SUIT: BLAZ WANTED ME GONE TO DUCK DIRTY DEAL
Official says he got ax for not playing along in murky moves that led to nursing home sale
De Blasio dummied up. Evidence filed in Manhattan Federal Court last week shows that as early as March 2016 Mayor de Blasio was communicating with top advisers regarding Ricardo Morales, a former city official now suing the mayor and the city over being fired.
The documents, which include email exchanges involving de Blasio and staffers, contradict statements the mayor made after the fact, claiming he couldn’t discuss details of the situation because he “wasn’t involved.”
New evidence in Morales’ lawsuit suggests otherwise.
Morales was fired from his job at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services in February 2017, a year after the Rivington House scandal had rocked City Hall and resulted in multiple investigations.
The scandal involved the city’s lifting of deed restrictions on a Lower East Side nursing home, ultimately paving the way for its sale to a private developer for $116 million.
Administrative Services was responsible for lifting those restrictions, but Morales has long maintained City Hall was also involved.
In his lawsuit, filed in February 2018, Morales claims he was fired from the agency because he wouldn’t go along with covering up City Hall’s role in the deal. City officials, including de Blasio, have said Morales was terminated for “performance” issues.
In August 2017, more than a year after the Rivington House story first emerged, de Blasio pleaded ignorance on the specifics surrounding Morales and his firing.
“I can’t speak to the details because I wasn’t involved,” he said at the time.
But documents filed in federal court last week show that, in fact, de Blasio was so concerned about an “issue” with Morales that he emailed top adviser Emma Wolfe about it more than a year before.
“I spoke to Dom,” the mayor wrote on March 25, 2016, referring to adviser Dominic Williams. “This is about the riccardo morales issue. Pls follow up with Dom.”
“Yes Sir,” Wolfe responded. One former city official who asked to remain anonymous said Wednesday that it was clear at the time the administration saw Morales as a problem, not just because of his performance, but also for the damaging information he was privy to concerning Rivington.
“There’s a reason he didn’t get his head lopped off right away,” the source said. “You don’t make the guy a scapegoat when the scapegoat knows where all the bodies are buried.”
“The waters were so muddy,” the source added. “I was lied to all the time.”
Around the time of de Blasio’s email exchange with Wolfe, Administrative Services Commissioner Lisette Camilo was also in discussions with Williams about Morales’ future at the agency, which she had just assumed control of two months earlier.
Camilo emailed him on March 7, 2016, about “some changes” she was considering for “the DCAS senior team” and put Morales at the top of a list for Williams to review.
Williams responded to Camilo two weeks later that he was “just working on Ricardo.”
Camilo stated in a sworn deposition — taken last year and made public last week — that she did not recall the exchange, but said several times she remembered considering firing Morales early on in her days as commissioner.
The court rejected in May requests from Morales’ attorney to depose several other administration officials, including Wolfe, former Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris and former press secretary Karen Hinton.
On March 26, 2016 — just a day after the mayor’s email to Wolfe about Morales — his press team was also scrambling to contain the PR fallout already surrounding Rivington House.
After the Daily News published a story that day revealing lobbyist James Capalino steered donations to de Blasio after pressing the deed restrictions issue, de Blasio’s then-spokesman Phil Walzak asked colleagues to opine on future fallout.
“They figure out Ricardo Morales. Preet asks for docs?” wrote Hinton, referring to former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara. “Ny times could do a deeper dive given daily news story.”
Contacted Wednesday about that email, Hinton said the Rivington deal “stunk to high heaven.”
Morales’ attorney, Robert Kraus, said he wants the mayor to testify “about what he meant when he talked to multiple senior City Hall officials about the ‘Morales issue.’ ” He acknowledged it’s not easy to hold the mayor of America’s largest city personally liable, but said, in this case, he thinks it will happen.
“A couple of conclusions seem apparent to me,” Kraus said.
“One, the mayor and City Hall realized that the press finding out about Ricardo would ultimately blow a hole in City Hall’s claimed lack of involvement in Rivington House, where politically connected donors again received favorable treatment, and the likely next step thereafter would be a visit from the U.S. attorney’s office,” he said. “Two, given the mayor subsequently minimizing his knowledge about Ricardo Morales and his firing, I think it’s fair to say that he has some memory issues.”
De Blasio spokesman Bill Neidhardt declined to specifically address the email exchange between his boss and Wolfe.
“This is ongoing litigation so I won’t comment any further than saying, with confidence, legal proceedings will affirm Ricardo Morales was appropriately fired for performance issues,” he said.