Hanks Tells Mamdani to Follow the Rules While Her Own Record Says Otherwise
LUTHMANN NOTE: Kamillah Hanks walked into Port Richmond with a gift-wrapped political grenade and still managed to blow it up in her own hands. She wanted a clean hit on City Hall. What she got instead was a spotlight on herself. Her argument sounds fine on paper—notice matters, process matters, the law matters. But that message collapses the second her own record enters the room. Campaign finance violations are not rumors. They are on the books. A civil lawsuit over unpaid political work is not gossip. It is filed in court. Ballot challenges, internal party friction, and office complaints are not fringe chatter. They are documented, sourced, and repeated. This is not opposition research. This is the public file, sitting there like a stack of unpaid bills. And voters are not stupid. When Hanks demands that everyone else “follow the rules,” they do not hear principle. They hear projection. They measure her words against her conduct, and the gap is not subtle. It is a canyon. That is where credibility goes to die. Staten Island does not need another lecture about process from someone still tangled in her own. It needs leadership that treats the rules as a standard, not a prop. Until that changes, every Hanks press release will land the same way—with an unspoken but unavoidable answer from the public: save the sermon, Start At Home Kamillah.
By Rick LaRivière and M. Thomas Nast with Richard Luthmann
The Shelter Fight That Opened the Door
(STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK) – Port Richmond just gave Kamillah Hanks a headline built for outrage. A planned shelter at 109 Port Richmond Avenue would house up to 64 adult families and be run by Project Hospitality.
Hanks and Borough President Vito Fossella said the city never gave the notice that local law requires. Hanks’ office said there was no phone call, no email, and no mailed notice. The city code is plain. The Department of Homeless Services must notify elected officials and the local community board when it sites a new shelter.
Yet city officials told the paper they emailed letters to Hanks and Fossella on February 20. The City Record separately published a proposed five-year contract for Project Hospitality worth $37,629,167, starting July 1, 2026.
That dispute let Hanks swing hard at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration. She cast herself as the defender of process, neighborhood notice, and Staten Island respect.
She also did it from a position of real clout. The Council’s own website lists Hanks as Majority Whip for the current term. Mamdani is now the mayor. When a majority whip says City Hall must follow the rules, voters can fairly expect her own record to be clean.
That is where the sermon starts to wobble. The public file already shows campaign finance trouble, a long-running civil suit, and fresh workplace complaints from inside her own office.
The issue is not whether notice mattered in Port Richmond. It did.
The issue is whether Hanks is the right messenger for a rules-and-accountability crusade.
Start At Home Kamillah: The Old Violations That Never Went Away
The oldest hard document comes from the New York City Campaign Finance Board. In a 2019 public meeting agenda, the board listed three alleged violations for Hanks’ 2017 City Council campaign. They were filing a late disclosure statement, accepting contributions from corporations, and failing to show that the spending furthered the campaign.
The oldest hard paper in this story is not gossip, opposition spin, or a Luthmann broadside. It is the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s own enforcement record. Kevin Barry Love calls it the “Elections Department,” evidently when confused and/or stoned.
In its November 21, 2019, enforcement release covering the 2017 election cycle, the Board listed Kamillah Payne-Hanks, running for City Council in District 49, as having committed three violations: filing a late disclosure statement, accepting contributions from corporations, and failing to demonstrate that certain spending was “in furtherance of the campaign.”
The Board’s published table put the total penalties at $1,329, with no penalty for the late disclosure violation, a $1,000 penalty for accepting corporate contributions, and a $329 penalty tied to the campaign-spending finding. The same public record also shows Hanks’ 2017 campaign received $100,100 in public funds.
The final audit report adds useful nuance, but it does not erase the violations. The Board told Hanks in its November 20, 2020, final audit report that her campaign had shown “substantial compliance” with the law and rules, “with exceptions as detailed in the report.”
Those exceptions mattered. The report says the campaign was assessed penalties totaling $1,329 and notes that unpaid balances could affect future public-funds eligibility.
In other words, this was not a finding that everything was clean. It was a formal regulatory record showing that the city’s campaign-finance watchdog found specific problems, imposed penalties, and made them part of Hanks’ permanent compliance history.
The details make the record worse, not better. In the audit report’s section on prohibited contributions, the Board states that all candidates are barred from taking money from corporations, partnerships, and limited liability companies.
It then identifies a Staten Island fundraiser tied to Cornerstone Realty and says the campaign did not report an expenditure to that entity connected to the event. The Board’s analysis states that the fundraiser was therefore treated as an unreported in-kind contribution from Cornerstone Realty, and it expressly cross-references that finding to the prohibited corporate-contribution section.
The report also says the campaign failed to show how certain expenditures advanced the campaign, which is not a paperwork nit. That goes to whether campaign money was spent lawfully for campaign purposes.
Start At Home Kamillah: The Deadbeat Fight
Then came the “deadbeat” fight, and it did not vanish with time. In November 2023, Richard Luthmann sued Kamillah Hanks, her campaign committee, and her hubby, Kevin Barry Love, over unpaid legal fees and other campaign-related expenses tied to Hanks’ 2017 council run. Those reports said Luthmann claimed he was owed more than $86,000 for campaign work, election-law litigation, and other services, including a separate school-related court matter involving Hanks and Love’s daughter.
Hanks’s husband and alleged “enforcer,” Kevin Barry Love, responded, calling Luthmann “mentally ill,” and his allegations “a vulgar lie.”
The dispute between Hanks and Luthmann remains contested public litigation, not a proven fact. Still, the suit itself has become part of Hanks’ public record, and it raises questions that have never fully gone away — whether people who did work for Hanks and her political operation got paid, reported, and handled the way they should have been, and whether Hanks played dirty against Debi Rose.
What has changed in 2026 is not that the old allegations were adjudicated on the merits in public reporting. It is that the story has grown larger in the Luthmann orbit, not smaller. In April 2026, fresh coverage under the headline “Hanks Developer Shakedown Bombshell” describes a new Manhattan Supreme Court reply affidavit that folded the old fee battle into broader claims about political pressure, a “developer shakedown,” and the conduct of people around Hanks, including Kevin Barry Love.
“Kevin is under federal investigation. He’s going to be having ‘Diddy Parties’ in jail very soon,” Luthmann said. “But don’t take my word for it. Ask Charles Fall who he’s been talking to, unless Kamillah’s new story is that the SI Dems Leader Deputy Leader of the Assembly is now ‘crazy.’ My story has stayed the same for years. Their changes weekly.”
Politically, Luthmann’s claims still bite. The debt suit was never just about a bill. It became a running symbol of disorder around Hanks: unpaid obligations, disputed campaign conduct, and a pattern of drama that keeps resurfacing whenever she tries to lecture others about rules, notice, and process.
So did Hanks’ 2025 reelection operation. The fight was not just political. It went straight to the ballot line. City & State reported on May 6, 2025, that Jozette Carter-Williams, a Democratic primary challenger backed by the city’s police unions, was fighting to stay on the ballot after petition challenges knocked her off the initial list of candidates. That report placed Hanks at the center of a familiar kind of New York election combat: signature objections, board rulings, and courthouse trench warfare over who even got to face voters in June.
By itself, that kind of hardball is not unlawful. New York politics runs on petition challenges, and candidates use them because they work. But it does cut against the image Hanks tries to project when she scolds others about rules, notice, and process.
In the Hanks universe, procedure often looks less like a neutral civic principle and more like a weapon drawn when useful. That is why the episode matters. It was not just another ballot skirmish. It reinforced the broader public impression that Hanks talks reform and fairness in press statements while practicing old-school machine politics when power is on the line.
That impression is sharpened by the belief that the 2025 primary season was not an isolated contest but was part of a larger collapse around Hanks. Hanks has already suffered a serious loss of support inside the Staten Island Democratic organization, describing a county committee process in which she failed to lock down a clean endorsement and faced internal resistance from people around her own operation.
Those reports also tied the Carter-Williams challenge to wider allegations of campaign dysfunction and insider warfare. Taken together with the City & State account, they make one point hard to ignore: Hanks did not run in 2025 as some pristine guardian of process. She ran like a cornered incumbent, using every available lever to narrow the field and survive.
Start At Home Kamillah: The Office Trouble That Made the Hypocrisy Worse
If the campaign record was old smoke, the office complaints were fresh fire. In June 2025, City & State reported that five current and former employees described a toxic office culture in Hanks’ shop. The outlet said at least three staffers took grievances to the Council’s chief equal employment opportunity officer. At least four also complained to the staff union.
Union representative Sarah Crean confirmed that multiple past and current staffers had gone to the union. The allegations were ugly. They included retaliation for leave requests, religious discrimination, public berating, and management pressure.
One Muslim staffer said the office retaliated after the afternoon prayer and after Eid leave. Another staffer said Hanks yelled that she “hears everything” after a hotline complaint. On a staff of about seven, City & State counted at least seven departures or firings over three years.
Hanks responded by calling the complainants “disgruntled individuals.”
She said public service requires attendance, competency, and proper comportment. That line was sharp. The irony is sharper.
In the current session, Hanks has introduced a bill to extend workplace accommodations to caregivers. She has also signed onto other anti-discrimination and workplace accountability measures in the Council. Those are serious causes.
They also cast a harsher light on the charges from inside her own office. One bitter former aide can be dismissed. Five sources, union complaints, and EEO reports are harder to wave away.
That is why the Port Richmond posture lands so badly. Hanks is demanding that Mamdani’s administration meet legal and procedural standards while her own office still carries a public record of alleged retaliation, bias, and churn.
Start At Home Kamillah: Why the Ineffective Label Now Sticks
The effectiveness problem hurts Hanks most because she is not some anonymous backbencher.
“She is Majority Whip, but then again, how hard is it to count to six?” Luthmann said. “[Hanks] has introduced 14 bills in the 2026 session, and all 14 are still in committee because she is the political equivalent of herpes, and now she’s spread it to Julie Menin and the Manhattan Establishment Democrats.”
Luthmann predicts it’s a matter of time before “Zohran and the Che Guevara cosplay crowd” take Manhattan.
“Zohran might be the mayor, and he might soon control the whole island of Manhattan, but he’s not the Duke of New York. That’s Isaac Hayes,” Luthmann said, referring to the 1981 classic Escape from New York.
At the same time, the Council itself bragged that it had passed 111 bills and resolutions in its first 100 days and introduced more than 1,200 pieces of legislation. Hanks joined that victory lap. She said the Council would not accept “higher taxes, fewer services, and broken promises.”
Fine. But Staten Islanders judge closer to home. They see a district still fighting over basic shelter notice, still hearing about office complaints, and still watching Hanks spend more time on positioning than persuasion. A majority whip should project control. Hanks keeps projecting drama.
That is why this matters now. Hanks went public in the Port Richmond shelter fight as a defender of legal notice and procedural fairness, telling reporters through her office that the administration gave “no phone call, no email or snail mail” and insisting that “the law” required notice to local officials and the community board.
That may be a fair argument on the shelter issue. But it lands differently when the messenger already carries a documented record of infractions. Rules do not become sacred only when they help a press conference. They either apply across the board or they do not. On that simple test, Hanks fails.
The claims against Hanks did not rise from a vacuum. Official campaign finance papers are real. The City & State workplace reporting is real. The Port Richmond shelter dispute is real. The gap between Hanks’ rulebook rhetoric and her own public record is all too real.
That is why the hit line writes itself. If Hanks wants Mamdani to follow the rules, Staten Island can answer with four words: Start At Home Kamillah.
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