It was an ordinary Friday at City Hall, and Mayor Eric Adams was at the microphone, flanked by two men who each commanded his own vast corner of New York City government.
One was the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip B. Banks III, who had wide influence over the city’s police and fire agencies. The other was his brother, the schools chancellor, David C. Banks, the leader of the largest school system in the United States.
The brothers bantered back and forth about the upcoming school year in a scene that underscored the power that, under Mr. Adams, had been concentrated in the hands of a single family.
Within a year, that air of poise and confidence would be shattered. The administration the brothers served would be engulfed in at least four separate federal corruption inquiries. Agents would show up at their doors, and at the door of their youngest brother, Terence Banks, and seize their phones as part of a bribery investigation. David Banks would announce his resignation as schools chancellor, and Mr. Adams would be indicted on corruption charges.
The inquiry involving the Banks brothers has focused at least in part on government contracts and a consulting firm run by Terence Banks, and its full scope remains unclear.
The brothers have denied any wrongdoing. David Banks said in a statement that federal prosecutors had told his lawyer that he was not a target of the investigation. A lawyer for Philip Banks predicted that his client would be cleared of any misconduct and charged with no crimes. A lawyer for Terence Banks said that the federal inquiry was a bribery investigation, but no bribery had occurred.
Aside from further unsettling a mayoral administration in free fall, the federal investigation has also focused attention on the brothers’ family and the extraordinary control it has wielded during the past two and a half years over America’s largest city.
A close look at the brothers — at where they come from and how they rose to power in New York — reveals a story of upward mobility and accomplishment in a city that sometimes seemed hostile to their rise. But it also reveals flashes of arrogance and poor judgment that occasionally threatened what they had worked to achieve.
The Banks brothers have known Mr. Adams since the 1980s, when the future mayor was a young transit police officer.
Mr. Adams looked to their father, Philip Banks Jr., a trailblazing Black law enforcer, as a mentor, and he co-founded a fraternal police organization, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, that closely resembled a prominent nonprofit that Mr. Banks once led.
After Mr. Adams took office in 2022, his loyalty to the Banks family continued to run deep. David Banks was his first appointment at the commissioner level. And when he named Philip Banks III as the city’s chief public safety official, he did so while brushing aside concerns about a nearly decade-old corruption scandal that had brought an abrupt end to Mr. Banks’s career at the top of the Police Department. Mr. Adams appointed Sheena Wright, David Banks’s longtime partner, to be first deputy mayor in late 2022. (Mr. Banks and Ms. Wright were married a few days after the mayor’s indictment was unsealed.)
After the federal investigation involving the Banks brothers came to light, Mr. Adams went out of his way to voice support for the family.
“We have a long relationship — that includes every member of the Banks family,” Mr. Adams said last month, before he was indicted. “And I will continue to have a relationship with the Banks family.”
But before all that, before David Banks shot through the ranks of the public school system and Philip Banks emerged as one of the city’s top public safety officials, the brothers were children growing up on a block full of civil servants on 223rd Street in Cambria Heights, Queens.
“The boys are the hardworking men they were raised to be, and anybody who knows us will say the same thing,” said their father, Philip Banks Jr., in an interview last month. “They have never done anything that I’m ashamed of.”
‘Become a Boss’
Like other Black families of their generation — including that of Mr. Adams — the Bankses left Brooklyn, where the boys had been born, in search of better schools and safer streets in southeast Queens.
They landed on a block of connected Tudor-style homes in a neighborhood that David Banks would later recall as being “a wonderland,” where dozens of children gathered to play — after finishing their homework.
That rule was enforced by their father, a policeman who believed in what he called the “long arm of supervision.” He would sometimes drop by the boys’ school in uniform and peek into their classrooms, just to ensure that they were behaving. For their part, the boys revered him, and would come to view him as their best friend, David Banks said in an interview last month.
Although the brothers shared a deep respect for their father, they were different in other ways. Born just 11 months apart, David and Philip III were always in the same grade — and always being compared to one another.
David was the eager one, ready to please, with top marks in all his classes. Philip was rebellious, often getting into trouble.
“I was the sort of young man whose light went on very early,” David Banks recalled in his 2014 memoir, “Soar.” “Philip was the sort whose light came on later.”
The family worried that Philip would never find his way.
Nobody needed to worry about David. He flew through school, and, after working as a school safety agent and a teacher, he earned a law degree and landed at the state attorney general’s office.
But, wanting to work again as an educator, he decided to return to the school system, this time as an assistant principal with big plans for his future. Before long, he was being written up in The Daily News as the man who had rescued Brooklyn’s Public School 191 “from the pits” — even though he was not its principal.
Philip Banks, too, had found his calling, not only putting his father’s mind at ease but filling him with pride.
He joined the Police Department in 1986, and, following the advice of his father’s friends to be more than a beat cop — to “study, become a boss”— he took the civil service promotional exams and began rising through the ranks.
His father, who had risen to the rank of lieutenant, sometimes joked that he would retire before he would be forced to salute his own son. He left the department in 1995.
Philip Banks III made lieutenant about two years later.
Making Headlines
During that time, David Banks, too, was on the rise. Soon after rejoining the city’s Education Department, he pitched an idea for a new high school that combined his interests — law and education — and got the greenlight to create it himself.
In 1997, he turned the school, the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice, into a bright spot in a neighborhood otherwise known for rough academic performance. The start-up also helped Mr. Banks grow what would become a thick Rolodex of educational and political allies, and to sharpen the skills he would need to put his next plan into motion.
On the other side of the city, Philip Banks was honing his own political skills. By 2002, he had been given command of one of the city’s 77 police precincts, with responsibility for suppressing crime, avoiding political flare-ups and forging ties to community leaders.
His command, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was regarded as a high-crime neighborhood, but Mr. Banks proved adept at the job. He was focused on reducing gun violence when a shooting unearthed a family secret.
In December 2003, a man wanted in connection with a fatal shooting turned himself in at Mr. Banks’s precinct and declared that he was Mr. Banks’s half brother. Mr. Banks called his father, who told him: “We’ve got to talk,” according to The Daily News.
An internal investigation was opened into whether Philip Banks III, who had walked past his half brother’s photograph on a wanted poster for weeks before the arrest, had shown the man any preferential treatment.
The threat to Mr. Banks’s career and reputation was serious enough for his father to publicly swear at a courthouse, with tears in his eyes, that he had never told the family about his other son.
At the time, Philip Banks III told The Daily News, “I don’t protect people who do things allegedly wrong, no matter who you are.”
Climbing the Ranks
Around the time of his father’s public admission, David Banks was on the move once more, this time with a school proposal even more ambitious than his last.
What the city needed, he believed, was a public school that emphasized discipline and mentoring for Black and Hispanic boys. Mining a connection to Hillary Clinton, who spoke in favor of the idea, he convinced Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to let him give it a try.
The all-boys school would come to be called the Eagle Academy. After the first school opened in 2004, David expanded the academy to a network of six sites, some of which would turn in low test scores. But the program was largely regarded as a success — one that Mr. Banks hoped would propel him to achieve a goal he had harbored at least since the mid 1990s: running the city’s public schools.
He had developed a crucial ally in Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president at the time, who had spent years promoting the Eagle schools and turning to Mr. Banks for advice about education policy. Mr. Adams helped secure city funding for a mentorship program at Eagle and appeared in a 2021 film about the schools.
“Education, it is an ocean liner,” Mr. Adams said in a trailer for the film. “We have to slowly turn that ocean liner around, and this is a starting point.”
At the Police Department, Philip Banks was continuing his own ascent, buoyed by his instincts and a keen understanding of why many New Yorkers distrusted the police.
Ahead of a parade in Harlem some 15 years ago, Mr. Banks learned of a plan to use police dogs to keep order and threatened to retire if his superior went through with it. No dogs were used that day.
By 2010, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, had promoted Mr. Banks to chief of community affairs, making him the highest-ranking Black officer on the force.
In taking the job, he had suddenly eclipsed his ambitious older brother, who had expanded Eagle Academy’s reach but was about to confront an awkward situation with Ms. Wright, a close friend and an up-and-coming nonprofit executive who would later become first deputy mayor.
One day in January 2013, after Ms. Wright and her husband at the time were each arrested after a fight at their home, David Banks reached out to Philip Banks, according to the online news organization The City. Stories differ about what happened next, but The City reported that Philip Banks placed a call to someone in the department. Ms. Wright’s arrest was eventually voided.
Unindicted Co-conspirator
After he fielded his brother’s call about Ms. Wright, Philip Banks was promoted again — this time to the assignment of his career.
He was named chief of department in March 2013 — the highest-uniformed position on a force of 34,000 officers.
As a top official, Mr. Banks was a well-regarded if sometimes prickly manager who was dedicated to strengthening police-community relations. He pushed the department to think critically about stop and frisk, the aggressive policing tactic that disproportionately targeted Black and Hispanic people, by telling his precinct commanders that if they could not do their jobs “without an overreliance” on it, he would find other people who could, he recounted in a 2019 interview.
As Mr. Banks worked to nudge the Police Department away from the tactic from the inside, Mr. Adams was railing against it as an outsider. Now a state senator, he gave testimony in a federal civil rights trial that helped persuade a judge to conclude that the police had engaged in racial profiling when using stop-and-frisk tactics.
It was a turning point for the Police Department, and Mr. Banks was now in a position to steer the department in a new direction. But his involvement with a pair of civilians soon entangled him in a scandal.
By the time he became chief of department, Mr. Banks and the civilians — favor-seekers named Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg — had become inseparable, dining together at upscale restaurants and traveling together to the Dominican Republic and Israel. Mr. Rechnitz usually picked up the tab.
And in an episode that would become a part of department lore, Mr. Banks once allowed the men to store a bag of diamonds for safekeeping in his office at Police Headquarters.
The good times ended in the summer of 2016, when federal prosecutors charged the two men and another one of Mr. Banks’s close friends, Norman Seabrook, the powerful leader of the New York City correction officers’ union, with fraud, bribery and other crimes. All three men were sentenced to prison after either pleading guilty or being convicted at trial.
Mr. Banks was never charged in the case because prosecutors did not have evidence that he did anything for Mr. Rechnitz or Mr. Reichberg in return for the meals and travel. But the U.S. attorney’s office labeled him an “unindicted co-conspirator,” casting a shadow over his life and career that he would never quite be able to shake.
By then, he had already abruptly resigned from the Police Department and, with a former subordinate, had bought into a company that sought security contracts with local government agencies.
Time would do little to ease the deep sense of bitterness he felt toward the federal prosecutors he believed had targeted him unfairly.
David Banks, too, was feeling frustrated. He had traveled widely to promote Eagle Academy and had even brought a group of students to the Democratic National Convention in 2016. But despite his successes, he had seen a procession of others come and go from the schools chancellor job. When it unexpectedly became open again in early 2021, he watched as one of his mentees, Meisha R. Porter, was tapped for the role instead of him.
He would have to keep waiting. A mayoral election was just a few months away, and his family friend, Mr. Adams, was running.
A Leg Up
All the while, David and Philip Banks’s younger brother, Terence Banks, was being overshadowed by his siblings’ success.
After high school, he managed a pest-control business and took a job with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, eventually becoming a train supervisor.
He was many rungs lower in his organization than his brothers were in theirs, but he, too, had ambitions.
In an interview with Time magazine in 1995, a 30-year-old Terence Banks described his keen interest in programs designed to give businesses owned by members of minority groups a leg up in government contracting.
“We’ve been cheated from the playing field,” he said at the time.
He was a couple years out from retirement when Mr. Adams won the mayoral election in 2021 and installed his older brothers as the heads of the school and public safety systems. Terence Banks was named as one of hundreds of unpaid appointees to Mr. Adams’s transition team.
But the men shared a friendship, too. During the summer that year, Mr. Adams showed up for Terence Banks’s birthday celebration in Martha’s Vineyard. The two men, both clad in pastel, were photographed smiling on the steps of a large home.
Mr. Banks stood onstage with David Banks and his parents during a jubilant news conference in late 2021, when his oldest brother was officially named schools chancellor. When David Banks joked that his younger brother liked to think he was the favorite son, someone in the crowd shouted, “I love you, Terry!”
In July 2022, Terence Banks incorporated a government and community relations consulting company, the Pearl Alliance, and the next year he retired from the M.T.A.
“Terry saw his two brothers sprouting and he wanted to be in that atmosphere also,” his father said in the interview.
As head of the new firm, Terence Banks set out to remake himself as a consultant with deep and obvious connections to some of the most powerful people in City Hall. Soon, he had signed up a number of clients, including some with business before the agencies that his brothers oversaw.
At least two of those clients would go on to receive subpoenas from federal prosecutors, the same who seized Terence Banks’s phones and had his home searched last month.
Now, with the mayor indicted on corruption charges, the Banks family is waiting to see what will happen next.
“I’m not afraid because I have a lot of faith,” Philip Banks Jr. said in the weeks after the searches and seizures, adding of his sons: “I think they do the right thing.”
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