Timothy Pearson

Timothy Pearson and Eric Adams go way back. Pearson, who joined the NYPD in 1981, was Adams’s commanding officer while the mayor was still on the police force. Pearson was a 9/11 first responder who ushered people out of the South Tower before it collapsed and retired from the department in 2011 with a $124,000 annual pension. 

After leaving the police department, Pearson took a job at New York City’s only casino, where according to his LinkedIn profile he was promoted from director of security and fire safety to a vice president position in June 2011. He hung onto the role even when he stepped into the Adams administration in May 2022, only resigning after reports emerged that he had retained the job and was likely pulling a $242,600 salary from the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-private, quasi-corporate “nonprofit” arm of City government controlled by City Hall.

What Timothy Pearson, who is apparently a flashy dresser, does for the Adams administration elides easy description. His official title is “senior adviser to the mayor for public safety” and, previously, for “COVID recovery.” But his work spans far beyond these issues, encompassing security checks at migrant shelters and overseas travel with the mayor—without any clear, public schedule or accountability, despite drawing that hefty City paycheck. When reached for comment about Pearson, the EDC directed Hell Gate’s inquiries to City Hall—but acknowledged that Pearson does work for the EDC, despite the fact that most of his duties relate to the mayor’s office. City Hall did not respond to a request for comment about Pearson.

Pearson’s relationship with Adams has been confusing outside observers since the latter was Brooklyn Borough president. He joined Adams on a 2015 trip to Turkey in an advisory capacity that baffled the Conflict of Interest Board members who eventually approved Pearson’s inclusion on the trip. “Is Mr. Pearson a volunteer to the BP? A personal friend of Mr. Adams? Or is Mr. Adams paying Mr. Pearson out of his personal funds?” the board’s attorney asked in an email. “I ask because we have never heard of a volunteer security person before and we just want to be clear on the association.” Pearson ultimately joined the trip not as a volunteer or as security, but “to assist in identifying & addressing security matters regarding tourism & ways to promote & maintain safety,” according to Adams’s special counsel. 

Adams and Deputy Mayor for Communications Fabian Levy have both expended plenty of oxygen defending Pearson, though. “Tim Pearson has had a long and distinguished career in both the public and private sectors, where he has spent decades keeping New Yorkers safe and creating security plans that have protected millions,” Deputy Mayor for Communications Fabian Levy told Politico in April 2023, referring to Pearson’s unpaid stint on Adams’s transition team. “New Yorkers are lucky to have such a knowledgeable and experienced 9/11 hero agree to serve and bring his expertise to the greatest city in the world, especially after he first did the job without being paid a single dollar for months.”

Adams also dismissed the questions around his decision to hire his friend. “If you know someone that’s qualified, like Tim Pearson—former inspector in the Police Department; a hero during 9/11, he was in the buildings when the buildings collapsed, instead of fleeing, he went back to help,” the mayor told NY1’s Pat Kiernan last August “Am I supposed to succumb to just those who are looking at hires? And they’re not saying he’s not qualified.”

As a member of the mayor’s transition team, Politico reported that Pearson helped hire former NYPD commissioner Keechant Sewell, pitched the NYPD on hiring “armed civilians” for Adams in lieu of a police detail (something City Hall has denied), and may have helped hook up Bernard Adams’s controversial deputy commissioner appointment. Months after the Bernard appointment, Pearson was widely seen as taking increasing control of the NYPD from Sewell with the help of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Philip Banks III before her resignation.

In late 2023, Pearson made headlines for a pair of incidents that took place at New York City migrant shelters on October 17. First, according to the CITY, Pearson allegedly entered the Randall’s Island migrant shelter with more than 100 police officers, two drones, and a helicopter in order to conduct a “quality of life sweep” and look for four individuals accused of assaulting a police officer. When the shelter’s site manager asked Pearson for the warrant legally required to search the premises, witnesses said Pearson threatened the manager’s job and insisted on entering the shelter, where the cadre of cops ultimately failed to find the people they were looking for. 

Later the same day, witnesses told the CITY that Pearson attempted to enter a migrant shelter in a Touro University building in Manhattan without identifying himself, this time in search of fire code violations. When guards refused to let him in, Pearson allegedly cursed at them and grabbed a female security guard, later identified as Leesha Bell, by the neck before pushing her into a table. When other shelter workers attempted to intervene and help their coworker, the scuffle reportedly bloomed into a full-on brawl, and two guards were arrested as a result. The latter incident resulted in an ongoing inquiry by the City’s Department of Investigation, which declined a request for comment from Hell Gate on the investigation’s current status. 

Adams, true to form, continued to defend the man who stood behind him in Times Square during his mayoral inauguration. 

“Let’s be clear, this is what happens when you are dealing with a crisis of this magnitude,” Adams said at a press conference a week after the incident—adding that over his 30-plus year relationship with Pearson, he’d never witnessed “a violent action” by him.

In October 2024, three of the guards whom Pearson encountered on his visits to migrant shelters told a very different story in their lawsuit against Pearson (along with Adams, the City of New York, and the NYPD) for false arrest and malicious prosecution. Per their lawsuit, Pearson was allegedly set off after he was asked for identification while trying to enter the Touro University shelter. According to the suit, he pushed one of the guards, Terrence Rosenthal, to the ground; screamed, “Bitch, do you know who I am?” at another guard, Leesha Bell, before grabbing her by her neck and pushing her into a counter; and pushed a third guard, Angelica Weldon, into a wall, fracturing her shoulder. 

According to a report from the New York Times, Rosenthal and Bell were arrested and detained following the altercation, and were taken to the NYPD’s Midtown South station. While they were being processed, Bell and Rosenthal told the Times that Pearson showed up at the station, cursed at them, and told them, “I told you all I’ll have your jobs.” The pair claimed that the Midtown South station’s precinct commander instructed them to apologize to Pearson, which both declined to do. Bell was charged with disorderly conduct and Rosenthal received misdemeanor charges, all later dismissed. 

That lawsuit is far from the only legal trouble Pearson is in. The aforementioned DOI probe into Pearson widened in scope after a former NYPD sergeant, Roxanne Ludemann, filed  a lawsuit against him in March 2024 that accused him of sexually harassing her and then retaliating against her when she reported him to her supervisor. According to the suit, while they worked together in the same office in 2022, Pearson asked her “sexually driven questions,” touched her inappropriately, and retaliated against her when she refused to act as his driver—all of which she said ultimately led her to resign from the police department. 

Ludemann said in the lawsuit that her then-supervisor, Inspector Miltiadis Marmara, attempted to promote her away from Pearson, but that Pearson blocked the promotion. After Marmara attempted to confront Pearson, the lawsuit alleges, Pearson pulled in NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who allegedly promised to “take care of it.” (You may recall that Maddrey has also been accused of sexual misconduct by a then-subordinate in the NYPD.) In her lawsuit, Ludemann alleges that she and her supervisor were subsequently transferred back to the NYPD, where they were bounced around from command to command and demoted, until Ludemann finally made the decision to retire due to the retaliation she said was orchestrated by Pearson and Maddrey. “I want what happened to come to light—that it started with me saying ‘no’ and doing the right thing, and the NYPD allowed this man to destroy my career and traumatize me,” Ludemann told the Daily News of Pearson.

Meanwhile, Mayor Adams had this to say about his old friend and top aide, at a press conference days after Ludemann’s lawsuit was publicized: “In this country there’s something called due process. And our due process does not change. It’s due process…and as a person who was in the [World] Trade Center when the buildings collapsed and saved a great deal of people in guiding them out and protecting this city for the time he has, I think he is due, due process.”

Pearson is going to get a lot of due process, as more lawsuits quickly followed. In April, another former NYPD sergeant, Michael Ferrari, also filed suit against Pearson, and claimed in the suit that he was demoted and faced retaliation after backing Ludemann’s harassment allegations. (It also includes an absolutely devastating anecdote about a nickname Pearson picked up during the Adams administration. According to the lawsuit, Pearson told a pair of cops in 2022 that he was jealous of contractors who were paid for work on a scrapped migrant shelter in Orchard Beach, allegedly saying, “Do you know how these contracts work? People are doing very well on these contracts. I have to get mine. Where are my crumbs?” The suit says that Pearson’s subordinates then began calling him “Crumbs” behind his back.) And in June, a third NYPD officer, Lieutenant George Huang, filed a lawsuit against Pearson, as well as Maddrey and NYPD Internal Affairs Deputy Inspector Joseph Profeta. In the lawsuit, Huang claims Profeta tried to intimidate him out of testifying about Pearson’s harassment of Ludemann. Huang also alleges that after he refused to change his testimony, Pearson enlisted Maddrey to transfer him to an undesirable midnight transit tour in Queens—an added hardship on top of the recent death of his 7-year-old daughter—and that he now plans to retire early too, in July. The suit also claims that FBI agents questioned Huang, Ludemann, and Ferrari about whether they witnessed Pearson engaging in illegal activities—indicating that Pearson may be the subject of an FBI probe.

We’ll get back to the FBI in a moment, but over the summer, related to Pearson’s alleged harassment of Ludemann continued. In July, Marmara, Ludemann’s supervisor, filed a fourth suit against Pearson, this time alleging that the NYPD was aware of decades of sexual misconduct by Pearson stretching back to his time as a uniformed officer, as well as a history of homophobic and otherwise prejudiced behavior during his time as the head of the Municipal Services Assessment Unit. The suit also describes extensive interventions by Chell and Maddrey to silence victims and protect Pearson, and says that in the MSA, Pearson was frequently compared to Jeffrey Epstein by his subordinates.

As a result of the lawsuits, which are all still ongoing, the DOI has requested “a wide range of records related to personnel procedures, discretionary promotions and disciplinary charges” from the NYPD, including Pearson’s full personnel file. As of October 2024, Pearson was being represented in all of the above lawsuits by attorneys hired by the City’s Law Department. The Law Department did not respond to a question from Hell Gate about whether they continue to pay for Pearson’s defense now that he has resigned.

As for that tidbit about the FBI being interested in Crumbs—excuse me, Pearson, from Huang’s lawsuit? In September, Pearson’s home was raided and his phones, documents, and cash were seized by the FBI on the same day as the FBI raided the homes of Sheena Wright and David Banks, Phil Banks III, and Terence Banks, seizing their phones as part of a sprawling federal investigation that is focused on Eric Adams’s inner circle. Federal agents also seized the phones of then-NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban and James Caban, his twin brother. Pearson has not been charged with a crime related to this investigation as of the time of this writing, but numerous outlets have reported on federal inquiries into Pearson’s control of migrant shelter-related contracts and whether he received kickbacks for influencing them.

Per a September 2024 report from the CITY, Pearson also used his assignment to monitor asylum seeker shelter projects to delay a City contract with Cherokee Nation Management & Consulting LLC, a business that was previously approved to provide case management services to assist City agencies with “work authorization papers, travel and housing,” with the goal of helping migrants leave New York City’s overcrowded shelter system.

According to the report, Pearson repeatedly delayed meetings with Cherokee Nation Management, pushing back the firm’s start date by around three months. New York City’s Office of Asylum Seeker Operations Director, Molly Schaeffer, was subpoenaed by federal investigators two days before the news of Pearson’s contract stalling broke. According to the CITY, Pearson’s daily schedules show that he met with Schaeffer almost daily from “the fall of 2022 and continuing into late 2023” to discuss topics such as “asylum seeker update” and “contracts.”

Adams once again swooped in to Pearson’s defense when discussing his assignment to contract oversight. “Tim brought something to the dynamic that I knew we had to think outside the box, to resolve the issues. And we saved hundreds of millions of dollars because of his analysis and partnership with the other people that are involved,” the mayor said during his weekly press conference on September 17, 2024. But a week later, Adams had changed his tune, telling reporters that Pearson is no longer in charge of migrant contracts.

On September 30, 2024, Pearson announced that he was stepping down from his role in the Adams administration on October 4, 2024. In a letter first obtained by the New York Times, Pearson wrote that he was resigning in order to “focus on family, self-care and new endeavors.” In what could be Adams’s final statement on Pearson’s tenure in City Hall, the mayor did not invoke metaphors, or heroic anecdotes, or his close relationship with Pearson when commenting on his old friend’s departure. He simply told reporters, “Tim has had a long career in both the public and private sectors, where he has spent over 30 years keeping New Yorkers safe…We appreciate Tim’s decades of service to this city and wish him well.”