New York City Mayor Eric Adams gestures outside federal court, on the day of his arraignment after he was charged with bribery and illegally soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign national, in New York City.
Credit: Reuters Photo
New York: Investigators on Friday seized the phones of Mayor Eric Adams’ chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, searched her Brooklyn home and served her with a grand jury subpoena, her lawyer said.
“Ingrid Lewis-Martin has been served with a subpoena from the Southern District of New York and her phones were given to the New York County district attorney’s office,” the lawyer, Arthur L. Aidala, said in a statement. “She will cooperate fully with any and all investigations,” he said, adding that Lewis-Martin was “not the target of any case of which we are aware.”
Lewis-Martin, speaking Friday evening on Aidala’s radio show, denied any wrongdoing.
“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I’ve done nothing. And I don’t think that there is anything to know.”
Later, apparently referring to herself and the mayor, she said that no one is perfect, “but we are not thieves.”
Lewis-Martin was served with the grand jury subpoena and told about the search Friday when she landed at Kennedy International Airport, having returned from a vacation in Japan, and was met by two sets of investigators, one state and one federal.
The actions appear to be tied to two different investigations, though information about the morning’s events and the nature of the state inquiry was preliminary. Several people with knowledge of the matter confirmed that the two sets of investigators approached Lewis-Martin after she passed through customs, served her with the subpoena and seized her phones.
The moves came shortly before Adams was arraigned in federal court in lower Manhattan on charges of bribery and wire fraud. The indictment from the US attorney for the Southern District of New York accuses the mayor of soliciting and receiving illegal campaign donations from foreign nationals and accepting bribes in exchange for official acts. Adams has pleaded not guilty.
Lewis-Martin, who is considered the mayor’s second-in-command, has been friends with Adams for roughly 40 years and has described herself as “his sister ordained by God.” A Christian chaplain, she has been his top aide since 2006, when she managed his successful campaign for a state Senate seat.
Colleagues describe her as the mayor’s political enforcer — she is known by the nickname “the Lioness of City Hall” — a characterization she does not shy away from.
“I’m not Michelle Obama,” she told City and State in 2022. “When they go low? We drill for oil.”
When Adams was elected mayor, several supporters advised him not to bring Lewis-Martin with him to City Hall, The New York Times reported last year, according to six people with knowledge of the conversations.
Lewis-Martin was seen as combative when she worked for Adams in the Brooklyn borough president’s office and as often pushing ethical boundaries. Others worried that she would have too much power and not enough responsibility.
The federal subpoena served on Lewis-Martin seeks information related to the investigation that produced the corruption charges against the mayor, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said. The state investigation apparently grew out of an inquiry by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that led to the indictment last year of Eric Ulrich, who had been the mayor’s senior adviser and buildings commissioner, for taking bribes.
When Ulrich was still in the administration, he and Lewis-Martin were considered friends, a former administration official said. Ulrich was a frequent presence in Lewis-Martin’s office and when he was indicted, she was upset, the official said.
Though she is not named in one of the indictments against Ulrich and three co-defendants, Lewis-Martin appears to play a small role in it. The charges accuse Ulrich of using his position to benefit his co-defendants in exchange for bribes.
The indictment features a person identified only as Adams’ “chief adviser” meeting and speaking by telephone with the co-defendants as they tried to get City Hall to help with regulatory issues affecting their business interests.
The indictment did not accuse the chief adviser of wrongdoing.
Shortly before noon Friday, Lewis-Martin was approached at the airport by the two sets of investigators after her flight had landed, the people said. The investigators from the district attorney’s office, who were accompanied by others from the city’s Department of Investigation both at the airport and during the search of Lewis-Martin’s Brooklyn home, seized her phones and told her they were simultaneously searching her house, the people said.
The investigators allowed her to call her lawyer, and she surrendered her phones in response to a warrant.
During the radio show Friday evening, Lewis-Martin described the investigators who took her phones as “very polite,” even when she got “a little vociferous.”
One of the investigators, she said, “explained to me, ‘Look, we don’t want to make this more than what it needs to be. We don’t want to have to arrest you for being noncompliant. And, you know, we don’t want to make this bigger.’ And he was very nice, and I apologized to him for being impolite, and I requested to speak with my attorney.”
At about the same time, the federal investigators served her with the grand jury subpoena, which had been issued by one of the prosecutors overseeing the investigation into the mayor, one of the people said.
Representatives of the U.S. attorney’s office, the district attorney’s office and the Department of Investigation all declined to comment.
On Friday afternoon, reporters assembled in front of Lewis-Martin’s small redbrick house, located in East Flatbush.
Amram Amsalem, 61, a neighbor who said he was “good friends” with Lewis-Martin and her family, said the search earlier in the day had taken him by surprise.
“I feel bad, to tell you the truth, I feel bad,” Amsalem said. “It’s very nice people.”