Terence Banks, the brother of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks as well as schools Chancellor David Banks, has been the center of an investigation of a suspected bribery scheme involving his company, and has now been accused of falsely alleging he worked with a technology company in the process.
Banks’ government relations firm, The Pearl Alliance, was presented as a lobbying organization. The company said it helped foster “strategic alliances among businesses, industry leaders, and government.”
The education company Banks allegedly worked with, 21stCentEd, was seeking to expand its presence in NYC’s public schools, turning to Banks, whose new consulting firm promised to connect clients with top government stakeholders. In the two years since 21stCentEd began working with Banks, more than $1.4 million in Education Department funds have flowed to the company, nearly tripling its previous total, according to records.
As a result of the probe into the reported bribery, Banks, who is a recently retired mid-level MTA supervisor along with his brothers Phil and David, had their phones seized by federal officials last week. This also raises potential questions of Mayor Eric Adams’ knowledge of and relation to the situation, as the Banks brothers work within the inner circle of his administration.
The Pearl Alliance advertised its work with VitalChek, a large record-keeping company that has many long standing contracts with municipal governments across the country and that employs several hundred people. Yet, according to the company’s records, Banks’ relationship with the firm was fiction, Gothamist reported.
“We dug, we really, really dug, we’ve pretty much exhausted everything, but we have no knowledge of any relationship with him,” said Jennifer Grigas-Richman, a spokesperson for LexisNexis, which owns Vitalchek.
Another one of the companies Banks alleged he worked with, SVAM International, is an IT technology firm that was listed as a client on Banks’ consultancy website. A representative with the company told Gothamist that it hired Banks hoping he could help broker meetings with the Adams administration, but that Banks was ineffective and no contracts were ever obtained through him. The representative declined to be quoted because of the pending investigation, and would not disclose whether SVAM had been in contact with federal officials about Banks, but said the company is not a target of the federal investigation.
SVAM has had contracts with the city for more than a decade, including with the Department of Education that Banks’ brother now runs, though it is unclear whether the company ever met with David Banks, the Chancellor. However, the company representative said it found the incoming administration to be opaque once Adams took office in 2022, adding that it was difficult to get information on the administration’s spending priorities.
The current inquiry into the Banks brothers is one of at least four recent ongoing federal investigations involving Adams’ campaign and inner circle. None of the brothers has been charged as of yet, and all three have denied reports of misconduct.
