The Puerto Rican eatery, located in a remote industrial section of Westchester Square, is owned by Richard Caban, the brother of NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban. The establishment has for the past few years gained a reputation as a hangout for Adams, who celebrated his birthday there last year, other high-profile elected leaders, including State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, as well as top NYPD brass, including Commissioner Caban and Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey.

But Con Sofrito has since 2022 faced a bevy of open building and fire safety violations over a sprawling “party room” it erected in its parking lot during the pandemic without proper permits. The restaurant’s landlord, a corporate entity named 1315 Commerce LLC, sued Richard Caban in Bronx Civil Court over the party room in October after it refused to dismantle the illegal structure, a development first reported last month by the news outlet The City.

In a previously unreported development, Jamie Schreck, an attorney for the landlord, filed court papers in that case last week saying Richard Caban had finally agreed to break down the party room by March 1 — and close Con Sofrito for good by Aug. 31.

In addition, Caban agreed as part of a settlement to cough up $14,000 to cover Schreck’s attorney fees and continue to pay rent through the final date of Con Sofrito’s occupancy, the court papers show. The presiding judge, Betty Lugo, approved the settlement in a decision released on the court docket Friday.

Speaking to the Daily News on Friday afternoon, Schreck said his client is pleased with the settlement and looking to find a new tenant who’s not in the hospitality industry.

“What he told me is that he’s done with restaurants after this,” Schreck said, referring to Joseph Dedona III, the manager of the corporate landlord entity. “He’s fed up with the restaurant industry.”

The settlement might not spell the absolute end of Con Sofrito, though.

“They want to find a new location and a new liquor license,” Schreck said of Caban and his Con Sofrito partners.

An attorney for Richard Caban did not immediately return a request for comment, nor did a spokesman for the mayor.

The illegal party room that sparked the court feud has been featured prominently in photos and videos posted to Instagram by Jimmy Rodriguez, an infamous Bronx restaurateur who lists himself online as the “manager” and “creator” of Con Sofrito.

Rodriguez posted videos and photos in September from the mayor’s 63rd birthday party — which was held in the party room.

Rodriguez used to run Jimmy’s Bronx Cafe, a popular club shuttered in 2004 after coming under suspicion of being a hotbed for gang and drug activity. In the 1990s, Major League Baseball officials warned Yankees players to stay away from Jimmy’s after two shootings took place in front of the club.

Rodriguez did not return a request for comment Friday.

Thursday’s procedural step came in the form of a resolution authorizing the speaker to pursue legal action on behalf of the full Council to compel the mayor to implement the laws, which are designed to expand access to CityFHEPS, a voucher program subsidizing rent for low-income New Yorkers. The measure breezed through the Council in a voice vote with overwhelming support.

With the resolution adopted, the speaker wouldn’t say what form any legal action against the mayor will take, though, or when it might be initiated.

“There has been no final decision yet on any legal action,” she told reporters. “But this maintains our ability to keep our options open, that’s what the resolution does.”

Among other provisions, the laws in dispute would expand access to CityFHEPS by eliminating a rule requiring that otherwise income-eligible individuals must enter a homeless shelter before they can apply for a voucher. By scrapping that rule, Council Democrats have argued the city can prevent more New Yorkers from becoming homeless.

The Council enacted the laws last summer by overriding the mayor’s vetoes of them. Nonetheless, the mayor didn’t implement the laws by a legally mandated Jan. 9 deadline, arguing the city can’t shoulder the added cost that would come with them.

After Thursday’s resolution vote, Adams spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak reiterated that argument, saying “this legislation will add $17 billion onto the backs of our taxpayers” — a figure Council Democrats argue is exaggerated.

The speaker’s reluctance to talk about what exactly her next step will be on the legal front comes as others are also mulling court action over the CityFHEPS matter.

The Legal Aid Society, which by law represents the city’s homeless population, said last month it would file a lawsuit against the mayor to force him to implement the CityFHEPS laws. At the time, a Council spokesman said the speaker was eyeing legal action, too, and that it wasn’t clear whether she would bring her own lawsuit or join Legal Aid’s filing.

A spokesman for the Legal Aid Society declined to comment after Thursday’s vote.

Sliwa, who erroneously identified the Bronxite as a Venezuelan migrant during a live interview Tuesday night on national TV, admitted to the Daily News Thursday he could have been “milder and calmer” during the episode caught live on FOX News cameras.

But his group’s actions during the attack and Sliwa’s on-camera comments sparked anger and outrage across NYC Thursday.

“Washed-up comic book villain instructed his herd of wannabe vigilantes to beat up a guy they decided ‘looked like’ a migrant. A hate crime,” Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan wrote on X. “Live on TV. Violence of any kind, whether against cops or innocent people in Times Sq, must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

“The wheels of justice must move at an appropriate pace. We don’t have the luxury to do what we saw Curtis Sliwa did,” Mayor Adams, Sliwa’s opponent in the 2021 mayoral election, said at an unrelated press briefing with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “To see someone on the corner and, based on their ethnicity, automatically identify them as a migrant or asylum seeker, and not a long-time Bronx resident — that is not what we can do. We have to get it right.”

Adams and Brannan were far from the only ones to tag Sliwa.

On CNN Thursday morning, Gov. Hochul said no one should take the law into their own hands.

“This is not the Wild West. This is New York State,” Hochul said.

Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller and possible Democratic mayoral candidate in 2025, described Sliwa’s antics as “racism” and said he looked forward to meeting him on the debate stage.

“This kind of racism has no place in our city. Unfortunately, Curtis Sliwa went to his usual worst instincts,” Stringer said. “I look forward as a potential Democratic nominee to debating this warmed-over MAGA Republican in 2025.”

While some politicos claimed the attack was motivated by hate and racism, Bragg was not ready to call it a hate crime but did call the incident “disturbing.”

“We’re going to do what we do on all of our matters, right?” Bragg said at the briefing with Adams. “So I think there are people speculating and using a legal phrase in [using] ‘hate crime.’ We don’t make assumptions, we investigate and look at the evidence, so we’ll do what we do in all the other matters — follow the facts.”

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards chalked the incident up to Sliwa’s typical fear mongering.

“This is classic Curtis Sliwa: in the mud, stoking division in New York City. And it’s shameful that he would believe that because someone speaks Spanish, they’re a migrant,” Richards said. “I’m hoping people like Curtis realize our diversity is our strength.”

In an afternoon press conference at City Hall, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said the “actions by Mr. Sliwa and his group” amounted to “fear-mongering” against migrants.

“Seeing incidents and occurrences like that certainly does not help the climate of the city right now. It actually does a lot of harm, creates a lot of confusion, a lot of anger,” she said.

Everyday New Yorkers also slammed Sliwa, who founded the Guardian Angels in the 1970s when crime was raging in the Big Apple and has been one of the more vocal critics chiding the city over its handling of the migrant crisis.

Desiree Joy Frias, a mutual aid volunteer, said she wasn’t surprised by the fracas or that Sliwa was wrong about the man’s background.

“This is not new behavior. They used to take down Black and brown people all the time in the 70s and 80s,” she said. “That people feel that they can handle things extra judiciously — that’s terrifying.”

Sliwa, who spoke to The News before going to a dermatologist appointment, didn’t seemed too fazed about all the controversy.

“All of these folks, I understand, they’re looking to dance on my grave. I take enough shots at them all the time, so it’s fair. But let’s get real here, guys” he said. “Let my haters know it’s not going to stop us from doing what we’ve done for 45 years — although on this one — my mistake. The rhetoric I used, I should not have used in that moment.”

The rule, which bars the city from using municipal government resources to help federal authorities carry out most forms of immigration enforcement, landed in the headlines after police said two NYPD officers were assaulted in Times Square by a group of migrants last month.

After the suspects were set free without bail, local Republicans pounced, blaming the sanctuary status law for their releases. Adding to the debate, Mayor Adams said earlier this week he “would love to entertain” allowing more cooperation with the feds on immigration enforcement, though he argued any such move would likely need to be cleared by the City Council, as it would involve altering local law.

At a press conference at City Hall on Thursday afternoon, Speaker Adams poured cold water on the possibility of the Council tweaking the sanctuary law.

“We have no plans to do that,” she said.

Noting that the city’s sanctuary edict was first established by Mayor Ed Koch in 1989, the speaker also charged it makes no sense for focus to be placed on that law in the context of the Times Square attack.

“Some have pointed to this repugnant and unfortunate incident as a reason to revisit policies advanced by Democratic and Republican mayors, from Koch to Dinkins to Giuliani to Bloomberg and beyond, who recognized that keeping city agencies and workers from being used for federal immigration enforcement is in the best interest of public safety,” she said. “In reality, these bipartisan city policies have no connection to this incident. … This was purely an issue of our local law enforcement solving and prosecuting an alleged crime.”

Since the Times Square assault, some stakeholders in the city have highlighted crimes committed by migrants. At a press conference Tuesday announcing the bust of an alleged robbery ring involving migrants, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban said “a wave of migrant crime has washed over the city.”

In Thursday’s press conference, the speaker, who has clashed with the mayor and his administration on a number of fronts lately, blasted the police commissioner’s comments as misleading.

“Continuing the fervor and the fearmongering around a supposed crime wave, which just is not true, I think is damaging,” she said. “Particularly right now.”

The laws, which the Council enacted on its own last summer by overriding the mayor’s veto of them, aim to greatly expand access to CityFHEPS, a voucher program that subsidizes rent for low-income New Yorkers on open market apartments.

Despite the override, the mayor didn’t implement the laws by the legally mandated Jan. 9 deadline, arguing the city couldn’t afford to overhaul the program the way the Council wants. That prompted Speaker Adams to threaten her chamber would pursue litigation unless the mayor’s administration took “concrete, verifiable steps to implement these local laws by Feb. 7.”

With the speaker’s cutoff date coming and passing Wednesday without action from the administration, she’s going ahead with legal action, a spokesman for her confirmed to the Daily News.

Before moving the matter into court, though, the Council must vote through a resolution authorizing the speaker to take legal action on behalf of the full chamber. The spokesman said the full Council is expected to take that vote Thursday.

Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for the mayor, did not address the Council legal moves when asked for comment Wednesday.

Instead, she touted some CityFHEPS reforms the administration has enacted on its own, including abolishing a rule that used to require that eligible individuals spend at least 90 days in a homeless shelter before they could apply for a voucher. Mamelak also reiterated the mayor’s argument that the legislation is too expensive at a time that the city’s under fiscal strain from the migrant crisis.

“As New York City taxpayers face billions in ever-growing asylum costs as we continue to manage a national humanitarian crisis, this legislation will add $17 billion onto the backs of our taxpayers,” she said. “Simultaneously, it will make it harder for New Yorkers in shelter to move into permanent housing at a time when there are 10,000 households in shelter that are eligible for CityFHEPS and thousands of asylum seekers continue to arrive in our city every week.”

Council Democrats say the mayor’s $17 billion cost estimate is exaggerated.

The speaker’s spokesman stressed it’s not entirely clear yet what form of legal action the speaker will take. The Legal Aid Society said last month it was planning to sue the administration over the CityFHEPS matter, and the Council could join such an action instead of filing its own.

Among other provisions, the laws would expand CityFHEPS eligibility by eliminating a rule requiring that eligible low-income earners first enter a homeless shelter before they can apply for a voucher.

HOMELESS

The legal action comes on the heels of Council Democrats overriding the mayor’s vetoes of two separate bills last month requiring more transparency from the NYPD and banning the use of solitary confinement in city jails. Those overrides came after months of heated debate between the mayor and supporters of the bills.

Bronx Councilwoman Diana Ayala, a Democrat who’s a top sponsor of the CityFHEPS legislation, said it’s disappointing the mayor has feuded so much with the Council lately.

“It’s a shame that it had to become so contentious,” she told The News.

The bill, authored by Bronx Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, is a direct response to the NYCHA bribery scandal that came to light Tuesday as federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted 70 current and former Housing Authority superintendents on charges that they solicited $2 million in bribes from private contractors. In exchange for the bribes, the supers are accused of giving the private operators no-bid “micro purchase” contracts for NYCHA complex construction jobs that didn’t exceed $10,000 in value.

Under current law, NYCHA doesn’t need to publicly report information about procurements in that small-dollar price category — and Torres argued it’s that gap in transparency that has allowed corruption to fester at the public housing agency.

‘“For five years, I have been sounding the alarm about NYCHA’s chronic lack of oversight over no-bid contracting, which can easily become a breeding ground for fraud, corruption and abuse,” said Torres, who as a member of the City Council called in 2019 for stricter transparency requirements around NYCHA micro-purchase contracts. Torres also grew up in public housing.

“One case of bribery or a few cases of bribery can be explained away as outliers,” he continued. “But 70 cases of bribery, affecting one-third of NYCHA properties, points to a systemic failure of management and oversight. It points to a culture of corruption.”

Asked for a response to Torres’ comments, NYCHA spokeswoman Barbara Brancaccio said the authority has “already made substantial reforms to its procurement processes,” citing a “nearly 50% reduction in micro-purchase spend on services” since 2021.

“While micro-purchases allow for staff to quickly and flexibly respond to emergencies at the development level, these recent and unfortunate events demonstrate that additional oversight is needed,” Brancaccio said.

Torres’ legislation, a copy of which was obtained by The News ahead of its introduction in the House of Representatives, would specifically order the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to require every public housing agency in the country to disclose information about all private outsourcing contracts they award.

Such disclosures would divulge the date of the contract, information about the goods and services provided as part of it as well as the identities of the agency official who solicited the contract and the vendor executing it, according to the bill text.

It was not immediately clear how the bill will fare in the House, which is controlled by Republicans.

None of the contractors who paid out bribes to NYCHA supers were charged as part of Tuesday’s massive bust.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a press conference that the indicted supers created an environment in which micro-purchase bidders knew they couldn’t get the contracts unless they paid kickbacks first.

In one especially egregious case, Juan Mercado, a super at the Hammel Houses and Carleton Manor, two jointly managed NYCHA properties in Queens, solicited and accepted at least $314,300 in bribes between April 2014 and this past July, making him the top offender in the scandal, according to prosecutors.

In a letter to NYCHA CEO Lisa Bova-Hiatt on Wednesday, Torres lamented that the agency never tightened rules around micro-purchase procurement after his 2019 lament. He asked her to provide him with information about all steps the agency has taken since then to improve oversight in the contracting gray area.

“NYCHA owes the people of New York transparency about the progress it has made toward procurement reform in public housing,” he wrote to Bova-Hiatt.

All in all, 70 NYCHA superintendents squeezed out just over $2 million in bribes from private actors in exchange for giving them no-bid contracts to do building repairs at the Housing Authority’s various projects across the city, according to a string of criminal complaints unsealed Tuesday.

Here are details on the 10 NYCHA supers accused of taking the biggest bribes, totaling $1.02 million:

1. JUAN MERCADO: 

A super at the Hammel Houses and Carleton Manor, two jointly-managed NYCHA properties in Queens, Mercado is accused of soliciting and accepting at least $314,300 in bribes between April 2014 and this past July — making him the scandal’s top offender.

The feds didn’t name or indict any of the private actors who allegedly issued the bribes at the heart of the scandal, in many cases because they cooperated with investigators, but Mercado’s complaint says he routinely demanded between 10% and 20% of a contract’s total price tag as a kickback before signing off on it. In total, Mercado’s accused of issuing no-bid contracts worth at least $1.7 million in exchange for bribes.

2. NIRMAL LORICK:  

Lorick, a super at Queens’ Baisley Park Houses, raked in about $153,000 in bribes between January 2014 and this past July, according to court papers.

In exchange for those payouts, Lorick gave the go-ahead on issuing no-bid work orders worth some $1.3 million, the feds say.

3. JOSE HERNANDEZ:  

While working as a super at the Marble Hill Houses in the Bronx, Hernandez pocketed about $95,000 in bribes between 2014 and September 2020, the feds charge.

The bribes prompted him to sign off on repair contracts worth about $640,000. The feds say that Hernandez made clear to contractors vying for repair work that they “would not be awarded no-bid contracts” at his developments unless they paid him bribes first.

4. DWARKA RUPNARAIN: 

Rupnarain retired from his superintendent post at the Bronx’s Gun Hill Houses in December 2022.

Before that, Rupnarain is accused of having taken some $83,100 in bribes between February 2015 and June 2022. In exchange, he cleared the way for no-bid contracts worth at least $508,000, the feds say.

5. VERONICA HOLLMAN: 

While working as a super at Brooklyn’s Pink Houses between May 2018 and July 2022, Hollman pocketed at least $80,000 in bribes in exchange for issuing contracts worth some $400,000, according to prosecutors.

“If [an unnamed contractor] did not make payments to HOLLMAN, HOLLMAN would not award [the contractor] additional no-bid contracts for work at Pink Houses,” prosecutors wrote in her complaint, citing interviews with the contractor.

6. RIGOBERTO “RICKY” CHARRIEZ:

Charriez pocketed at least $70,000 in bribes while working at various projects across the city as a super between 2016 and 2023, including most recently at the Richmond Terrace development in Queens. The bribes paved the way for Charriez to issue contracts worth about $377,000, the feds allege.

“The contracts were typically each worth approximately $5,000, and [an unnamed contractor] therefore paid CHARRIEZ approximately $500 in cash per contract,”  his complaint states.

7. DEXTER LINO:

While working as an assistant superintendent between 2019 and 2021 at NYCHA’s Latimer Gardens in Queens, Lino raked in about $70,000 in bribes, too, prosecutors say.

The bribes prompted Lino to award no-bid repair deals worth about $245,000, according to his complaint.

8. CLARENCE SAMUEL:

While working at NYCHA’s Gompers Consolidation project in Manhattan between 2016 and September 2022, Samuel collected at least $56,000 in bribes, according to the feds.

In exchange, he allegedly green-lit no-bid contracts worth about $250,000.

9. FRANKIE VILLANUEVA:

Villanueva took some $50,000 in bribes while working as a super at the Mott Haven Houses in the Bronx, according to his complaint.

In exchange, he issued no-bid contracts worth about $200,000, the feds say.

10. MICHAEL JOHNSON

In exchange for at least approximately $48,000 in bribes between 2018 and 2022, Johnson used his power as a super at Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Houses to issue contracts worth about $225,000.

Against that backdrop, Johnson retired from NYCHA in January 2023.

Adams, who testified before lawmakers in Albany on Tuesday, was responding to a question from state Assemblyman Michael Reilly (R-Staten Island) who asked if he’d consider issuing an executive order to allow the NYPD to engage in more cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

As he’s done before, Adams reiterated that city laws passed in 2014 under former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration prevent him from doing that, but added that he’d be open to such a move if the city’s lawyers gave him their stamp of approval.

“If my legal team tells me I have the authority to have cooperation with ICE for those who commit felony dangerous crimes, that is something we would love to entertain,” he said.

Adams weighed in on the issue a day earlier as well — saying that it was up to the City Council to “review” those laws — but on Monday, he stopped short of offering a preference on how he would like to proceed.

The rhetoric and wrangling over the city’s sanctuary status comes just days after migrants were accused of beating two NYPD officers in Times Square. More recently, on Monday, the NYPD announced that they’d busted seven people — five of them migrants — in connection with a series of brazen cell phone robberies carried out on mopeds.

In recent weeks, Adams has fielded a number of questions on how leading a sanctuary city has impacted his ability to manage the migrant crisis, which has strained the city’s budget and sent his administration into repeated scrambles over how to care for the more than 150,000 asylum seekers who’ve streamed into the city over the past two years.

Asked by a reporter Tuesday in Albany if he’s been reluctant to share his views on the city’s sanctuary status because he believes current restrictions should remain as is, Adams said “no” and added that he intends to discuss the issue at greater length with the City Council, which just last week overrode two of his vetos on criminal justice bills he opposed.

“I don’t want to broadside the City Council. We’re going to have the conversation about those who commit serious crimes, and I want to sit down with them first, have the conversation and then we’ll publicly say what we’re doing,” he said.

Tuesday’s bust, which landed 55 current NYCHA employees and 15 retirees in handcuffs, marked the largest number of federal bribery charges filed in a single day in Department of Justice history, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said.

The 70 building superintendents and assistant superintendents were charged with receiving kickbacks for awarding contracts at their facilities — which amounted to a third of all the NYCHA complexes in the city, federal officials said.

“Instead of acting in the interests of NYCHA residents, the City of New York, or taxpayers, the 70 defendants charged today allegedly used their jobs at NYCHA to line their own pockets,” Williams said at a Tuesday press conference.

If convicted, each super arrested could receive between 10 and 20 years behind bars, officials said.

NYCHA supers are accused of having their palms out at public housing complexes in Harlem and Washington Heights, the Lower East Side, the Bronx, the Rockaways, north Brooklyn and Coney Island, a map of the investigation shows.

Building superintendents were arrested in the Taft and Martin Luther King Houses in Harlem as well as the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, the largest NYCHA complex in the five boroughs.

The defendants were arrested Tuesday morning throughout the city and across six states following the yearlong investigation, officials said. The building supers are accused of receiving bribes between 2013 and the end of last year.

At Manhattan Federal Court on Tuesday, bail was set at $50,000 for most of the defendants, with none singled out as top suspects, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

The defendants had a great deal of power in awarding repair and construction contracts of under $10,000, Williams said. The work, considered “micro-purchases” that could be awarded with no-bid contracts, was mostly for plumbing fixes, window repairs, paint work and minor construction work.

But the supers arrested would hold off on approving the repair work and giving NYCHA the green light to pay contractors until they got some cash for themselves, Williams said.

“The superintendents would demand their own cut in order to do their jobs in assigning and approving those repairs,” Williams said. “This misconduct became a regular practice to dozens of superintendents.”

The contractors, none of whom have been arrested, would often pay the bribes without hesitation, Williams said.

“They knew if they didn’t the defendants would give the jobs to someone else,” he said.

Those arrested worked in about 100 of the city’s NYCHA complexes. The bribes they pocketed amounted to about $1,000 to $2,000 per job, but they “added up,” Williams said.

All told, the superintendents received about $2 million in bribes for approving about $13 million on construction contracts, he said.

Those arrested were apprehended by the feds, the city Department of Investigation, Homeland Security and the office of the Inspector General for Housing and Urban Development.

“We are firmly committed to cleaning up the corruption that has plagued NYCHA for too long,” Williams said.

The bribes were so baked into the approval process that in some cases it was considered by contractors as a minor cost for doing business with NYCHA and was bartered openly.

According to the complaint against retired Brooklyn building superintendent Angela Williams, who was arrested at her home in South Carolina, a contractor asked her in June 2019 if “1k per” no-bid contract was “cool?”

“No problem babe,” she responded, according to the complaint.

While the employees are all accused of similar behavior, only a handful of them appeared to be working together, according to the criminal complaint.

Supers Joseph Fuller, 42, George Kemp, 49, and Chrisie Salter, 46, often shared bribes they received for work in housing complexes across the city, prosecutors charge.

After awarding one contract in 2022, Fuller allegedly told the contractor offering him a bribe that he “needed to begin paying Fuller a higher amount for each no-bid contract because Fuller needed to share the money with Kemp,” the criminal complaint reads.

An unindicted co-conspirator, only identified as a “superintendent with the NYCHA Office of Mold Assessment and Remediation,” also reached out to a contractor on behalf of Angela Williams, the retired Brooklyn super.

“Please take care of my friend in Farragut,” the mold remediation super told the contractor about Williams, according to courts papers. “She will be very disappointed.”

“You could give her 5k total,” the co-conspirator wrote in a text. “I’ll make up the difference cause she is my good friend. I’ll also give you 2 developments next month. Deal?”

“Please erase this text after you read it,” the co-conspirator added.

The 55 suspects currently employed were all suspended by NYCHA. Steps had been taken to make sure their positions were replaced so no current work in their buildings would be stalled or halted, agency officials said.

NYCHA Chief Executive Officer Lisa Bova-Hiatt said those arrested “put their greed first and violated the trust of our residents, their fellow NYCHA colleagues and all New Yorkers.”

“These actions are counter to everything we stand for as public servants and will not be tolerated in any form,” she added. “In the past five years, NYCHA has achieved many significant milestones, while remaining vigilant to ensure integrity in every area of our work. We will not allow bad actors to disrupt or undermine our achievements.”

This is not the first time the feds have arrested NYCHA superintendents for taking bribes on no-bid contracts. Last February, building supers Leroy Gibbs and Julio Figueroa were sentenced to less than two and a half years in prison after being convicted of soliciting bribes from contractors between 2019 and 2022.

In 2021, the city’s Department of Investigation recommended NYCHA make wholesale changes to how it awards no-bid contracts that would “remove responsibility for micro-purchases from staff within the housing development and places the responsibility instead with specialized centralized staff with the necessary expertise.” But NYCHA rejected the proposal.

After Tuesday’s arrests, NYCHA has agreed to making the change, as well as to implement 13 other recommendations aimed at removing the temptation to solicit bribes.

“[The current no-bid contract process] was intended to ensure swift completion of necessary lower-cost construction and maintenance work in the NYCHA developments,” Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocely Strauber said. “[The bribes] drove up the cost of this kind of work and diverted valuable public funds away from public housing and into the pockets of corrupt NYCHA staff.”

Mayor Adams, who was in Albany Tuesday speaking about the city’s migrant crisis, said he hasn’t been fully briefed on the details of the investigation.

“Taking money from the city in general is wrong,” Adams said. “But when you go down to NYCHA residents, everyone knows how I feel about the investments we’re making in NYCHA.”

Asked for comment on Tuesday’s bust, City Hall noted the micro-purchase program at the heart of the feds’ case is operated by NYCHA alone without any input from the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services.

“Anyone who breaks the law in New York City will be held accountable — no matter where they work. But misusing resources set aside for our public housing residents is particularly egregious,” Adams spokesman Charles Lutvak said. “NYCHA residents deserve the same quality of life as any New Yorker, and our administration will not tolerate any level of fraud, abuse or waste that gets in the way of our efforts to deliver that.”

NYCHA residents cheered the arrests, believing that the supers’ search for contractors willing to give them a piece of the action likely delayed needed repairs to their apartments.

“Obviously if they were arrested they were doing something wrong,”  Myrisa Lewis, 47, who lives in the Martin Luther King Houses, told the Daily News. “It’s ridiculous how long a work order takes. It shouldn’t take a month and a half to fix a door knob.”

While the bribes have been going on for years, U.S. Attorney Williams hopes Tuesday’s arrests will finally squash the practice.

“We wanted to send a message with a 70-person takedown,” he said. “We hope it finally puts an end to the culture of corruption.”

With Tim Balk and Colin Mixson

“We want to assist. We want to help. The problem is, is due to city policies and state law, the cooperation is no longer afforded between the NYPD, the law enforcement partners and ICE,” said Kenneth Genalo, New York City field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “So unfortunately, a lot of the way we have to do our intelligence in ICE is the same way that you find out about cases — it’s through the media. We’re no longer contacted. We’re no longer called.”

Genalo, who spoke Monday morning in Times Square, was flanked by Republican lawmakers and a Democratic city councilman, Robert Holden of Queens, seeking to highlight the issue after NYPD officers were beaten by a group of migrants about a block away on Jan. 27.

That assault — which led to the arrest and release of some but not all of the suspects — has sparked a broader debate over whether Mayor Adams should seek to dismantle the city’s laws around being a sanctuary city.

At a news conference later in the day, Adams was asked about the ICE honcho’s criticism on a lack of engagement from city government on immigration enforcement matters. Adams said his administration does have conversations with ICE, but added that “the law is very clear on what I can do and what I can’t do.”

He then pointed a finger at the City Council, which passed laws in 2014 barring the city from detaining foreign nationals on behalf of the federal government for deportation purposes.

“This is a conversation for the City Council, that’s their law, that wasn’t my law,” Adams said of whether he would like to repeal the city’s sanctuary status designation. “Far too often, we leave bodies of government off the hook, we should be sitting down asking people to show: Where do y’all stand on this position?”

Council spokesman Rendy Desamours said that “violence against NYPD officers and municipal workers doing their jobs, or any New Yorker generally, is wrong and unacceptable,” but then added that “it’s also important that government officials provide accurate information to the public.”

“Existing New York City law allows individuals charged with crimes, regardless of their immigration status, to go through the legal process like any other person. City law does not prevent people from facing federal immigration proceedings,” he said. “Rather, it limits the involvement of our city agencies in being part of the federal immigration process to ensure immigrant communities aren’t deterred from seeking help or reporting crime to city officials out of fear of deportation due to their immigration status.”

The city’s sanctuary laws and policies prohibit the NYPD from helping federal immigration authorities with immigration enforcement itself,  but do not necessarily preclude the Police Department from assisting the feds in criminal cases involving migrants.

Republicans’ criticism over the Big Apple’s sanctuary city status comes in a presidential election year, and as former President Donald Trump — who’s facing dozens of criminal charges and is seeking the GOP nomination — has argued that President Biden should do more to secure the southern border.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-S.I., Brooklyn), who stood alongside Genalo on Monday, demanded that the city “resume cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport individuals who are committing these dangerous crimes in our city.”

Genalo’s remarks Monday were notable given his high rank in a federal agency overseen by  Biden, a Democrat.

He contended that city officials haven’t been honoring administrative warrants seeking to detain migrants — and are instead demanding judicial warrants — a provision of a more recent law enacted under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. According to Genalo, that isn’t in line with federal immigration law and has proven counterproductive.

“We don’t get a judicial warrant for these cases,” he said. “We have the authority to issue the warrants. So I’m willing to work with the mayor’s office and with the governor’s office to try and get back to the table to speak about having this situation addressed once again.”

He added that before the city adopted its most recent sanctuary city laws, ICE had an outpost at  Rikers Island that “worked hand in hand” with the NYPD, but that ended when new laws were enacted under de Blasio.

“Basically, anyone at that time that was foreign-born was vetted by my staff, the immigration officers, to determine whether or not they were amenable to removal procedures. If they were, we took custody of them,” he said.

Genalo suggested that the situation has improved under Adams and that “at least we’re dialoguing again,” but that it has a ways to go.

“If they don’t contact us, if you don’t honor the detainers, there is no way that we can get them immediately,” he said of migrant criminal suspects. “At that point, we have to go searching for them, and obviously once they’re released, they can be in the wind, they can be going to another state or they can be going anywhere.”

Adams’ administration has offered a somewhat mixed message when it comes to the city’s sanctuary status. While the mayor himself has blamed a past iteration of the City Council, last week, his chief of staff, Camille Varlack, said that the city is in fact permitted to work with the feds when an arrest warrant is issued.

“We are able to participate and engage with and cooperate with law enforcement agencies on all levels generally. That’s the starting point for it,” she said. “With respect to the sanctuary law, what it essentially says is that if they are here for a purpose that is primarily immigration-related, that’s a different circumstance. So if the federal authorities are able to get a warrant for the arrest of these individuals, we are allowed to work with them and participate with them.”

On Monday, Adams said he supports the concept of deporting migrants who engage in violent crimes.

“If you assault police officers on the streets, I believe that if you’re found guilty, the federal government should do its job of deporting that person. If there should be more collaboration with ICE and others, that’s something that the Council should deliberate on and make a determination,” he said. “I cannot use city resources based on existing law. So I think that’s a question that should be presented to the City Council. How do they want to move forward on this issue?”