Prime Adams administration official Jesse Hamilton pressured town authorities’s high actual property dealer to place one in every of his buddies in control of its dealings with town, who in flip used that function to sideline a competitor and maximize her personal commissions, in response to 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 industrial leases between town authorities and personal property house owners.
In September, investigators seized telephones and different digital units from Hamilton, Boutross and Ingrid Lewis-Martin, then Adams’ chief adviser at Metropolis Corridor, after they landed at JFK getting back from a visit to Japan.
The seizures had been a part of a probe led by the Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace scrutinizing doable corruption within the metropolis’s industrial property leasing sector, in response to sources. No fees have been filed, however Lewis-Martin was indicted by the Manhattan DA final month on bribery fees unrelated to the industrial 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 Companies, beneath which each companies are presupposed to share within the commissions brokerage companies can web from locking in leases between town and personal property house owners.
JRT’s go well with claims Boutross, upon taking up 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 line with JRT’s go well with, Hamilton, whose DCAS submit comes with oversight of town authorities’s industrial leases, informed Cushman & Wakefield in late December 2023 it will lose its fee offers together with his company except 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 function 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,” in response to the go well with.
This was allegedly executed 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 means of DCAS’s places of work and informed workers there, “Remember that the Bronx Logistics Deal is only a C&W deal!” in response to 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.
Finally, throughout an April 8, 2024 assembly, an official at Cushman & Wakefield informed JRT they might now 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 stated 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 Revealed: January 7, 2025 at 4:28 PM EST
