During the early days of the pandemic, former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration booked hundreds of hotel rooms across the city that were to be used by New Yorkers who had tested positive for COVID-19 and needed a place to isolate.
As part of the initiative, the administration outsourced security on the premises — and one company contracted to guard at least 17 of the isolation hotels was unlicensed to do that work and now faces scrutiny from three local investigative agencies as a result, the Daily News has learned.
The company, Global Operations Security, locked in the hotel contract worth more than $7 million from the city Emergency Management Department on April 18, 2020, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The News.
The contract, which ran through Sept. 30, 2020, held that the firm would keep at least two security guards posted 24/7 at each of the 17 hotels, eight of which were in Manhattan, seven in Queens, one in the Bronx and one on Staten Island. The contract noted that the number of hotels in need of the firm’s security “may increase as this program continues.”
But Global Operations Security did not have the watch guard license required to perform such work, according to the New York Department of State, which regulates security licensing. Nonetheless, in the contract obtained by The News, Global described itself to the administration as “a security company, licensed, insured and operating in full compliance with the city, state and federal regulations.”
The apparent misrepresentation allowed Global to collect millions of taxpayer dollars, and a city Department of Investigation spokeswoman confirmed Friday that her agency recently received a referral from Mayor Adams’ office asking for a probe of alleged wrongdoing related to the hotel security contract.
Meantime, the New York Department of State also said Friday it has made similar referrals to the Queens district attorney’s office and the state attorney general’s office for investigations into Global.
Representatives for the Queens DA’s office and the state AG’s office declined to comment.
A woman who picked up the phone at a number listed for Global last week said she only does payroll services for the firm and could not respond to questions about any contracts.
“The managers who work on that are out on vacation,” the woman said. She declined to identify herself or the managers.
A spokeswoman for the Emergency Management Department, Allison Pennisi, said last week that her agency paid out $3.2 million to Global before the isolation hotel contract expired in September 2020.
The department did not renew the contract, “and we are no longer working with” Global, Pennisi added.
She declined to say why the Emergency Management Department failed to discover that Global lacked proper security credentials before hiring the firm.
Global’s unlicensed status first came to light in a report last month by the news organization The City.
According to the report, Global was hired in 2020 by another private company, Exodus Transitional Communities, which provided security at three hotels where Exodus had been contracted by the de Blasio administration to house recently released inmates as COVID rates were soaring in the city.
Though the Emergency Management Department scrapped the direct contract with Global in September 2020, the unlicensed firm appears to have benefited from the subcontract it got from Exodus for many more months.
The City reported that Adams’ administration just this spring sought to renew a contract with Exodus that would have kept Global as a security subcontractor for the hotels where Exodus continues to house ex-inmates.
An Adams administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, blamed the subcontract flub on the Emergency Management Department, saying that City Hall assumed Global was in the clear to stay on as a security provider since the agency contracted with it directly in 2020.
“It was during a crisis, and there’s sympathy for that, but nobody understands now why that firm was picked,” the official told The News.
Following the recent revelations, Adams announced on March 25 that his administration would immediately cut all ties with Global, including terminating any subcontracts. He also ordered a “comprehensive review” of the city’s overall pandemic emergency contracting practices.
But that didn’t stop the Adams administration from recently moving ahead with awarding a new $40 million inmate placement contract to Exodus. The administration said it could safely continue to contract Exodus because it no longer relied on Global for security.
City Comptroller Brad Lander, however, refused to register the latest Exodus contract, saying in a statement that “a number of questions remain regarding this contract, including payments to Global and Exodus’ subcontracting procedures.”
Exodus did not return a request for comment last week.
Adams can likely override Lander to award the contract to Exodus anyway, and signaled during a news conference last week that he will do so.
“We don’t want a disruption of services,” Adams told reporters. “We’re going to make the right decision.”
