High Adams administration official Jesse Hamilton pressured town authorities’s prime actual property dealer to place considered one of his pals in control of its dealings with town, who in flip used that position to sideline a competitor and maximize her personal commissions, based on a bombshell criticism filed late Monday.
The criticism was introduced by the competitor, JRT, which alleges that Cushman & Wakefield government Diana Boutross,was picked at Hamilton’s “behest” in late 2023 to take over brokering business leases between town authorities and personal property homeowners.
In September, investigators seized telephones and different digital gadgets from Hamilton, Boutross and Ingrid Lewis-Martin, then Adams’ chief adviser at Metropolis Corridor, after they landed at JFK coming back from a visit to Japan.
The seizures have been a part of a probe led by the Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace scrutinizing attainable corruption within the metropolis’s business property leasing sector, based on sources. No expenses have been filed, however Lewis-Martin was indicted by the Manhattan DA final month on bribery expenses unrelated to the business property dealings; she has pleaded not responsible.
Each Cushman & Wakefield and JRT are on a contract with Hamilton’s company, the Division of Citywide Administrative Providers, beneath which each corporations are imagined to share within the commissions brokerage corporations can web from locking in leases between town and personal property homeowners.
JRT’s go well with claims Boutross, upon taking on Cushman & Wakefiedl’s account with town, sought to “destroy the reputation” of JRT and acquire that agency’s commissions. She was not as a defendant within the lawsuit.
In keeping with JRT’s go well with, Hamilton, whose DCAS put up comes with oversight of town authorities’s business leases, instructed Cushman & Wakefield in late December 2023 it might lose its fee offers along with his company until Boutross was put in control of the DCAS account.
He issued that directive after C & W’s earlier supervisor on the account, Robert Giglio, introduced he was retiring.
As soon as Boutross was within the high-powered position on the agency, Cushman & Wakefield “engaged in a premeditated campaign to block JRT from the DCAS account and destroy JRT’s reputation with DCAS, other City agencies, brokers, and landlords,” based on the go well with.
This was allegedly achieved to dam JRT from competing with Cushman & Wakefield in an upcoming aggressive bid course of, in addition to to gather JRT’s 33.75% fee on offers, together with on the Bronx Logistics Middle, a warehouse in Hunts Level that town authorities was in talks to purchase for $750 million.
Though JRT was on the Logistics Middle deal, round March 2024 Boutross allegedly blocked them from being concerned and didn’t loop them on communications.
Round this time, Hamilton repeatedly walked by way of DCAS’s places of work and instructed workers there, “Remember that the Bronx Logistics Deal is only a C&W deal!” based on the go well with.
“If the Bronx Logistics Deal had closed, Boutross would have earned millions of dollars in commissions under the DCAS Contract, which was secured by C&W’s designation of JRT as its M/WBE subcontractor,” the criticism reads.
Ultimately, throughout an April 8, 2024 assembly, an official at Cushman & Wakefield instructed JRT they might not be working with DCAS, blaming this on “performance issues” and saying they got here on the request of DCAS.
The go well with comes after Councilmember Lincoln Restler questioned Commissioner Louis Molina at an October oversight listening to.
“There was a contractor, JRT Realty, who has been working with Cushman & Wakefield for years, providing excellent services with Cushman while Bob Gigilo was the account lead,” Restler mentioned on the listening to. “And since Diana Boutross came in, the subcontractors were slashed, the M/WBE contractor was slashed.”
Molina replied that he was “being informed by my team that that was not the case.”
Neither DCAS nor Hamilton instantly responded to a request for remark.
Initially Printed: January 7, 2025 at 4:28 PM EST
