A longtime aide to Mayor Eric Adams awarded a lucrative lease to a prominent mayoral donor, reportedly overriding the results of a competitive bidding process earlier this year.
Jesse Hamilton, New York’s deputy commissioner of real estate services, stepped in to give the lease to billionaire Alexander Rovt after another landlord, AmTrust Realty, had won the bidding to provide office space to the city’s Department for the Aging, several sources told Politico.
Hamilton instructed his staff at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services to halt communications with AmTrust, asserting that Department for the Aging commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez favored moving her agency to Rovt’s 14 Wall Street. The deal was worth tens of millions of dollars.
A spokesperson for the agency referred the publication’s questions about the lease to DCAS. AmTrust Realty also declined to comment. Hamilton is a longtime pal and mentee of Adams, who was indicted in September on unrelated bribery charges.
The city had been seeking a new location for the Department for the Aging since before Adams became mayor in 2022. The agency’s employees work across seven non-contiguous floors in a century-old building near City Hall.
Rather than renovating, which the city deemed too expensive, the agency proposed moving, which brought Hamilton’s division at DCAS into the picture. That division controls 22 million square feet worth of leases with private landlords.
City procurement rules usually prohibit city employees from interfering when the city issues a request for proposals. It is not clear whether those rules applied to this particular transaction, and neither DCAS nor City Hall has provided clarification.
Hamilton has a long history with Adams. The mayor had tapped Hamilton as his successor when he left the state Senate to run for Brooklyn borough president. Hamilton lost the seat four years later, but Adams, as mayor, hired him as a DCAS lawyer before elevating him to his current role.
Hamilton is one of several mayoral officials under investigation as part of a probe into the city’s leasing of commercial properties. His phone was recently seized by the Manhattan district attorney’s office as he returned from a personal trip to Japan. Agents also confiscated the phones of several others on the trip including Ingrid Lewis-Martin, a prominent Adams adviser, and Cushman and Wakefield’s Diana Boutross, a commercial broker who works with DCAS on leases.
It is not known if the 14 Wall Street lease is part of that investigation. A spokesperson for District Attorney Alvin Bragg declined Politico’s request for comment.
Hamilton’s reported intervention in the DFTA lease benefited Rovt, a billionaire real estate investor, health care entrepreneur and longtime Adams donor.
Rovt and his wife both gave the legal maximum of $3,850 to Adams’ campaigns in 2013 and 2017, while Rovt gave between $5,000 and $20,000 to a nonprofit Adams oversaw as Brooklyn borough president, according to records Politico obtained. Rovt and his son have donated a combined $3,500 to Adams’ 2025 re-election campaign.
The Rovt family has also given $15,000 to Adams’ legal defense trust as federal investigators probed the mayor’s ties to Turkish diplomats and businesses. Reached by phone by Politico for comment, Rovt declined to answer questions.
After Hamilton overruled the bidding, the Rovt deal went through a public review. A Manhattan community board recommended approval, but later expressed concerns after reporting by The City drew attention to Rovt’s ownership of the building, his past support of Adams, and Hamilton’s role overseeing leasing.
On Oct. 16, a day after receiving the board’s letter, the City Planning Commission, which is controlled by the mayor, approved DFTA’s lease at 14 Wall Street.
The third layer of approval could prove a harder bar for the contract to clear. The City Council has authority to call the lease up for review, and can reject it via a two-thirds majority vote.
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Council member Lincoln Restler, chair of the Council’s Committee on Governmental Operations, has scheduled a hearing next week on DCAS leasing, and co-authored a letter with fellow Council member Christopher Marte seeking more information on DCAS’ process for identifying commercial leasing opportunities.
“The allegation that Jesse Hamilton unilaterally and improperly steered a lucrative city lease to a donor of the mayor is extremely disturbing,” Restler said in a statement. “New Yorkers deserve an administration free of corruption and I hope there will be a swift investigation by appropriate authorities that leads to real accountability.”
— Caroline Handel