NYC Mayor’s Former Aide Lewis-Martin Charged With Bribery
(Bloomberg) -- Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the former top adviser to New York Mayor Eric Adams, was charged with bribery and money-laundering in the latest case to emerge from corruption probes rattling City Hall.
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Lewis-Martin, who resigned from her post earlier this week as one of the most influential people in City Hall, turned herself in to investigators at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office Thursday morning. She is the first of Adams’ closest advisers to be charged since the mayor was indicted on federal corruption charges in September.
“From the moment Lewis-Martin became the second most senior person in City Hall, she abused her position and sold her influence to enrich herself and her family,” prosecutors said Thursday after unsealing an indictment in New York state court. District Attorney Alvin Bragg called her actions “naked cronyism that in and of itself is anathema to public service.”
The indictment accused Lewis-Martin, her son and two New York City real estate investors of engaging in a bribery-conspiracy scheme. The DA alleged that during her time as chief adviser to Adams, Lewis-Martin and her son accepted more than $100,000 from Raizada Vaid and Mayank Dwivedi, who had pending construction permits for two of their properties: the Glass Ceiling rooftop bar near Herald Square and the Hotel on Rivington on the Lower East Side.
“The Mayor’s Chief Adviser accepted cash and other benefits for herself and her son, in exchange for using her authority and influence to expedite her co-conspirators’ construction projects,” said Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber.
Lewis-Martin, wearing a black suit and leopard-print shirt, pleaded not guilty Thursday during an arraignment in New York, as did the other defendants. All four were released on their own recognizance, but the judge ordered each to surrender passports and notify prosecutors if they plan to travel by airplane or leave the state for more than seven days.
Other Probes
The charges don’t involve the mayor, who wasn’t accused of wrongdoing and isn’t a target of the district attorney’s investigation, Bragg said during a press conference. At the arraignment, a prosecutor told the judge that Lewis-Martin is “subject to several investigations in our office.”
Lewis-Martin, who resigned abruptly a month before her planned retirement, has denied wrongdoing. “I have never done anything illegal in my capacity in government,” she said at a news conference Monday, before the indictment was unsealed.
According to prosecutors, Lewis-Martin’s son got a $50,000 check from Dwivedi and a $50,000 check from Vaid last year, which he deposited in a bank account he shared with his mother. Her son, Glenn Martin II, then transferred $50,000 to a company used for his disc-jockey business, Suave Productions, and used that money to issue a $113,000 cashier’s check to purchase a 2023 Porsche, prosecutors alleged.
In exchange, “Lewis-Martin acted as an on-call consultant for Vaid and Dwivedi, serving at their pleasure, to resolve whatever issues they had” on their construction projects, Bragg said.
According to the indictment, Lewis-Martin explicitly instructed the alleged co-conspirators to use the encrypted messaging app Signal to communicate with her. Prosecutors also used wiretaps to track phone conversations of the defendants.
As Vaid and Dwivedi continued to seek Lewis-Martin’s intervention on behalf of their projects, her son asked them to help with his other business ventures, including his request for their financial backing to open a Chick-fil-A franchise, prosecutors said.
Lewis-Martin was one of Adams’ longest-serving confidants. The mayor was charged by federal authorities with fraud and bribery, and since then, more than a half-dozen of his top aides have quit in the face of several investigations of city government. Adams denies the charges.
‘Navigate Red Tape’
Arthur Aidala, Lewis-Martin’s lawyer, called the charges “preposterous.” He said his client had simply “helped a citizen navigate the thick red tape of city government.” The attorney also said the mayor’s longtime aide was being targeted to secure her cooperation in the criminal case against Adams.
“This is a political case, this is a witch-hunt type of case,” Aidala said. Even though Lewis-Martin and her son shared a bank account, he had his own independent relationship with the two real estate investors, Aidala said.
Adams became the first New York City mayor in modern history to be indicted on federal corruption charges in a case brought by the Manhattan US attorney’s office. He is expected to go to trial in April.
The prospect of criminal charges against Lewis-Martin came to light a day after the mayor’s indictment, when investigators seized her phones after she’d landed at John F. Kennedy Airport from a trip to Japan.
--With assistance from Magdalena Del Valle.
(Updates with Lewis-Martin pleaded not guilty and comment from her attorney. A previous version corrected the spelling of Porsche in subhead.)
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