When Eric Adams became New York City mayor in 2022, he brought a lot of old friends to City Hall. One of those associates, from his years at the New York Police Department, is Timothy Pearson.

A retired NYPD sergeant, Pearson was hired by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit that functions as a quasi-city agency, which allowed him to briefly collect a $242,600 salary as “senior advisor for public safety and COVID recovery” while simultaneously enjoying his NYPD pension ($124,000) and working as an executive at the Resorts World New York City casino in Queens. When these unusually lucrative arrangements were exposed by local reporters, he dropped the casino gig.

Pearson and the mayor go back some thirty years; the two even traveled to Turkey together in 2015. Politico called him “the most powerful New Yorker you’ve never heard of,” noting that Adams often tapped his friend for sensitive tasks, be it helping install Adams’s younger brother as head of the mayor’s security, flying to Israel with former chief of staff Frank Carone, or heading to El Paso, Texas, to suss out information about asylum seekers traveling to New York.