, said he hopes management agrees to “a full and fair contract.”

“I am on strike for to be able to stay in my job and continue for the long term, to provide effective assistance of counsel as part of a team of workers — and for me, that’s about clients who are people, no matter what they’re accused of doing, who deserve dignity and respect and due process,” he said.

In a statement, Brooklyn Defender Services Executive Director Lisa Schreibersdorf said the organization “stand[s] ready to continue bargaining to reach a swift and equitable resolution.” She said that supervisors would be picking up the striking workers’ caseloads “to ensure that our clients are not negatively impacted by the work stoppage.”

Staff at Brooklyn Defender Services were not among the UAW shops who last summer went on an extended, larger strike. But its members did picket on several occasions after Schreibersdorf eliminated work-from-home schedules and allegedly required employees to install location tracking apps on their mobile phones. The union claimed Schreibersdorf violated their contract by implementing those changes without negotiations. 

Tensions culminated in the fall, after the union filed a bombshell complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging Schreibersdorf offered a staff member and Local 2325 delegate a lighter workload in exchange for dissolving the union and installing what critics called a “sham union” in its place. In a recent settlement, BDS and Schreibersdorf agreed to not “actively encourage” or offer any perks in exchange for booting the union. 

Last month, Schreibersdorf announced her retirement effective January 2027.

The organization has had a rocky two years.

In 2025, Brooklyn Defender Services absorbed the core work of another legal services provider, Queens Defenders, that had imploded in scandal. The founder and head of that organization, Lori Zeno, was arrested and later pleaded guilty in federal court to allegations that she used the non-profit’s funds to pay for rent in a penthouse apartment and other freebies, including luxe shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus and Ralph Lauren and a $10,000 trip to Bali.

Born in the ’90s

Brooklyn Defender Services was established in the mid-1990s out of a different labor dispute.

After unionized employees of the Legal Aid Society went on strike in 1994, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani broke the city’s exclusive contract with the organization to represent indigent clients and opened requests for proposals for other organizations to go into business with the city.

Workers at Legal Aid ended the strike, but the Giuliani administration forged ahead anyway, creating agreements with a constellation of new non-union legal organizations that spun off from the dispute — including Brooklyn Defender Services.

Brooklyn Defender Services was non-union for decades until 2021, when its staff voted to join the UAW’s ALAA as part of a post-pandemic wave of educated workers and legal staff that unionized in New York.

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The court-appointed remediation manager overseeing Rikers Island has ordered the city to overhaul key parts of the troubled jail system, calling for hiring new investigators to police officer misconduct, a $50 million expansion of educational and other programs for detainees and a pilot revamp of solitary confinement.

In a 33-page action plan filed Wednesday — six months after his appointment — Nicholas Deml ordered the Department of Correction to improve everything from internal investigations and staffing to fixing broken cell doors and quickly reporting serious security breaches.

U.S. District Judge Laura Swain appointed Deml, a former CIA officer who most recently led Vermont’s prison system, after concluding years of court oversight had failed to bring the jail system into constitutional compliance.

Deml cautioned that meaningful change will take time. 

“The failures that define these jails developed over many decades and will not be resolved overnight,” his report said. “Yet these conditions can be reversed.”

His report opens with two vivid examples of why he believes dramatic intervention is necessary.

Fire and Brawls

During one of his team’s first walk-throughs of the Rose M. Singer Center for women detainees on Rikers, they entered a housing unit filled with smoke from fires set by people in custody. The air carried what the report described as a chemical odor, likely from burning synthetic materials. Fire alarms echoed through the housing area, as detainees pounded on their cell doors, while others sat shackled to restraint desks. 

A correction officer simply shrugged, according to the report, as though it were “another day on Rikers.”

In another incident at the George R. Vierno Center on Rikers, nearly 30 detainees became involved in a violent fight after officers failed to secure doors connecting two housing units. 

Detainees armed themselves with broomsticks and mop buckets taken from unsecured janitorial closets. A single officer eventually dispersed the melee with chemical spray.

Rather than prompting sweeping operational changes, Deml wrote, both incidents were treated as routine. Between January and May, people in custody set 130 fires and were involved in 2,978 fights, according to his report filed in federal court.

Among the most significant directives, Deml ordered the corrections department to dramatically expand the number of investigators examining allegations of staff misconduct, spend an additional $50 million on educational, vocational and therapeutic programming and establish a pilot housing unit that would offer an alternative to solitary confinement for people who commit serious acts of violence.

He also directed the department to develop plans to improve staffing, repair broken infrastructure, strengthen emergency reporting procedures and better manage day-to-day jail operations.

Deml wrote that the city has a rare opportunity to remake its jail system, pointing to new leadership under Commissioner Stanley Richards, the court’s appointment of a remediation manager and the planned transition to borough-based jails. 

The Legal Aid Society, the city’s largest public defender organization, praised the plan’s emphasis on expanding programming.

“We applaud the Plan’s focus on increasing both the volume and variety of programming, as well as engaging community-based service providers,” the organization said in a statement. 

The Hard Parts

But the action plan is also notable for what it leaves untouched: how to address the growing number of detainees with serious mental illness or overhaul the disciplinary system for officers accused of brutality.

Deml does not propose a strategy for reducing the jail population, which remains well above the roughly 4,400 people envisioned under the city’s plan to close Rikers Island. As of Wednesday, 6,576 people were being held in city custody.

For years, the Department of Correction and Correctional Health Services have struggled to provide adequate treatment for mentally ill detainees despite creating specialized therapeutic housing units known as CAPS and PACE. Those units have consistently fallen short of demand.

Earlier this year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the opening of a long-delayed 104-bed therapeutic unit at Bellevue Hospital intended to house detainees with acute mental health needs. The project, however, nearly doubled in cost, climbing from $130 million to $241 million.

The report also stops short of recommending specific changes to the department’s long-criticized disciplinary system for correction officers accused of using excessive force, despite years of findings by the federal monitor documenting staff brutality and weak accountability.

The action plan also calls for a comprehensive analysis of how correction officers are deployed throughout the department, a politically fraught issue that has stymied previous reform efforts.

Several years ago, Steve Martin, the court-appointed federal monitor, hired corrections expert James Austin to conduct a similar staffing review. The report was never made public, and DOC never implemented any sweeping changes.

Today, officers with the most seniority — or the strongest political connections, according to current and former DOC officials — are often assigned away from housing units and into coveted posts at department headquarters in the Bulova building in East Elmhurst, perimeter security or courthouse assignments. That has left many jail housing areas staffed by less experienced officers.

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City Comptroller Mark Levine on Wednesday launched a comprehensive audit of nearly a quarter-billion dollars in no-bid migrant shelter contracts the city awarded to a non-profit group called BHRAGS Home Care whose leaders have been indicted on corruption charges.

The group’s former president, Ronald Tirelus, and its former executive director, Roberto Samedy, were hit with federal charges in March, accused of embezzling more than $1 million from the group and shaking down subcontractors for bribes. At the time, the group was winning contract after contract with the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) to run shelters during the city’s 2022 migrant crisis.

“Today we began the process of auditing DHS’ financial oversight of a number of BHRAGS contracts,” a spokesperson for Levine told The City Reporter. “This audit will help us determine whether DHS’ oversight and control methods are adequate.”

Accusations of bribery involving BHRAGS first surfaced in December 2023, and DHS put the group into a corrective action plan in the fall of 2024, but the former Comptroller Brad Lander — who last month unseated Rep. Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary to represent lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn — did not open up an audit while serving as the city’s fiscal watchdog.

As The City Reporter recently revealed, more than a million taxpayer dollars steered to BHRAGS are unaccounted for, including $1.3 million the Brooklyn U.S. attorney alleges Tirelus and Samedy pocketed, and hundreds of thousands in payments DHS made to BHRAGS for security at the shelters that the security firm says was never paid.

Records show Homeless Services paid BHRAGS $1.1 million for shelter security, but Fort NYS Security claims it got a fraction of that. Prosecutors charged the firm’s president, Edouardo St. Fort, with paying bribes to Tirelus and Samedy to win the subcontract for migrant shelter security.

Levine’s team will look at all expired shelter contracts worth a total of $243 million that DHS awarded to BHRAGS between October 2022 and February 2024, checking to see that all reimbursements DHS paid BHRAGS “were reasonable and consistent with terms and conditions of the contracts, as well as agency and City oversight policy,” the spokesperson said.

And going forward, the comptroller will review DHS’ monitoring of all new contracts “to ensure those oversights are adequate.”

During the migrant wave that began in the spring of 2022 the administration of Mayor Eric Adams halted competitive bidding procedures and began handing out hundreds of emergency no-bid contracts for migrant-related services. More than 210,000 asylum seekers and other migrants were bussed to New York from Republican-led border states. 

Neha Sharma, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, which oversees DHS, said her agency was “pivotal to the investigation into BHRAGS and as soon as we identified inconsistencies with the provider we flagged them for the Department of Investigation which ultimately resulted in the federal indictment.”

Social Services “also took corrective actions which included directing BHRAGS to immediately cut ties with problematic executives and sub-vendors while instating new leadership at the organization,” she said. “We are finalizing a monitoring agreement to ensure independent oversight of the provider and reducing BHRAGS’s portfolio from nine sites under the Adams administration to four sites, of which three are intended to be temporary hotel locations.”

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