A former New York police commissioner is suing the city, Eric Adams, the mayor, and top police officials, accusing them of a “coordinated criminal enterprise that had taken root at the highest levels of city government”.
Tom Donlon, who served for two months last year as New York’s top cop, filed the 251-page claim in federal court on Wednesday. In it, among other explosive claims, he says he attempted to establish internal oversight into corruption at the NYPD, and “uncovered systemic corruption and criminal conduct being perpetrated by the NYPD’s leadership”, but after he warned Adams he was sidelined.
He also claimed that the police department falsely arrested his wife in a “coordinated humiliation” and then leaked the arrest to the press.
“This lawsuit is not a personal grievance; it is a statement against a corrupt system that betrays the public, silences truth, and punishes integrity,” Donlon said in a statement emailed to the Guardian.
Four others lawsuits were filed by former top police officials last week, which made similar claims about Adams’s involvement in NYPD corruption.
Donlon resigned in 2024 just weeks after taking the job, after his home was searched by federal agents in a separate investigation. A career FBI counter-terror expert who investigated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Donlon also served for a time as New York’s director of office of homeland security, and then CEO of a private security firm, before he was tapped to lead the NYPD in September 2024.
In his brief tenure, Donlon now claims that he discovered Adams and NYPD officials were involved in a wide variety of illegal behavior, including “wire fraud, mail fraud, honest services fraud, obstruction of justice and retaliation against whistleblowers” and “engaged in outright malfeasance by using the NYPD to consolidate political power, obstruct justice, and punish dissent”.
A City Hall spokesperson, Kayla Mamelak Altus, said to City & State: “These are baseless accusations from a disgruntled former employee who – when given the opportunity to lead the greatest police department in the world – proved himself to be ineffective. We will respond in court, where we are confident these absurd claims will be disproven.”
Donlon claims that his efforts to establish internal NYPD oversight were “sabotaged”. He gives examples including that his meetings were cancelled, his communications were spied on, he was excluded from decision making, and alleges that his official police commissioner’s stamp was used to forge internal documents.
The alleged corruption, Donlon claims, was used to promote unqualified, politically connected cops and “triggered a massive, unlawful transfer of public wealth – millions of dollars in unearned salary increases, overtime eligibility, pension enhancements, and post-retirement benefits”.
Donlon says that after he warned Adams of his findings he was sidelined. His wife, he claims, was placed under false arrest and subjected to a full-body and personal effects search. After she was released, a reporter from the New York Post called him for comment – “a media leak that could only have come from inside the NYPD”, the lawsuit claims.
Donlon’s allegations come as Adams is mounting a campaign as an independent candidate to retain his position as mayor. Adams switched political parties after a series of scandals, including a since-abandoned federal corruption prosecution, and skipped the New York City mayoral Democratic primary race last month, which was won by Zohran Mamdani.
Last year, Donlon briefly served as interim police commissioner after Edward Caban resigned amid a federal investigation into potential corruption in the NYPD. About two months later Donlon stepped down and was moved to the office of the deputy mayor for public safety – a job that itself came to an end in May of this year when he was pushed out.
Earlier this year, four deputy mayors resigned over concerns that Adams had reached a quid pro quo with the Trump administration to get tough on illegal immigration in exchange for getting his federal corruption charges dropped.
Barely a week into Donlon’s tenure as NYPD police commissioner, his home was raided by the FBI, who seized classified documents that he said had come into his possession 20 years earlier. Very little information was released about the raid or the nature of the documents.
“At a certain point, we all would walk out of the movie theater because the script was just too fantastical, incredulous, and unbelievable for real-life,” Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, noted in a social media post at the time.
The Guardian has contacted Adams’s office for comment.
