In the autumn of 2023, as the warm summer breezes began to fade, Jocelyn Strauber, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, detected a distinct chill emanating from the office of Mayor Eric Adams.
Strauber had been nominated for the job by Adams. But as the head of the agency charged with investigating municipal corruption, she was committed to DOI’s longstanding tradition of independence from City Hall, one that dates back to its inception during the legendary scandals of Tammany Hall.
In her first years on the job, Strauber was able to communicate and meet with the highest levels of the Adams administration, including the mayor himself. That changed in September 2023, when multiple criminal investigations into the administration began to break into public view.
“At some point those meetings stopped. Or they certainly became, to the extent that those meetings were warm and cordial, they became less so,” Strauber said during an interview last week with THE CITY.
With no word from Mayor Zohran Mamdani on whether he’d keep her in the job, Strauber exited on Jan. 17, leaving behind an extraordinary track record as the first DOI commissioner in history to run a corruption investigation that led to the indictment of the mayor himself. The last time a sitting mayor faced such charges was in 1871, two years before the formation of what was then called the Office of The Commissioners of Accounts, now known as the Department of Investigation.
Confirmed by the City Council in January 2021 immediately after nomination, Strauber arrived at DOI to learn to her surprise that her own agency and the FBI had begun investigating the mayor a few months earlier — before Adams was even elected. A former prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, Strauber was now overseeing a behind-the-scenes investigation of the man who had appointed her.
The allegations were diverse. Bribery. Kickbacks. Campaign finance fraud. Already, the phone of a campaign supporter Adams would later appoint building commissioner was being secretly recorded. In the coming months, the FBI and DOI would obtain dozens of search warrants and confiscate phones of the highest levels of the mayor’s administration. Targets would ultimately include Adams’ Chief Advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, her husband, Schools Chancellor David Banks, his brother, Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Philip Banks III, Police Commissioner Edward Caban and a half dozen other senior mayoral aides.
At first, the existence of the growing investigations remained entirely out of the public’s view.
Strauber, meanwhile, communicated on a regular basis with City Hall, at first with First Deputy Mayor Wright and the mayor’s general counsel, Brendan McGuire, who had urged Adams to hire her. In early 2023, she began direct conversations with the mayor himself.
“We decided, you know, this position has a direct report to the mayor. There’s no reason you can’t sit down and have a meeting with the mayor. It’s good for him to understand generally what the office needs and what it does,” she said. “You don’t have to be isolated from him.”
In the spring of 2023, as tens of thousands of asylum seekers flooded New York City’s already overburdened shelter system, Strauber attended a meeting with Adams and other top aides. During that meeting, she recommended that DOI hire an independent monitor to oversee the growing number of no-bid emergency contracts the administration was awarding to handle the wave of migrants.
“The mayor,” she said, “was very receptive to that ask.” Soon after, DOI hired the accounting firm of KPMG to begin monitoring all migrant-related contracts. (The firm’s final report has yet to be issued).
‘Outsiders Now’
Then the winds began to shift.
On the afternoon of Sept. 23, 2023, Strauber stood next to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg at a press conference announcing a sweeping indictment of Adams’ building commissioner Eric Ulrich on bribery charges spanning his role in City Hall and his previous job as a City Councilmember. Ulrich had allegedly accepted cash and Mets tickets to do favors for, among others, a developer and a tow truck firm owner. (Ulrich pleaded not guilty to all charges).
During the press conference, Bragg made clear the investigation was ongoing. Strauber declared, “We will pursue bribery at any level of New York City government to the full extent of the law.”
The fact that the Ulrich matter wasn’t the end of Adams’ troubles became clear early in the morning of Nov. 2, 2023, when the mayor suddenly canceled meetings in Washington, D.C. and flew back to New York City after the home of his campaign treasurer, Brianna Suggs, was publicly raided by DOI and the FBI.
The cold, hard truth arrived a week later when law enforcement approached Adams after a speaking engagement in Greenwich Village and confiscated his phones. From there, while some high-level City Hall officials continued to respond to the agency, overall communications between DOI and City Hall changed dramatically.
“To the extent there had been opportunities to get the administration’s support on things that we wanted to do, it was going to be much more difficult,” Strauber told THE CITY. “It was more of an internal sense I had, ‘OK, we’re going to really be outsiders now’.”
This shift in dynamic was in many ways a predictable result of the independent role DOI has always embraced.
Speaking with THE CITY, former DOI Commissioner Mark Peters says he experienced this dynamic shift first-hand when DOI investigated the man who appointed him, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and determined that he had violated city ethics rules by directly soliciting six-figure donations from individuals and lobbyists seeking favorable treatment from his administration for a non-profit he controlled. (De Blasio was investigated by the Manhattan U.S. attorney and DA, but was not charged with any crimes).
“When you’re asked to investigate City Hall, when you get information suggesting there’s wrongdoing, you have to do it, but it can create some awkward moments,” Peters said. “In theory, DOI should just do the investigation, and the mayor should leave you alone. But mayors, being human, can often be very unhappy about this. That doesn’t stop you from doing your job, but it creates pressure on doing our job.”
From Strauber’s position, each investigation was based on the facts, and the agency was obligated to pursue those facts wherever they may lead.
“I understood coming here that that was my job — to participate in investigations to the fullest extent that the facts bore them out. And that’s what we did,” she said.
“So yes, there was a time early on that I realized that this case [against Adams] was going to move forward. There was a point when we seized the mayor’s phones, and I appreciated that my relationship with the mayor and this administration was going to be totally different going forward. And that was sort of a moment of realization that this job was going to be less of a collaboration and partnership to prevent corruption in the city than perhaps it might have been.”
Adams’ indictment, she noted, “may be extraordinary in terms of the history of this city, but I think as a prosecutor it was something I was prepared to do because that is what the job required.”
‘New Yorkers Expect Better’
On Sept. 26, 2024, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, Assistant Director of the FBI’s New York Office James E. Dennehy and Strauber announced Adams’ indictment on bribery and campaign finance charges, alleging he’d obtained $120,000 in free air fare and hotel upgrades arranged by officials in the Turkish government in return for helping them navigate fire inspectors at the Turkish consulate’s new building. Adams was also charged with soliciting and accepting illegal campaign donations — including some choreographed by the Turkish government — in his quest to obtain $10 million in matching funds for his 2021 campaign.
The scope of DOI’s involvement in the investigation now became clear.
The indictment referenced thousands of text messages and conversations gleaned from the dozens of phones seized by the FBI and DOI, including at least six belonging to Adams himself. The chats revealed the mayor assisted donors with City Hall obstacles. Endless conversations took place about obtaining donations from suspect donors.
In her remarks to the assembled press, Strauber alleged that the man who’d nominated her three years earlier had “abused his power and position for nearly a decade, obtaining personal benefits and illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals.” His conduct, she alleged, “compromised his integrity as an elected official.”
“New Yorkers,” she added, “expect better.”
Strauber told THE CITY she made a point of appearing at this press conference “so it was clear that this agency was not afraid to stand up and be part of a case like that.”
Adams, who was running for re-election in a June Democratic primary just nine months away, immediately denied wrongdoing.
Three months later, Manhattan DA Bragg unsealed an indictment against Chief Advisor Lewis-Martin, charging her with using her powerful position as the mayor’s closest confidante to resolve Buildings Department issues for two businessmen who’d funded a new Porsche for her son.
“I’m not playing. Your sister has to be rich!” Lewis-Martin was heard saying, referring to herself, on one secretly recorded call, according to prosecutors.
That indictment, and a second set of charges unsealed against Lewis-Martin in August, highlighted a distinct feature of the Adams administration: the mayor’s insistence on surrounding himself with longtime cronies who’d been by his side earlier in his career as he rose to the top of Gotham’s heap.
Speaking with THE CITY, Strauber declined to address the allegations against Lewis-Martin or any other defendant with a pending case, but noted that choosing to hire aides based on loyalty rather than strictly on merit creates a danger zone for the enforcement of ethics rules.
“In looking back over the past four years, I think one thing comes into sharp focus: When top elected officials are surrounded by fiercely loyal senior officials, that kind of relationship creates an obstacle for City employees to come forward and report allegations of wrongdoing that they may witness,” she said. “I think it is more difficult for the other people around you to say, ‘Hey wait a minute’.”
Another tactic Adams embraced that may have contributed to the pervasiveness of corruption accusations in the mayor’s office and across city agencies was his creation of two new units at the start of his tenure: the Mayor’s Office of Risk Management and the Mayor’s Office of Services Assessment. Both were supposed to monitor city contracts and services for potential waste and fraud.
Strauber says the administration appeared to be relying on the new units to flag problems without informing the public, although she did note that their staff did, at times, refer some matters to DOI.
“I think both of those things are mechanisms to basically get your insiders to kind of whisper in your ear about where your problems are,” she said. “I’m not saying that’s impermissible. It’s obviously fine for the mayor to do something like that. But as an expenditure of money with such limited resources? That money should have gone to us so we could have used those resources to do more work, to do the proactive work and report on it in a transparent way. That was not their intention.”
Instead, some members of the administration preferred to have these units “see around the corners” and keep ethical issues that arose behind the scenes in-house.
“That’s not how the world works, because no matter how much seeing around the corners you’re doing, if there are people engaged in wrongdoing, they’re going to do that and they are going to have to be called out,” Streuber told THE CITY. “There’s no way to sort of keep it all under wraps and fix it. But that is how I think [some Adams’ aides] thought about oversight.”
‘By the Book’
In the end, the roller-coaster ride that was Adams tumultuous tenure at City Hall did not result in the full public display of all the evidence DOI, the FBI and the Manhattan U.S. attorney had assembled to present to a jury of Adams’ peers. Instead, the Justice Department under President Trump stepped in to change the course of events.
After the indictment was unsealed, Adams’ attorneys began pressing the Justice Department to toss the case. In February 2025, DOJ did just that, filing a dismissal motion in exchange for the mayor’s cooperation with the administration’s aggressive campaign to deport undocumented people.
“One night it became clear that they were going to make a motion, that the DOJ was going to move to dismiss the case. We had a call with the whole team,” Strauber recounted.
“What we said to them, the work that we did, the indictment, which is really the main public document out there, made very clear to the public…what the mayor had done, at least allegedly.”
On April 2, Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho approved the dismissal, but not without expressing some frustration about the position he’d been put in.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of a prosecution in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Ho wrote.
Well before then, Acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon had resigned in protest, as had the entire federal prosecutorial team who brought the case. Four deputy mayors had also resigned in protest, and Adams’ standing tanked in public opinion polls.
By April, Adams withdrew from the Democratic primary to run as an independent before dropping out of the race entirely in late September. A political career that started in 2007 in the State Senate, moved to the Brooklyn Borough presidency and culminated in a term at City Hall was now over.
In his final days in office, Adams ramped up his claim, without offering any evidence to support it, that his indictment was the result of the Biden administration “weaponizing” the justice system to bring him down due to his criticism of Biden’s border policies.
But speaking with THE CITY, Strauber points out that in moving to have a judge dismiss the charges against Adams, Trump’s Justice Department did not question the merits of the case.
“It was very clear that this [dismissal] had nothing to do with how this investigation was conducted, with the integrity of it, with the integrity of the people involved in the case. And I think the fact that it was a purely political decision, I think that made it easier for us to say we did everything we could do in that case. No one even tried to suggest, well there was some problem with the evidence or there was something untoward that occurred in the way searches were conducted. This case was done by the book.”
With Adams gone from City Hall and Zohran Mamdani at the helm, several pending indictments and investigations remain active. But Mamdani chose a different path, and Strauber, who made clear she would have enthusiastically stayed on, issued a Jan. 7th email to staff announcing her resignation.
“It has become clear to me that there is no prompt path forward to my remaining in this role permanently,” she wrote. “In light of the nature of our work, and our critical independence, continuing in an interim role as the new Administration makes its determination is not feasible.”
Asked why he accepted her resignation, Mayor Mamdani responded, “We are putting together an administration that is dedicated to building a new era in our city, and so we are continuing to make decisions on retention and recruitment. We appreciate her service.”
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