The day the 20-page indictment was unsealed alleging massive corruption at Bhrags Home Care, a non-profit awarded millions of dollars in no-bid city migrant shelter contracts, the Brooklyn U.S. attorney spoke up. So did the acting head of the city’s Department of Investigation, and the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office.
Missing from the scene was Brad Lander, the longtime elected official who was serving as the city’s chief financial officer during the time of this alleged malfeasance and the city was steering more and more taxpayer money to Bhrags.
Lander had been the city comptroller, but he never audited Bhrags, despite being officially notified of kickback allegations that had been public for months. At the time he learned this in 2024, Lander had just announced he was joining the 2025 mayor’s race.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) more than doubled the group’s contract awards to $68 million while it was being run by a director prosecutors would ultimately name as one of two masterminds of corruption that cost the city millions.
In fact, amid a deluge of emergency city contracts to address the city’s migrant crisis, Comptroller Lander audited only one vendor providing migrant-related services, Rapid Reliable Testing, also known as DocGo. That’s out of more than 340 migrant services contracts Mayor Eric Adams inked in 2022 and 2023.
In multiple news interviews, Lander has emphasized that his experience and achievements as the city’s top financial officer make him more than qualified to serve in Congress as he challenges Rep. Dan Goldman in the Democratic primary for a seat representing lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn.
The site of a shelter in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that was managed by Bhrags Home Care. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
“My audits rooted out Eric Adams’ corruption, canceling his $432 million crony contract to DocGo, and saved the City billions of dollars,” he said in one candidate questionnaire. But critics say he was asleep at the switch in the case of Bhrags.
Claude Millman, a partner at Kostelanetz LLP and former head of the Mayor’s Office of Contracts Services, examined the Bhrags contract records at the request of The City Reporter and noted that Lander’s office had approved a Bhrags contract increase in 2025, months after he was told about corruption problems at the non-profit.
“From the City’s public databases, it is clear that in February 2025, the city added $92,844 to a contract with Bhrags Home Care Corp., and the city comptroller was involved in the process of amending that contract and adding those funds,” Millman said.
Emily Minster, a spokesperson for Lander’s congressional campaign, declined to answer questions about his response to Bhrags after he was informed of the corruption allegations there. She referred The City Reporter to the current comptroller, Mark Levine, who did not hold that office when the Bhrags allegations first surfaced.
The executives at DocGo, the sole contractor that Lander did audit, were never charged with a crime. Bhrags’ top two officials were, and the fallout from the criminal case against them left several unanswered questions that only an auditor could answer as to where millions of dollars the city paid to Bhrags wound up.
Kickback Allegations
The indictment described two schemes orchestrated by Bhrags Executive Director Roberto Samedy and its president, Ronald Tirelus: the embezzlement of $1.3 million from the group, and a kickback scheme in which a percentage of the money the city paid Bhrags for security at migrant shelters wound up in Tirelus and Samedy’s pockets.
And even more taxpayer money could be missing: Fort NYC Security, the security firm at the center of the kickback caper, claims some of the money DHS paid to Bhrags for security never got passed on to them. (The firm’s owner, Edouardo St. Fort, was also named in the indictment).
Comptroller Brad Lander’s office released an audit showing DocGo mismanaged at least $11 million in public money while running migrant shelters, Aug. 6, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Bhrags first began winning migrant shelter contracts in the fall of 2022. Within months one contract grew to five — all no-bid.
City procurement rules normally require that agencies seek multiple competitive bids for major contracts, with the comptroller vetting the winning bid. But in an emergency, the comptroller can waive this oversight and allow agencies to ditch the competitive bidding process.
In July 2022 at Adams’ request, Lander granted the waiver and, per the city charter, he and the corporation counsel — the city’s top lawyer — began approving each “emergency” contract requested by the administration. That meant the comptroller’s office signed off on hiring Bhrags without looking into the group’s track record.
The number of no-bid migrant services contracts grew exponentially, and by September 2023 Lander was raising concerns, warning at one City Council hearing of a “greater risk of waste and fraud, as agencies scramble to procure goods and services with less time and competition.”
As Lander began focusing more attention on these contracts, he released one report finding a lack of coordination between the half-dozen city agencies handling migrant service contracts that resulted in overpayments of millions of dollars for staff, and another report looking at per-diem hotel costs which he found were, for the most part, in line with market rates for economy lodging.
But he did not target specific contracts for scrutiny — with one exception.
In September 2023, months before he announced his candidacy for mayor, Lander announced his first and only “real time audit,” of a $432 million no-bid deal awarded to DocGo. He made the announcement only after state Attorney General Letitia James announced she’d initiated an investigation into the contractor and after the New York Times reported on migrants alleging the firm’s employees had misled and mistreated them.
Brad Lander 10th Congressional District race posters were posted in windows around Park Slope, May 22, 2026. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
In a Sept. 15th letter from Lander to Adolfo Carrión Jr., then-commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the agency that hired DocGo, the comptroller warned: “The contract with DocGo also raises broader concerns regarding the Adams Administration’s utilization of emergency procurement.”
Housing Commissioner Carrión informed Lander he would not cancel the contract and would continue relying on DocGo to provide migrant-related services. In his correspondence with Carrión, Lander made a point of mentioning the importance of agencies properly vetting the integrity of subcontractors brought in by the vendors they hire — an issue that had risen with DocGo.
As it happened, another city agency — the Department of Homeless Services — would soon be raising alarms about Fort NYC Security, a subcontractor hired by Bhrags. By early 2024, DHS had cancelled Fort NYC Security’s subcontract after it learned of kickback allegations contained in a Dec. 18, 2023, lawsuit Fort NYC Security filed against Bhrags.
In the lawsuit, the security firm claimed Bhrags’ then-chairman and president, Tirelus, had forced them to split all security payments DHS made to Bhrags 50/50 through a shell corporation Tirelus set up.
The Missing Million
And Fort NYC claimed even more money that the homeless services department paid to Bhrags for security may be missing. Records kept by the comptroller’s office show Fort NYC Security was allegedly paid $1,007,182 as a Bhrags subcontractor. But James Kousouros, an attorney representing Edouardo St. Fort, told The City Reporter: “My client did not receive that money.”
In a second lawsuit, Fort NYC sued DHS, claiming that while the department continued to allot money to Bhrags for security, Bhrags had stopped paying them in December 2023 — and Fort was still owed $607,000.
Lander’s predecessor as comptroller, Scott Stringer, told The City Reporter that once Lander was informed of the corruption allegations at Bhrags, he should have immediately launched an audit and rejected increasing the size of the Bhrags contracts.
“This contract should have been rejected. You do a whole due diligence,” said Stringer, who has endorsed Rep. Dan Goldman, whom Lander is challenging in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District.
The Department of Social Services (DSS), which oversees DHS, imposed the “Corrective Action Plan” on Bhrags on Sept. 11, 2024, and informed Comptroller Lander about it. The 8-page document spelling out the requirements of the plan references the lawsuits that alleged a kickback scheme and missing money. It was signed by Samedy, who was later indicted.
Neha Sharma, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, said the agency “was proactively looking into Roberto Samedy and did raise questions about conflicts of interest as outlined in the corrective action plan. At the time, Samedy misrepresented the facts and affirmatively stated in writing that he had nothing to do with the problematic transactions and affiliations.”
Lander learned of the problems at Bhrags just two months after announcing an ultimately failed run for mayor. A recent Politico report noted that as the campaign ramped up, Lander kept his official schedule completely empty on 33 weekdays, and listed only one or two events on another 99 weekdays. Lander’s spokesperson, Minton, responded by touting his city pension fund investments and “138 hard hitting audits.”
Bhrags, the subject of sworn allegations of corruption, was not on that list.
Despite the kickback and missing money allegations, the Department of Homeless Services had decided the remedial action plan was enough to allay concerns about corruption at Bhrags: between February and June 2024, DHS more than doubles Bhrags’ approved contract amounts from $31.4 million to $68.5 million.
But DHS’s parent agency notified the city’s Department of Investigation, which initiated the probe that ultimately led to federal indictment. On March 31 of this year, Samedy, Tirelus, St. Fort, the owner of Fort NYC Security, and another Bhrags subcontractor, Miguel Jorge, were all arrested on multiple federal felony charges filed by Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. All have pleaded not guilty.
‘A Few Bad Actors’
As for Bhrags, the group is required to disclose its “corrective action plan” if it bids on any other city work. All of its migrant services contracts are scheduled to wrap up at the end of this month.
Since the indictment, the Department of Social Services has cut the group’s shelter portfolio from nine sites to four, and the Investigations Department is preparing to place Bhrags into a monitorship that would provide independent oversight of the group. According to the agency’s spokesperson, Neha Sharma, Bhrags has new leadership and has to date fulfilled its requirements under the corrective plan.
“We know that frontline staffers working across our provider network step up to deliver quality services for vulnerable New Yorkers and do the right thing every day,” Sharma added. “A few bad actors and actions at the executive level do not represent the work of the organization as a whole.”
Frances Pierce, the interim executive director who replaced Samedy after he was indicted, offered a brief statement Thursday:
“Serving individuals in need with integrity and the highest ethical standards has been at the heart of our work for more than 50 years, and we remain as committed as ever to enhancing the quality of life for those individuals and being a trusted resource to our government agency partners,” she said.
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