The brother of two high-ranking members of Mayor Eric Adams’ inner circle claimed he worked with a company that said it had no record of having done business with him and another that said he promised access that never came.
Terence Banks and his government relations firm have been thrust into the spotlight after the three brothers’ phones were seized by federal officials last week. He is a recently retired mid-level MTA supervisor and brother of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks as well as schools Chancellor David Banks. Terence Banks’ company, The Pearl Alliance, had many of the hallmarks of a lobbying firm. It claimed to help foster “strategic alliances among businesses, industry leaders, and government.”
Earlier this week The New York Times reported federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating a suspected bribery scheme involving Terence Banks and his company.
No one has been charged with a crime and attorneys for all three Banks brothers have denied reports of wrongdoing. Banks was not a registered lobbyist and city ethics laws forbid lobbying family relatives.
“Ethics rules certainly would kick in when you are looking at public officials and their family,” said Rachael Fauss, senior policy adviser with Reinvent Albany, a good government group.
SVAM International is an IT technology firm that was listed as a client on Banks’ consultancy website. A representative with the company told Gothamist that it hired Terence Banks hoping he could help broker meetings with Adams administration, but that Banks was ineffective and no contracts were ever obtained through him. The representative declined to be quoted because of the pending investigation. He would not say whether SVAM had been in contact with federal officials about Terence Banks, but said the company is not a target of the federal investigation.
SVAM has had contracts with the city for more than a decade, including with the Department of Education that Banks’ brother now runs, though it is unclear whether the company ever met with David Banks the chancellor. But the company found the incoming administration to be opaque once Adams took office in 2022, the company representative said, adding that it was difficult to get information on the administration’s spending priorities, he said.
The Pearl Alliance also advertised its work with VitalChek, a large record-keeping company that has many long standing contracts with municipal governments across the country and that employs several hundred people. According to the company’s records, Banks’ relationship with the firm was fiction.
“We dug, we really, really dug, we’ve pretty much exhausted everything, but we have no knowledge of any relationship with him,” said Jennifer Grigas-Richman, a spokesperson for LexisNexis, which owns Vitalchek.
The Daily News reported that investigators served a search warrant on another firm represented by Banks. And the AP reported that a firm that hired Banks secured $1.4 million in contracts with the Department of Education after meeting with his brother David Banks, the schools chancellor. Such a meeting could violate the city’s conflicts of interest law, which forbids city officials to use their position to benefit a sibling.
The inquiry into the Banks brothers is one of at least four federal investigations involving Adams’ campaign and inner circle.
The FBI also seized the phone of senior public safety advisor Tim Pearson, according to The Times. Pearson, a former police officer, has been accused of sexual harassment and retaliation by four current and former police officers.
NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban resigned from the NYPD on Thursday, writing that “recent developments [have] created a distraction for our department.”
Terence Banks was a train service supervisor for the MTA until 2023, making anywhere from $110,000 to $175,000 each year, according to payroll records. He formed the consultancy company Pearl Alliance in 2022, according to state records, the same year Mayor Eric Adams took office.
The firm’s website was taken down after the Banks brothers’ phones were seized last week, but an archive remains online. The site touts clients ranging from small startups to large companies. Several have city contracts going back more than a decade. Calls to other companies on the site were not returned.
The origin of the Pearl Alliance’s name is unclear. Phil Banks kept an office at the Verizon building at 375 Pearl Street.
According to state and city law, lobbyists have to register if they collect more than $5,000 to “influence” government officials.