NYC NOW - October 10, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

The Adams administration says the migrant shelter at Randall’s Island will close at the end of February. Plus, police are looking for two men they say fatally beat a homeless immigrant in Brooklyn last month. And finally, WNYC’s Janae Pierre and Samantha Max look at the career of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, the man prosecuting Mayor Eric Adams.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. The Adams administration says the migrant shelter at Randall's Island will close at the end of February. As need has plummeted over the past 14 straight weeks, one part of it, a tent holding 750 cots, has already been dismantled. The site has housed more than 2,200 asylum seekers as part of a citywide shelter system that served more than 60,000 migrants. Police are looking for two men, they say, fatally beat a homeless immigrant from Guatemala as he slept in a shop-right parking lot in Brooklyn last month. WMYC's Brittany Crickstein has more from the neighborhood. A few scattered personal belongings in the back corner of a shopright parking garage show that people spend the night here.

Store employees say it's the spot where 38-year-old Jirvin Jonas Ajpaq Koss was brutally attacked last month by two men wielding a baseball bat and a metal pipe. Police say Ashbach Kos died of his injuries in the hospital. Store employees say he often showed up at the parking lot to deposit bottles for cash. They're not sure why he was attacked. Police say the two alleged assailants are 25 and 49-year-olds and are known to hang around the area near the store. U.S. attorney Damien Williams is playing a central role in the federal case against Eric Adams. After the break, we learn a bit more about the man prosecuting the mayor of New York City. Stick around for the conversation.

Mayor Eric Adams is in the spotlight as the first sitting mayor indicted in modern New York City history. But another man is playing a central role in this legal drama. That's U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. I'm in studio with WNYC's Samantha Max to talk more about the U.S. attorney. Sam, tell us, who is Damian Williams? So Damian Williams is the lead prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Sauterese. in District of New York. That's the federal prosecutor's office that oversees a lot of the country's most prominent cases, especially white-collar crime and public corruption.

Williams was born here in New York City, in Brooklyn, but he was raised in Atlanta, a child of Jamaican immigrants. He has a really prestigious background. He got degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, Yale Law School. And then he clerked for some huge names in the legal sector, Merrick Garland, who's now the Attorney General, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. But since then, he has spent most of his career here in New York at the Southern District of New York, U.S. Attorney's Office. And since taking over that office, fairly recently, he has made corruption a central focus of his tenure. There's a common refrain that you'll hear at a lot of his press conferences when he's announcing charges in these big cases that he's rooting out

public corruption. Sometimes you'll even hear him repeating the same phrases verbatim. One of my top priorities is to fight the corruption that pollutes our politics and our public institutions. The Southern District of New York remains committed to rooting out corruption. Without fear or favor and without any regard to partisan politics. Public corruption arose people's confidence and faith in government. We are not focused on the right or the left. We are focused only on right and wrong. This Adams indictment, this isn't the first high-profile public corruption case that Williams has brought. He brought a notable case earlier in his career, right? Yeah, I mean, he's done several of these public corruption cases throughout his career, but one that I think is

really noteworthy is the Sheldon Silver case. That's the former New York State Assembly Speaker who was accused of doing political favors for a doctor that prosecutor said was basically funneling millions of dollars of business to his day job as a private law attorney. Silver was convicted in 2015, but then there was a Supreme Court ruling that kind of changed the rules around what constitutes corruption in federal cases. And basically, the Southern District of New York had to bring the case a second time. And that's when Williams, an up-and-coming attorney was brought in and he actually gave the opening statement in that trial. The New York Times has reported that he gave that opening statement 22 pages in the court transcript with no notes. Yeah, I mean, it just speaks to

his skills as an attorney and as an orator. And then his team managed to get silver convicted a second time. And then there's the case against former lieutenant governor Brian Benjamin, which is facing a shaky future in court right now. What's the status? there, Sam? Yeah, so Brian Benjamin, former lieutenant governor of New York, he was charged with bribery, wired fraud, falsifying records. Prosecutors say that he took campaign donations from this real estate investor, and then in return, he pledged to get that real estate investor estate grant. Williams was very clear at the press conference announcing these charges that this was a classic bribery scheme. But then, effect,

federal judge actually ruled in and said, you know what, I disagree. And he threw out the kind of central charges, those public corruption charges. A higher court has since weighed in and they reinstated them. But the case is kind of in limbo right now as the courts figure out if the case actually rises to the level of public corruption. So it's an example that's worth keeping in mind as the Adams case plays out because it really shows just how tough it is to process. prosecute public corruption. Yeah, for sure. It's not easy.

Now, a recent case that William successfully tried was that of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez. What might that case signal? Yeah, so in that case, we're talking about longtime New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez. He was the former chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, which means that he had a ton of power over relations between the U.S. and other countries. Basically, prosecutors say that he was using his huge amount of power to, help out Egypt's government and also some of his friends who had legal issues in exchange for gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz, wads of cash. He was convicted on all counts earlier this year.

And there are some similarities between that case and the Adams case. I think most notably, these allegations of kind of a connection between U.S. politics and some sort of foreign entity and the exchange of lavish gifts in the middle of all of this. So in court the other day, a prosecutor actually used the Menendez case as kind of an example. But Adams' attorney has been really strong in his statements that these are not the same. There's different evidence. The cases are unique. And it seems pretty clear that he does not want his client, the mayor of the city of New York,

connected to this New Jersey politician who has been convicted of all these federal charges. And I should note that Menendez is also appealing his conviction. So, you know, we'll see how that continues to play out. Yeah, I want to talk a bit more about the mayor's attorney because his attorney has accused Williams's office of bringing a fake case to get attention in the press. What's his argument there? So part of it goes back to what I was saying earlier about just how difficult it is to bring bribery charges in federal court nowadays. And the mayor's attorney is really trying to undermine the bribery charge.

He's saying that it is legal to accept what's considered a gratuity, which is basically a gift that a politician can get as long as it's not directly in exchange for some sort of political favor. So he's saying the flights, hotel stays, things like that, they were gratuities and that other politicians take similar gifts. And then the other really big piece of all this is allegations that the U.S. Attorney's Office is leaking information to the press. So Adams team has cited all these different examples of news stories with confidential information about the case saying that prosecutors must have been the one that shared it. But in court, prosecutors said, well, actually the mayor in his circle knew some of this information. So there's a chance that they could have been leaking it too. So I think in the coming weeks, we will get more information about that. That's WMYC's Samantha Max.

Thanks for listening to NYC now from WN. YMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Jenae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.