Before Philip B. Banks III was named deputy mayor for public safety for New York City, the security company he once owned rarely did business with the city.
But two years after Mayor Eric Adams appointed Mr. Banks to the high-ranking post in his administration, the company Mr. Banks said he had sold years earlier began receiving city business worth millions of dollars, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.
The firm, City Safe Partners, received a $154 million contract from the New York City Housing Authority in January 2024 to provide “emergency fire watch services” in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, records show. Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor in the Adams administration and the fiancée of Mr. Banks’s brother, the schools chancellor, sits on the housing authority’s board and voted to approve the emergency contract, records show.
Mr. Banks’s business dealings have been under scrutiny at least since his phones were seized this month by federal agents investigating a possible bribery scheme involving city contracts. The phones of Mr. Banks’s brothers — David Banks, the schools chancellor, and Terence Banks, a consultant with clients who received city contracts — were also taken as part of the corruption inquiry.
The investigation involving Philip Banks and his brothers is one of at least four separate federal inquiries focused on members of the Adams administration — inquiries that have rocked City Hall and raised questions about Mr. Adams’s political future. It was not clear whether City Safe Partners was a focus of any of the investigations.
The company’s fortunes, however, seemed to have run in parallel with the political fortunes of Mr. Banks and another top Adams aide who was once briefly involved with the firm.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is conducting three of the four investigations, including the one that resulted in the phone seizures, declined to comment. So did a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Investigation, which is assisting in the inquiries.
Mr. Banks bought an interest in the security firm in 2015, a City Hall spokesman told The Times last year, and he was listed as a member of the firm’s management team on an archived version of its website as recently as 2018.
Had Mr. Banks retained any financial interest in the company, its city business would likely have raised ethical and legal concerns. But a representative of City Safe Partners said Mr. Banks sold 100 percent of his interest in the firm to its current owner on July 9, 2018.
Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Mr. Banks, said his client had long had nothing to do with City Safe, which was originally formed as Overwatch Services LLC.
“Banks was with Overwatch for less than two years and was long gone before the contracts you reference were ever awarded,” Mr. Brafman said.
On Friday, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office, Liz Garcia, said that Mr. Banks had divested from the company before joining the administration, but she did not say when he did so or provide documents reflecting the divestment. She said he had had no involvement in its operation in years.
A lawyer for Sheena Wright, Xavier R. Donaldson, declined to comment.
The security company was founded in 2010 by Dwayne Montgomery, a retired police inspector who worked and socialized with Mr. Adams at the Police Department. Mr. Montgomery was charged last year with conspiring to funnel illegal donations to Mr. Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign; Mr. Montgomery pleaded guilty to misdemeanor conspiracy in February and was sentenced to 200 hours of community service.
Mr. Banks bought the security firm with a partner, a former police sergeant named Soyini Chan-Shue, from Mr. Montgomery months after Mr. Banks abruptly retired from the Police Department amid a federal corruption probe. Mr. Banks, who had been the chief of department, the highest-ranking uniformed official on the force, was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in that wide-ranging corruption investigation, which resulted in several convictions, including that of a Police Department chief who served as his top aide, as well as Mr. Banks’s close friend, the head of the correction officers’ union. Mr. Banks was never charged with any crime.
After Mr. Banks joined the security firm, it began using the name City Safe Partners, records show.
On its website, the company prominently featured Mr. Banks’s credentials with the Police Department.
“Philip Banks III is one of the highest-profile security and law enforcement leaders in America,” the website said. “His extensive executive-level security and law enforcement experience spans 28 years culminating in his role as the highest-ranking uniformed position in the New York City Police Department.”
Winnie Greco, who would become Mr. Adams’s special adviser and director of Asian affairs, was also prominently displayed on the company’s website as a member of the management team in 2018, according to an archived version of the site.
Ms. Greco, a major fund-raiser for Mr. Adams during his mayoral campaign, has close ties to New York City’s Chinese community. Her homes were searched by agents in February as part of a separate federal investigation.
Ms. Greco was engaged by City Safe to generate new business by providing “training of Chinese security staff,” but no business ever materialized and she was paid no money by the firm, the company representative said.
A lawyer for Ms. Greco, Steven Brill, said his client had no role with the company.
“Winnie has no connection to this company and has no knowledge of how her profile ended up on the website,” he said.
City Safe is currently helmed by Ms. Chan-Shue, the former sergeant with the Police Department, who long worked under Mr. Banks during his time there. After more than two decades at the department, Ms. Chan-Shue retired and then became the chief executive of City Safe in 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Since it was launched, the security firm has advertised its status as a minority-owned business — a designation that allowed it to qualify for certain government business under programs aimed at giving contracts to firms owned by women and members of minority groups, records show.
Before Mr. Adams took office, City Safe did some business with the city, records show. It was paid $4,773 by the Department of Parks & Recreation in 2014 to provide security guards for a summer solstice event at an office building in Harlem, according to a department spokeswoman.
It also had some business with the state.
In 2017, the company started receiving a portion of a contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state-run agency, to provide security guards to patrol subway stations as part of a push to improve safety. Another aim of the contract was to combat fare evasion — which would become a priority for Mr. Adams once he took office and installed Mr. Banks as an influential public safety aide. The company continued as a subcontractor until April 2024, according to the authority. They were paid $7.2 million, the City Safe representative said.
After Mr. Adams took office, the company’s business with the city and other government entities appeared to take off, records show.
In 2022, City Safe Partners was hired as a subcontractor to help provide vetting and identification cards to staff members at Kennedy and Newark Liberty Airports, the company representative said. The subcontract was worth $10 million, according to records the firm provided to the city. Both airports are managed not by city officials but by the state-run Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The work was performed on behalf of the New Jersey-based company Inter-Con Security.
In January of that year, Inter-Con announced that it had been selected as the sole awardee of the Port Authority’s five-year contract for uniformed security guard services. The company’s news release said it would be responsible for providing more than 1,000 security guards for the Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark airports, the World Trade Center campus and the Port Authority Trans-Hudson transit system.
Inter-Con’s vice president, Matthew Reeser, confirmed to The Times that City Safe had performed subcontracting work under that contract but declined to provide details about the amount and nature of the agreement.
In 2023, the New York City Housing Authority was unhappy with the performance of a security company that it had hired to provide fire safety services, and the agency began looking for new firms, prioritizing those classified as minority and women-owned businesses, an agency spokeswoman said. The authority launched a competitive bidding process, and four companies submitted quotes, the spokeswoman said. City Safe was one of them.
As part of the contract, City Safe would place up to 500 guards in more than 150 public housing developments to monitor them for fires.
At a board meeting in January, housing authority officials said that state law had required them to have people watching out for fires around the clock while repairs were being made to fire safety systems. Jamie Rubin, the chair of the authority’s board, questioned the need to spend $154 million and said he felt like there “had to be another path forward.”
“It’s an eye-watering number for something that seems like there’s another solution,” he said.
Nevertheless, the board, which included Ms. Wright, approved the $154 million emergency contract to City Safe. Mr. Banks’s former security firm got the job because it was “the lowest responsive and responsible bidder” that was not already providing fire and security services to the public housing agency, the authority’s spokeswoman said.
So far, the company has been paid $13.3 million of the three-year contract and the agency said it did not expect to reach the contract’s maximum value.
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