Back in the good old days of “honest graft,” William “Boss” Tweed didn’t mess around when it came to enriching himself at the expense of New York City taxpayers. Take the Tweed Courthouse, the opulent Italianate marble edifice next to City Hall that now houses the Department of Education headquarters.
Originally budgeted at $250,000, it wound up costing the city $3.2 million in 1869 — nearly $80 million in today’s dollars. Of that, Tweed pocketed a quarter, which came to $932,858 deposited into his bank account, plus another $104,333 in the account of a printing company Tweed secretly controlled.
His Tammany Hall total take: $1,037,191. That comes to slightly more than $25.5 million today.
Compare that to Eric Ulrich, ex-Mayor Eric Adams’ one-time buildings commissioner who’s set to go on trial Monday, charged with using the power of his office to benefit himself financially via a fairly mundane collection of bribes — compared to Tweed, anyway.
According to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Ulrich did favors for a wide variety of bribe-payers in exchange for Mets season tickets, several thousand dollars to pay off gambling debts, a discounted rental apartment in the Rockaways, artwork and a “bespoke suit.”
Grand total? Around $150,000.
On Monday Ulrich is set to be the first of several veterans of the former administration of Mayor Eric Adams charged with corruption to actually go to trial. But the relatively meager nature of his alleged loot makes Ulrich’s case remarkably similar to the other pending indictments or — in the case of Mayor Adams himself — charges that were dismissed.
Or, as Jimmy Breslin once put it, “Nothing is too small to steal.”
With Ulrich, prosecutors say they will present evidence in the coming weeks that while he was Adams’ buildings commissioner, he took $4,000 in an envelope from two brothers, Anthony and Joseph Livreri, in exchange for helping them resolve problems their Ozone Park pizzeria was having with the buildings and health departments. Both Livreris have pleaded guilty and admitted to handing Ulrich the cash, though their lawyer insists they are not cooperating with the government.
During the trial, prosecutors will also allege Michael Mazzio, owner of Mike’s Heavy Duty Towing, funded Mets season tickets for Ulrich worth “nearly $10,000.” Mazzio will be sitting at the table as a co-defendant with Ulrich, charged with bribing Ulrich to get him to resolve problems he was having with his tow company’s license.
Wheel and Deal
Other members of Adams’ inner circle, like Ulrich, are charged with obtaining an eclectic array of payments to sell their services.
Ingrid Lewis-Martin allegedly used her powerful position as Adams’ chief advisor at City Hall to eliminate bureaucratic snags for a wide variety of bribe payers, including a movie production firm that wanted her to kill a proposed bike lane on a street their trucks often traversed.
In exchange, Braggs’ prosecutors allege the firm, Broadway Stages, arranged to get her a walk-on part in a TV series about a Harlem drug lord. Developers she was helping resolve Buildings Department issues steered $100,000 to her son to buy a Porsche, they allege, and they say she also snagged a $3,000 pair of diamond earrings to help another developer dodge city inspections.
Then there’s Frank Carone, once Adams’ chief of staff and a longtime close associate of the one-term mayor. Carone allegedly got his personal credit card paid for via a bribery scheme Brooklyn federal prosecutors say was routed through a law firm where he was a partner. They allege he “directed” a city commissioner to steer a migrant shelter contract to a hotel owner who’d hired his law firm as a consultant. Soon after, the owner was awarded a $6 million, no-bid emergency contract.
Both Lewis-Martin and Carone have pleaded not guilty and say they will fight their respective cases in court. Their former benefactor, Mayor Adams, was planning to do the same regarding his own corruption case when in February 2025 he got a sudden gift from the Trump Justice Department.
In late 2024 federal prosecutors charged that Adams had received some $90,000 in free or discounted airfare and hotel stays along with thousands of dollars in illegal campaign donations from representatives of the Turkish government. In exchange, the charges alleged, Adams helped smooth out a dispute with the fire department over a new Turkish consulate building in Manhattan and other favors.
Adams ridiculed the charges as much ado about nothing, but at the start of 2025 he was nevertheless headed for trial. Then the Trump Justice Department intervened, asking the court to dismiss the case in exchange for the mayor’s cooperation in the administration’s immigration crackdown.
In the end, Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho reluctantly dismissed the case, but made a point of stating the transaction “smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
Non-Jury Trial
Until this week, New Yorkers have not had the chance to see any member of the Adams administration go to trial. And in this case, no jury will get to weigh in.
Ulrich and Mazzio asked for a non-jury trial in which Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Paul Conviser will decide whether they are guilty or not. He agreed.
Judge Conviser was for years a senior counsel to former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver before Silver was convicted in a corruption case involving getting secret referral fees for steering asbestos-related cancer cases to his law firm.
In 2012, Judge Conviser handled another high-profile non-jury case: the trial of James Lomma, owner of New York Crane and Equipment Corporation, who was facing manslaughter and other charges after one of his giant cranes collapsed into an Upper East Side building and killed the crane operator and a worker standing below.
During a 10-week trial prosecutors in then-Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office presented witnesses and other documentary evidence they said showed Lomma was negligent in hiring a cheaper but unqualified Chinese company to perform repairs on the crane — a choice that prosecutors argued ultimately resulted in the deadly collapse.
In the end Judge Conviser did not agree, acquitting Lomma of all charges without explanation.
The victims’ families were furious at the judge’s decision but later received a measure of closure when a jury hearing a civil lawsuit found Lomma liable and awarded them $96 million, later reduced to $35 million on appeal.
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