Paco Alvarez: How did the idea for Courts of Contempt come about?
Max Rivlin-Nadler: So since we launched Hell Gate around just over four years ago, this had been something that had been on our mind, which was how nobody has had done a deep dive into how the judicial system as a whole functions and how somebody becomes a judge in New York City. There had been really, really good investigative reporting from news outlets like New York Focus and Gothamist on individual races for judges or specific boroughs, but we really felt like there was room for a large scale investigation, especially because as we matured as a news organization, people kept coming to us with questions they had about how the city functions.
And this question we kept getting again and again was, what the hell is a judicial delegate? Which is, for people not from New York, this is going to be really arcane. But it is a very specific elected office where you’re supposed to go into a room and decide with other delegates who will be the nominee for a judgeship in New York City. And the whole thing is rigged. It’s all kayfabe. It’s totally just controlled by local party apparatuses. We didn’t have a good answer when people asked us beyond like, oh, it’s a scam or oh, it’s totally rigged and then we’re like, okay, well we should have a really good answer for this. And so it ended up becoming this massive, nearly 50,000 word investigation and cool little zine that we made, but it was just kind of something we always knew from when we started. If we wanted to plumb the depths of weird and arcane and totally messed up New York City bureaucracy and corruption, this was something we were always gonna have to deal with because it is one of the last strongholds of these really archaic party apparatuses.
Alvarez: Speaking about that, how exactly does the process for selecting New York city judges work and how does that make it susceptible to corruption?
Rivlin-Nadler: Yeah, so that’s a great question because there’s actually, as we found, so many different ways to become a judge in New York City, and the lack of clarity and understanding around it is what makes it so susceptible to corruption or people having an outsized influence in it – especially the lawyers who practice in front of these judges who end up with these appointments or these elected offices play a huge role in who ends up on the bench, much to their benefit. I’ll just run through a few ways.
One way is that, like I said, you end up being nominated by your party through a judicial convention that, like I said, is dominated by party insiders. This replaces the direct primary for a judge. It’s theoretically similar to how we do the electoral college: you send delegates, they come up with a decision and that’s who your nominee is. We do that for judges. It’s supposed to make sure there’s no outsized influence by the party and that regular New Yorkers play a role in deciding who becomes a judge. Obviously not what happens. The party still has massive amounts of influence. And so whoever is decided at that judicial convention becomes a state Supreme court judge.
The [Courts of Contempt] project is focusing on the state Supreme Court, which we’ve got to be really clear here in New York is not the highest court. That is just our normal court. Our Court of Appeals, that’s the highest court. The state Supreme Court, that’s just your normal trial court. You murdered somebody, allegedly, you’re being sued, things like that. That’s happening at state Supreme Courts. So we have a lot of judges. We have a lots of lawsuits in New York City. We have a lot of crimes charged by our district attorneys in New York City. So not only do we have our elected state Supreme Court judges, but we actually have to appoint a bunch of people to the very same position because our state constitution does not allow us to expand the amount of state supreme court judges to keep up with our caseload.
So that brings us to the other ways that people end up on the bench at this court, which is you are elected to civil court, which again is a fairly low court. It’s curing smaller domestic issues, small claims, family court, et cetera. And then you are elevated, and this is what our investigation really went into, by a kind of shadowy organization that runs everything: the Office of Court Administration, who makes huge decisions regarding who becomes a judge. So they then choose who to elevate to the state Supreme Court from the civil court.
There’s also another way to become a judge. You could be appointed. And by the way, the Civil Court, you’ve won an election and a primary. That is actually direct representation of judges. Anyway, that’s the other way. You’re a civil court judge. Maybe you’ve never even heard a criminal case before in your life. Maybe you never argued one before in life. And all of a sudden you’re handling arraignments or large felony cases and things like that.
The other way is you become a judge on the court of claims that’s appointed by the governor. The other is that you are appointed to the city criminal court by the mayor, who in this case right now is Zohran Mamdani, who’s actually gonna be able to appoint a lot of judges based on how many terms are expiring.
There’s at least six or more ways to become a judge in New York City, which makes it really complicated, right? Because like we could be narrowing in on the judicial convention and judicial delegates and then zoom out and be like, but that’s actually only half of the judges. And the rest of the ways that people end up on the bench is just as screwy.
Alvarez: What was the initial reporting process for the Courts of Contempt project? Could you tell me a bit about how you approach the project and the research that went into it?
Rivlin-Nadler: Yeah, I mean, one thing that was nice about this is that a lot of the reporters at Hell Gate do have a background in reporting on the criminal justice system, knew where the pressure points were, but it was a learning experience for all of us. Even people I know who had in-depth knowledge about the judicial system still had no idea about all the different ways you could become a judge, or even how different judges became a judge.
Obviously, we talked to as many experts as possible and identified the holes there. Then we sent out a survey to the greater legal community in New York City, which is quite extensive, asking people to basically describe experiences that they’ve had with judges who they felt were unfit or unqualified, because what we really wanted to highlight with this project – which we talk about the system as a whole, as one half of the project are these case files, which I recommend everybody check out, about how the system operates and the undue influence of political parties. But then the other half is looking at who actually ends up on the bench based on the decisions made by those political parties or shadowy organizations like the OCA and how the criminal justice system is impacted by the decisions that are made by these political parties in the form of these judges and the decisions that they make and the demeanor that they have and who gets rewarded and given these positions and the impact that has on everyday New Yorkers. So we really wanted to ask lawyers, hey, who do you think on the bench right now best exemplifies kind of what’s gone wrong with the system?
We got a lot of responses, overwhelmingly from the criminal defense community. Prosecutors are much more buttoned up. Public defenders love to talk shit. So, we will readily admit, we make clear, our coverage highlights a much more criminal defense friendly perspective, because those are who talked to us and who are willing to point us in specific directions. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have other people weigh in. Law professors, other people who’ve done tons of research on the criminal justice system, et cetera. So we reached out to those people with a survey and from there, it was eight months of just getting into the weeds, sitting in court houses, requesting documents, talking to even more people, finding criminal defendants, finding the families of criminal defendants, looking up the outcomes of these cases. Which in of itself provided way even harder rivers to cross than we thought – just the very basic act of getting a court transcript was essentially impossible and our reporter-researcher-private investigator Allie Conti did a heroic job getting these documents, but it shows that anybody who wants to at all shine a light on the criminal justice system and what happens in specific courtrooms in New York City is going to be fighting an uphill battle that takes a lot of time, energy, and financial resources.
Alvarez: You and the Hell Gate team went to various political party events and meetings pertaining to the Judge election process. What were those like? Were party officials willing to speak to you?
Rivlin-Nadler: I went on a really gorgeous day last August, I think it was like right after a heat wave had broken. And the meeting that I went to was the executive committee of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, who were there to basically among themselves decide who the judicial nominees would be at the next week’s judicial convention. So it was basically fixing this process that’s supposed to be democratic; not fixing in a good way, but like match fixing. So when you show up as a delegate, an elected delegate to the convention the next week, you don’t really have any options because the conventions are run by the party and the party at this secret-ish meeting in the sense that everybody knew it was happening, we’re going to decide who those nominees would be.
And so I showed up to a storefront in Mill Basin. That was the new home of the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, which is one of the oldest Democratic clubs and most influential Democratic clubs in Brooklyn. And it’s run by a guy named Frank Seddio, who we wrote a lot about. And they were meeting. And I got there early. And I just talked with a bunch of people on the executive committee, who are these district leaders, who half of them are essentially in an open rebellion against the party. They want to see reform happen. They wanna topple the leadership. So, you know, very chatty, but people who are committed to the party.
A great thing is like, these are people who do not get asked their opinion all that much by the press. And they were just happy to talk to me. I was talking with one guy for like 20 minutes. He’s like, Oh, yeah, it’s all fixed. It’s all fake. You know, this is the real convention. This is where the sniping and the fights happen. And then another district leader comes over to him and is like, whoa whoa whoa, why are you talking to this guy? He was like, oh, I’m in trouble. And you know, so it’s pretty collegial. Like this isn’t a bunch of people in a dark room wearing cloaks or anything like that. It’s just a lot of people who this is just how they’ve done it for a very, very long time.
And so I showed up. I was even invited in for the buffet, the guy, Frank Seddio, who technically is no longer the executive director of the Brooklyn Dems, but still wields tremendous power, invited me in. That’s kind of how he is, a total schmoozer. Then they kicked me out, and eventually I was able to obtain a recording from the meeting that showed three and a half hours of people sometimes talking about real qualifications these judges had. I want to be really clear: some of these judges are very qualified. The process doesn’t just put unqualified people on the bench. The process puts people on a bench who have not really been vetted. And sometimes that’s OK, because these are good judges and people who have a lot of experience. But other times people were like, this person is from this specific ethnic community and they deserve this seat. Or this person has been a very good friend to the Brooklyn Democratic Party. And like, that’s why they’ve come to all of our events and they deserve this seat. And, nobody said as much during the meeting.
Except at the very end, the executive director of the Brooklyn democratic party, Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn gave this totally insane speech about how basically, listen guys, we’ve heard judge nominees have been taking you all out for expensive dinners, she was like, that makes us look bad. We should stop doing that. And so when you get up here and call somebody your very good friend, people might think that’s because they showed you a good time. That was the inference.
Another funny part of that was that she was like, careful with your texts because you’ll never know who ends up with your phone, which is kind of insane because a few months later, her husband had his phone seized as part of a separate corruption investigation. And of course, this is where Eric Adams comes from. And they were all very big supporters and backers of Eric Adams, whose whole inner circle has had their electronics seized at various points over the past couple of years.
It was incredible to see this all play out, to hear it, to watch it, cause I watched the whole thing from outside. They didn’t have blinders up. I was just watching these people talk to each other. I couldn’t hear them. And they knew we were there. They knew we’re reporting on it. And there was just a bit of shamelessness to it. My colleague, Chris Robbins, did the same exact thing in Queens. He went into the actual judicial convention where they kind of bragged about how smooth the process is. I think the convention lasted less than an hour. Everybody knew exactly who they were gonna pick. When somebody threw a little curve ball and was like, hey, actually, what if we made this other guy a judge? It was like what the fuck? Come on, man, we’re all trying to get out of here.
So I think what’s interesting about this is that there is a certain shamelessness to the procedure. It happens out in the open. And that’s not to say people haven’t challenged it. A judge nominee challenged the whole process a few years ago, I believe over 20 years ago at this point, by saying, listen, I was unable to become a judge because I refused to play the game of greasing the right palms. In this case, it was because she didn’t give a job to somebody who was connected to the party. And that was her claim, I wronged the party by not doing graft and I’m being punished even though I’m qualified. I should be a judge. We should have direct elections. And in fact, court after court after court sided with her and her lawsuit all the way up into the Supreme court. And the Supreme Court in 2008 in a unanimous decision was basically like, listen, this sucks. This is a bad system. We hate it. It was Justice Stevens, I believe, who was quoting an earlier judge from a different case, just basically being like, listen, at the end of the day, there’s nothing in the law that stops states from enacting stupid laws that are still constitutional. So we agree this system is stupid, but it’s not unconstitutional because there is some representative democracy involved. You elect the judicial delegates, etc. So we’re going to let it stand. So I think once it passed muster at the Supreme Court, everyone just kind of dropped the pretense and was like, hey, listen, we don’t like this system as much as you do. But it is working out in our favor quite well.
Alvarez: You’ve talked a bit about how the judiciary chooses the judges, but how did you pick the judges that you chose to profile?
Rivlin-Nadler: Yeah, I mean, a lot of that was like feedback based on the surveys and interviews we’ve done. Also, a few of them were just courtrooms I had sat in reporting for years and been like, we got to include this person because they illustrate a specific part of the system that we think deserves attention. So I think, judges might feel, oh, I’m singled out on this list. And, yeah, sure, like, you know, you could name tons of judges who are deserving of scrutiny because I think an indictment of this whole project as always is like, there used to be courthouse bureaus in court houses for the press, for the media in courthouses across the city. I mean, there used to be five or six reporters dedicated solely to Queens County Supreme Court every day. And so judges never got to act like no one was watching. They knew, hey, listen, there’s media in, there’s always press in the gallery. What I say is gonna be reported. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad, but at least somebody is watching me.
And now that is just not the case. A lot of it was like, oh, wow, there’s so much conduct that we’re hearing here that’s never been reported. And so some of it was this name that keeps popping up. Some of it was like, this is an exceptional case and issue of possible misconduct that we’re hearing that’s really interesting. Or this is just a great example of somebody who is elevated to the bench in a strange way and then was in over their heads. Like one judge that we profiled was only a criminal court judge for two years, but basically they won an election as a civil court judge. They’ve only been a civil litigator for the most part. They were then shifted over to Bronx County Criminal Court where they were setting bails and doing arraignments for people who are accused of crimes in the Bronx. And defense attorneys were like, oh my God, this guy has no idea what they’re doing. They’re in over their head, right? So like, is that person any inferior judge or less qualified than other people in that position? The reason he was highlighted was he never campaigned for that position. He never qualified himself for that position. He was not elected for that position. And this is a great illustration of somebody who ends up in a position they shouldn’t be in because we have a broken system. So I would say all judges in New York state and especially New York City are deserving of scrutiny. These nine just stuck out for us as being representative of something broken in the system or displaying genuinely outrageous behavior.
Alvarez: What are some of the biggest challenges you faced during the reporting of the project?
Rivlin-Nadler: We would go to the courtrooms and immediately, because you know normally these are empty, immediately the court officer was like who are you? Honestly I kind of wanted to keep it low key just because I do think judges change their behavior when there’s media in the courtroom.
But really it was just getting these court documents. It’s totally insane the system that we have. We have this thing which people have seen in the media and in TV shows and stuff – court reporters, right? There are people typing in their little shorthand laptops. Now they’re digital and they’re creating shorthand transcripts of what has occurred in court because recording and any audio visual documentation of what happens inside of our criminal or civil courts for that matter, for most of the civil courts, is not allowed. Even though we’re in the 21st century, you cannot record what happens in these courtrooms. So we’re entirely relying on these court reporters. On top of that, the court reporters do not work for a specific judge. They are effectively independent contractors for the court system, which means if you want to get the court document or a transcript, even a transcript from a case that happened like four months ago because we were trying to really focus on recent cases – here’s the process that, again, our reporter-researcher Allie Conti really heroically battled through, which is you go to the county courthouse and you meet with the clerk and you’re like here is the defendant’s name, here’s the date, here is the judge. Okay, do they go back to like a bunch of case files and pull the transcript for you because you’ve given them the name, the date of birth, the date the hearing happened, the judge? No, what they’re going to say to you instead is, OK, this is who the court reporter was. OK, so now I have an email address, sometimes just an email address, and sometimes you get the phone number too. Then you just send it off into the void and the court reporters, there’s really nobody monitoring them to make sure that they’re responding to you
So sometimes Allie would send off an email and it would go to the void and we talked to lawyers and be like, hey, this court reporter didn’t get back to us. They’re like, oh yeah, she never gets back to you. It’s like, okay, so like the transcripts are just gone. Like they just don’t exist. Some of them retire, some of them die. Some of them just log off for months at a time. And yeah, you can’t get those documents. And you know that’s us trying to do journalism.
Then there’s people who desperately need to file appeals for their criminal cases and lawyers. And you have no right to counsel for appeals for the most part. There’s always a waiting list to get somebody to handle your appeal for free. And even if you are wealthy enough to get someone to go handle your repeal, you can have a law firm who has people on staff whose only job it is to create relationships with these court reporters so that they could get the transcripts. So it’s just a totally insane, totally ridiculous system where even people who had been sentenced and served their time, which was considerable. We cite one example of a person who did four years for a crime, was never able to file an appeal because they never got their court transcripts back.
So it’s a totally broken system that we solved decades ago with recording equipment. And listen, other places have solved this while not putting these folks out of work. You could do both. You could like, oh yeah, there’s somebody tip tapping away, but we also record it and here you go. Here’s the audio file, right? And like, that’s not the most cost-effective, but it at least solves the issue of due process which for the most part is like does not exist for many people in New York City, New York State criminal courts because of this insane court reporter system. So getting those documents was like just a massive barrier, like it just took us forever to get a few documents and then you get the documents and sometimes it’s the wrong one, or totally the wrong date or the wrong case. So that was surprising to us and so surprising in fact, we’re like, all right, this is part of the project. And we had Allie write a really good piece just about the whole process.
Alvarez: So part of the project isn’t only talking about the issues with the judiciary, but also talking about potential reforms. Could you talk about some of those potential reforms?
Rivlin-Nadler: Yeah, so like I said, the idea of overturning this judicial delegate system in the convention and getting rid of it through the courts was foreclosed by the Supreme Court. But there are other ways, obviously, to reform the system as it exists. We’re currently in election season right now. There is an election on June 23rd [with people] running for district leader positions across the five boroughs who want to reform and make this way more democratic of a process like. Even if we’re stuck with judicial conventions, we should have judicial delegate forums. We should do trainings. We should have way more screenings. Like in Manhattan, New York County, they are furthest along with the reform and still there are massive issues with that system as well. But at the very least, there is a lot of transparency as compared to what’s been going on in Brooklyn, the Queen, and the Bronx, which just is still stuck in this absolutely secretive, daylight-averse system.
So people are trying to reform that, at the very least in Brooklyn, which looks like there might be enough momentum this year to kind of topple the existing power structure in the Brooklyn Democratic Party. In Queens, they’ve taken a totally different route where they’re like, we cannot defeat the Queens Democratic Party, we could just make it totally irrelevant and like Zohran Mamdani is the mayor. He’s from Queens and Queens DSA is essentially what catapulted him to become the mayor and we could just totally work outside of the Democratic Party until they’re irrelevant and they’re doing a very good job at that and that’s very possible in the next few years.
Another person who can really make a difference here is the mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and that he will appoint dozens of people to the city’s criminal court, who are then, like I said, elevated into the state Supreme Court. So those people could have much more vetted backgrounds, could be much less prosecutorial focused in their backgrounds. It’s a huge impact he could have not only on people who will be elevated to be state Supreme Court judges, but even people who get enough experience to be elected to be state Supreme Court Judges, even if they don’t get elevated. So you know, because the great way to get experience to become a state Supreme court judge is to be a city criminal court judge, which maybe I mentioned before, but they cover arraignments, bails, misdemeanors, small stuff like that. So, the mayor, who obviously is a democratic socialist, and, I would argue, is still trying to figure out what the fuck he’s doing with his criminal justice platform.
But you know that is something that they on day two announced was going to be a priority of theirs which is kind of wild because normally in mayoral administrations, this is such either a patronage machine, here this is a great way to give jobs to our friends. or just not a focus, just like not something they’re into and so they really clearly billboarded like we’re really paying attention to this. So we wrote a lot about how the mayor can change this, make it more transparent and invite more people from more diverse backgrounds to join the bench. And then ultimately there’s a bill in the state legislature which would kind of get rid of this appointment system where people are elevated from courts that maybe have nothing to do with criminal courts by just expanding the amount of state supreme court seats that we have in New York State. Big problem there, of course, is that this is in our Constitution. So to change it, we have to pass it twice, and then it has to go to the voters. So that’s a long way around. But there’s some more immediate actions that could be taken by the mayor and people who want to reform the local political parties.
Alvarez: And then my last question is, what has the reaction been to the project so far?
Rivlin-Nadler: The reaction has been good. We had a very cool 300 person attended event at Littlefield in Brooklyn, where we kind of boiled down the project to a bunch of much more chattier PowerPoint presentations to make it a lot less dry. We framed it as like a fake judicial convention, which the joke was like, this is just as staged as the actual judicial conventions. We called it the Hell Gate judicial convention. We would call it the Hell Gate and Type Investigations judicial convention, but we were handing out pencils that only had so much space.
Our fans love it, our subscribers really dig it. And the thing is, is, you know, outside of a few nasty emails we got from the Office of Court Administration, when we were asking them for comment, we’ve heard nothing from them, we got no comment from them. We asked them literally dozens of questions over the course of a month and they just decided for them, and this often happens, silence was the best course. So I am still waiting to see if the court system has any real response to what we did.
We know for sure that the judges were circulating it amongst themselves, and we even heard anecdotally that a few of them were quite flattered with the drawings that we commissioned of them, which, as they should be, they look pretty good. And we had Lauren Tamaki, a very good illustrator, to do that work for us. So, that’s what we’ve heard from the judges.
That being said, you know, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about, people are paying attention to it. So one case in particular, and, and these operators that my colleague Nick Pinto wrote about was this kind of long running scheme in Brooklyn, where local lawyers were working with outside investors, holding escrow money, which is a really important thing that lawyers do, right? You wanna buy an apartment, you wanna do a real estate deal, you wanna show that you have liquidity. Giving money to lawyers to hold an escrow is a huge role of the civil bar. And fucking with escrow-money is like the one thing you cannot do. But Nick has been writing about this ongoing, essentially, shell game where one lawyer, this guy, Sam Sprei, would be sent escrow money, and then the money would kind of disappear. It would be tough for people to get it back. And then the courts in Brooklyn would actually be weaponized against the people, the investors who gave him money by this whole kind of Brooklyn machine, which also involves the guy we mentioned before, Frank Seddio, because at the end of the day, like the lawyers who are holding the money for investors or moving money around are also the lawyers who play huge roles in appointing judges to the bench.
And so when investors sue to get their money back, weird things happen, that they recuse themselves. They make strange decisions. They delay in the delay until people lose interest and things like that. And this was kind of an open secret in Brooklyn. Once we started digging into it was like how the court system was being weaponized by party insiders to help benefit kind of these not premier lawyers, just guys who are running what is now alleged by federal prosecutors to be a scam. Today [May 13], just like literally an hour ago, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York indicted Sam Sprei, who Nick had written about for this project, and also indicted a former judge in Brooklyn, who Nick had also written about, Edward King, who resigned at the end of last year. He was a state Supreme Court judge. He had been elected to civil court and then elevated by OCA to be a state supreme court judge. And then the alleged conduct involves King essentially being involved in the scheme here to defraud people. These are fraud charges. He ultimately resigned as the internal investigators began zeroing in on his conduct, but obviously he couldn’t outrun federal prosecutors, which is not always a given.
And so that just shows like immediately case in point, what was a really important part of this project was to show that the process by which we choose these judges and elevate them being so close to these political parties, which are essentially run a lot of times by these lawyers who have local cases in front of these very same judges, invites corruption. And if you create a better system or at least add more transparency to the system in an effort to actually figure out who has connections to whom, as opposed to bragging about those connections, which is what we heard in the recording that we received. And instead, we want fair and impartial judges who are not super well connected to local lawyers and local political players in the borough, that’s the type of judge we want. That being said, if you want to make money, you probably want a different type of judge. So yeah, it’s kind of a beautiful thing that like this literally happened a week to the day after we released the project is immediate action. Obviously, this case was in the offing, a lot of people had written about it. But you know, I think it’s a testament to the more journalism you could throw at these arcane and difficult processes to explain instead of just being overwhelmed by them. Literally, Nick has done such heroic work laying out the very complicated scheme. You know, we’re not cops, we are not cops. But like, this is obviously allegedly illegal conduct.