Ex-NYPD Sergeant, Brooklyn Nonprofit Executives Charged in $1.3 Million Kickback Scheme

The unraveling of a multi-million dollar bribery scheme involving a former NYPD officer and a Brooklyn nonprofit lays bare deeper flaws in New York City’s oversight of emergency contracts and the safeguarding of funds intended for its most vulnerable.

New York City’s war on corruption occasionally yields a case so baroquely familiar it might portend little else than the city’s chronic vulnerabilities. This week, a federal indictment unsealed in Brooklyn revealed that, beneath the veneer of public service, a modest cabal had siphoned away more than $1.3 million from a nonprofit aimed at the elderly and homeless, while steering millions in city business toward well-placed insiders.

Four men now face a litany of charges. Jean Ronald Tirelus and Roberto Samedy—respectively the former chair and executive director of BHRAGS Home Care Corp., a Brooklyn-based nonprofit—are accused of looting their charity and brokering contracts to select vendors, including ex-NYPD sergeant Edouardo St. Fort and businessman Miguel Jorge. In return, prosecutors allege, Samedy and Tirelus pocketed kickbacks, bribes, and the largesse of city contracts.

At the heart of the affair stands St. Fort’s private firm, Fort NYC Security, which, according to city officials, received roughly $7 million in contracts—most awarded through “emergency” procedures with scant oversight. In the post-pandemic city, such fiscal shortcuts have become regrettably routine, especially in the fraught world of sheltering migrants and homeless New Yorkers.

Yet the scandal’s resonance exceeds the sum embezzled or the reputations now in tatters. The nonprofit in question, founded in 1981, was ostensibly committed to helping the “needy and unfortunate.” Its betrayal erodes public trust not only in charitable organizations reliant on city funds but in the web of government agencies that fail to keep avarice in check.

For New Yorkers, the issue is not merely abstract. The city spends billions annually on non-profits to deliver basic services, from housing to elderly care. The vast expansion of contracts post-Covid—replete with emergency measures and paltry safeguards—has proved a veritable buffet for opportunists. Former Comptroller Brad Lander’s audit found tens of millions frittered away in recent years, the result of “emergency” designations wielded with libertine frequency.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s diffident response—he would “get back” to local reporters on the matter of ongoing emergency contracts—offers little solace. While the mayor insists on the gravity of any “improper behavior,” the city’s system still smacks of willful negligence, almost inviting the mendacity of those entrusted with public funds.

The case exemplifies a broader malaise: when oversight is cursory, political patronage turbocharges market share for a coterie of well-connected vendors—former city officials among them—while accountability languishes. Lawmakers clutch their pearls at embezzlement, but remain loath to untangle the bureaucracy that seeds it.

The second-order effects are sobering. When shelters and home care are delivered by profiteers, outcomes for the vulnerable deteriorate, costs for the taxpayer balloon, and the city’s claim to compassion rings hollow. Meanwhile, every scandal leaves more rope for critics eager to paint the public sector as feckless or corrupt, sapping support for social spending at a time when need is acute.

Nationally, American cities have wrestled with similar patterns. Emergency procurement, designed for wartime or catastrophe, has become a loophole for hurried contracting and shadowy deals from San Francisco to Miami. New York’s scale and sophistication merely magnifies the problem; only in Gotham could $7 million in guard contracts appear almost trivial as a line-item, yet each dollar lost is a dollar not spent on beds, meals, or nurses for the city’s most precarious.

Globally, the story echoes wider debates about the interface between public institutions and markets. Some European cities run public housing and homeless services in-house, limiting outside contractors and eschewing the charity-corporate complex. Others, like London, have seen similar scandals, with nonprofits exploited as delivery vehicles for politically connected businessmen.

Emergency contracting bodes ill for accountability

Proponents of rapid, flexible procurement castigate slower processes as bureaucratic sclerosis. Yet the cost of haste is clear: emergency contracts, with tepid scrutiny and limited competition, entrench the very risks they are meant to solve. When millions can move with a single signature, and when former law enforcement officers find themselves on both sides of a lucrative transaction, it signals a governance gap that spreadsheets and audits alone will not bridge.

The legal saga now winding through Brooklyn’s federal courts will, no doubt, command headlines for a news cycle or two. Tirelus, Samedy, and Jorge have pleaded not guilty; St. Fort’s formal plea awaits. Their fates remain in the hands of the justice system—a process that will plod with less fanfare than the contracts once did.

We reckon, though, that the city’s real challenge lies not in prosecuting miscreants, but in fortifying the very structures that made their scheme not only possible but, to some, predictable. New York’s house is too drafty for modest reforms: a full audit of emergency contracting, sharper guidelines for nonprofit governance, and a less cavalier embrace of “urgent” public-private deals are needed.

If the story shocks, it should not surprise. Scandals of this stripe surface just often enough to remind us that vigilance is not a one-off but a perennial duty whose neglect carries a steep price. Politics has made hay from anti-corruption crusades before; only a cold-eyed look at incentives, and a sober planting of guardrails, will stymie future St. Forts and Samedys.

For now, New York is left to tally the cost—not merely in dollars siphoned, but in damaged faith and more frayed safety nets. It is a bill the city can ill afford to ignore. ■