When Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently announced he was reappointing Adams administration holdover Michael Garner as the city’s top official promoting diversity in city contracts, he singled out Garner’s past success aiding minority- and women-run businesses in a similar role he had held for years at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).
But Garner’s record of MWBE success came under a cloud before Adams even appointed him.
In a report issued just as Garner left the agency to go work for City Hall, the MTA’s inspector general concluded that a unit he supervised cherry-picked and relied on unverified data that presented a distorted picture of the small-business development program Garner ran to steer minority-and women-owned firms to lucrative MTA contracts.
The MTA ultimately agreed with the IG’s findings and promised to adopt its recommended reforms.
In announcing Garner’s reappointment to his $274,000-a-year role as the mayor’s chief advisor on MWBE policies, the new mayor also did not mention Garner’s involvement in a behind-the-scenes attempt to manipulate a city agency’s MWBE goals in a way that a woman-owned real estate brokerage contends helped cut it out of receiving commissions on city leases.
In a lawsuit, the woman-owned firm, JRT Realty, alleged the agency that handles leases, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), removed women from the traditional MWBE goals in an effort to favor a broker with ties to Adams’ top aides, including his former Chief Advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin and Jesse Hamilton, a protege Adams put in charge of city leases.
On Tuesday Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for Mamdani, declined to respond to any of THE CITY’s questions about Garner, including whether the administration was aware of the IG report or the allegations of DCAS altering MWBE goals when vetting Garner for reappointment. She also declined to provide a response from Garner.
This is the third instance in which problematic new information has surfaced about a Mamdani pick after their appointment was announced.
Since-deleted antisemitic social media postings by one hire, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resulted in her resigning. And Mamdani continues to back Cea Weaver as his choice to run the new Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, even after past social media posts surfaced in which she dubbed homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” and contended that private property should be banned.
While most top level advisors to Eric Adams are now gone, Garner is an exception. He managed to hold on until the last minute, and then became one of a handful of Adams veterans Mamdani decided to keep on at City Hall.
Adams named Garner as his chief diversity officer in February 2023. His ties to the former mayor date back decades. He was co-founder of 100 Black Men of New York City, a philanthropic group of prominent Black leaders whose president for years was Philip Banks Jr., with whom Adams had a longstanding friendship from their days in the NYPD.
For much of his career Garner managed programs that help businesses owned by women and minorities to land government contracts, including at the New York City Housing Authority and then for 14 years at the MTA.
In that capacity, Garner ran the MTA’s Small Business Development Program, a unit that since 2010 has recruited, advised and mentored small, minority-owned businesses “to create a large pool of diverse, qualified contractors who can compete for MTA projects.”
Then the MTA’s Chief Diversity Officer Michael Garner announces a milestone in contracting with minority and women-owned companies through the MTA Small Business Mentoring Program, Sept. 27, 2021.
Credit: Marc A. Hermann/MTA
By the time Adams put Garner in his administration, Acting MTA Inspector General Elizabeth Keating was wrapping up an investigation of Garner’s MTA program.
By January 2023, the MTA IG had “identified weaknesses in the TA’s ability to report on participating firms’ success in winning contracts,” charging that a unit under Garner’s direct supervision, the Department of Diversity and Civil Rights (DDCR), was presenting a distorted version of reality.
The unit, the IG charged, relied on selective data when reporting on the successes of the program. Looking at the MTA’s 2022 report on that program, the IG found that the data did not include 80% of the program’s graduates.
The IG stated that the DDCR’s report included only 50 of the 268 MWBE firms that had participated in the program and included only firms that graduated from the program and went on to win contracts in the $1 million to $3 million range that had achieved certain revenue levels over three years.
The department, the IG found, also used potentially unreliable information in filtering out these top performers, relying on data provided by the firms without independently verifying the credibility of the information.
“The report the MTA uses to communicate firms’ contracting activity and revenue levels after graduation is overly selective and relies, in part, on unverified information,” the IG stated, advising that the MTA should include all the program’s participants to get an accurate picture of its overall successes and failures.
The IG also found Garner’s Small Business Development Program did not track how many participants in the program subsequently bid on MTA work and how many actually won contracts. This effectively prevented the public from knowing how many graduates of Garner’s program were successful bidders and how many were not.
“Because the MTA does not fully identify which graduates have won prime contracts with the TA nor have the ability to determine how many times graduates have sought and been unsuccessful in winning bids, the agency does not have the information needed to evaluate its success rate,” the IG declared. “The program is at risk of investing significant staff time and effort…to select, train and mentor small businesses without knowing if the investment is providing a sufficient return.”
The IG sent a draft of its findings to the MTA seeking a response in early January 2023. A few weeks later at a January 30 party at Cipriani’s attended by Adams, Garner announced he was leaving the MTA to work for City Hall.
That Feb. 13 Adams announced his appointment of Garner as his chief diversity officer. A few weeks later in March, the IG made the findings of its investigation public.
In its report, the IG noted that the MTA’s interim Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer agreed with all the investigators’ findings and promised to adopt all the IG’s recommendations for reform, including looking at all the program’s participants when reporting on the program’s success rate with graduates.
The mayor’s spokesperson, Pekec, also did not respond to THE CITY’s questions regarding Garner’s involvement in a behind-the-scenes effort at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) that a woman-owned real estate brokerage alleges was designed to squeeze her out of commissions on city leases.
Garner’s role in this incident emerged last year in a lawsuit filed by JRT Realty, a brokerage founded by Jody Pulice. For years the brokerage that advises the DCAS on city leases, Cushman & Wakefield, had relied on JRT to meet the city’s goals to award 30% of its work to MWBEs.
That changed in 2024, JRT alleged, when Jesse Hamilton — an Adams protege installed as DCAS deputy commissioner in charge of the city’s leasing — got involved. According to the lawsuit, once Hamilton showed up, DCAS replaced the 30% mark with a different formula and tried to eliminate women-owned businesses from the agency’s MWBE goals.
JRT accused Hamilton and Cushman of conspiring to push them out, effectively giving a C&W broker, Dianna Boutross — a friend of Hamilton and Adams’ then-Chief Advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin — the whole commission on DCAS leases and purchases. Boutross accompanied Hamilton and Lewis-Martin on a trip to Japan in September 2024. All three had their phones seized by the Manhattan District Attorney at JFK International Airport upon their return from overseas.
Lewis-Martin and Hamilton have since been indicted by the DA on unrelated corruption charges. Both have pleaded not guilty.
In the spring of 2024, JRT alleges, DCAS informed them that the department had changed its MWBE goals from 30% for either minority- or women-owned businesses to a new system where the goal was now 10% Black, 10% Hispanic and 10% Asian.
Women-owned businesses were no longer in the equation.
JRT says the firm then reached out to Garner about this in his role as the mayor’s top MWBE advisor. Garner first responded by confirming the existence of the new protocol, but then came back and said it was now amended again — this time to 10% Black, 10% Hispanic and 10% women. The proposed reformulation would have put JRT back in the picture, but at a much reduced rate.
During meetings at City Hall with DCAS and Cushman that spring and summer, Garner praised JRT’s professionalism but said the city did not want to get involved in any disputes between contractors and subcontractors, and warned that the city doesn’t tolerate MWBE fraud, according to the lawsuit.
Ultimately JRT was pushed out entirely and sued. A Manhattan Supreme Court judge dismissed some aspects of the lawsuit in June but that judgment is currently on appeal. JRT’s attorney, Carmine Castellano, declined to comment on Garner’s involvement or the pending suit.
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