More than once, Mayor Adams has defended appointments to top city positions of people with character blemishes by declaring that no one should be judged by the worst day of his life.
Far too often, though, those appointees after assuming their positions have been accused of having multiple “worst days.”
The latest example was Jeff Maddrey, the NYPD’s top uniformed officer until his abrupt resignation Dec. 20 after a female cop filed a legal complaint alleging he gave her excessive overtime work in return for sex, while she was facing foreclosure on her home. Last month, Lt. Special Assignment Quathisha Epps was exposed by The News as getting $204,453 in overtime pay in the last fiscal year on top of her $175,893 salary.
Maddrey’s lawyer claimed Epps was trying to shift blame after the embarrassing publicity regarding the extra pay, but a former female NYPD captain quickly asserted Maddrey repeatedly badgered her for sex, too.
The department’s lax attitude toward top commanders preying on female subordinates may explain why Maddrey’s career wasn’t derailed nearly a decade earlier. In December 2015, according to then-Officer Tabitha Foster, after Maddrey previously pressured her into sex while both were working at the 75th Precinct in East New York, he met her in a Queens park where he beat her and pushed her to the ground. She said she pulled a gun to defend herself, leading him to disarm and choke her.
Foster’s court suit over his treatment was dismissed, but publicity about the incident spurred NYPD charges against Maddrey. He was allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges that included lying to Internal Affairs cops about the incident and not mentioning that Foster had pulled a gun. He lost 45 vacation days, but soon after Adams became mayor in 2022, Maddrey was promoted to chief of patrol.
The previous November, Maddrey voided the arrest of an ex-cop who served under him at the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville for pulling a gun on three teenagers he had chased after their basketball struck a security camera at his family’s storefront.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board substantiated charges against Maddrey — at the time of the incident the chief of community affairs — and in 2023 then-Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell agreed with its recommendation to dock him 10 vacation days. Adams, however, agreed with the Internal Affairs Bureau finding that Maddrey should not be punished. Only the sergeant who ordered the ex-cop’s arrest was ultimately disciplined.
Sewell, already chafing over limits on her authority imposed by Adams’ choice for deputy mayor overseeing the NYPD, Phil Banks, stepped down as the city’s first female police commissioner. It was a public relations debacle for Adams. In less than 18 months in the job, Sewell had impressed the public, as well as hard-to-please police unions. Banks, in contrast, got his position because Adams was friends with his father, despite having stepped down as chief of department in 2014 shortly before a corruption scandal broke in which he was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator.
The mayor won praise early in his tenure for choosing women for several top level jobs that traditionally were held by men, but it became clear that he had no problem with the NYPD being run as an Old Boys Club. Sewell was replaced by Eddie Caban, who lacked both her public presence and her intelligence. He resigned in September after his cellphone was seized by federal investigators looking into whether his restaurateur brother had used his promotion to shake down other businessmen for “protection” from law enforcement.
Phil Banks stepped down in October along with his brother, then-Schools Chancellor David Banks, and David’s wife, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, during a federal probe unrelated to the charges the mayor himself was already facing. Tim Pearson, another old friend of Adams in a top police post facing allegations of sexually harassing a female cop and retaliating against her and several colleagues who supported her claim, also left under pressure.
When the explosive charges against Maddrey became public, Adams released a statement saying he was “deeply disturbed” to learn of the allegations against someone he’d been friends with dating back to his time as an NYPD captain. A mayor who previously mocked reporters who had questioned why so many of his close associates seemed ethically challenged sounded uncharacteristically chastened.
But given the deep rot unpeeling like an onion among his key operatives at the NYPD, if Adams had any sense of honor, he’d have followed Maddrey out the door.
Steier is the former editor of the civil-service newspaper The Chief.