Case Explained: Eric Adams and His Aides Are Not Out of Legal Trouble – Legal Perspective

Eric Adams is making the most of his last moments in office. He’s hopscotching the world — Mexico, Israel, Albania, Uzbekistan — and talking up his many “dream job” offers. Most important, he’s walking out of Gracie Mansion a free man after making nice with Trump’s Justice Department.

His former aides aren’t quite so lucky. Many of them are still facing criminal prosecution, lawsuits in state court, federal and local investigations, or some combination of all of the above. And while Adams is all grips and “What, me worry?” grins in public, he continues to have some legal exposure of his own. (Adams’s spokesperson did not have a comment for this story.) Here, a rundown of some of the outstanding legal cases against Adamsworld that will outlive his administration.

The mayor was barely four months into his term when he told his Buildings commissioner, Eric Ulrich, “Watch your back and watch your phones.” Sixteen months after that, Ulrich became the first major Adams official to be charged with felonies. Five separate indictments portrayed Ulrich at the center of a wild — and wildly corrupt — world that included an illegal casino, a former Mafia hangout, an Ozone Park pizza joint, and $150,000 worth of alleged bribes, such as a painting from Salvador Dalí’s last apprentice. It’s been a lot to unpack. A trial date still hasn’t been set for Ulrich, who pleaded not guilty.

Former G-man Tom Donlon was the interim police commissioner for just two months and 11 days. That was more than enough time, he later told me, to conclude that Adams and his NYPD cronies had turned the department into a wide-reaching “criminal enterprise.” Donlon sued them in federal court in July. Adams and a former deputy commissioner hit back, accusing Donlon of suffering from cognitive issues. Donlon filed a second, $10 million defamation claim. The cases are both considered long shots in legal circles, but they haven’t been filed in isolation — at least nine former cops have also filed suit against Adams’s handpicked police chiefs, and they include allegations of selling promotions for $15,000 a pop.

One of those chiefs is Jeffrey Maddrey, who was accused, going back nearly a decade, of harassing female cops who worked for him. That didn’t stop him from being promoted to chief of department, the NYPD’s top uniformed officer. Maddrey’s career finally ended last December when a member of his staff, Lieutenant Quathisha Epps, alleged in a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Maddrey paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime in part to maintain her silence about his repeated sexual assaults of her at One Police Plaza. (Maddrey’s attorney insists the whole thing was consensual.) Epps’s lawyer has promised to sue Maddrey and has two more years to do so. Meanwhile, the Feds are “lining up star witnesses,” according to the New York Post, in their sex-for-overtime case against him.

On September 4, 2024, the FBI seized the phones of brothers David, Philip, and Terence Banks. David was school chancellor, Philip was the deputy mayor for public safety, and Terence was a super-connected consultant, specializing in companies looking to do business with the city. The phones were seized, according to the New York Times, because public-corruption prosecutors were hunting for evidence of bribery. (A few weeks later, David married first deputy mayor Sheena Wright, who also had her phone seized.) Fast-forward to December 2025: One of Terence’s clients was indicted on commercial-bribery and fraud charges in the alleged theft of millions of dollars. That may not be the end of the investigation.

What would you do for a cameo on Godfather of Harlem and a few thousand bucks’ worth of crab cakes and seafood salad? Especially if a little cash was thrown in? According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, that was enough of an incentive for Adams’s chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, to try to speed up building permits and undo a bike-lane plan that offended her generous friends. For a slightly higher price — $50,000 — she allegedly fast-tracked approvals for a Queens karaoke bar. (Her son, a wannabe rapper, used the cash to help purchase a Porsche.) Lewis-Martin insisted on her lawyer’s radio show that “we have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires” an investigation. The DA disagreed. His probe into an alleged “series of bribery conspiracies” also swept up Adams protégé Jesse Hamilton and fundraiser Tian Ji Li. There’s no trial date yet.

Former NYPD inspector and longtime Adams crony Tim Pearson had a rather vague portfolio as a “senior adviser” in City Hall. He managed to get himself embroiled in all sorts of scandals while in the job, from double-dipping with a local casino company, to allegedly demanding “crumbs” from migrant-care contracts, to assaulting security guards at a migrant shelter. (The city had to pay $350,000 to settle that case.) But it was Pearson’s role as a sort of shadow police commissioner that continues to dog him. A series of interlocking lawsuits allege that Pearson sexually harassed an NYPD sergeant, interfered with the subsequent Internal Affairs Bureau investigation, and then retaliated against the cops who stood up for her. As of last February, the city had paid Pearson’s lawyers $300,000 to defend him.

Adams won a close election for mayor, thanks to $10 million in public matching funds. One teeny-tiny problem, according to the Feds: He obtained that money illegally by leveraging foreign, bogus “straw” donations. That federal case is famously over, but the New York City Campaign Finance Board is still investigating. That includes looks into lavish fundraisers orchestrated by Adams aide Winnie Greco, she of the money-stuffed-in-the-potato-chip-bag fame. Depending on what it finds, the CFB may demand that $10 million back.

She was a cop looking for advice from a senior officer. He started rubbing his crotch and demanded a blowjob. That’s the crux of what Lorna Beach-Mathura claims happened between her and Adams in 1993. (He denies the allegation.) She sued the mayor in 2024 under the Adult Survivors Act, and that suit has been winding its way through the courts. So far, the city’s Law Department has been defending Adams, and City Hall’s expectation is that it will continue to do so during Zohran Mamdani’s administration.