NYC MAYOR ERIC ADAMS FIRES CRIME-FIGHTING GROUP, STIFFS THEM FOR $400K
RISE AND FALL OF VIOLENCE INTERRUPTERS GANGSTAS MAKING ASTRONOMICAL COMMUNITY CHANGES
Shanduke McPhatter on his G-MACC team. Photo credit: unknown, courtesy of Shanduke McPhatter.
Oct. 6, 2025
The City hired them to save New Yorkers' lives, which they did, then Mayor Eric Adams fired and stiffed them for $400,000.
Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes was one of the first non-profit groups hired by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015 to do the dangerous work of violence interruption in Brooklyn. At the same time, the FBI opened an investigation into the group's founder, Shanduke McPhatter, because it looked to them like maybe he was a little too close to the active gangsters the City hired G-MACC to serve.
The City's Department of Investigation joined the federal inquiry in 2018. When the Mayor's office found out about the twin investigations in 2020, it told G-MACC to keep working, despite those investigations, and that they would be paid later.
The investigations turned up nothing, but the City effectively fired them anyway—and only paid them some of the money the group was owed in 2021. When Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022, he told the group through Deanna Logan, his hand-picked Director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice Services, "there is no path forward for G-MACC under his administration," McPhatter says.
Adams replaced G-MACC with political loyalists from the God Squad and University Settlement. Neither of those groups had experience in violence interruption.
The City told G-MACC to file a claim for the missing $406,601 with Comptroller Brad Landers' office—where it remains pending to this day, three years later.
G-MACC’s story is worth examining because it tells the history of violence interruption in New York, the key role it plays in contemporary crime-fighting and the unique challenges government bureaucracies sometimes face when they employ former felons.
New York’s maximum-security Green Haven state prison in Stormville, New York, Mar. 9, 2015. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
The use of former gang members as "violence interrupters" to mediate street conflicts without violence and thereby control crime in New York City was a signal—if under-appreciated— achievement of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Progressive approach to criminal justice reform from 2014 to 2021. The program—based on a public health model to reduce gun violence, instead of a police-centered punitive one—works, according to the Mayor's Office, the City Council, the Comptroller and research by social scientists at John Jay as well as across the Nation.
The idea for this pragmatic approach was born by a former Black Panther serving time in New York's maximum-security Green Haven prison.
Eddie Ellis and like-minded comrades founded the Green Haven "Think Tank" and began publishing "white papers" on criminal justice reform in the late 1980s and 1990s. One of their ideas was "credible messengers": the then-radical notion that formerly incarcerated people should be trained to return to their neighborhoods and, instead of teaching a new generation how to be better criminals, would show them how to be better men—who left crime behind.
Chicago-based epidemiologist Gary Slutkin took Ellis's credible messenger concept and refined it into a violence interruption model. Dr. Slutkin started the Chicago-based nonprofit Cure Violence in 1995, according to his Curriculum Vitae. The model, according to Slutkin, "uses several new categories of workers to interrupt conflicts and maintain persons with the highest risk with care and support, and mobilizes the whole community to change norms."
In New York, billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg's philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, got the violence interruption ball rolling through its Young Men's Initiative in 2011. The initiative funded a program for the City's Department of Probation called "Arches." Arches paired mentors with what Bloomberg's website calls "court involved youth" aged 16-24 who were on probation.
Crucially, Arches' mentors were formerly-incarcerated "credible messengers."
Vincent Shiraldi was the Commissioner of the City's Department of Probation from 2010 to 2014. In addition to informally interacting with credible messengers during office visits, youthful probationers were required to attend structured classes with them where they did cognitive behavioral therapy and other exercises aimed at taming violent impulses.
"Basically," Shiraldi recalls, they taught them to stay cool.
"They taught kids not to over-react in volatile situations," Shiraldi said. "They taught them to 'Stop. Think. Reflect.'"
"It was a wildly popular program." Shiraldi said. "It far exceeded anything else we did. The kids really liked going to hang out with the credible messengers. They didn't drop out. They stayed with the program."
At the end of the day, Shiraldi says, "We established that people with criminal records could occupy a positive role in crime prevention."
Some wanted Mayor Bloomberg to extend Arches to the street, beyond the Department of Probation, but the NYPD couldn't bear the thought of formerly-incarcerated social workers mentoring gangsters.
"What I was told was," Shiraldi said, "the NYPD was resistant to that."
Mayor Bloomberg did not want to pick a fight with the NYPD, apparently. Bloomberg Philanthropies did not respond to an invitation to comment for this report.
Vincent Shiraldi was the Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Probation from 2010 to 2014. He says “ "We established that people with criminal records could occupy a positive role in crime prevention." Photo credit: unknown, courtesy of Vincent Shiraldi.
Barbara Miller was the Black Kitty Genovese.
Catherine, a/k/a "Kitty," Genovese was killed in Queens, 1964. The Lesbian bookie-turned-bartender was repeatedly stabbed to death by a man trying to rape her. Though she was attacked twice over a half-hour on a residential street and screamed for help no one saved her.
20 years later, Miller, 37, was beaten by two assailants for as long as 15 minutes in the courtyard of the Gowanus Public Housing development in Brooklyn before being dragged inside the lobby of one of its high-rise towers and shot to death in 1984. Police arrested a 14-year-old and a 21-year-old.
No one stopped it—but one person did call police during that attack. They arrived too late.
Beside the notoriety of Miller's murder, Gowanus, a neighborhood between downtown Brooklyn and Park Slope, was infamous for its stinking canal. Before American factories moved first to the suburbs, then overseas, it was a center for light industrial manufacturing. The high-rise public housing development Miller was murdered in was built after World War Two for returning soldiers.
In covering the killing, the New York Times reported the City allowed the Gowanus Houses to fall apart. Residents, the newspaper said, "showed a visitor a lobby floor slick with dirt." Elevators "smelled of urine." There were "paper bags for garbage on each floor because the garbage chute had been sealed."
Ominously, even in 1984, residents showed a Times reporter "a stairwell whose walls bore the graffiti of rival gangs."
A women cleans up blood on a Brooklyn stoop where three young men were murdered in a case of mistaken identity in retaliation for a robbery in 2007. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
"This is what I come from," McPhatter, now 47, told The Free Lance in September. "I never seen a picture of my father."
Born in 1978, he was six when Miller was murdered. His single mother raised him, two brothers and two sisters alone in the Wykoff Houses—another public housing project one block away from Gowanus with the same serious problems. For as long as he could remember, he said, "There was beef between Gowanus and Wykoff. They killed each other. For what?”
"I was one of the first adolescent bloods," McPhatter revealed. He renamed himself "Trife Gangsta." Trife Gangsta spent his teenage years slinging drugs—when he wasn't in jail.
"I was the recidivist. I did numerous stints on Rikers Island. I'm in-and-out," he says, "recruiting guys to be Bloods."
Outlaw folk history tells the Bloods started in California when Los Angeles street crews united to defend themselves against better organized Crips in 1972. They expanded to the East Coast when Omar "OG Mack" Portee and Leonard "OG Dead Eye" McKenzie organized Black prisoners on Rikers Island to defend against better organized Hispanic gangs the Latin Kings and Netas in 1996.
Peter "Pistol Pete" Rollack sped expansion of the East Coast "United Blood Nation" when he met Portee and McKenzie on Rikers Island and allied his Bronx-based "Sex, Money, Murda" crew with UBN on one condition: that he be allowed to maintain control of SMM as his own "set," according to the NYPD and federal prosecutors.
The effect of Rollack's alliance with UBN was comparable to that of an underdog sports team suddenly signing an A-list star. It supercharged the gang's recruitment efforts because Pistol Pete was a star gangster.
McPhatter says when he joined the Bloods it "was about protecting black people from being oppressed. We didn't just take it from California. We added love to it."
But, he adds that, over time, "The Bloods became the majority and became the oppressor."
Aftermath of a murder in Brooklyn, Dec. 6, 2006. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
McPhatter conceived G-MACC at New York State's Sing Sing prison in 2007. He was serving three years for possessing a handgun. Then aged 29, "My pre-frontal cortex shifted. I started seeing things in a different light.”
One of the things he saw was a son meet his father for the first time in the notorious maximum security prison's yard. The father was an infamous gangster and the son had "lived the reputation of his father," according to McPhatter. Having fathered twin boys in 1999, McPhatter said he saw his evil past as his sons' dark, doomed future if he did not change.
"If I keep this up, that will be my story," he thought to himself. "I don't want that for my sons."
By then, McPhatter had risen through UBN ranks and become a top OG of a set called Gangsta Killer Bloods. But now, the former GKB leader said, "I wanted to use my influence differently."
Before "I wouldn't question passing you the gun." Now, he said, he wanted to "stop and ask you, 'What's the problem? Let's talk it out.'"
McPhatter started the legal paperwork to get G-MACC Inc. federally recognized as a bona fide 501(c)(3) non-profit in prison. But prison officials intercepted the paperwork and punished him for submitting it with solitary confinement for 45 days.
When he was released in 2008, McPhatter moved to Atlanta to give himself a fresh start. He worked as a personal trainer and general manager for LA Fitness while banking cash to start G-MACC. He returned to Brooklyn in 2009.
GMACC Inc. was granted official non-profit status in 2012. That same year, PBS FRONTLINE broadcast "The Interrupters." The gritty documentary showcased violence interrupters in Chicago, highlighting the Windy City's public health approach to crime control.
When Mayor de Blasio took office in January 2014, his top criminal justice priority was "to bring murders under 300, to bring shootings under 800," says Dr. Marcos F. Soler, who was chief-of-staff in the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice—MOCJ—before becoming Gov. Kathy Hochul's Deputy Secretary for Public Safety.
"One of the strategies we settled on was violence interruption," Dr. Soler says. "We tracked the pilot programs. We saw significant reductions in gun violence."
Building on the recommendation of Erica Ford and others for a holistic approach, Mayor de Blasio and then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito held a news conference at Harlem Hospital in August 2014 to announce the City would spend $12.7 million to create a "Gun Violence Crisis Management System," or CMS.
The CMS, they said, would begin in the 14 police precincts that accounted for 51 percent of the City's shootings.
“The violence interrupters are a community-based solution," Mayor de Blasio said. "Community members talking to other community members and convincing them that violence is not the right path.”
Dr. Soler is quick to point out that violence interrupters do not replace police. They supplement police.
"The best practice pairs violence interrupters with precision policing," referring to a police strategy that focuses aggressive police attention on gang leaders and individuals likely to offend.
Then-Councilmember Jumaane Williams first funded G-MACC in 2015. Photo Credit: unknown, courtesy of Shanduke McPhatter.
G-MACC was one of the first non-profit groups contracted by the City.
The money came through then-Councilmember-now-Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. In 2015, Williams gave G-MACC money out of his counsel seat's discretionary account to fund violence intervention in his District, the 45th. G-MACC’s "jurisdiction" was the NYPD's six-seven precinct. The group opened its first office in East Flatbush on Mar. 20.
"I chose that corner because it was outside any of the hottest spots," McPhatter explained his thinking. "It was neutral territory among the different peer groups"—gangs.
Having their office in neutral territory was important so that clients would not fear traveling through an enemy gang's territory to go there. G-MACC identified hot spots to target through COPSTAT data from the NYPD. The G-MACC team also walked the streets and talked to local residents to gather intelligence about what blocks, areas and groups to target.
McPhatter said at first the City only wanted part-time violence interrupters. He pushed for enough money to hire full-time workers.
"They wanted to give people part-time pay for full-time work," McPhatter recalled. "That's not going to work in New York City. When I got funding I made the violence interrupters full-time."
Daron Goodman worked for G-MACC as a violence interrupter, outreach worker, supervisor and finally program manager. Today he works for the City's Administration for Children's Services, a job got because of his work at G-MACC.
"We were able to reach a demographic that regular or normal people couldn't reach," Goodman told The Free Lance. "Most of the staff lived both sides of it. We were able to reach those youth and put the guns down."
They were able to do it by "bringing warring factions together and mediate disputes so that there was some kind of peaceful resolution," Goodman explained. "We don't expect kumbaya because there's been blood shed, but we expect a ceasefire."
Tiffany Lamela joined G-MACC as a part-time out-reach worker in 2016 before rising to become Deputy Director. She said the first thing an effective violence interrupter does is stall.
"The more time we buy, we are able to stop it," she explained.
But that's only half of it.
"Once we got him to put down the gun, who's working with them for all the other things?," she asked. "Who's working with them for school? Work? Who's working with them if their parents are in prison?"
"Its not just putting the gun down and preventing the shooting," Lamela concluded, "its how we do the follow up."
The City granted G-MACC a second contract to work in the eight-eight precinct, covering Fort Greene and Downtown Brooklyn in 2019. The City also gave G-MACC a contract to work in public schools.
"We needed to get into the schools," Lamela said. "That's were a lot of the beef starts."
"We made a big impact," she added. "We brought down violence in that precinct by 67%."
13-year-old girl shot in the leg on the Lower East Side on July 7, 2007. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
As time went by, the City listened to what front-line violence interrupters were telling them about the work, which allowed them to tune and expand New York's Cure Violence program.
"The more-and-more we learn about these strategies, the more we realize they work together and we needed to integrate them," Dr. Soler, de Blasio's MOCJ chief-of-staff, said.
"You need to have a much more comprehensive strategy for neighborhood safety," he added.
He cited the doubling of the City's summer youth employment program as an example.
"We connected to hospitals. We connected to the schools. We even went into the jails," Soler says. "By 2017 we came down to 292 murders, around 750 shootings."
The Progressive crime-fighting innovation was a success.
"We went into junior high schools and high schools," McPhatter recalls. "We went into the Department of Probation. We went into ACS to talk to kids. We went into Rikers Island. We went into all these spaces and created pilot violence intervention programs."
McPhatter remembers those heady days with pride.
"We were at the forefront of leading violence prevention," he says. "We're bringing down violence. We're the first to create junior violence interrupters."
April Glad worked with Shiraldi at the Department of Probation as its Director of Public Private Initiatives. She championed the credible messenger model from the start. Today she's a Senior Program Officer at the Pinkerton Foundation. She was impressed by the work G-MACC was doing and Pinkerton's board gave it $250,000 between 2019 and 2021, she told The Free Lance.
At its height in 2018, G-MACC employed 33 full-time staff members, 27 of which worked the street as either violence interrupters or outreach workers.
"Shanduke had this great idea but he didn't really get to execute it," Glad recalled. "It's like AA for gang kids. Everyday to have a support group."
Aftermath of the murder of 14-year-old Christopher Duran in the Bronx, May 23, 2015. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Ultimately, it was G-MACC's work on Rikers Island that exposed the group to intense law enforcement scrutiny—and sabotage, according to McPhatter, Goodman and Lamela.
"When we got a contract to work on Rikers Island, the COs got mad because we all got passes to drive across the bridge to Rikers Island and walk into these jails," McPhatter says.
Just as the NYPD did not want violence interrupters working the streets to fight crime, the City's Department of Corrections didn't want them working its jails either, according to an anonymous DOC source.
Against this backdrop, G-MACC worker Pompey Garrett, 46, was caught allegedly trying to smuggle two straight-edged razor blades into Rikers on Apr. 6, 2018. G-MACC fired him.
Goodman, the ACS administrator who got his start at G-MACC, was there.
He says he suspected something fishy was happening because the COs searched them and let them into the jail then came for them, brought them back to the jail's entrance and demanded they submit to a second search. He decided to leave instead and directed the rest of the team to leave with him.
Garrett, he says, disobeyed orders and insisted on being searched a second time—even though, or maybe because, he was on parole after serving 20 years for robbery and assault.
When guards searched Garrett a second time, that's when they found the razors, Goodman says.
After Garrett was released without bail he told Goodman the razors were part of his pedicure regime.
"He said he had to cut the corns off his toes," Goodman recalled.
The charges against Garrett were dismissed, Goodman and McPhatter said. Garrett did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.
McPhatter told The Free Lance he believes Garrett's arrest was "some real COINTELPRO shit," referring to the FBI's largely illegal counter-insurgency campaign against the Black Panthers in the 1970s.
Cages in a recreation yard between cell-blocks as seen through the window of a cell on Rikers Island, Mar. 12, 2015. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
G-MACC saved lives but McPhatter couldn't save his brother.
Ronald McPhatter, 33, was shot to death while working as a bodyguard for rapper Roland "Troy Ave" Collins during a T.I. concert at Irving Plaza on May 25, 2016. Daryl "Taxstone" Campbell was the shooter. Taxstone was a Podcaster who beefed online with Troy Ave for years. They ran into each other in a green room backstage at the concert. Taxstone pulled a gun. Ronald grabbed it.
Taxstone shot Ronald once in the chest, Troy Ave in the legs twice and also wounded two bystanders.
After his brother Ronald was killed, Shanduke went to Rikers Island to tell his other brother, James a/k/a "Jah Blize", what happened. James was being held on $1 million bail for armed robbery.
"It changed things for me," Shanduke said. "Now, instead of being the individual picking up the gun, I understood the mother who loses a son to gun violence."
"I had to support my mother and my sisters through it," he added. At the same time, "everyone was worried about me going backward. I had to deal with all these comments online."
But he didn't retaliate. He walked the path he preached.
“Retail therapy also helped," McPhatter joked. In the end, he says, his brother's murder "forced me to take G-MACC's work to the next level."
Taxstone was convicted of manslaughter, assault and weapon possession. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2023.
(James, Shanduke's remaining brother, was convicted and sentenced to 23 years-to-life. He was also convicted of running a drug smuggling ring while awaiting trial on Rikers and sentenced to 120 months—concurrently with his 23-to-life state sentence. One of James' co-defendants in the smuggling case was a G-MACC worker, Jonathan "Trigg" Medina.)
After Garrett's arrest, the City's Department of Investigation opened an inquiry into G-MACC and McPhatter, McPhatter, Goodman and Glad said. The City's DOI inquiry joined with the existing federal investigation, according to court records and a Google notice advising McPhatter that Google's records of his Internet activities had been first subpoenaed by the FBI in 2015.
Because of the open investigations, the City effectively prevented G-MACC from applying for additional contracts, but kept paying them under existing ones.
"They told us that there was a red flag because of a DOI investigation and we could not apply," McPhatter said.
Soler, of the Mayor's office, explained it this way: "we have to be prudent with the People's money."
Glad and Pinkerton stepped in.
"Violence interruption is an important piece of the public safety puzzle," Glad said. "The work G-MACC was doing was solid. That's why we supported them."
Then the FBI knocked on her door.
"Two FBI agents came to my house at 7:00AM with a subpoena ordering me to appear at a Grand Jury," Glad recalled. "I've spent more than 40 years working in philanthropy. Nothing like that ever happened before."
Long before Republican Pres. Donald Trump was elected a second time and threatened to sic federal law enforcement on perceived political enemies in the non-profit arena, the FBI under Democratic Pres. Joe Biden asked Glad several—what The Free Lance sees as—politically-charged questions.
"It was shocking," Glad charged.
"They started asking me about philosophical statements on Pinkerton's website," she revealed. "I gave them an education in philanthropy."
Investigators came up empty. Neither DOI nor Federal prosecutors ever filed any charges against McPhatter or G-MACC leadership.
Maximo Peguero was unarmed when he was shot-to-death by NYPD officers in Washington Heights on July 22, 2009. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
McPhatter was charged with misdemeanor menacing and harassment for allegedly threatening to shoot a neighbor in December 2019 and then allegedly threatening to sic the Bloods on the same neighbor in January 2020. The neighbor worked for the NYPD in traffic enforcement, the Daily News reported.
The case was dismissed—two years later.
"They pulled the camera footage from his project and it showed he wasn't there," Lamela said. "They put him through that process for two years to show he was a villain."
McPhatter himself says the bogus case was retaliation for loudly speaking out about NYPD abuses—including to then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and others.
"I was the only CURE Violence leader tackling police violence so that made me a problem to the police and Adams—a former cop who continues to control the NYPD," McPhatter alleges.
Dr. Donna Hylton is a Brooklyn-based formerly-incarcerated activist, writer and founder of a non-profit group named after her transcender’s memoir, A Little Piece of Light. She spoke at the 2017 Women's March in Washington, D.C. Hylton met McPhatter during the MDC Heat Crisis in 2019. It was a crisis because the Brooklyn federal jail lost heat in the middle of winter. It became a center of anti-mass incarceration protests. At one point, activists literally stormed the jail—like it was the Bastille. They were repelled from its lobby with batons and pepper-spray.
I was there too. I saw it with my own eyes.
Hylton confirms McPhatter was a loud voice for criminal justice reform that sometimes grated on public officials.
"He was lighting a fire under everybody with his activism," Hylton told The Free Lance. "And he called it out. He was up in their face saying 'You know this is wrong. You can't allow it to continue.'"
Referring to the false charge the NYPD traffic agent filed against him, Hylton points to its dismissal and says "Shanduke didn't do anything wrong. He's basically trying to right his wrongs. He's giving back to the community he hurt."
Shanduke McPhatter protesting the murder of George Floyd with Akeem Browder, brother of close-Rikers martyr Kalief Browder. Photo credit: unknown, courtesy of Shanduke McPhatter.
When G-MACC submitted its existing contracts to be renewed for FY 2021, the Comptroller, then Scott Stringer, refused to "register" them because of the open investigations. ("Registration" is a necessary step under city law for the contracts to be paid.)
Contact information for Stringer could not be obtained from public records. An invitation to comment sent to the former Comptroller's wife was not responded to.
City law allows the Mayor to circumvent the Comptroller to "deem" contracts registered and that's exactly what de Blasio's administration did with G-MACC's contracts, according to McPhatter and emails he received from the City shared with The Free Lance.
"I never questioned the effectiveness of what G-MACC was doing," Soler says. "I thought that G-MACC was very effective. It was my intention all along that G-MACC would continue to get funded."
In the end, the Mayor's office required G-MACC to agree to a "Corrective Action Plan." The plan required McPhatter to effectively resign. It also required G-MACC to hire accounting firm N Cheng to keep the group's books. N Cheng charged the non-profit a significant percentage, reducing cash available to hire violence interrupters.
Blood money, literally.
G-MACC receiving an award from Eric Adams, then Brooklyn Borough president. G-MACC’s founder Shanduke McPhatter stands to his left (right in photo), while G-MACC Deputy Director Tiffany Lamela is on Adams’ right (left in photo). Photo credit: unknown, courtesy of Shanduke McPhatter.
"They had a woman there. Shanduke's number two. She was very good. I said she should be G-MACC," Soler revealed.
That woman was Lamela.
"They put us on a CAP—a Corrective Action Plan," Lamela told The Free Lance. "They told us Shanduke couldn't be the face of the organization. He couldn't be the face of G-MACC."
"We always had such a hard time getting paid," Lamella said. But after the City imposed the CAP, "We worked from the end of '20, all of '21, all without ever getting paid."
"They told us they were going to pay us, so we kept working," she added. "They told us to continue the work in July 2021."
July is when the new fiscal year starts.
"They told us, 'Continue to work. We're going to pay you. We're going to work with the new administration [of Mayor-elect Eric Adams] that comes in to make sure you continue working."
They even sent G-MACC a letter dated May 25, 2021 confirming their contract with the City would extend into Mayor Adams' term and end June 30, 2022:
the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice will be extending its Crisis Management System contract with Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes Inc. (G-M.A.C.C.) via a Negotiated Acquisition Extension with a term of 7/1/21 – 6/30/22 for $2,280,000.
Then in October, Lamella said, suddenly the City changed its tune.
"That's when they told us, 'Pause work. Don't work any longer.'"
Just before the de Blasio administration shut the lights and closed the door on City Hall, they paid most—but not all—of the money the City owed G-MACC.
"One of my last actions was to sign the agreement that paid them," Soler says. "Because they had not been paid in a while."
"In December 2021 we were finally paid for the work we did up to June 2021," Lamella says. "That leaves four months of outstanding pay. July, August, September up until October."
Four months of the new Fiscal Year 2022 that bled over into Adams' first term.
G-MACC stopped paying rent on its offices and fired the bulk of its staff in October.
"Oct. 12, 2021 is when I released about 27 employees and kept 7 on the PPP and Pinkerton payroll," McPhatter said.
After Adams was sworn in as Mayor, G-MACC met with his hand-picked MOCJ Director Deanna Logan.
"She said to us," Lamella recalled, "'We have spoken to the mayor, and his team, and they do not want to move forward with you guys."
"'He said we had too many issues,'" Lamella said Logan told them. "This from the most corrupt mayor in recent history."
"We asked why?," McPhatter recalled. "We were told by Deanna Logan 'We are not required to do that.'"
Lamella asked about the money they were owed.
"They told us to 'file a claim with the comptroller's office,'" she said Logan told them. "Three years later, we still haven't been paid."
The press offices of Mayor Adams, Comptroller Lander and Public Advcate Williams all did not respond to invitations to comment. Neither did former mayor de Blasio.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Shanduke McPhatter at Gracie Mansion on Dec. 21, 2016. Photo credit: unknown, courtesy of Shanduke McPhatter.
Dr. Soler went to Albany after Adams became mayor. He helped convince Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature to budget over $347 million in gun violence prevention. Hochul established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention by Executive Order in 2021.
Even the Federal government contributed funds through its Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative starting in 2022—funding the current occupant of the White House, Pres. Trump, cut to the tune of $158 million in 2025, Reuters reported in July.
More than two-out-of-three big city American mayors report their cities support violence interruption programs. They also say violence interrupters are effective in combating crime, even though they are generally under-funded, according to a 60-city survey taken by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in September.
Both front-runners to replace Adams as the City's mayor in November's election, Independent Andrew Cuomo and Socialist Democrat of America candidate Zohran Mamdami, say they support increased funding for violence interruption.
Send tips or corrections to jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me
Harlem murder, Oct. 2, 2013. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.