It took decades for Ingrid Lewis-Martin to fight her way to the top of New York City politics. But by 2022 she had unquestionably arrived.
As chief adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, she was arguably the second most powerful person in city government. She had an office across the hall from him, a habit of rewriting policy and a reputation as his heavy-handed enforcer.
So it was notable that fall when Ms. Lewis-Martin set her sights on a seemingly whimsical goal: a turn on the silver screen. A pair of studio executives she knew agreed to help, and soon enough she was donning an evening dress for a cameo alongside Forest Whitaker in “Godfather of Harlem.”
She had just two brief lines, but she was delighted.
“It was everything,” Ms. Lewis-Martin gushed to the executives afterward in a thank-you text message. “One thing off of my bucket list.”
In reality, the TV gig was far from a lighthearted aberration, Manhattan prosecutors asserted on Thursday. Rather, in a series of four indictments, they said that it was one of the earliest perks of a yearslong bribery scheme in which Ms. Lewis-Martin put the city up for sale in exchange for home improvements, cash and catered crab cakes, totaling more than $75,000. Her graft ended, they said, only when she resigned from the Adams administration last December, just ahead of earlier bribery charges accusing her of receiving another $100,000.
The indictments this week undoubtedly dealt another grave blow to Mr. Adams as he fights for re-election, though he was not directly implicated.
But even more so, they turned a high-wattage spotlight onto one of the most colorful and consequential figures of this chaotic New York era. A fierce and foul-mouthed daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Ms. Lewis-Martin arrived at City Hall as an emissary of a Brooklyn before bike lanes or artisanal grocers. Her mastery of its bare-knuckle politics helped make Mr. Adams the second Black mayor; now, it may also hasten his undoing.
When she moved into her new office, Ms. Lewis-Martin, 64, hung a poster declaring herself “the lioness of City Hall.” In court this week, she dressed in gold as she surrendered to authorities in Lower Manhattan to plead not guilty to eight counts of bribery and conspiracy.
“She’s a larger-than-life character,” said Lincoln Restler, a City Council member from Brooklyn who has known and sometimes clashed with Ms. Lewis-Martin for two decades.
“Ingrid is a shrewd operator,” he continued. “But she thinks that the rules don’t apply to her, and she believes that she’s fighting for team Eric Adams and therefore what she’s doing is inherently right or just.”
Mr. Restler was one of 20 associates interviewed for this story who described Ms. Lewis-Martin as a figure of deep contradictions. A chaplain who frequently begins text messages with offerings of prayer, she once told City and State: “I’m not Michelle Obama. When they go low? We drill for oil.” She could be unfailingly devoted to friends and openly hostile when she felt they had crossed her — or the mayor.
Relying on intercepted phone calls, texts and encrypted messages, prosecutors accused Ms. Lewis-Martin of using the same muscle that powered her rise to wage pressure campaigns designed to fast-track her friends’ projects and rig a multimillion-dollar migrant shelter contract.
On one profanity-laced call described by prosecutors, she told a developer that when she gives a city agency an order, “we expect them to make that shit move.”
In another instance, they said, Ms. Lewis-Martin torpedoed a proposal to reduce traffic fatalities on McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn to help out the studio executives who opposed the changes and had put her on TV.
“Just make sure we shut their asses down on McGuinness,” she said in one intercepted phone call from April 2024, according to the indictment.
Her lawyer, Arthur L. Aidala, forcefully rejected the prosecutors’ narrative in a statement on Friday, saying Ms. Lewis-Martin and her son, Glenn D. Martin II, who was also indicted, were prepared to “vigorously contest each and every charge.”
“Her decades of public service are marked by meaningful achievements and acts of genuine dedication to this city,” Mr. Aidala said. “These accomplishments clearly call into question the veracity of these unfounded accusations.”
‘Nobody does it better than Ingrid’
Before Ms. Lewis-Martin ever set foot in City Hall, her style had polarized members of the mayor’s orbit.
While Mr. Adams was planning his transition in 2021, several allies expressed concern that his longtime confidante had a history of clashing with staff members and pushing ethical boundaries. As his top aide while he was Brooklyn borough president, Ms. Lewis-Martin led a nonprofit, the One Brooklyn Fund, that a city inspector general said appeared to have improperly solicited funding from entities with business before the office.
“I told him that mayors are judged by the quality of the people around him, and Ingrid was such a looming presence,” said Tom Allon, a media executive who was once a close ally of Mr. Adams. “I warned him to find a job for Ingrid outside of the day-to-day operations of the city.”
The mayor did the opposite.
Mr. Adams, after all, had known Ms. Lewis-Martin since they were both in their 20s, when he was a young police officer and she was a middle-school teacher in Crown Heights married to his police partner. They were both ambitious, conservative Black Democrats in a city that was still mostly run by white officials.
They both have spoken about what happened in the years that followed in near-religious terms: Mr. Adams made it his life’s mission to be mayor, and Ms. Lewis-Martin made it hers to help.
After working for two Brooklyn Democrats (and as a modern and African dance instructor and school dean), Ms. Lewis-Martin managed Mr. Adams’s successful State Senate campaign in 2006. After a stint in Borough Hall, she helped lead his mayoral campaign four years ago.
Letitia James, the state attorney general, who declined to comment for this article, once said that power in Brooklyn was built on retail politics, and “nobody does it better than Ingrid.”
Mr. Adams once told a friend that even after a career in law enforcement, Ms. Lewis-Martin was the only person he knew would take a bullet for him. She was also one of the few people who could yell at the mayor, according to an associate who witnessed her do so.
At his election night victory party, Ms. Lewis-Martin was the first person Mr. Adams thanked from the stage. “Started from the bottom, now we’re here,” he said, quoting Drake.
When Mr. Adams won the mayor’s race, he not only defied entreaties not to hire Ms. Lewis-Martin, but he let her choose her position. She came up with the title of chief adviser, which she said would provide maximum flexibility to “pick and choose which weeds to be in,” and took the office normally reserved for the first deputy mayor (with whom she feuded). Her starting salary was more than $250,000, and the post came with a car and driver.
Colleagues credited her with sometimes deploying her fierceness to get politicians or union officials on board with projects they resisted. She took an interest in policing, quality-of-life issues and the mayor’s free concert series (at which her son, a D.J., performed).
“Ingrid is someone who is passionate — passionate in politics, passionate in life,” said the Rev. Karim Camara, a former assemblyman from Brooklyn. “That’s not a negative. That’s something that helps somebody get through life, persevere and succeed at high levels, as she has.”
But it did not take long for Ms. Lewis-Martin to attract scrutiny. She played a role in hiring gay marriage opponents at City Hall in the early weeks of the Adams administration, sharply criticized former President Joseph R. Biden Jr’s immigration policies, and in widely covered remarks, said the mayor’s administration did not believe in the separation of church and state.
Lupe Todd-Medina, a longtime Democratic operative in Brooklyn, said Ms. Lewis-Martin had drawn extra scrutiny for years because she was a Black woman in a job that required her to be a “bull in a china shop.” The problem, she said, was that someone in her role should never have been tasked with “working within the structures” required by City Hall.
“She just got too big and too powerful,” Ms. Todd-Medina said.
Ms. Lewis-Martin never lost Mr. Adams’s confidence, though. Even after she was indicted the first time, late last year, he allowed her to return to his campaign as a volunteer. Facing reporters at City Hall on Friday, Mr. Adams did not defend Ms. Lewis-Martin, but he refused to criticize her either.
“Ingrid is like a sister to me. I love Ingrid,” he said. “I know her son and I know her and I know her heart. She and her attorney will deal with the case that’s in front of her.”
Asked if anyone had raised ethical or legal complaints to him about her while she was still employed, Mr. Adams did not directly answer.
“There were no complaints on her work ethic,” he said. “In fact, to the contrary, people knew that she knew how to make sure the people in this city got the services they needed.”
‘I have a plan’
In America’s most transit-rich city, Ms. Lewis-Martin said publicly that she had not “taken the subway really” since she was 19. She seemed to take particular umbrage at efforts to make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists, projects that often pitted a new, gentrifying Brooklyn against older working- and middle-class residents who drove.
In early 2022, she ordered officials to reopen a street in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn that the Transportation Department had closed to vehicles. In another case, she intervened to derail a bike lane on Ashland Place in the same neighborhood, according to two city officials familiar with the matter.
But that June, her interest shifted across town to what would turn out to be a more consequential project. “Our friend Gina Argento needs our support has to do with bike lanes,” an associate wrote in a text to Ms. Lewis-Martin, according to prosecutors.
Ms. Lewis Martin responded, they said, by saying she was already working on it. “I have a plan,” she said.
Ms. Argento and Tony Argento, her brother, owned Broadway Stages, a company with more than four million square feet of production space where shows like “The Gilded Age,” “Blue Bloods” and “Billions” have been shot.
Some of their property is in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, near McGuinness Boulevard, a major thoroughfare that has been the site of several traffic fatalities. The hit-and-run killing of a popular public-school teacher there in 2021 had helped galvanize a movement to make the corridor safer. The Adams administration at the time was drawing up proposals to reduce car lanes to make room for bikes and pedestrians.
The Argentos would ultimately back a public campaign to stop the effort, arguing it would create traffic, delay emergency vehicles and be bad for business. Ms. Lewis-Martin was ready to help, prosecutors said — for a price.
The Argentos helped arrange Ms. Lewis-Martin’s appearance on “Godfather of Harlem,” which earned her $806.31. Mr. Argento also offered to serve as her agent for other roles, according to the indictment.
In June 2023, shortly after Ms. Lewis-Martin had set up a meeting with the mayor to discuss the bike lanes, Ms. Argento transferred $2,500 to Ms. Lewis-Martin, the indictment said. The siblings later provided $10,000 worth of catering for an event that prosecutors say she hosted at Gracie Mansion for free. (“You are a blessing,” Ms. Lewis-Martin texted Ms. Argento after, prosecutors said.)
It evidently paid off for the Argentos. In July 2023, when Ms. Argento sent Ms. Lewis-Martin a photograph of a flier from the organization Make McGuinness Safe advocating for more space for bicycles and pedestrians, Ms. Lewis-Martin assured her she had the matter under control.
“We do not care what they say,” she wrote the same day, according to the indictment. “We are ignoring them and continuing with our plan. They can kiss my ass.”
Ms. Lewis-Martin ultimately undermined transportation officials’ preferred plan for a more pedestrian- and bike-friendly corridor that had already been announced, prosecutors said. (The city changed course again days after investigators searched Ms. Lewis-Martin’s home in 2024.)
The Argento siblings were also charged on Thursday with bribery and conspiracy and pleaded not guilty. On Friday, Mr. Adams, who said his son had worked for Broadway Stages, called them “beautiful people.”
‘Unless the mayor tells us otherwise’
As Mr. Adams’s term wore on, Ms. Lewis-Martin increasingly became tied up in responding to a historic influx of asylum-seekers arriving in the city. The mayor and his top adviser angered fellow Democrats by blaming Mr. Biden for the mess.
“Close the borders,” Ms. Lewis-Martin told a local news channel. But prosecutors assert that she also saw an opportunity.
In late 2022, they said, she entered into an agreement with Tian Ji Li, a major political player in the city’s Chinese American community. Ms. Lewis-Martin had already been working internally to fast-track approvals for Mr. Li’s karaoke club, V Show, prosecutors said.
Now, Ms. Lewis-Martin would flex her power to steer city contracts to operate migrant shelters to Mr. Li’s associates, according to the indictment. He planned to take a 10 percent cut, then share it with her and her son, who acted as an intermediary.
In August 2023, shortly after speaking to Ms. Lewis-Martin, Mr. Li transferred $50,000 to an account controlled by her son, the indictment said. When a City Hall employee raised concerns about a shelter site Mr. Li proposed a year later, Ms. Lewis-Martin shut the person down on a conference call, saying the project should move forward “unless the mayor tells us otherwise,” according to the indictment.
Everyone seemed happy for awhile. In September 2024, Mr. Li, Ms. Lewis-Martin and Jesse Hamilton, a former state senator who prosecutors said helped with the shelter contracts, traveled together to Japan.
But Mr. Adams was indicted on corruption charges while they were away. When the group landed at Kennedy Airport, the authorities were waiting with search warrants to claim their phones.
They were not caught entirely by surprise. On the flight home, prosecutors said Thursday, Mr. Li had taken time to delete text messages between himself and Ms. Lewis-Martin.
Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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