Red Flags Abound in Adams Administration Real Estate Probe

At some point, prosecutors might reveal damning details from their probe of the city’s real estate operation. But it already looks bad — even though an early sign of trouble has been overlooked.

More on that shortly.

First, let’s piece together the clues revealed by the lawsuit JRT Realty just filed against Cushman & Wakefield. It concerns Cushman & Wakefield’s choice of Diana Boutross to lead its account with DCAS, the city agency that leases private space for city government.

Cushman and JRT handled city office leases totaling 11 million square feet. Boutross was a retail broker with “virtually no experience” in government office deals, according to the lawsuit, and had not formally applied to lead the lucrative, 10-person DCAS account — although 10 other Cushman & Wakefield brokers did.

But she was picked anyway because DCAS official Jesse Hamilton threatened to drop Cushman & Wakefield if it chose someone else, the brokerage’s former tri-state head John Santora and managing principal Todd Schwartz told JRT, according to the lawsuit.

That’s red flag No. 1. City officials don’t make demands like that, and retail brokers don’t get office-leasing gigs they didn’t apply for, unless something funny is going on.

Red flag No. 2: Hamilton and Boutross later vacationed in Japan together. Also on the trip was Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who like Hamilton was a senior city official and long-time pal of the mayor. We know about the trip because, upon their Sept. 27 return to JFK, investigators seized all of their phones. Lewis-Martin has since been indicted on unrelated bribery charges.

At the risk of stating the obvious, vacationing with someone in Japan is not like meeting someone for coffee. What were they doing there? Did the public officials really pay their own way, as one lobbyist on the trip said? Japan is among the world’s most expensive countries to visit.

But wait, there’s more. DCAS was in contract to buy the Bronx Logistics Center. The potential $750 million deal, which preceded Boutross’ appointment, would yield a large commission for her team and brokerage if it closed — but even larger if JRT were denied its usual 33.75 percent split.

“Hamilton regularly walked through DCAS’s offices and openly announced to DCAS lease negotiators, ‘Remember that the Bronx Logistics deal is only a C&W deal!’” JRT’s lawsuit states.

Red flags 3 and 4: Why would Hamilton not want Boutross’ team to split the commission with JRT? And why did Hamilton film a promotional video for the Bronx property when the city was negotiating to buy it? Was there something in it for him?

It doesn’t help Hamilton’s cause that the central narrative of Adams administration scandals is one of the mayor’s buddies running amok, apparently believing they were untouchable because the mayor would protect them. That very dynamic had led Adams’ first police commissioner to quit, but Adams had to back off after being indicted.

Now, about that forgotten scandal.

Despite ample media coverage of the investigations, indictments, resignations, raids, seizures, hearings and lawsuits, no one has mentioned an early sign of Hamilton’s character: He used affordable housing as a campaign office, paying his own nonprofit rent from his campaign fund.

Will Bredderman broke the story for Crain’s in 2018, when Hamilton was a state senator and I was Bredderman’s editor. For some reason, Google searches do not readily find it. But it’s still online.

Bredderman discovered that Hamilton’s nonprofit had purchased 284 New York Avenue in Crown Heights with a low-interest mortgage from the city that required the property to be rented to low-income tenants.

Yet Hamilton used it for his campaigns and as a regular meeting place for his Democratic club. Good-government group Common Cause later demanded an investigation. Instead, Hamilton was hired by the Adams administration at DCAS and later given an 18 percent raise.

But hey, at least he had some real estate experience, right?