A city official and a Cushman & Wakefield broker walked into a meeting at 1 Centre Street, headquarters of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.
It was October, a little more than a week after state officials had seized the phones of the official, Jesse Hamilton, and the broker, Diana Boutross, as the two were returning from a vacation together in Japan with Mayor Eric Adams’ former chief advisor, Ingrid Lewis-Martin. The phones were reportedly seized as part of a probe into corruption across the administration.
Yet even after the phone seizure, Hamilton, who oversees the city’s office leases at the department known as DCAS, and Boutross, who handles those leases for Cushman & Wakefield, were among the group of at least 10 gathering that day to discuss an odd potential acquisition, a warehouse in the Bronx — a massive spec industrial complex from Turnbridge Equities and Dune Real Estate Partners — for about $670 million.
“It’s a phenomenal place,” Hamilton said of the Bronx Logistics Center in a barebones video, apparently filmed to promote the complex to municipal departments who could move there. “1,300,000 square feet, which can accommodate a lot of the city agencies.”
The deal, which has since been called off, underscored the wide-ranging authority and influence of Hamilton’s little-known agency. It has also put a spotlight on the kind of power that can be wielded by someone in Hamilton’s position, via the city’s own real estate holdings, the office leases it signs with private landlords and the brokers it picks to represent it in those deals. After the phone seizures and an October hearing held by Council member Lincoln Restler to grill DCAS about its activities, the Adams administration said it was pausing one lease as part of a broader review.
Since then, leadership at the agency hasn’t changed, and the city continues to lease and acquire properties.
“There’s been no slap on the wrist,” Restler said. “No accountability, no change in leadership.”
DCAS is a sort of administrative coordinator for the city government — training employees, buying goods, maintaining vehicles. But like the federal government’s General Services Administration, it also oversees the city’s rented and owned real estate. DCAS manages roughly 400 leases by city agencies at private property, spanning more than 22 million square feet, as well as the city’s own 15 million square feet.
“Remember that the Bronx Logistics Deal is only a C&W deal!”
During Adams’ tenure, agencies have signed some large leases.
After the pandemic, private landlords looked to DCAS as a lifeline to fill vacant space in their struggling office buildings, and now city officials are investigating whether Hamilton put his thumb on the scale in favor of specific owners. Some lobbied Hamilton and DCAS in connection to properties they were pitching as headquarters for city agencies, but these negotiations largely happened behind the scenes.
Working with the agency is a coveted gig. Brokerages sign long-term contracts with DCAS to represent the city when it signs leases for its agencies. Landlords who secured the city as a tenant guaranteed rent checks at a time when many owners defaulted on loans backed by office towers, and in some cases, handed the keys to their properties back to their lenders.
Having power over these deals seems to translate into an easy confidence. In the video for the Bronx Logistics Center, Hamilton wears a yellow vest and hard hat and stands in front of the building, which is covered with scaffolding. Beside him are another DCAS official, George Donahue, and Eric Abad, assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget.
“I’m sure this is a win-win for everybody involved,” he says to the camera.
Administering the city
The city charter has a process for how city office leasing works.
Each year, city agencies submit a report of their real estate needs to the mayor. These reports are public, and community boards and borough presidents can look at suggested locations for new offices and make comments that the agencies are supposed to take into consideration.
The report for fiscal year 2025-2026 showed that agencies were seeking 764,224 square feet of space, a 44 percent increase from the prior year. Of that, more than 61,478 square feet represented office space needs.
If the Office of Management and Budget approves an agency’s need for space, DCAS reviews the city’s own holdings before looking in the private market.
Once DCAS certifies that no existing space is suitable, the agency and DCAS, along with its brokers, work to find private office space to lease. The agency’s pick then has to get approval from the budget office.
After that, the agency files an application with the Department of City Planning for review, and then the request to lease goes to the City Council and finally the mayor.
“It’s unusual that it goes through the process and at the end it doesn’t get approved,” a source familiar with land use approvals and the lobbying activity around them said. “What you don’t see are the many things that get jettisoned before that public process starts.”
Mayoral priorities and city budgets shape the government’s leasing activity.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg sold off city assets and required new agency office build-outs to feature open seating plans, which fit more people. Mayor Bill de Blasio beefed up staff in departments by the hundreds (in the case of the Department of Education, thousands), which meant agencies needed more office space.
And Eric Adams has been trying to get employees back to work since early 2022.
“It turns out to be somewhat of a bonanza for the commercial real estate industry, particularly in this market, because now the city is signaling that it is aggressively looking for space,” a former senior DCAS official said in an interview.
While Adams has called on city agencies to identify space they don’t need, the city also signed some of the biggest office leases in the city over the past two years. The third largest of 2023 was the Administration for Children’s Services’ agreement to take more than 640,000 square feet at 110 William Street, owned by Pacific Oak.
Top of the org chart
Hamilton, a longtime friend and mentee of Mayor Eric Adams, is deputy commissioner of real estate services at DCAS, though his background is not in office leasing.
Hamilton spent the first two decades of his career overseeing disputes about property tax assessments, working at the Department of Finance’s assessor’s office as a small claims tax reduction hearing officer from 1986 to 2014. In 2008, he launched his own law firm, Jesse E. Hamilton III and Associates, which handled a range of civil disputes, according to the firm’s now defunct website. He also spent nearly a decade as a district leader for the 43rd Assembly District, and worked as legal counsel for then-State Sen. Eric Adams.
When Adams left office to become Brooklyn borough president, many saw Hamilton as his hand-picked successor, and he won the next election.
At Hamilton’s victory party in 2014, every speaker first congratulated Adams on the win before celebrating Hamilton, according to a Brooklyn Paper account. Hamilton beat Rubain Dorancy, who was backed by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.
“We didn’t win by one, or two, or three points, we kicked their ass!” Adams shouted at the party, as Brooklyn Paper reported at the time. “We showed them who the real kingmaker in Brooklyn is.”
Hamilton served two terms in the state Senate, representing the 20th District in Brooklyn, which includes Crown Heights, Park Slope and Sunset Park.
The political career soon sputtered to a halt.
Hamilton lost his seat to Zellnor Myrie in 2018, as one of several former members of the Independent Conference to be ousted by progressives. In the months before the primary, reporters uncovered a scandal: Hamilton had been running his primary campaign out of a building owned by his nonprofit, Lincoln Civic Block Association, which had received a low-interest loan through a city program for multifamily owners to get financing to rehab their properties. As a condition of the financing, the units had to be leased to low-income renters; no office use permitted. Hamilton’s nonprofit also rented the space out to his political allies. It is not clear if Hamilton was ever penalized.
Two years later, Hamilton ran for Assembly member Diane Richardson’s seat but lost again. (Richardson reportedly once referred to Hamilton as “Brooklyn’s Donald Trump.”)
But after Adams won the mayoralty in 2021, Hamilton joined DCAS in August 2022 as legal counsel. Onlookers noted his hiring as one of several friends and political supporters of Adams in the administration.
Within a few months, Hamilton rose up the ranks to deputy commissioner. The new title came with a $24,000 pay bump — a total salary of $213,783.
Friends in high places
Hamilton’s job at DCAS proved a boon to at least one broker, allegedly.
Diana Boutross was an established retail broker when she joined Cushman in 2015. She had helped bring the first Whole Foods location to Williamsburg and worked as the exclusive broker for the Trump Organization’s retail on Third Avenue, according to her bio. At Cushman, she helped expand Starbucks’ presence in the outer boroughs.
In August 2023, despite a lack of experience in the niche, she took over Cushman’s contract representing the city on office leases.
A lawsuit filed against Cushman by another brokerage, JRT Realty, potentially offers a window into why. JRT’s complaint alleges that Hamilton intervened in the hiring process, telling Cushman that if Boutross was not made account manager, the brokerage would lose its DCAS account.
The lawsuit alleges that several other brokers vied for the job, but that Boutross was handed the position without applying. Cushman called the lawsuit “frivolous” and “a coordinated PR and lobbying campaign to damage Cushman’s ability to conduct future work with DCAS.”
“We didn’t win by one, or two, or three points, we kicked their ass! We showed them who the real kingmaker in Brooklyn is.”
During the City Council hearing in October, questions about Boutross’s background netted few answers. (Neither did questions about Hamilton’s limited pre-DCAS experience in real estate.) The nature of the relationship between Hamilton and Boutross is also unclear. An attorney for JRT could not elaborate beyond the fact that the two, along with Lewis-Martin, were close enough to take an international vacation together — the three had just landed after a trip to Japan when their phones were seized.
JRT’s lawsuit accuses Cushman of abruptly ending its work with JRT and trying to shut JRT out of its commission on the city’s potential purchase of the Bronx Logistics Center — the star of the Hamilton video. With the deal worth between $670 and $750 million, the brokers stood to make up to $13.6 million in commissions.
Hamilton allegedly reinforced the idea that Cushman was not sharing commissions on that deal with JRT or others.
“Remember that the Bronx Logistics Deal is only a C&W deal!” he regularly reminded DCAS staffers, according to the lawsuit.
Public-private partners
The DCAS process is technically public, but Hamilton’s department has a lot of discretion before the roadshow starts.
The potential for someone awarding lease deals to play favorites surfaced in the Department of Aging’s search for a new office, which is at the heart of one city probe into how DCAS functioned behind closed doors.
The Department of Aging seemed poised to move to AmTrust Realty Corp.’s 250 Broadway, but Hamilton then told his team to stop negotiating with AmTrust and steered the lease instead to an 80,000-square-feet spot at Alexander Rovt’s 14 Wall Street, Politico reported. The change raised eyebrows, in part, because Rovt and two of his family members have each given $5,000 to Adams’ legal defense fund.
DCAS Commissioner Louis Molina testified during a City Council hearing that 14 Wall Street was the better deal for taxpayers because 250 Broadway would have cost $10 million to renovate.
However, AmTrust Realty had agreed to cover the costs of those renovations.
First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer has said she is reviewing the city’s leasing practices, and City Comptroller Brad Lander is auditing leases. The Department of Investigations is also digging into the 14 Wall Street lease and other actions involving Hamilton, The City reported.
Brokers can also influence the process. Generally, agents working for DCAS solicit office landlords whose floors might be a good fit for city agencies, but the parameters of the ideal space or partner aren’t spelled out in a public request for proposals as in ordinary city procurement requests.
The agency currently works with both Cushman and CBRE, after extending their contracts a number of times. The firms are assigned specific portfolios, so that they are not competing for the same space. The brokerages sometimes represent the landlords whose properties are under consideration. For example, the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau is in the process of getting approval to relocate to an office building in Queens represented by CBRE.
These brokerage contracts with the city, while worth millions of dollars, require patience and significant resources. The leasing deals take time and require upfront investments, for things like engineering and architectural work to assess the feasibility of a potential space.
“To get a city lease is big stuff, because that check is guaranteed. We pay our bills, so we’re better than all these companies that are going belly up.”
“You are spending a huge amount of time and not making any money,” one broker familiar with the process said. “Even though the commission is substantial, it’s a long way to get there.”
Property owners pay the commission for the city’s tenant representatives, which is roughly 6 percent for leasing, and ranges between 4 and 6 percent on purchases, Molina testified.
Negotiations between DCAS and a landlord happen behind the scenes, until what the agency has deemed the best deal for the city emerges for review.
Sometimes those competing for space pop up in lobbying records. For example, Salmar Properties and Madison Capital lobbied DCAS regarding a potential lease at 850 Third Avenue, which was later selected as offices for the Human Resources Administration.
Property owners also lobby the agency for issues unrelated to office leases. Bally’s lobbied Hamilton related to an appraisal of Ferry Point Park in the Bronx, where it hopes to build a casino, if it manages to win one of three licenses up for grabs. The appraisal, which is required as part of Bally’s efforts to get state approval to use part of the park land for the casino, was performed by a third party, according to a representative for Bally’s.
The owners of 110 William Street also lobbied Hamilton and other DCAS officials. About the time the lease was announced, Savanna had transferred its 40 percent stake in the building to Pacific Oak as part of a deal to restructure more than $334 million in debt on the property. The owners had defaulted on the loan in June 2022, and had been granted multiple extensions by the lender. In other words, the lease was part of the building’s recovery.
“To get a city lease is big stuff, because that check is guaranteed,” the former DCAS official said. “We pay our bills, so we’re better than all these companies that are going belly up.”
Leasing freeze
Neither Hamilton nor Boutross has been charged with any crimes. Lewis-Martin, who resigned as the mayor’s top aide, was indicted in December on charges that she accepted bribes in exchange for intervening at the Department of Buildings on behalf of two hotel owners.
If, prior to the indictments against Lewis-Martin and the mayor, Hamilton may have seemed an obvious person for landlords to approach when struggling with lease renewals or other issues where the mayor has influence, now some might hold off.
“Everybody over there is going to be gun shy,” one real estate source said.
This is not the first time that DCAS has found itself at the center of a wide-ranging probe into a mayoral administration.
Investigators scrutinized the agency in the wake of the Allure Group paying the city $16.2 million to remove two deed restrictions on Rivington House, a nursing home on the Lower East Side. Allure flipped the property for $116 million, drawing fierce criticism and questions about how the city could agree to such a seemingly low price.
A Department of Investigations report in 2016 concluded that DCAS did not have a process in place where any party was responsible for analyzing whether lifting a deed restriction is in the best interest of the city. DOI concluded that the Rivington deal was the result of a “complete lack of accountability within City government regarding deed restriction removals and significant communication failures between and within City Hall and DCAS.”
That debacle resulted in a reorganization of leadership at DCAS and a law that requires the agency to conduct an extensive review of such transactions.
It is unclear what will come from the current investigations into office leasing. For now, the agency is preparing to release a request for proposals seeking five, instead of two, brokerages to represent the city on office leases.
The office market has been on the upswing, though still below pandemic levels. In Manhattan last year, 33.4 million square feet of office space was leased, the highest volume seen in five years though still down from 2019’s nearly 43 million square feet, according to Colliers.
The city inked, renewed or amended 35 office leases in fiscal year 2024, spanning 2.9 million square feet. Of the 2024 leases, 23 percent were new lease agreements, down from the previous year when 43 percent were new agreements, according to the mayor’s management report. The administration has pointed to the decrease in new leases and the long lead time for these deals to come together as an explanation for why its lease activity has increased at a time when it is trying to consolidate its office space.
Still, the mayor announced in January that he wants to turn the headquarters of the city’s housing agency at 100 Gold Street into 2,000 units of housing. That means the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and the other agencies at Gold Street, will be on the hunt for new space. A DCAS official also acknowledged in a January meeting that there were “rumblings” that the agency is discussing buying office buildings given the depressed value of some properties.
Restler said the questions over the city’s office leases shows a need for more transparency and accountability around these leases. But structural change can only go so far.
“If you don’t have the right people in these jobs,” he said, “improving the rules and process will only help so much.”