As part of its probe into the Eric Adams campaign’s connections to Turkey, the FBI is looking into whether an internal list of property owners seeking approval of fire alarm systems, kept by the mayor’s office under both Bill de Blasio and Adams, allowed prominent real estate developers to cut the line for crucial inspections, THE CITY has learned.
Those developers allegedly include the government of Turkey as it sought to open a new midtown Manhattan consulate with Adams’ assistance when he was Brooklyn Borough President, an interaction that is now under scrutiny as part of the federal probe.
The so-called Deputy Mayor of Operations (DMO) List started in 2021 as a way to cut red tape that was supposed to benefit small businesses. Instead, it wound up favoring big-money developers, according to allegations made in a lawsuit by Joseph Jardin, formerly the FDNY’s chief of fire prevention.
Jardin, who was demoted by Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, is now suing the city alleging retaliation after he protested the use of this list and other behavior he and six other ex-FDNY chiefs deemed “corrupt.” In that suit, the former chief highlights serious safety concerns he saw in the Adams administration’s attempts to cut red tape.
Jardin is one of three Fire Department officials interviewed by federal law enforcement in its ongoing investigation of Adams’ fundraising, according to a source familiar with the ongoing and widening investigation.
Last spring Jardin told the FBI about an interaction in 2021, when Adams was still Brooklyn Borough President but soon to be mayor, and allegedly pressured the FDNY to reinspect a newly constructed 35-story Midtown building housing the Turkish consulate where the fire safety system had failed an inspection.
In speaking with the FBI, Jardin described the Turkish consulate interaction as simply one example of a broader effort by City Hall under de Blasio and then Adams to help big real estate sail past the often confounding obstacles ordinary property owners experience trying to get approvals from city agencies.
The FBI and the Manhattan federal prosecutors were provided with the DMO list and are now looking to see if other big-money developers were able to skip the line, according to a source familiar with the ongoing investigation.
“Jardin talked to the FBI about this [list] because this became part of the institutionalization of doing favors for City Hall,” said attorney Jim Walden, a former federal prosecutor who’s representing Jardin and the six other former FDNY chiefs suing the city. “There are other chiefs that hated this list.”
The FBI did not return THE CITY’s calls. A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment. The mayor’s office also did not respond to THE CITY’s questions about the DMO list.
Cutting the Line
Jardin is suing Kavanagh and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Philip Banks III, a longtime close associate of the mayor who has oversight over the fire department.
In his lawsuit, Jardin and the other chiefs allege that Kavanagh and Banks conspired to force them out after they complained about a number of protocol changes with which they disagreed, including the ‘cut-the-line’ list for “friends” of City Hall. Jardin also alleges, for example, that he objected to other steps he says Kavanagh took during Adams’ tenure to make it easier for developers to move ahead with their projects.
For example, in early 2022, after Adams’ arrival at City Hall, then-interim Fire Commissioner Kavanagh’s “subordinates” proposed to Jardin and the Bureau of Fire Prevention that the Department of Buildings should take over the task of inspecting fire alarm systems.
Eric Ulrich, a senior advisor to Adams, became his buildings commissioner that May and remained in the job through mid-November 2022. Ulrich was indicted in September on charges of accepting cash, Mets tickets and a discount apartment in exchange for using his influence to obtain favors from City Hall.
As part of this effort to smooth the path for “friends” of City Hall, Jardin alleged that Kavanagh and her subordinates also “pushed the idea of permitting building owners to self-certify their fire alarm systems” as being up to code.
In his affidavit in the lawsuit, Jardin said he was “troubled by these ideas because other City agencies did not have the plan review expertise to do what FDNY had been doing. ” He noted that in “many of the self-certifications have been discovered to be fraudulent and fires in self-certified buildings have led to the deaths of firefighters.” He said he advocated for FDNY to “retain ultimate certification authority.”
In response to THE CITY’s questions about the allegations made by Jardin and the other former chiefs in the pending lawsuit, FDNY spokesperson James Long stated, “The Fire Department’s top priority is to keep New Yorkers safe, and every decision we make is with fire safety in mind.”
“This simply seems like an attempt by someone who is unsuccessfully suing the FDNY and Commissioner Kavanagh, and who has a financial interest in undermining the fire commissioner and smearing her good name,” he added.
Jardin was appointed chief of fire prevention in April 2019 by former Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro. At the time, he said in an affidavit filed in connection with his lawsuit, there was a “growing backlog of Fire Alarm Plan safety inspections dating back to the de Blasio administration” that he attributed, in part, to FDNY engineer staffing shortages.
In his new role as head of the Bureau of Fire Prevention, which inspects fire alarm systems in all new buildings and performs follow-up inspections once buildings are up, Jardin said he “encountered corruption in favor of major real estate developers” and attributed his demotion to his “refusal to acquiesce to it.”
The lawsuit zeroes in on the DMO list, which is described as being created “at the behest of the Real Estate Board of New York.” The suit alleged that City Hall was relying on this list “to fast-track inspections for ‘friends’ of City Hall” described as “prominent and influential real estate developers.”
“The DMO list became a mechanism to force FDNY to permit politically connected developers to cut the inspection line,” the lawsuit alleged. “Developers with access to City Hall — or with access to Defendant Kavanagh and her staff — could get their development projects onto the DMO list.”
In response to THE CITY’s query, a spokesperson for REBNY, Sam Spokony, stated, “It is widely understood that at the end of the de Blasio administration the FDNY had a very lengthy response time for processing plans and inspecting buildings. When REBNY members face delays in the inspection process, it is common for them to request our assistance with City agencies.”
Erdogan’s Moment in the Sun
The case of the FDNY’s involvement in the Turkish consulate emerged shortly after the New York times revealed that the FBI had raided the home of Adams’ chief fundraiser and subsequently seized some of the mayor’s cell phones and an iPad.
Adams has since admitted that he did reach out to Nigro in September 2021, after he won the primary and was expected to win City Hall in a few weeks, asking him to look into problems approving the fire safety system at the Turkish consulate. Without a sign-off from FDNY inspectors, the building could not obtain a certificate of occupancy from the Department of Buildings.
“The mayor has said many times, and it’s been widely reported from people with knowledge of the text exchange between him and Commissioner Nigro, that he forwarded the consulate issue to ask him to look into it but did not ask him to take any specific action.” said Evan Thies, Adams’ 2021 campaign spokesperson. “It is up to agencies to adjudicate how they address those requests.”
At the time, the mayor had been the beneficiary of tens of thousands of dollars in donations from contributors associated with Turkey, including $69,720 at a May 2021 fundraiser organized by Erden Arkan, the president of KSK Construction, a Brooklyn contractor with Turkish ties. KSK is tied to a firm that has twice been ensnared in investigations that alleged the firm bribed city workers for favors.
In a press conference Tuesday, the mayor stated, “The commissioner was the person that I asked if you look into this. That was who I spoke with. I did not speak to any chief. I did not speak to any deputy. I didn’t speak to anyone else. It’s not my job to circumvent a commissioner. I spoke just with the commissioner and the commissioner took the proper action.”
Jardin’s attorney Walden said someone in the top levels of the fire department — he did not say who — instructed Jardin to send inspectors to the site that day. Jardin declined, Walden said.
Then Jardin was told to issue a “certificate of defect,” which would cite only minor flaws that would still allow the building to receive a temporary certificate of occupancy. Again Jardin declined to do so, noting that the fire alarm system itself was not fully installed, Walden said.
Finally Jardin issued a certificate of conditional approval, which still required the alarm system to be fully installed and then tested by the FDNY and the DOB before a temporary certificate could be issued. Walden said some but not all of these requirements were met, and the building still got a temporary certificate in time for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to show up the day the building was formally opened.
“It wasn’t about public safety,” Walden said. “It was about Erdogan having his moment in the sun.”
FDNY spokesperson Long noted: “Internal emails make clear that Commissioner Kavanagh had no meaningful involvement in how the FDNY handled this request, and there is nothing to suggest that the FDNY was pressured to do anything improper.”