"A Deeply Entrenched Criminal Enterprise" - Will Zohran Mamdani Take on a Corrupt & Broken NYPD?

We are deep into the dog days of summer, where leaves wilt from the August heat, families enjoy their last few weeks of vacation before school resumes, and when New York City’s reactionary establishment flails in search of a line of attack against Zohran Mamdani’s surging mayoral campaign.

Cuomo’s hilariously inept campaign has opted for a ham-handed, ’reply all’ social media strategy and floated restrictions on rent stabilized apartments that purport to target Mamdani’s residence in an Astoria walkup but reads like a landlord-lobby plant that will do nothing but boost Zoran’s message on affordability.

The disgraced former governor also decided to make public safety and unconditional support for the NYPD (along with Israel, of course) part of his campaign, attacking Mamdani over his criticism of the police department’s brutal repression of the 2020 George Floyd protests. Moreover, Cuomo vowed to expand the Strategic Response Group, the NYPD’s protest and counter-terrorism unit (those two things are joined for a reason, fwiw) that was created under Bill De Blasio’s flaccid mayoralty and beat the ever-loving shit out of hundreds of New Yorkers in the Summer of 2020.

The less said about Eric Adams, the wildly corrupt current inhabitant of Gracie Mansion, a sex pest of a former cop, corrupt New York state legislator, Trump vassal and preemptive pardon recipient all in one, the better. He’s polling at a whopping seven percent with New Yorkers as of mid-August and is deader than the World Series hopes of the Mets (Juan Soto is Steve Cohen’s latest white collar crime) and the Evil Empire, whose knuckle-dragging fans have been reduced to covering their heads in paper bags.

The short of it is that from now through November 4, criminal justice is at the heart of the 2025 mayoral election in New York City - and for whatever reason, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is running shy on the issue, preferring to stick to housing and affordability issues while getting absolutely dog-walked at the moment by a Satanic combination of Cuomo, Adams and the New York Post. While I respect the work done by the Democratic Socialists of America for Mamdani's winning get-out-the-vote campaign this spring, they’re a little too heavy on transplants for their organizing body and are clearly uncomfortable organizing around policing issues on a citywide scale, despite unrelenting waves of scandals and complaints about NYPD officers rising to highs not seen since Michael Bloomberg/Ray Kelly stop-and-frisk era in the early 2010s .

While this line of attack against a left-of-progressive candidate is unsurprising, as a native New Yorker who’s covered the NYPD on and off since 2007, it is deeply frustrating to see the Mamdani campaign’s reticence to step back and throw a right hook to the jaw of his opponents. During the disastrous tenure of New York City’s Black Frank Rizzo, the NYPD’s internal dysfunction has metastasized as a cabal of Adams cronies seized control of the largest police department in the United States.

One marker of the decline of New York City’s press corps is that law enforcement is no longer reported on in terms of policy or real-world results, be they arrests, traffic citations, convictions, legal settlement payouts or any other tangible metric. Public safety in the United States' largest city is solely reported on through the lens of horse-race politics and related calculations. There was a time when the opposite was true: stop and frisk’s wild abuses from 2004 through 2013 were so obscene, that even in spite of plummeting crime rates, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly could not staunch a grassroots groundswell against the NYPD. For those with short memories or who weren’t around, this is what got Bill De Blasio elected - a promise to change the NYPD, which he promptly turned his back on by bringing Zero Tolerance/Broken Windows fanatic and Giuliani retread Bill Bratton back to run the NYPD and create the SRG.

In his 2021 campaign, Adams ran on ‘restoring order’ to a city scarred by a lethal first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting social and economic disruptions, which led to spikes in violent and property crimes that returned New York City back to….the state of affairs during Michael Bloomberg’s first mayoral term. Not the ‘bad old days of the early 1990s when more than two thousand people were murdered every year, and far below the state of play at the end of Giuliani's Mano Duro era that reactionary ghouls still pine for.

Unsurprisingly, during Eric's trainwreck term, highlighted by a sprawling federal corruption indictment that was short-circuited by Donald Trump this February thanks to a quid pro quo over immigration enforcement, the NYPD has not only gone back to its 1990's zero tolerance tactics, but also become a prime nexus for graft. With apologies to Frank Serpico and the Mollen Commission that delved into systemic narcotics-related corruption in the 1990s, that's old is new again.

Though Keechant Sewell was appointed as his purported commissioner, the NYPD was for all intents and purposes run by disgraced former Chief of Department Phillip Banks III, who resigned abruptly in 2014 while in the crosshairs of a De Blasio-era FBI corruption investigation involving several prominent developers, other NYPD brass, and even Big Bird himself. Banks resigned from his position as deputy mayor for public safety last October shortly after the since-voided federal indictment was handed down.

During this period, Adams and Banks elevated a series of violent and corrupt officers to the NYPD’s upper ranks, who, if you believe a telephone book-sized lawsuit filed by former interim NYPD Commissioner (September-November 2024, more on that later) Tom Donlon last month, ran the department as “a deeply entrenched criminal enterprise” that should be placed under the control of a federal court to enact top-to-bottom reforms.

Let that sink in - this is a remarkable way to describe any government agency, let alone a massive police department with a multi-billion dollar budget, more manpower than some midsized European armies, its own intelligence division, doctors, and hell, even beekeepers.

An FBI veteran and NYPD outsider who publicly clashed with NYPD’s chief spin officer Tarik Sheppard before being forced out by Adams last Fall and replaced by Zionist real estate scion Jessica Tisch, Donlon laid out a stunning series of allegations that, for whatever reason, was treated as a one-day story by local media.

Many of the allegations in the lawsuit have been publicly reported in episodic fashion over the past three years. But others have not. And the substance of Donlon’s allegations are that over the past four years, the NYPD’s already…uh…problematic approaches to public safety - which involve heavy surveillance both of First Amendment activity (active federal consent decree for four-plus decades) and the city’s streets through a massive network of surveillance cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors and increasingly, facial recognition software built by the current commissioner during her stints in NYPD's Intelligence and technology bureaus. There's also the aforementioned stop-and-frisk program, which concentrates overwhelmingly on neighborhoods of color and did not go away despite a 2013 binding court order. All this has now been compounded with naked graft and corruption that will determine who runs the NYPD for years to come, if the current status quo is not challenged by the next mayor.

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Delving into Donlon’s lawsuit, the key players are:

*Phil Banks III, once an inspector and now a senior public safety advisor to Adams but widely considered the NYPD’s ‘shadow commissioner’ since Adams came to office.

During that aforementioned relationship with the corrupt real-estate developers while serving in the De Blasio administration, Banks held diamonds for the duo in his office safe at One Police Plaza and traveled to Israel repeatedly on their dime. Banks resigned from his position in the current administration in October 2024 after the federal corruption indictment.

*Chief of Department (#2 in NYPD org chart) Jeffrey Maddrey, who was set to be disciplined for voiding a former colleague’s gun arrest before Sewell’s discipline was overruled by Eric Adams, leading to her quitting in June2023. Maddrey, who is built like a human refrigerator, resigned in December 2024 while facing lurid accusations of coercing female subordinates to have sex with him in One Police Plaza, under circumstances that border at least on sexual assault, if not outright rape.

Donlon characterizes the tolerance of Maddrey's corruption and sexual assault as indicative of a "deep moral rot at the heart of NYPD leadership." In addition to Commissioner Sewell resigning over Adams' decision to protect Maddrey, a top NYPD lawyer was forced out of her job for attemping to push through the approved punishment for Maddrey voiding his former subordinate's gun arrest.

*Former Commissioner Edward Caban, appointed in June 2023 to succeed Sewell. Caban, a hard-partying cop with a nightlife-loving twin who allegedly posed as his brother in some facsimile of a vaudeville routine to shake down businesses for protection money, made a practice of protecting brutal and abusive cops from punishment by 'retaining' a unprecedented number of disciplinary cases, effectively voiding investigations and even administrative trials proving malfeasance.

[It's worth noting that Jessica Tisch has continued this practice since taking over from Caban last Fall]. Caban quit in September 2024 while under a still-open federal investigation for soliciting bribes from nightclubs, along with other ranking officers the 10th Precinct on Manhattan's West Side.

*Chief of Patrol turned Chief of Department Jonathan Chell, who fatally shot a fleeing, unarmed suspect in the back in 2008 and faced no discipline, despite costing taxpayers a $2.5 million legal settlement after a civil jury found him culpable. Chell, who was promoted to Chief of Department in winter 2024 following Maddrey's resignation, is behind the loosening of the NYPD's vehicular chase policy, which led to a major spike in chase-related injuries and fatalities before being dialed back after public outcry under Mayor Tisch.

That still didn't prevent this obscene incident (video included) earlier in the Spring where a car pursued by NYPD officers into Inwood crashed and caught fire. The driver burned to death, while the pursuing officers drove away from the wreck. Chell also ran the 'khaki pants squad' that is the Crime Reduction Team, Adams' reboot of the NYPD's aggressive/abusive anti-crime squads that have been outed as a brutal, unaccountable unit loaded with problem cops that livestreams body-camera footage directly to Mayor Adams for his own personal enjoyment. In the past two years Chell has also made a habit of showing public support for Donald Trump, appearing on NewsMax in uniform during Trump's October 2024 rally at Madison Square Garden and recently visiting the president's golf course in Bedminster with Kaz Daughtry with his NYPD security detail in tow. Any sort of overt politiciking like what I've outlined here is definitively against NYPD policy, but there are no consequences in Eric Adams' New York City for his friends.

*Tarik Sheppard, the head of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, or its 86-person press office, which dwarfs any Metro news operation in the Five Boroughs. Sheppard came to public attention during the George Floyd protests half a decade ago, when he tackled a demonstrator to the ground and repeatedly tased her.

Sheppard reportedly falsified a promotion for himself, and allegedly took control of Donlon's security detail while he was commissioner. Seems too strange to be true, but that's the NYPD for you. He "retired" in April 2025 - with a falsely inflated pension thanks to that fake promotion - after getting into a a number of heated confrontations with local reporters.

*Kaz Daughtry, yet another cop friend of Adams with a violent past (51 misconduct complaints, 4 substantiated) who rose like a rocket through the NYPD ranks following the 2021 mayoral election from detective all the way to assistant commissioner thanks to Ed Caban greasing the skids. Whatever you want tosay about Kaz, he's come a long way from driving Jeffrey Maddrey around Brooklyn.

He'd already reportedly had more influence in the department as a detective than Caban's predecessor, Keechant Sewell, thanks to his close relationship with Adams. The eight grade promotion was unprecedented, but the voiding of Daughtry's then-active misconduct complaints was par for the course with Commissioner Caban. It soon became clear that Daughtry was the point man for the NYPD's ongoing love affairs with surveillance technology, including a massive expansion of 'drones as first responders' to spy on protests, beachgoers and Labor Day barbecues in Brooklyn's black neighborhoods. Daughtry was shuffled over to City Hall in a reorganization this Spring to fill Banks' shoes and retain proximity to Adams.

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This sordid cast of characters are well known to the NYC press corps close readers of metro news, particularly for their hilarious attempts to intimidate and demean local elected officials, reporters, and New Yorkers critical of the NYPD on social media. That behavior triggered a Department of Investigation probe that found rampant violations of NYPD policy. Once Donlon took over as police commissioner, that behavior ended.

HOWEVER, the real meat of Donlon's legal filing lay out a far more alarming set of allegations.

-NYPD contracts were steered to companies associated with Phil Banks III and Tim Pearson, a retired NYPD commander who worked in a shadowy, free floating role for Eric Adams before resigning after physically assaulting a homeless shelter employee.

-"The promotional process was entirely corrupted" - false promotion lists generated by Banks and Pearson to be marked for approval with a duplicate copy of the Police Commissioner's personal stamp. Donlon learned of this system from a member of his staff, who told him Pearson and Banks' control of the promotions long predated his term at the head of the department. Notably, this allegation dovetails with a separate lawsuit filed by former Chief of Detectives James Essig that claims promotions were sold by Banks and Pearson for up to $15,000 a pop. Donlon not only tried in vain to alert Adams about the fraudulent promotions (which include who knows how many officers), but also informed current Commissioner Tisch about the scheme. Her response? "That was the past and we are moving in a different direction.”

-Overtime was systematically abused and awarded to officers deemed loyal to Adams and his close friends at the head of the NYPD. This includes a female lieutenant who earned tens of thousands in fraudulent overtime that she claims was compensation for being sexually assaulted and extorted by Jeffrey Maddrey - who also allegedly took a cut of the overtime. Other instances of possible overtime fraud include the NYPD's Aviation Unit, which is reportedly under scrutiny by the FBI for falsified time cards, safety records and unqualified pilots.

-On a deeper level, Donlon makes a far more serious allegation about overtime: the fraudulent compensation claims made by NYPD officers under Eric Adams also included the theft of federal grant money. This allegation, which I've heard from NYPD sources firsthand who have witnessed restricted federal counter terrorism grants used on a precinct level to cover hours for extra 'mobile field force' deployments meant to put extra cops on subways and city streets to bolster Adams' tough on crime image.

-Internal Affairs investigations were blocked and stymied systematically for officers deemed loyal to Adams and his departmental allies. This not only includes high-ranking individuals like Daughtry, Chell, and Sheppard but also members of the Critical Response Team, who were protected from disciplinary consequences by Adams and his minions despite their documented penchant for abuse.

-The NYPD's evidence warehouses are an absolute shambles, which should come as no surprise given the December 2022 blaze at one Brooklyn facility that obliterated decades worth of biological evidence, including cold case DNA evidence. Conveniently, this haphazard storage arrangement led to Eric Adams claiming, in response to a serious sexual misconduct civil suit, that his own personnel records were destroyed during Hurricane Sandy. Donlon inspected two of the NYPD's eight warehouses, and found the following

There's far more in the 251 pages of Donlon's suit, including hilarious bits about Phil Banks demanding his IAB case be cleared because Trump won the presidential election and Adams would receive a pardon ("so what about me?") Chell being an alcoholic shirker who "seemed to do as little work as possible" and Daughtry staging a for-the-cameras prostitution sting on a particularly problematic portion of Roosevelt Avenue in Queens that led to minimal arrests and was followed by an increase in crime for the proscribed area.

There are far darker elements as well, including the stunning prevalence of sexual harassment and assault by senior NYPD commanders and the efforts of Adams et al to not only protect such bad actors from consequences, but to promote such commanders.

None of this, of course, deals with the NYPD's systemic and violent suppression of pro-Palestinian demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza (which is the subject of a new class action filed just this week), its chaotic and nearly lethal raid on Columbia University where an officer discharged a round in a crowded hallway filled with unarmed protesters, the ongoing failure of NYPD officers to document rising numbers of stops and frisks, and the aforementioned complaint rates. Meanwhile, legal payouts related to the NYPD are through the roof at $205 million in 2024, the highest total since 2018.

All this is to say - the police department pisses New Yorkers off. It has pissed them off for time immemorial, and the agency is not only hoovering more than ten percent of the city budget (roughly $11 billion at last count) as other agencies are cut to the bone (Parks, anyone???), but is effectively still on a silent strike begun during the 2020 protests. One way of measuring this is traffic enforcement - one of the most basic functions of 'public safety.'

You can also gauge this work slowdown by the number of cops staring at their phones in the middle of the day or hanging out in groups doing nothing, something that prompted Adams to ask New Yorkers to send him 'proof.' Predictably, he was inundated with images of uniformed Candy Crush champions in action.

And even though crime is now at what appear to be historic lows in New York City, it's also worth recalling that the city is well into its post-pandemic recovery and crime rates famously do not rise or fall directly in correlation with police activity or staffing - there are far more factors at play here, per this pre-Trump Department of Justice report.

The point of this long-winded recitation of the NYPD's current state of disarray is that the Adams years have undermined what little credibility the agency had left with much of the city - and even the rank and file, who have been leaving in droves thanks to punishing work schedules and in frustration with the way a former cop has run an agency he purportedly knew so well. Moreover, Donlon and Essig's lawsuits makes clear that there are now an untold number of NYPD commanders and supervisors who were improperly promoted at the expense of other, more qualified officers. That situation has gone completely unaddressed and the press silence on the matter is alarming.

Maddrey, Banks, Daughtry, Chell, Sheppard and the rest are absolute gifts to Mamdani's campaign. So is Cuomo's promise to expand the Strategic Response Group and the department's ranks. Run the rule back over the NYPD's record the past half decade or so. Talk to former brass who've been pushed out by Eric's cabal. Cite the shocking cost of the NYPD's legal settlements, the agency's refusal to do basic police work and enforcement while engaging in insanely risks vehicle pursuits and running interference for illegal ICE arrests for people still in immigration proceedings.

New York City is still a tough place, despite decades of Disneyfication efforts to turn the Five Boroughs into Bloomberg's "luxury product" for the 1 percent. The NYPD as it currently exists does not make New Yorkers' lives better. Use that as a line of attack. New Yorkers love a fighter - and conversely, loathe a coward. Mamdani is anything but.

Still, there's an open question right now as to whether his campaign and the DSA are going to roll over when Cuomo and Adams call them soft, or if they'll get the bat off their shoulders and take a cut at the absolutely putrid meatball that is the NYPD. As they say in baseball, it's getting late awfully early.