Realty Advisory Board In RICO Lawsuit, Selected Dead Arbitrators To Civil Rights Panel

Prominent New York labor board failed to vet arbitrators, appointed long-dead lawyers to handle Title VII claims.

As New York mayor Eric Adams is under indictment, in part for an illicit building development deal on Manhattan’s west side, a prominent fixture for developers and owners, The Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, also known as the R.A.B., has come under increasing scrutiny in a civil racketeering lawsuit that alleges they rigged the arbitration protocol process of  the building workers’ union 32BJ, by hand-picking mediators and arbitrators to sabotage legitimate wrongful termination disputes.

“Ask any one of the guys, and they’ll tell you the arbitrations are fixed,” said a doorman in Sutton Place. “I’ve been doing this forty years, and every few years I get a notice in the mail that says my pension is frozen. But the people who live here, they pay into that pension without missing a beat. So something’s going on.”

Initially, the plaintiff filed a Title VII discrimination lawsuit against building operators Orsid Realty and 61 West 9th Owners Corporation, featuring transcriptions of a recorded phone call from Orsid bigwig Robert Mellman threatening the plaintiff, Benjamin Lagerstrom, that he would sabotage the arbitration process if he got a call from the union, and that together with the union, they would “have a laugh about it” because he sits on the committees that designed the contract and arbitration process.

“This is a first!” said the flustered New York Realty Advisory Board attorney Harry Weinberg when questioned in a controlled phone call about a Federal Judge selecting arbitrators to decide a case before the New York Southern District Court. Weinberg, the Realty Advisory Board’s go-to lawyer, is prominently featured in the lawsuit as a co-conspirator who engineered the arbitration process to gain favorable results for the city’s top real estate owners, including by scoffing Federal Law and appointing arbitrators to cases with extreme conflicts of interest, including living in defendants’ buildings, not meeting the criteria required to perform the arbitrations, and in some instances, having died before being appointed.

Weinberg, who first refused to speak about the arbitration process coming under Federal oversight and at one point stated he was turning off his earpiece, later interrupted the conversation, attempting to blame the American Association of Arbitrators for not vetting the arbitrators; however, the union contract clearly states: “The Union and the R.A.B. have received and vetted” the arbitrators on the panel.

One arbitrator, who laid claim to handling “thousands” of these arbitrations, Barry Peek, an attorney, is Mr. Weinberg’s neighbor in a Boynton Beach, Florida condominium, and threatened the plaintiff in the arbitration, even laying the false claim that he was a federal agent and would have the plaintiff punished by the Federal Judge, J. Paul Oetken, and that he was having conversations with the judge.

The union contract holds that in order for discrimination claims to be lawfully arbitrated, the arbitrators have to be vetted by the union and the Realty Advisory Board. Appointing deceased arbitrators “certainly renders them unqualified,” said the doorman, who did not want his name published.

New York’s building workers—doormen, porters, elevator operators—are a fixture in the city, one of those quirky jobs shrouded in intrigue. Ask anybody paying maintenance fees in a Manhattan high-rise, and they will tell you these men (and women) increase those fees in substantial ways via payments for their pensions, healthcare, 401ks, and other benefits in excess of their base salaries. Doormen earn on average $43,000 per year, but the payments made in addition to salary amount to roughly $70,000 each year, sometimes more. That money goes into their retirement and benefits, funds they cannot touch until they turn 65 years of age.

Ask any building worker why they commit themselves to what can amount to a lifetime in one job, they will likely tell you it is because of the pension and the medical benefits. The lawsuit naming the Realty Advisory Board, currently in the powerful New York Southern District, lays the claim that building worker pensions can be valued at as much as two million dollars each. “I thought they had a powerful union, what’s going on?” said a resident on the Upper East Side. “It was always like, you had to move hell and high water to fire these guys. Why did the union allow this to happen, and what’s happening with that pension money?”

The lawsuit, 24-cv-05485, *Lagerstrom v. The Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations, Orsid Realty, et al.*, involves a controversial firing of a veteran employee who properly sought exemptions from being vaccinated for COVID for religious and medical reasons. In an attached lawsuit, the worker presented transcripts of recorded calls with building management promising him he would never be terminated for not being vaccinated and that the building board had negative “perceptions about non-vacciners.” The lawsuit asserts that Lagerstrom, the only non-vaccinated employee, is the only building worker who did not get COVID.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2024cv05485/625125%3famp

https://www.google.com/amp/s/dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2024cv05485/625125%3famp

https://nybma.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2018-RAB-Residential-Agreement.pdf