Adams operative had altercation at Randall’s Island Shelter hours before fighting guards at Touro

Tim Pearson showed up with 100 cops, two drones and a helicopter, locking down the island and threatening to fire a shelter manager who followed the city’s rules by asking him to show a warrant.

October 20, 2023 Gwynne Hogan, THE CITY

Timothy Pearson stands behind Eric Adams while he's sworn in during the New Year's Eve 2022 celebration in Times Square. Photo: lev radin/Shutterstock

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Hours before a top operative for Mayor Eric Adams got into a physical altercation with migrant shelter guards in Midtown Tuesday while attempting to enter without showing identification, he pulled a similar maneuver at the Randall’s Island shelter, according to an internal report obtained by THE CITY.

The operative, retired NYPD officer Tim Pearson, was on Randall’s Island along with a huge police presence in the middle of what the NYPD had described as a quality of life sweep to try and find four people who he said had previously assaulted an officer. According to the report, Pearson berated the site manager as he demanded to be let inside the shelter without producing an arrest warrant — despite the city’s own protocols requiring one.

That previously unreported incident is detailed in an internal document prepared by agency staffers at the city’s Health and Hospitals system, which oversees the Randall’s Island shelter that has capacity for 2,000 migrants. A copy of that report obtained by THE CITY recounts a tense situation, in which the former police officer and long-time Adams confidant threatened the site manager’s job if they didn’t step aside to let police enter without showing a warrant.

The Tuesday afternoon incident echoed one later that day where Pearson threatened to fire a security guard who wouldn’t let him into a Midtown migrant shelter without identifying himself, then shoved her. Since THE CITY’s initial report about that encounter, which ended with the arrest of two security guards, the left-leaning Working Families Party and Councilmember Diana Ayala have called on Pearson to step down if witness accounts prove true.

Adams, who recently began only taking off topic questions from reporters at a weekly briefing on Tuesdays, rebuffed a reporter from THE CITY’s request for comment on the incident at an unrelated event Friday morning.

Pearson, who Adams hired via the city’s Economic Development Corporation and then tasked with overseeing security issues around migrant shelters on behalf of City Hall, arrived at Randall’s Island at around 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon with a cavalry of over 100 police officers on hand along with two drones and a helicopter overhead, according to the incident report.

The NYPD shut down all the entrances and exits to the island, trapping residents and staff there and preventing anyone from arriving, during a shift change. Police told staffers on site they were searching for people who they said had assaulted an officer two nights earlier, and showed staff several pictures of suspects they thought lived at the shelter, along with the name of one of those people.

When the site manager asked them if they had an arrest warrant, Pearson bristled.

“Mr. Pearson got upset and yelled at manager [name] and stated he can have him lose his job over him asking this question, to never questions him again because they know what they were doing,” the report reads. An administration source confirmed Health and Hospitals’ protocol, vetted by the city’s Law Department, requires requesting a warrant when law enforcement try to make an arrest inside one of their facilities.

Evidently, they then entered without producing a warrant. The report goes on to say: “They combed through the entire Randall’s Island trying to locate the guests in question and was unsuccessful in locating them.”

Health and Hospitals, City Hall and the NYPD all did not immediately respond to requests for comment from THE CITY about the episode on Randall’s Island. A spokesperson for the mayor and the Law Department also didn’t respond to requests for comment. The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which technically employs Pearson, deferred to City Hall for comment.

‘Do You Know Who I Am?’

The report on the Randall’s Island incident bears similarities to the accounts of 12 eyewitnesses leading up to a fight involving Pearson at the Touro migrant shelter on West 31st Street less than three hours later. Following the Manhattan incident, Pearson told prosecutors that he’d identified himself to security staff when attempting to enter the migrant shelter but was barred from entering and was then accosted by guards.

Eyewitness accounts, however, described him refusing to identify himself, cursing at employees to get out of the way and shouting, “Do you know who I am? You won’t be working here after today.”

Pearson then physically shoved a female guard, triggering a fight inside the shelter lobby, according to the eyewitness accounts. Site staff who saw the incident stated that the Office of Emergency Management protocol is to request identification of any unannounced visitor to migrant shelters.

A police spokesperson had described Tuesday’s raid on Randall’s Island at the time as part of a joint effort with the Parks Department to enforce quality of life and park regulations “such as barbeques, food vending and tents.” On the banks of the East River beside the migrant shelter, residents had taken to cooking, selling empanadas, cutting hair and selling used goods.

Police arrested one person for criminal possession of stolen property, an NYPD spokesperson said.

Pearson, dubbed “the most powerful New Yorker you’ve never heard of” by Politico, has a relationship with Adams stretching back to their time in the NYPD and stood next to the mayor at his Times Square inauguration. Over the summer, Adams tasked Pearson with identifying cost cutting measures to deploy at migrant shelters as the shelter census ballooned to what’s now more than 118,000 people.

Katie Honan contributed reporting.