Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday offered new details of bribery allegations against a top aide to the former New York City mayor, describing what they said was a corrupt scheme in which the aide received jewelry and other gifts in exchange for pressuring city regulators to approve building projects despite safety concerns.
The aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the former chief adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, is facing several criminal indictments accusing her of misusing her position to help friends and associates in exchange for bribes. In a court filing on Tuesday, prosecutors detailed communications between Ms. Lewis-Martin and city officials on behalf of two developers who had run into delays with the city’s Buildings Department.
Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in the filing that the developers established a relationship with Ms. Lewis-Martin’s son, Glenn Martin II, as they sought help getting their projects approved. Ms. Lewis-Martin entered City Hall in 2022 and, for years after, repeatedly used her position to help the businessmen by reaching out to city regulators on their behalf, prosecutors said. In return, prosecutors said, they provided her with bribes including a pair of 2-carat diamond earrings worth $3,000.
At one point, prosecutors said, one of the developers, Raizada Vaid, was seeking approval for renovation plans for a hotel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and asked Ms. Lewis-Martin to intercede with the Department of Buildings. “Please call your DOB contact,” Mr. Vaid texted her, saying that the project was “stuck.”
Ms. Lewis-Martin contacted the department’s acting commissioner two days later, according to the filing. When the commissioner’s staff voiced safety concerns about what Mr. Vaid had presented as “simple” interior renovations, Ms. Lewis-Martin kept up the pressure, and the permit was ultimately approved, prosecutors said.
The 170-page filing came in response to a request from Ms. Lewis-Martin to dismiss the charges against her.
A lawyer for Ms. Lewis-Martin, Arthur L. Aidala, said on Tuesday evening that “we look forward to a robust reply that we will be filling to these charges.”
In December 2024, Ms. Lewis-Martin, her son and the two developers, Mr. Vaid and Mayank Dwivedi, were charged in a four-count indictment that accused them of participating in “a long-running bribery, money-laundering and conspiracy scheme.”
Ms. Lewis-Martin resigned just before the initial charges became public. Last year, she and her son were again charged by Manhattan prosecutors, led by the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg.
Across five indictments, prosecutors said she used her proximity to the mayor to help fast-track approvals from city agencies, steered contracts to a favored developer and tried to kill a project to build protected bike lanes in Brooklyn.
In turn, she received cash, crab cakes, home renovations and even an appearance on a popular television show, they said.
Ms. Lewis-Martin and the other defendants have all pleaded not guilty. Mr. Adams was not charged in any of the indictments, and Mr. Bragg has said that the mayor is not a target of those investigations.
The first charges against Ms. Lewis-Martin came amid a swirl of investigations around Mr. Adams’s administration, including a federal corruption indictment brought in the fall of 2024 against the former mayor himself, making him the first sitting mayor in modern New York City history to be criminally charged. The Justice Department ultimately abandoned those charges.
The allegations of corruption, and the mayor’s courtship of the Trump administration as he sought to have the charges dismissed, colored the public’s perception of Mr. Adams’s four years in office, hurting his approval rating and sinking his re-election campaign last year.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
The post Former Adams Aide Took Bribe of Diamond Earrings, Prosecutors Say appeared first on New York Times.
