Former NYPD sergeant Timothy Pearson allegedly spent his time in the Eric Adams administration threatening and sexually harassing people and bragging about kickbacks. The mayor still let him oversee the safety of one of the city’s most vulnerable populations.
According to a court filing, Adams administration official Timothy Pearson was prone to demanding kickbacks by asking, “Where’s my crumbs?” earning him the nickname “Crumbs.” (Ken Murray / New York Daily News / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
When Eric Adams became New York City mayor in 2022, he brought a lot of old friends to City Hall. One of those associates, from his years at the New York Police Department, is Timothy Pearson.
A retired NYPD sergeant, Pearson was hired by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit that functions as a quasi-city agency, which allowed him to briefly collect a $242,600 salary as “senior advisor for public safety and COVID recovery” while simultaneously enjoying his NYPD pension ($124,000) and working as an executive at the Resorts World New York City casino in Queens. When these unusually lucrative arrangements were exposed by local reporters, he dropped the casino gig.
Pearson and the mayor go back some thirty years; the two even traveled to Turkey together in 2015. Politico called him “the most powerful New Yorker you’ve never heard of,” noting that Adams often tapped his friend for sensitive tasks, be it helping install Adams’s younger brother as head of the mayor’s security, flying to Israel with former chief of staff Frank Carone, or heading to El Paso, Texas, to suss out information about asylum seekers traveling to New York.
While the Adams administration has no lack of shady characters, it’s Pearson’s connection to the issue of asylum seekers that raises questions that have yet to be answered by the ever-growing reams of reporting on the Adams indictment. While many of Adams’s worst acts — trying to defund the public library system, cutting back on the city’s universal pre-K childcare program, sweeping homeless people off the streets and out of the subway system — were perfectly legal, his elevation of Pearson to a key role in handling the safety and security of the growing number of asylum seekers in New York is another matter entirely.
The City reported last year that Pearson “runs point for City Hall on security in migrant shelters.” That entailed setting up security for the makeshift shelters in all five boroughs, which meant meeting with Molly Schaeffer, the city official in charge of asylum-seeker operations, on an almost daily basis from late 2022 through late 2023. Pearson also began heading the Office of Municipal Services Assessment, a somewhat mysterious new agency that aims to save costs for the city and has played a key role in handling contracts related to serving asylum seekers.
In this role, again per the City, Pearson “blocked a major migrant casework contract for months, hampering efforts to help shelter residents get authorization to work in the US.” The contract with Cherokee Nation Management and Consulting, LLC, had already been approved by the agency in charge of the effort, the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, a public-benefit authority that administers thousands of beds in city migrant shelters.
Yet Pearson delayed Cherokee’s January 1 start date “by three months without explanation — putting off meetings, not responding to HHC’s communications about the contract, at a time of increasingly desperate need for the case management services, particularly help with work authorization papers, travel and housing to enable people to leave the shelter system.” As one source put it, he asked “all sorts of questions that were out of line.”
Why would he do that? Well, according to a court filing, Pearson was prone to demanding kickbacks by asking, “Where’s my crumbs?” earning him an unforgettable nickname around his secret office: “Crumbs.” The question is whether Pearson sought payment from Cherokee and held up the contract in hopes of receiving it.
Despite Adams’s consistent defense of his buddy, none of this is out of character for Pearson. The New York Times reported in July that the power broker had already racked up four sexual harassment complaints just this year alone, encompassing an array of allegations: vulgar and abusive toward female subordinates, homophobic slurs, and suggestions of a “quid pro quo sexual relationship.” Three of the complaints were brought by male police officials, one of whom told the Times that “he was disgusted by Mr. Pearson’s treatment of women at a small unit Mr. Adams created to improve government efficiency.”
Then there’s the Department of Investigation case over Pearson’s actions on October 17, 2023. That day, he went to a Randalls Island migrant shelter with more than one hundred police officers, two drones, and a helicopter in order to conduct a “quality of life sweep” and look for four individuals apparently accused of assaulting a police officer. When the shelter’s site manager asked Pearson for a warrant, legally required to search the premises, witnesses said Pearson threatened the manager’s job and insisted on entering the shelter, where the cops nonetheless failed to find whoever they were looking for.
That would be quite a day at the office for most people. Yet later that same day, he also tried to enter a Touro University building being used as a shelter for asylum seekers without identifying himself, apparently to inspect a fire code violation. When he was denied entry, he allegedly assaulted the security guard.
Schaeffer, the head of the asylum seeker office, has since received a subpoena, suggesting her communications with Pearson may be of interest to the Southern District of New York in its ongoing investigation into the Adams administration. Pearson had his phone seized by the FBI and his home raided in September. He has since resigned, telling reporters, “I’ve decided to focus on family, self-care, and new endeavors.”
That this is the person in whose hands asylum seekers’ safety rested is a scandal and an abomination. For once, it might even be a crime too.