A former FDNY chief “betrayed the trust” of New Yorkers by taking bribes to fast-track fire inspections, a Manhattan judge said Monday before sentencing him to 20 months in prison.
“You betrayed the trust that the Fire Department and the people of New York placed in you,” Judge Lewis Liman said of Brian Cordasco, 49, before ordering the retired smoke-eater to serve the prison time and pay $157,000 in restitution and fines.
Cordasco pleaded guilty in October to scheming with supervisor Anthony Saccavino at the FDNY Bureau of Fire Prevention to take nearly $200,000 in kickbacks — including from high-end restaurants and hotels near JFK International Airport — in exchange for a prized spot on City Hall’s inspection “VIP list.”
The two FDNY chiefs and middleman Henry Santiago Jr. exploited a hefty backlog of projects at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to score illicit cash payouts from clients eager to move forward on projects quickly, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York alleged.
“The crime was opportunistic,” Judge Liman said Monday. “You took advantage of your position, and you took advantage of the COVID crisis.”
Manhattan feds pushed for Cordasco, who was netting a salary of $250,000 a year, to serve up to four years in prison for pocketing payoffs in a scheme involving 30 projects across the city.
“There was no reason he had to engage in this conduct but greed,” prosecutor Jessica Greenwood told the court.
Cordasco’s lawyers pushed the judge to sentence him to one year of home confinement, suggesting that a broader culture of corruption at City Hall may be responsible for his crimes as well.
The attorney, David Stern, did not refer to Mayor Eric Adams by name. But Hizzoner was accused — in an indictment dropping from the same Manhattan feds days after Cordasco and Saccavino were arrested — of taking travel perk bribes from Turks in exchange for fast-tracking FDNY inspections at the Manhattan Turkish consulate building.
A 2023 lawsuit also accused the Adams administration of helping big real estate developers cut to the front of the line of a so-called Deputy Mayor of Operations, or DMO, list to help speed up fire alarm inspections for local businesses.
“When the mayor or the mayor’s office is telling people, ‘I want you to move these people up, because I want you to move them up,’ it breeds a kind of complacency about doing that,” Stern said.
“That doesn’t make it right,” Stern continued, before adding: “If the mayor did it, I don’t know.”
The Justice Department under President Trump has moved to dismiss Mayor Adams’ corruption case — a decision admittedly made without considering the strength of the evidence that Adams took bribes.
The department has claimed instead, without providing evidence, that the case was “politically motivated” and harming Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, which Adams has expressed support for.
Cordasco’s bribery scheme started at the tail end of the Bill de Blasio administration, in 2021, and ran until 2023, federal prosecutors say. Santiago, who ran a crooked fire safety company, personally delivered bribe payments to his partners during steakhouse dinners in Manhattan and even at the fire prevention bureau’s Brooklyn office, according to the feds.
Cordasco apologized to his former colleagues Monday before the sentence was read out.
“I betrayed the very same people who took me in with open arms,” he said, standing and reading a prepared statement.
“I know I cannot go back and make things right,” he added. “There are no do-overs.”
Judge Liman called Cordasco’s speech “very impressive” and, acknowledging his family members in the gallery, noted that he doesn’t view the prison sentence “as a reflection of you as a human being, but rather the seriousness of the offense.”
The judge also moved back the date when Cordasco is required to report to a federal lockup to June 17 so that he can attend his son’s school graduation ceremony earlier that month.
Saccavino and Santiago have pleaded guilty as well and are awaiting sentencing.
, “The sentence imposed today sends a clear message that government officials who betray the public trust to line their own pockets will be met with just punishment,” Matthew Podolsky, acting US Attorney for SDNY said in a statement Monday.
The four Southern District prosecutors handling the Adams case have either resigned in protest of the Trump DOJ’s handling of the case, or were abruptly put on leave.
An internal probe has been launched into their conduct, according to DOJ Assistant Attorney General Emil Bove, formerly one of Trump’s criminal defense lawyers.
The Adams case is now being handled by the Main Justice in Washington, DC, with Bove himself the only prosecutor to make an appearance at the latest court date.
