New York

The Mayor Had a Photo of a Fallen Officer. Was His Story About It True?

Published

2 years ago

July 6, 2023

The Mayor Had a Photo of a Fallen Officer. Was His Story About It True?

In Mayor Eric Adams’s first month in office, he was confronted with a tragic crisis: the deaths of two New York City police officers who were responding to a domestic disturbance in Harlem.

Mr. Adams, a former police captain who campaigned as a Democratic crime fighter, quickly sought to humanize the killings. The loss of the officers, he said, reminded him of the 1987 line-of-duty death of a friend, Officer Robert Venable.

“I still think about Robert,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference at City Hall. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet.”

A week later, Mr. Adams posed for a portrait in his office, holding a wallet-size photo of Officer Venable after The New York Times had requested to see it. Mr. Adams has since repeated the moving anecdote in media interviews and at a Police Academy ceremony last June, where he again displayed Officer Venable’s picture.

But the weathered photo of Officer Venable had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet. It had been created by employees in the mayor’s office in the days after Mr. Adams claimed to have been carrying it in his wallet.

The employees were instructed to create a photo of Officer Venable, according to a person familiar with the request. A picture of the officer was found on Google; it was printed in black-and-white and made to look worn as if the mayor had been carrying it for some time, including by splashing some coffee on it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Two former City Hall aides, who asked not to be identified, said they were informed about the manipulated photo last year, not long after it was created.

Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, did not dispute that Mr. Adams had shown a photo to The Times and at the police ceremony that had been recently created by a City Hall aide.

Mr. Levy, however, insisted that Mr. Adams had carried a photo of Officer Venable for decades, and provided the names of several former transit police colleagues who said in interviews that Mr. Adams and Officer Venable had indeed been friends.

The person who directly ordered the altered photo to be created, according to the person who was familiar with the matter, said she had no comment when reached by The Times. She said she had been told to direct all media inquiries to Mr. Levy.

Mr. Levy criticized The Times for what he characterized as a “campaign to paint the mayor as a liar.”

“The Times’s efforts to attack the mayor here would be laughable if it were not so utterly offensive,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.

After releasing the statement, Mr. Levy ignored repeated requests to elaborate about the authenticity of the photo. He also did not respond to questions about whether the photo was made to look old in part by staining it with coffee.

As mayor, Mr. Adams frequently shares personal recollections, helping him connect to his working-class base. Many of his stories are difficult to verify, and at times, he has been caught stretching the truth. The mayor, for example, said he was vegan before being forced to admit that he eats fish; he said that a story he told in a 2019 commencement address about intimidating a neighbor was true, but acknowledged it did not happen to him.

More recently, Mr. Adams’s claims to have sold his stake in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn were once again contradicted by recent financial disclosure forms that show he still retains ownership.

But in his retelling of carrying the photo of Officer Venable, the mayor and his staff went a step further. City resources were used to create a photo that Mr. Adams surely knew had not been in his possession for decades; city employees were pressured to get involved.

In the initial interview with The Times in his office, Mr. Adams said that the photo was “always in my wallet until my wallet got too bulky,” and added that he more recently had been keeping it in a money clip.

“He was a very dear friend and it keeps me committed,” he said.

Mr. Adams brought up the photo in at least two television interviews last April, as he discussed his grief following the deaths of the officers in Harlem, Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera.

“I understand the pain,” Mr. Adams said on News 12. “I carry around a picture of Robert Venable, my close friend, that was shot several years ago during my early days of police, and I always have Robert’s picture. The pain never dissipates.”

At the June 2022 Medal Day ceremony at the Police Academy, he again held up Officer Venable’s photo, referring to him again as “one of my closest friends.”

“Robert died when he was shot in the head when responding to a job,” the mayor said. “We were going away that week and going on vacation together.”

Officer Venable’s daughter, Januari Venable, who was 8 when her father was killed, said that she did not recall ever meeting Mr. Adams until this year. Ms. Venable, now 44, said in an interview in early spring that she was surprised to learn that the mayor was carrying a picture of her father.

“All I can say is that as far as being in his wallet or not, the fact that people still think of my dad all these years later — whatever the meaning behind it — it makes me thankful that he’s not being forgotten,” Ms. Venable said.

Five police officers who knew Mr. Adams and Officer Venable in the early 1980s did recall that the men were friends. Randolph Blenman, a former police officer, said the two worked together and socialized.

“There weren’t many young Black officers,” he said. “Those of us who came on after the fiscal crisis of the 1970s — we basically stuck together.”

Benjamin Andrews said that he was Mr. Adams’s partner on the transit force, and they were friends with Mr. Venable: “We worked together, we partied together.” Cliff Hollingsworth, another officer, said he remembered Mr. Adams “taking Robert’s death very personally.”

Januari Venable said that she wanted her father to be remembered for giving back to the community and setting up basketball hoops at a local park in Brooklyn so that children had a place to play. The park was later named for him.

Ms. Venable, who lived with her grandparents after her father’s death, said that if the mayor stretched the truth about carrying the photo in his wallet, it was possible that he had good intentions “to drive a point home — there’s too much gun violence.”

This was not the first time that Mr. Adams or his campaign provided a document to The Times that raised questions of authenticity. During the height of the 2021 mayoral race, the campaign told The Times it would provide a contract showing that a property Mr. Adams co-owned in Brooklyn was transferred to its other owner, Sylvia Cowan, in 2007. A week later, the campaign provided the “official document transferring ownership” — a letter to Ms. Cowan, not notarized, bearing Mr. Adams’s signature but not hers, dated Feb. 9, 2007.

An email obtained by The Times that Ms. Cowan sent in May 2021 to the co-op board said that Mr. Adams had agreed to transfer ownership to her — 14 years after the letter provided by the campaign. Mr. Adams listed the apartment on his financial disclosure forms released this year, and a spokesman for the mayor said the process of transferring it was still “underway.”

Betsy Gotbaum, executive director of Citizens Union, a good government group, said that she had known the mayor for years. She said she did not know of the photo’s provenance, but did not understand why he would risk embellishing the truth around it.

“Stretching the truth in this context does question an elected official’s credibility, and that might be a problem for voters,” she said. “I don’t see why he does it. He doesn’t need to do it, so why does he do it?”

Mr. Venable’s niece, Meredith Benson, when first contacted by The Times, said that she would be disappointed if the mayor was not being truthful about the photo. But in a recent phone call, she said she was more concerned about Mr. Adams’s management of the city and said, “I support him 100 percent.”

Ms. Benson, who was a teenager when her uncle died, remembered visits Mr. Adams made to the family after Officer Venable’s death, his kindness to her grandmother, and his driving the family to events. She said she had not seen Mr. Adams in roughly three decades until this year.

How the mayor handled the photo, she added, was “not going to diminish the spirit and impact my uncle had.”

In April, Januari Venable said she finally met the mayor at a breakfast on Long Island in honor of her father and another officer who was killed in the line of duty. Ms. Venable invited Mr. Adams and said she was glad that he came. They did not discuss the photo.

“He played with my son,” she said, “and he told my son that his grandpa was a great guy.”

Susan Beachy contributed research.

New York

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

Published

8 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

The Chinese government’s paranoia about overseas dissidents can seem strange, considering the enormous differences in power between exiled protesters who organize marches in America and their mighty homeland, a geopolitical and economic superpower whose citizens they have almost no ability to mobilize. But to those familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, the government’s obsession with dissidents, no matter where in the world they are, is unsurprising. “Regardless of how the overseas dissident community is dismissed outside of China, its very existence represents a symbol of hope for many within China,” Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who spent years in prison before being exiled to the United States in 1998, told me. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the hope for change among the people is itself a threat. Therefore, they spare no effort in suppressing and discrediting the overseas dissident community — to extinguish this hope in the hearts of people at home.”

To understand the party’s fears about the risks posed by dissidents abroad, it helps to know the history of revolutions in China. “Historically, the groups that have overthrown the incumbent government or regime in China have often spent a lot of time overseas and organized there,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University. The leader Sun Yat-sen, who played an important role in the 1911 revolution that dethroned the Qing dynasty and led eventually to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, spent several periods of his life abroad, during which he engaged in effective fund-raising and political coordination. The Communist Party’s own rise to power in 1949 was partly advanced by contributions from leaders who were living overseas. “They are very sensitive to that potential,” Weiss says.

“What the Chinese government and the circle of elites that are running China right now fear the most is not the United States, with all of its military power, but elements of unrest within their own society that could potentially topple the Chinese Communist Party,” says Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity consultant who worked on Chinese cyberespionage cases when he was at the F.B.I. Specifically, Chinese authorities worry about a list of threats — collectively referred to as the “five poisons” — that pose a risk to the stability of Communist rule: the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, followers of the Falun Gong movement, supporters of Taiwanese independence and those who advocate for democracy in China. As a result, the Chinese government invests great effort in combating these threats, which involves collecting intelligence about overseas dissident groups and dampening their influence both within China and on the international stage.

Controlling dissidents, regardless of where they are, is essential to China’s goal of projecting power to its own citizens and to the world, according to Charles Kable, who served as an assistant director in the F.B.I.’s national security branch before retiring from the bureau at the end of 2022. “If you have a dissident out there who is looking back at China and pointing out problems that make the entire Chinese political apparatus look bad, it will not stand,” Kable says.

The leadership’s worries about such individuals were evident to the F.B.I. right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kable told me, describing how the Chinese worked to ensure that the running of the Olympic flame through San Francisco would not be disrupted by protesters. “And so, you had the M.S.S. and its collaborators deployed in San Francisco just to make sure that the five poisons didn’t get in there and disrupt the optic of what was to be the best Olympics in history,” Kable says. During the run, whose route was changed at the last minute to avoid protesters, Chinese authorities “had their proxies in the community line the streets and also stand back from the streets, looking around to see who might be looking to cause trouble.”

New York

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Published

17 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Thursday proposed several measures that would restrict hedge funds and private-equity firms from buying up large numbers of single-family homes, the latest in a string of populist proposals she intends to include in her State of the State address next week.

The governor wants to prevent institutional investors from bidding on properties in the first 75 days that they are on the market. Her plan would also remove certain tax benefits, such as interest deductions, when the homes are purchased.

The proposals reflect a nationwide effort by mostly Democratic lawmakers to discourage large firms from crowding out individuals or families from the housing market by paying far above market rate and in cash, and then leasing the homes or turning them into short-term rentals.

Activists and some politicians have argued that this trend has played a role in soaring prices and low vacancy rates — though low housing production is widely viewed as the main driver of those problems.

If Ms. Hochul was inviting a fight with the real estate interests who have backed her in the past, she did not seem concerned. She even borrowed a line from Jimmy McMillan, who ran long-shot candidacies for governor and mayor as the founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

“The cost of living is just too damn high — especially when it comes to the sky-high rents and mortgages New Yorkers pay every month,” Ms. Hochul said in a written statement.

James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said his team would review the proposal, but characterized it as “another example of policy that will stifle investment in housing in New York.”

The plan — the specifics of which will be negotiated with the Legislature — is one of several recent proposals the governor has made with the goal of addressing the state’s affordability crisis. Voters have expressed frustration about the high costs of housing and basic goods in the state. This discontent has led to political challenges for Ms. Hochul, who is likely to face rivals in the 2026 Democratic primary and in the general election.

In 2022, five of the largest investors in the United States owned 2 percent of the country’s single-family rental homes, most of them in Sun Belt and Southern states, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office. The report stated that it was “unclear how these investors affected homeownership opportunities or tenants because many related factors affect homeownership — e.g., market conditions, demographic factors and lending conditions.”

Researchers at Harvard University found that “a growing share of rental properties are owned by business entities and medium- and large-scale rental operators.”

State officials were not able to offer a complete picture of how widespread the practice was in New York. They said local officials in several upstate cities had told them about investors buying up dozens of homes at a time and turning them into rentals.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that investment firms were buying smaller buildings in places like Brooklyn and Queens from families and smaller landlords.

Ms. Hochul’s concern is that these purchases make it harder for first-time home buyers to gain a foothold in the market and can lead to more rental price gouging.

“Shadowy private-equity giants are buying up the housing supply in communities across New York, leaving everyday homeowners with nowhere to turn,” she said in a statement on Thursday. “I’m proposing new laws and policy changes to put the American dream of owning a home within reach for more New Yorkers than ever before.”

Cracking down on corporate landlords became a prominent talking point in last year’s presidential election. On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass previously introduced legislation eliminating tax benefits for large investors that purchase large numbers of homes.

“It can make it impossible then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home,” Ms. Harris said last summer.

In August, Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging by private-equity firms in the housing market. He cited a study that estimated that private-equity firms “are expected to control 40 percent of the U.S. single-family rental market by 2030.”

Statehouses across the country have recently looked at ways to tackle corporate homeownership. One effort in Nevada, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, proposed capping the number of units a corporation could buy in a calendar year. It was opposed by local chambers of commerce and the state’s homebuilders association.

A bill was introduced in the Minnesota State Legislature that would ban the conversion of homes owned by corporations into rentals. It has yet to come up for a vote.

At the federal level, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, introduced joint legislation that would force hedge funds to sell all the single-family homes they own over 10 years.

New York

N.Y. Prosecutors Urge Supreme Court to Let Trump’s Sentencing Proceed

Published

1 day ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

N.Y. Prosecutors Urge Supreme Court to Let Trump’s Sentencing Proceed

New York prosecutors on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to deny President-elect Donald J. Trump’s last-ditch effort to halt his criminal sentencing, in a prelude to a much-anticipated ruling that will determine whether he enters the White House as a felon.

In a filing a day before the scheduled sentencing, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office called Mr. Trump’s emergency application to the Supreme Court premature, saying that he had not yet exhausted his appeals in state court. They noted that the judge overseeing the case plans to spare Mr. Trump jail time, which they argued undermined any need for a stay.

The prosecutors, who had secured Mr. Trump’s conviction last year on charges that he falsified records to cover up a sex scandal that endangered his 2016 presidential campaign, implored the Supreme Court to let Mr. Trump’s sentencing proceed.

“There is a compelling public interest in proceeding to sentencing,” they wrote, and added that “the sanctity of a jury verdict and the deference that must be accorded to it are bedrock principles in our Nation’s jurisprudence.”

The district attorney’s office has so far prevailed in New York’s appellate courts, but Mr. Trump’s fate now rests in the hands of a friendlier audience: a Supreme Court with a 6-to-3 conservative majority that includes three justices Mr. Trump appointed. Five are needed to grant a stay.

Their decision, coming little more than a week before the inauguration, will test the influence Mr. Trump wields over a court that has previously appeared sympathetic to his legal troubles.

In July, the court granted former presidents broad immunity for official acts, stymying a federal criminal case against Mr. Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election. (After Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, prosecutors shut down that case.)

The revelation that Mr. Trump spoke this week by phone with one of the conservative justices, Samuel A. Alito Jr., has fueled concerns that he has undue sway over the court.

Justice Alito said he was delivering a job reference for a former law clerk whom Mr. Trump was considering for a government position. But the disclosure alarmed ethics groups and raised questions about why a president-elect would personally handle such a routine reference check.

It is unclear whether Justice Alito will recuse himself from the decision, which the court could issue promptly.

Mr. Trump’s sentencing is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. Friday in the same Lower Manhattan courtroom where his trial took place last spring, when the jury convicted him on all 34 felony counts.

If the Supreme Court rescues Mr. Trump on Thursday, returning him to the White House on Jan. 20 without the finality of being sentenced, it will confirm to many Americans that he is above the law. Almost any other defendant would have been sentenced by now.

“A sentencing hearing more than seven months after a guilty verdict is aberrational in New York criminal prosecutions for its delay, not its haste,” the prosecutors wrote.

The prosecutors also noted that Mr. Trump would most likely avoid any punishment at sentencing. The trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, has signaled he plans to show Mr. Trump leniency, reflecting the practical impossibility of incarcerating a president.

Still, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the sentencing could impinge on his presidential duties. It would formalize Mr. Trump’s conviction, cementing his status as the first felon to occupy the Oval Office.

That status, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote in the filing to the Supreme Court, would raise “the specter of other possible restrictions on liberty, such as travel, reporting requirements, registration, probationary requirements and others.”

The court’s immunity ruling also underpinned Mr. Trump’s request to halt his sentencing. In the application, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that he was entitled to full immunity from prosecution — as well as sentencing — because he won the election.

“This court should enter an immediate stay of further proceedings in the New York trial court,” the application said, “to prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the presidency and the operations of the federal government.”

Mr. Trump’s application was filed by two of his picks for top jobs in the Justice Department: Todd Blanche, Mr. Trump’s choice for deputy attorney general, and D. John Sauer, his selection for solicitor general.

“Forcing President Trump to prepare for a criminal sentencing in a felony case while he is preparing to lead the free world as president of the United States in less than two weeks imposes an intolerable, unconstitutional burden on him that undermines these vital national interests,” they wrote.

Whether that argument will prevail is uncertain. Some legal experts have doubted the merits of Mr. Trump’s application, and lower courts have greeted his arguments with skepticism.

Earlier Thursday, a judge on the New York Court of Appeals in Albany, the state’s highest court, declined to grant a separate request from Mr. Trump to freeze the sentencing.

Prosecutors noted that Mr. Trump had yet to have a full appellate panel rule on the matter, and that he had not mounted a formal appeal of his conviction. Consequently, they argued, the Supreme Court “lacks jurisdiction over this non-final state criminal proceeding.”

Also this week, a judge on the First Department of New York’s Appellate Divison in Manhattan rejected the same request to halt the sentencing.

That judge, Ellen Gesmer, grilled Mr. Trump’s lawyer at a hearing about whether he had found “any support for a notion that presidential immunity extends to president-elects?”

With no example to offer, Mr. Blanche conceded, “There has never been a case like this before.”

In their filing Thursday, prosecutors echoed Justice Gesmer’s concerns, noting that “This extraordinary immunity claim is unsupported by any decision from any court.”

They also argued that Mr. Trump’s claims of presidential immunity fell short because their case concerned a personal crisis that predated his first presidential term. The evidence, they said, centered on “unofficial conduct having no connection to any presidential function.”

The state’s case centered on a sex scandal involving the porn star Stormy Daniels, who threatened to go public about an encounter with Mr. Trump, a salacious story that could have derailed his 2016 campaign.

To bury the story, Mr. Trump’s fixer, Michael D. Cohen, negotiated a $130,000 hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels.

Mr. Trump eventually repaid him. But Mr. Cohen, who was the star witness during the trial, said that Mr. Trump orchestrated a scheme to falsify records and hide the true purpose of the reimbursement.

Although Mr. Trump initially faced sentencing in July, his lawyers buried Justice Merchan in a flurry of filings that prompted one delay after another. Last week, Justice Merchan put a stop to the delays and scheduled the sentencing for Friday.

Mr. Trump faced four years in prison, but his election victory ensured that time behind bars was not a viable option. Instead, Justice Merchan indicated that he would impose a so-called unconditional discharge, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation.

“The trial court has taken extraordinary steps to minimize any burdens on defendant,” the prosecutors wrote Thursday.