Sunday, March 24, 2024

New York City Has a Problem: Mayor Adams' Buddies in Crime

Arturo Holmes/Getty Images Timothy Pearson is pictured behind Mayor Adams on Jan. 1, 2022

Harry Siegel got it right this time:

Harry Siegel: Adams’ favorite cops have major women problems 

By  | harrysiegel@gmail.com

At least one new lawsuit spotlights a nasty boys-club vibe among the cops in Eric Adams’ tight inner circle.

There’s the suit with a former civilian NYPD employee filed under the Adult Survivors Act, accusing him in graphic detail of sexually assaulting her when she asked for his help in getting promoted in 1993, when he was a police sergeant. Adams, who city lawyers are defending, says “this did not happen” and “I don’t recall ever meeting this person.”

And the suit Graham Rayman scooped in The News, where now retired Sgt. Roxanne Ludemann alleges her career was derailed after she rejected the unwanted advances of retired NYPD Deputy Inspector Tim Pearson.

Pearson, who Adams has tasked with overseeing and controlling the costs of the city’s migrant crisis, is nominally a civilian.

But while he’s drawing a 125K police pension along with his 250K salary from the city’s quasi-public Economic Development Corp., he still acts like a cop. He flashes a badge, barks orders and expects people, including officers, to respect his authority as he’s reportedly controlled all promotions inside the department.

My colleague at The City, Gwynne Hogan, reported last year that he got physical with a female security guard at a migrant shelter who wasn’t quick enough to let him inside, and then had two guards arrested before the DA dropped those ridiculous charges.

Now, according to Ludemann’s suit, Pearson is running Adams’ shadowy new Mayor’s Office of Municipal Services Assessment, based out of a city workplace in Queens and memorably described by Politico’s Joe Anuta as “a squad of NYPD and other staffers who act as governmental private eyes monitoring city agencies.”

While Pearson wasn’t initially running the office, it’s been his “hang out” since it opened according to the suit, which alleges he’s come on to numerous women working there to the point where NYPD bosses took steps to keep him from being alone with them and internally reported their concerns.

Ludemann’s suit claims she turned down Pearson’s persistent offers to become his private driver, a role she was over-qualified for and that’s “a common way women are sexually harassed in the NYPD” by getting male supervisors “one on one access to the female officer.”

After that, it says, she was knocked off of a promotions list, reassigned and placed on shifts that conflicted with her child care obligations. When she complained, an Internal Affairs probe was allegedly weaponized against her.

The suit also names Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks and NYPD Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey as defendants.

Banks abruptly resigned from the NYPD in 2014 after years of letting two guys — who later went to prison for bribing then-Mayor Bill de Blasio with campaign cash and top cops with hookers — hang out and smoke cigars inside his office at One Police Plaza, when they weren’t taking him out to fancy dinners or flying him around the world.

(Banks wrote in the Daily News Op-Ed where he bizarrely announced his own appointment as deputy mayor — published the day after he fired the head of Internal Affairs who’d investigated him before his resignation — that he regretted the association but hadn’t broken any laws or boundaries.)

As to Maddrey, the Adams team made him the department’s top uniformed officer five years after he was docked vacation days for waving off cops responding to a 911 call while he was parked in a car with a former officer who said he’d been beating her — and that she’d been in a long-term affair with him — until she pulled a gun, and then beat her harder after convincing her to put it down: “He choked me up. He threw me from side to side like I was a rag doll.”

Candidate Adams vowed to appoint a woman as his police commissioner, only for his pick to resign after just 18 months of being undermined by these guys — culminating in the mayor personally asking her not to discipline Maddrey, this time for voiding the arrest of an ex-cop who pulled a gun on kids he was chasing.

In the lawsuit alleging a younger Adams acted like “a predator” disguised as a guardian, a footnote points to an interview he gave for a history of the Guardians, the NYPD Black fraternal organization he was a prominent member of in the early 1990s.

He recalled a piece of wisdom passed down by the group’s elders: “You can’t be strong and wrong. If you’re going to speak out, if you’re going to stand up, then you have to understand that you’re going to be under scrutiny all the time.”

Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.

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