Integrity for enemies, Immunity for friends, as Tisch’s “reform” swaps cops for cronies.
NOTE: Everyone told us Jessica Tisch was the adult in the room. The technocrat. The reformer. The one who would scrub the NYPD clean after years of scandal. That was the sales pitch. It was a lie. What Tisch has actually done is perfect the art of selective integrity. She punishes the expendable, protects the connected, and wraps naked cronyism in the language of ethics. She talks reform while running cover. She invokes “accountability” while enforcing loyalty. Under Tisch, integrity isn’t a principle. It’s a weapon. And like every weapon in her NYPD, it’s aimed only in one direction. This is an Op-Ed entitled “Hypocrite Commissioner Jessica Tisch.”
By Richard Luthmann
Hypocrite Commissioner Jessica Tisch: The Fall of Chief Maddrey and a Faux “Integrity” Crusade
(NEW YORK, NY) – Everyone expected Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to clean up the NYPD. Instead, she’s redecorating it with her cronies and punishing the enemies of the politically connected. We’ve seen enough hypocrisy to last a lifetime.
Tisch forced out NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey over a salacious scandal that now appears increasingly unfounded. Maddrey was accused of manipulating a subordinate’s overtime in exchange for sex. He vehemently denied any quid pro quo, and evidence suggests the allegations don’t hold water.
In fact, his own lawyer acknowledges Maddrey – who is married – had a brief consensual relationship with the accuser, Lt. Quathisha Epps, a “self-professed swinger” now mired in an overtime abuse investigation.
Epps claims Maddrey coerced her into sexual favors and even alleged, without proof, that she bankrolled a Miami vacation for him and his wife – assertions that strain credulity and lack any corroboration.
Notably, Epps was the NYPD’s top-paid officer in 2024, racking up over $200,000 in overtime (on a total salary of $400k). When scrutiny fell on this exorbitant overtime, Epps was suspended, and the department later demanded she repay $230,000 in questionable overtime earnings, suggesting her credibility was already in tatters.
Maddrey’s attorney, Lambros Lambrou, has flatly dismissed Epps’s story as a desperate smokescreen, saying, “Lieutenant Epps got caught with her hand in the cookie jar and is trying to deflect her wrongdoing by making these allegations.”
He points out that Maddrey couldn’t even personally grant overtime in the first place – only supervisors can sign off on those slips, “never a Chief” – undermining the very premise of Epps’s quid pro quo claim.
Lambrou also produced a trove of text messages and explicit photos that Epps sent to Maddrey, evidence that she actively pursued him “in her attempts to have him begin a relationship with her”.
This hardly squares with the picture of a coerced victim, instead suggesting Epps was a willing participant until she landed in trouble. Inconsistencies in her narrative, along with the lack of supporting witnesses or evidence, further cast doubt on her story.
Yet the explosiveness of Epps’s accusations — however flimsy — made them a political weapon. The New York Post splashed the lurid claims on Dec. 21, and by the next day, Maddrey was essentially forced out amid the furor.
Federal agents then piled on, raiding Maddrey’s home in a high-profile probe that appears driven more by optics than substance.
Tisch swiftly announced she had suspended Maddrey as the feds and Internal Affairs swarmed. Even former Mayor Eric Adams, a friend of Maddrey, felt compelled to call the allegations “extremely concerning.”
Tisch portrayed the shake-up as a virtuous house-cleaning — “At my direction, the Internal Affairs Bureau is working with law enforcement to investigate…” she declared smugly. It sounded like the dawn of a new era of accountability at 1 Police Plaza.
But a closer look reveals Tisch’s broom only swept one way. She ousted a decorated top cop over unproven misconduct on Epps’s say-so – all while quietly elevating members of her own inner circle who have checkered histories that drew far less scrutiny. Her much-touted “integrity” crusade seems selective and politically motivated.
Maddrey’s fall was less about actual wrongdoing and more about the appearance of it – a convenient chance for the new commissioner to flex her reformer credentials and eliminate a rival power center. Meanwhile, the case against Maddrey is already collapsing under its own weight: the key witness’s credibility has crumbled, her motives reek of retaliation, and no hard evidence has emerged to back up the salacious claims.
Maddrey was taken down by a rush to judgment and a sensational narrative, not facts. As more light is shed, it’s becoming clear that the allegations against him were baseless – a hit job wrapped in the guise of #MeToo-era accountability.
In the end, the only thing this episode truly exposed was the Jessica Tisch NYPD’s eagerness to sacrifice a career cop’s reputation on the altar of politics and optics.
The Rise of Thompson: Cronyism Over Integrity
Tisch’s idea of reform was to replace scandal with cronyism. The day after Maddrey resigned, she bounced Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) Chief Miguel Iglesias and plugged in Edward A. Thompson.
Iglesias’s sin? Tisch claimed he “failed to properly investigate” the overtime-sex allegations.
Convenient.
In reality, Thompson is a 38-year NYPD veteran long cozy with Tisch. They go back to her days running the tech bureau. When Tisch left NYPD for a stint as Sanitation Commissioner in 2022, Thompson trailed right behind as her enforcer at DSNY.
Now she brought him back and rocketed him straight to three-star Chief of Internal Affairs – effectively double-promoting him from retirement.
Tisch sang his praises in a press release, preaching that IAB “must always be dedicated to preserving integrity and rooting out corruption… Chief Thompson is up to the task.”
Up to the task? This is the same Thompson who’s curiously absent from the NYPD’s public profiles. The department’s official pages list him only in passing, with none of the fanfare or transparency you’d expect for a top watchdog. It’s as if Tisch doesn’t want New Yorkers looking too closely.
She crowned her loyal fixer as internal integrity czar, then kept him in the shadows.
I see nothing “honorable” about that. Tisch’s message was clear: loyalty trumps merit. Integrity is just a buzzword for press conferences. Meanwhile, the real rot was just beginning.
Hypocrite Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Detective Zayas’s Meteoric Climb and Hotel Secrets
No move underscored Tisch’s hypocrisy like the rise of Detective Joanna P. Zayas. Thompson’s protégé, Zayas, followed him to that cushy Sanitation job and back to IAB. Almost overnight, she hit the career jackpot.
According to public NYPD records, Zayas “has managed a career trajectory that defies the laws of physics,” rocketing from Detective Specialist in 2021 to Detective First Grade by 2025, and pocketing $168,000 last year.
That highest rank is a rare honor typically earned by solving major cases over decades – yet Zayas snagged it in just four years.
The kicker?
“Apparently, she has never been assigned to a Squad,” never worked a single day as a precinct detective. Real investigators bust their humps for years, but Thompson’s favorite gets gold shield status without ever catching a case.
How does that happen?
Wink, wink. NYPD insiders are buzzing that Thompson’s relationship with Zayas isn’t just professional.
In fact, one viral video by @TheSalGreco accused Chief Thompson of “fraternizing with a subordinate” – none other than Det. Zayas – at a Long Island hotel getaway. The optics are outrageous: the head of Internal Affairs carrying on with an underling he just “double-promoted,” among other things, he may have done more than twice.
Even some in IAB couldn’t stomach it. The same day that the Instagram clip made the rounds, three of Thompson’s own IAB supervisors reportedly lined up at the pension section to retire in disgust. They saw the writing on the wall.
Thompson’s Inner Affairs Bureau was becoming his personal fiefdom.
And Commissioner Tisch? She’s been silent, hoping no one notices that her vaunted integrity chief might be policing everyone’s behavior but his own.
Well, Jessie girl, you and your boy Thompson made a fatal mistake. You listened to crooked Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon, and now that’s going to cost you.
Hypocrite Commissioner Jessica Tisch: A Bogus ICARD Retaliation to Banish a Critic
It’s now been the better part of a year since I discovered I’m the target of a secret NYPD ICARD that flags me for felony arrest on sight in New York City. This ICARD is nothing short of bogus and retaliatory – by the NYPD’s own admission, an ICARD is “not an arrest warrant” and lacks judicial review.
Yet it’s being wielded like a backdoor warrant to keep me, an outspoken journalist, exiled 1,200 miles away in Florida under threat of immediate arrest if I set foot in NYC.
What was my “crime”? Investigating and reporting on political misconduct and anti-Muslim bias in Staten Island’s halls of power – misconduct that Staten Island District Attorney Michael E. McMahon and his allies wanted to keep buried.
McMahon pushed for this fraudulent ICARD in July 2025 explicitly to muzzle my reporting on an Islamophobia scandal involving his cronies (City Councilmember Kamillah Hanks and her “cracker” husband, Kevin Barry Love) – a hate-threat case McMahon’s office quietly declined to prosecute.
In retaliation for shining light on their corruption, McMahon had the NYPD issue a phony “felony on sight” ICARD alert against me, hoping to either drag me back in cuffs or scare me into staying silent and far away. He gravely miscalculated on that one.
I have never been charged with any new crime; this ICARD has no lawful basis. Any judge who would entertain it or sign a warrant on it is either brain-dead or corrupt. It was concocted out of thin air as a political hit job, and it still sits active in NYPD databases to this day. My only “offense” is that my media outlet sent a mass email newsletter (one not even written by me and not even about McMahon) that McMahon lied and pretended to find “dangerous.”
In July 2025, McMahon swore under oath that he “feared for his safety [and] life” just because he received a Substack email – a routine public newsletter his own staff had voluntarily subscribed to! The email contained no threats whatsoever, and in fact didn’t even mention McMahon by name. Yet McMahon cynically mischaracterized it as a violation of a protective order (an order I was never even served with).
He even lied in his sworn complaint by describing me – a man he’s sparred with publicly for a decade – as a random “stranger” to him. This blatant falsehood helped him paint me as an ominous, unknown stalker to justify urgent police action. It’s crystal clear that McMahon’s supposed fear was never genuine; it was a pretext – the DA’s office “fake fear” scam to trigger police intervention and silence a critic.
In McMahon’s hands, the ICARD became a weapon to punish a dissident journalist, not protect public safety.
As I wrote in a letter to Commissioner Jessica Tisch (with IAB copied), “This is not a misunderstanding. It is not a paperwork error. It is not a gray area. It is corruption, plain and simple.”
The ICARD was designed to chill my reporting and avoid a judge entirely – that is the scam.
NYPD Detective’s Tape: “With the Victim Who It Is… I Get Whatever I Want.”
How far did McMahon go to enlist the NYPD in this vendetta? An explosive recorded phone call provides the answer. On July 21, 2025, NYPD Detective John Wilkinson – the warrant squad officer tasked with acting on McMahon’s complaint – unknowingly confessed to the fix on tape.
Speaking with an attorney, Det. Wilkinson bluntly admitted that his marching orders came straight from the Staten Island DA. When asked who the complainant was, Wilkinson revealed it was “the Staten Island DA,” then boasted about the special treatment this “victim” commanded.
“With the victim who it is… I get whatever I want,” Wilkinson bragged. “I ask for X, I get X. I ask for Z, I get Z,” he added, describing a rubber-stamp process in which judges would green-light anything he asked, no questions asked.
Because the complaining ‘victim’ was DA McMahon himself, the detective felt entitled to bend every rule and use every tool to “get” me – even if it meant skirting the courts and concocting charges.
In his own words, Wilkinson “admitted the fix was in.” He spoke casually of elevating McMahon’s flimsy complaint into a full-blown felony case and even using U.S. Marshals to haul me from Florida. All of this over an email that, as noted, didn’t even reference McMahon.
This recorded evidence is now in the hands of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau as part of an active investigation. It proves that McMahon abused his power and that members of the NYPD colluded in this abuse, bypassing all lawful procedure to do a political hit job.
Hypocrite Commissioner Jessica Tisch: IAB and Thompson Shield McMahon
One would think such egregious misconduct – a DA engineering a false arrest scheme and a detective caught red-handed on tape – would spur swift action from law enforcement leadership. Instead, the response at the top of the NYPD has been a deafening silence and inertia.
I immediately filed official complaints about this abuse. The Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) logged my case (IAB Log #2025-24036), and I provided detailed evidence of the fraud. I even sent a personal letter to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in November 2025, formally demanding that this “fraudulent and bogus” ICARD be withdrawn and expunged. The letter documented how the ICARD violated my constitutional rights and chilled my reporting by effectively banishing me from New York “under threat of false arrest.”
The City’s own Law Department acknowledged receipt. Commissioner Tisch knows exactly what’s going on – the IAB Chief Edward C. Thompson knows too. Yet here we are, well into 2026, and that baseless ICARD still taints the NYPD system. No one has been disciplined. Nothing has been done.
Why? Because Tisch and Thompson appear to be running interference – protecting one of their own in the club of New York power brokers. By stonewalling and slow-walking the investigation, the NYPD’s top brass is effectively obstructing justice to cover for DA McMahon’s misconduct.
Internal Affairs, the so-called “Rat Squad,” has had this “open” case for months, with no tangible action to show for it. Wilkinson and the rest of the McMahon cronies are clearly violating the law and the NYPD Patrol Guide.
Indeed, the cover-up may soon blow up: federal authorities and outside watchdogs are now alerted to this mess. The stench is too strong to ignore.
By circling the wagons around McMahon, Tisch, and Thompson have abdicated their duty to the law and the public. Instead of cleaning house, they’re enabling a grave abuse of police power.
Every additional day that this fraudulent ICARD remains active – with their knowledge and tacit approval – is a day of complicity for NYPD’s leadership. They are sending a chilling message to every rank-and-file officer: that politically connected wrongdoers get a pass, and whistleblowers or critics of the powerful will be hung out to dry.
Commissioner Tisch’s silence and inaction amount to protecting a corrupt DA at the expense of a free press and an honest police department. Is the NYPD Commissioner’s job to uphold the law, or to play bodyguard for Michael McMahon’s political machine?
Right now, it looks like the latter.
If NYPD’s higher-ups continue to stonewall the IAB probe, they risk crashing headlong into federal obstruction territory. The FBI is already sniffing around, and any attempted cover-up “might itself blow up” in their faces. McMahon has proven himself to be politically compromised and ethically bankrupt – a prosecutor who treats the law as a cudgel for personal and partisan vendettas.
This is the same DA who filed a sworn report so full of lies that he “perjured himself half a dozen times” in one document.
Now, in a delicious twist of fate, the McMahon machine is imploding under the weight of its own wrongdoing. The political protection racket that shielded them for so long is falling apart. And they know it.
In November 2025, Judge Judy McMahon abruptly “retired” at age 68, despite having years left on her term. She had just coasted to re-election in 2022 with a backroom, cross-party endorsement deal that ensured she faced no opponent. Yet suddenly, barely a year into her new term, she bowed out early, citing her age.
Age, my ass – New York’s mandatory judicial retirement age is 70, and even then extensions are common for connected judges.
The truth is, Judy fled the bench under a cloud of suspicion. Behind closed doors, word is that she was quietly warned she wouldn’t be recertified for a new term at 70, and rather than face public humiliation or new scrutiny, she bolted. By stepping aside, Judge McMahon hopes to collect her pension and dodge any fresh scandal before investigators connect more dots.
The question now becomes who in the NYPD is going down on the McMahon ship?
Hypocrite Commissioner Jessica Tisch: An Unforgivable Abuse of Power
The ICARD affair is more than a personal dispute – it’s a stark exhibit of how deep the rot runs in New York’s justice system when political interests trump the law. A District Attorney, aided by NYPD collaborators, concocted a fraudulent police alert to silence a former political opponent and investigative journalist.
High-ranking officials like Commissioner Jessica Tisch and IAB Chief Edward Thompson, whose duty was to intervene, instead turned a blind eye and left this travesty in place to please their friends in power.
The lapses in integrity parallel the Maddrey dog-and-pony show. This is a coordinated abuse of power at the highest levels – much like a weekday afternoon motel romp with a subordinate.
Commissioner Tisch and Chief Thompson: You had a choice. You continued to stonewall and cover for cronies. You didn’t do your jobs. Silence is complicity.
I never thought I’d see an NYPD Commissioner preach reform while tolerating such rot. Jessica Tisch rode in promising to restore honor. Instead, she’s presiding over a palace of hypocrisy.
She sacrificed Maddrey on the altar of optics – then quietly installed her own friends with benefits in key posts. She lets corrupt practices like McMahon’s ICARD shakedowns run rampant if they serve her circle’s interests.
This is cronyism, pure and simple. New Yorkers deserve better than a two-faced Commissioner who talks about “preserving integrity” while keeping one set of rules for herself and her cronies, and another for the rest of us.
Tisch’s NYPD is starting to stink from the head, and no amount of press-conference perfume can cover that stench. The rank-and-file know the truth. The public must know it too. It’s time to call out Jessica Tisch’s double game – and demand the same accountability from her that she so eagerly claims to enforce on everyone else. The city’s Finest, and the city itself, deserve nothing less.
It has risen to the highest levels; even federal eyes are on it now. It’s past time to clean house. If the NYPD’s leadership won’t police itself, others will happily step in.
Your time is up. The truth has a way of coming out, and when it does, the whole crooked machine will come crashing down.
History will not be kind to any of you.
About The Author
