Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at the Legal Aid Society as it celebrates its 150th anniversary. We’ll also get details on a fight between a weed shop owner and the nonprofit that helped arrange financial backing for the store to open.
Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and several other presidents had side jobs while they were in the White House: They also served as honorary vice presidents of the Legal Aid Society in New York.
As the society celebrates its 150th anniversary with an exhibition at the New York Historical, would it offer that title to the current chief executive, the first felon to be elected president? Twyla Carter, Legal Aid’s attorney in charge and chief executive, sidestepped the question.
“For Donald Trump and his felony convictions, what I will say is he and his case illustrate very clearly in today’s times the two tiers of justice,” she said. “The people that we serve are not able to be out typically on bail if they are facing 34 felonies” — and probably would not have been freed after they were found guilty. Trump was convicted in 2024 in Manhattan on 34 counts of falsifying records to cover up hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels.
“The message, I think, of Donald Trump is our clients would like to experience the same criminal legal system that he got to experience,” Carter said.
Rowing into the harbor to free clients
For 150 years, Legal Aid has represented people who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. Its early clients were immigrants, sailors, women and factory workers whose wages were being withheld by unscrupulous bosses or who had been hauled off to prison because they owed money to loan sharks. The lawyers also fought predatory practices at boardinghouses and aboard ships: Early Legal Aid staff members sometimes rowed out into the harbor to free sailors who were being held against their will.
The organization began as the German Legal Aid Society — its original charter was in German — and handled 212 cases in its first year and more than 23,000 in its first decade, winning unpaid wages worth $3.6 million in today’s dollars. After 20 years, it dropped the word “German” from its name as it broadened its focus. It had nearly 7,500 clients in 1896, from 37 countries.
And in 1902, it named Rosalie Loew its attorney in chief, the first women in that job. She was later the state labor commissioner, and in the 1930s LaGuardia appointed her a justice of the Domestic Relations Court, a predecessor of Family Court.
Legal Aid began representing defendants in criminal courts by 1920, and argued cases before the Supreme Court and the state’s highest court that led to the expansion of defendants’ rights. More recently, Legal Aid and two law firms filed the lawsuit that brought the troubled Rikers Island jail complex under federal oversight. Last year Judge Laura Taylor Swain ordered the city to give up control of the jail, with major decisions to be made by an outside official.
Preparing for the anniversary, the New York Historical assembled photographs, newspaper clippings and original documents from 1876 to the mid-1960s. Legal Aid also collected memorabilia from “alumni,” as Carter described lawyers who had worked for the society and moved on.
She stumbled across some artifacts herself, while on a tour of the 130-year-old building that is now the Harlem Community Justice Center. It once housed a police court and a jail.
“We were down in the area where the cells were located,” she said. “There were these little desks, and on the desks are these ledgers that are covered in dust. I start opening them, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ These are from decades ago with the names of people who were incarcerated.”
“Some of these people,” she said, “were our clients.”
Weather
There is a chance of rain in the morning before cloudy conditions take over. Today’s high will near 44. Rain is expected tonight, with a low around 39.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 20 (Eid al-Fitr).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I was not wanting to do this so willingly.” — Asif Merchant, who is on trial in Brooklyn on federal terrorism and murder-for-hire charges. He says that he went along with a plot to kill President Trump to protect his family in Tehran from the Revolutionary Guards.
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A nonprofit sues a weed shop it helped open
It started as an ideal partnership — the first Black woman to open a legal cannabis dispensary in Brooklyn and Housing Works, a nonprofit that had long assisted people living with AIDS.
It became a case study in how a deal negotiated in the frenzied rollout of New York’s legal cannabis business unraveled.
Housing Works had broadened its mission to include helping people negatively affected during the so-called war on drugs. The woman with the dispensary, Leeann Mata, had three brothers who had been detained years ago on low-level marijuana offenses. The state laws they were accused of breaking have since been amended.
Mata started her dispensary with support from Housing Works. But it is now suing her for $2.5 million in unpaid fees.
Mata, who countered by filing a complaint with state regulators accusing Housing Works of taking advantage of her, said the breaking point had come when a delivery driver from Housing Works’s dispensary in Manhattan visited her store in Park Slope. The driver commented that he was making deliveries in the area. She felt that Housing Works was undercutting her because its consultants had been telling her that her store was not ready to provide deliveries.
“Everything they were doing was destroying my company,” Mata said.
The president of Housing Works, Matthew Bernardo, said it had delivered to Park Slope before it became involved with Mata’s store, Matawana. He also said that the store did not have the software or the training early on to handle deliveries.
Housing Works began courting her in the summer of 2023, she said, and she eventually agreed to a deal because Housing Works was well known and was already running a dispensary. Under her contract with Housing Works, the nonprofit introduced her to investors who put up $700,000 for a 19 percent stake in her company.
Housing Works then brought in consultants who hired the staff and oversaw payroll and accounting. Mata was to pay Housing Works either $20,000 a month or 5 percent of the revenue.
Bernardo said that Housing Works had never received any money from Mata. She said that errors by the consultants had led her staff to be paid incorrectly and her quarterly business taxes to be filed late. That led to a penalty from the Internal Revenue Service.
My colleague Ashley Southall says the case points to the risks for businesses in an industry that is locked out of traditional financing and resources, because selling cannabis remains illegal under federal law. Matawana is one of six dispensaries that became partners with Housing Works, and the only one to sever the deal on bad terms. All but one of the stores are among the state’s highest-grossing dispensaries, according to sales data compiled by Lit Alerts, a market research company.
METROPOLITAN diary
Along Canal Street
Dear Diary:
I was walking along Canal Street past some vendors. One man had various objects and clothing he was selling spread out on a sheet.
One item caught my eye: Laid out for sale were green tights, white shorts, a green tank top and a green warm-up jacket. On the sleeve was the number 136.
I did a double take and asked the man where he had gotten the items. He didn’t know, but I did. I used to wear them.
It was my old high school wrestling uniform.
— Howard Bowler
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post 150 Years of History: The Legal Aid Society of New York appeared first on New York Times.
