NYPD Sergeants Benevolent association SBA
Former president of the NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA), Ed Mullins, has pled guilty to misappropriating $600,000 from the SBA, it was announced on Thursday, Jan. 19. The news was confirmed in a brief press release by the SBA, whose current president is Vincent J. Vallelong.
“During his plea allocution, Mullins admitted to defrauding the union by submitting inflated expense reimbursement reports as well as characterizing personal expenses as SBA expenses, which he knew to be false,” the SBA statement read. “As part of the plea, the court entered a preliminary forfeiture order in the amount of $600,000. As such, Mullins is required to make full restitution to the SBA,” the statement continued.
In a separate press release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice, Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Mullins pled guilty before U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl to one count of wire fraud “in connection with a scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the SBA through the submission of fraudulent expense reports.”
In the context of the announcement, Williams said, “Edward Mullins promised to look out for the thousands of hard-working NYPD Sergeants who are members of the SBA. Instead, as admitted today in federal court, he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from them to fund his lavish lifestyle.” He added, “Thanks to the hard work of the FBI, Mullins’s betrayal has been exposed, and he now faces jail time and significant financial penalties.”
According to the information filed in the case and statements made in court, the SBA is the fifth-largest police union in the U.S., with its headquarters located in lower Manhattan. The SBA’s membership consists of all active and retired sergeants of the NYPD, with approximately 13,000 members. From 2002 until October 2021, Mullins served as president of the union.
According to the case information, beginning in 2017, Mullins used his personal credit card to pay for meals at high-end restaurants and to purchase luxury personal items, among other things, and then submitted false and inflated expense reports to the SBA, representing that his charges were legitimate SBA expenditures, when in fact they were not.
The court heard that Mullins routinely included meals on his expense reports that were not SBA-related. He also inflated the costs of his meals, whether SBA-related or not. For example, if the actual cost of a meal was $522.55, Mullins would seek reimbursement from the SBA for $822.55 and pocket the difference.
The court also heard that Mullins would also take personal expenses like supermarket bills and claim them on his expense reports as SBA-related meals for which he also sought reimbursement. According to the case information, his fraudulent expenses were paid through the SBA’s contingent fund, which is funded primarily through annual dues paid by SBA members. In total, Mullins stole at least $600,000 from the SBA, according to court records.
The guilty plea of Mullins, 61, of Port Washington, New York, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. As part of his plea agreement, the prosecution team said Mullins agreed to forfeit $600,000 to the United States, and to make restitution in the amount of $600,000 to the SBA. The maximum potential sentence in the case is prescribed by Congress. Any sentencing of Mullins will be determined by the judge.
Photo courtesy of Ed Reed
Williams praised the outstanding investigative work of the FBI and the FBI/New York City Police Department public corruption task force. The case is being handled by the Office’s public corruption unit. Assistant U.S. attorneys, Alexandra Rothman, Andrew Rohrbach, and David Robles, are handling the prosecution.
As previously reported, Mullins had been involved in a public dispute in 2020 with then-district 15 city councilman and now Congressman Ritchie Torres (NY-15), who represents part of Bronx Community Board 7, including Norwood, before the former SBA president was later forced to resign following the FBI investigation into his finances.
During a press conference held outside City Hall in Manhattan on Sept. 8, 2020, Torres displayed, on a large placard, a copy of a Tweet posted in 2020 under the SBA’s Twitter handle, @SBANYPD, in which the congressman had been referenced in derogatory terms.
The Tweet was published in response to earlier comments made by Torres in which he questioned if there had been a correlation between prevailing high crime rates in New York City and a slowdown on the part of the NYPD in addressing such high crime. The congressman’s comments had followed earlier widespread calls to defund the police in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.
Torres had called for Mullins to resign following the insult. Mullins refused, issuing a response on Twitter in which he said the insult, which has since been removed from the social media platform, “had nothing to do with his [Torres] race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.” Mullins added, “My comments had everything to do with his dangerous policies and worldview. The City is burning and Councilman Torres wants to blame the police.” Torres, meanwhile, defended his comments, saying as an elected official, it was his job to raise pertinent questions about such matters.
On July 17, 2020, CNN reported that Mullins had appeared on a Fox News show with a QAnon mug visible in the background of the screen. As reported by The New York Times, one of the central conspiracy theories behind QAnon is the belief in a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring and are trying to control politics and media. It has been widely reported that QAnon supporters were involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In the wake of the Twitter spat, the former SBA Twitter handle used at that time was archived and the union now uses a new Twitter handle in its place.
As also reported, prior to the resignation of a former health commissioner appointed under the De Blasio administration, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, in a separate, public dispute, the SBA had publicly referred to the former health commissioner using an expletive.
As reported, at the beginning of the pandemic, CDC representatives said that N95 masks were in short supply, and were reserved for front line, health care workers, who, it was clear, were being directly exposed to the virus from patients. As the pandemic unfolded, police and other emergency services began falling ill from the virus, as they were transporting patients from their homes to other locations.
Increasing numbers of coronavirus-related deaths among police and the emergency services followed. Eyewitness News reported at the time that in March 2020, when NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan had asked Barbot for a supply of N-95 masks for police officers, the two got into a heated discussion due to the short supply of available masks at that time.
Photo courtesy of Jeff Reed / NYC Council
Barbot allegedly wanted to preserve the low mask stocks for front line health care workers. During that March discussion, it was reported that the health commissioner made some offensive remarks to Monahan, for which she later apologized. It was after this incident that Barbot was later called an expletive on social media by a member of the NYPD Sergeants’ Benevolent Association (SBA), in response to her comments. This was despite the fact that Monahan had already accepted her apology for her own comments.
NBC reported at the time that when questioned during a press conference about the name-calling of Barbot by the SBA, then New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said, “I have not seen all the comments from different unions, and I want to caution that if people are concerned about this issue, they need to express their concern in an appropriate manner, and two wrongs don’t make a right.” NBC also reported that the mayor added at the time that the SBA’s language was misogynistic and unacceptable.
Mullins is scheduled to be sentenced for the misappropriation of SBA union funds on May 25.
admin
Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.
English
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese (Simplified)
French
Spanish