How New York’s Court System Intertwines With Party Politics

The homeowner’s lawyer, Ravi Batra, filed a motion contesting the auction result. The motion was denied by Brooklyn’s former longtime chief administrative judge, Lawrence Knipel — whose ruling was premised on the false notion that the home had sold for $1.7 million.

Records show that a number of major players in the case — the judge, court referee, and bank’s law firm — had ties to the local political machine, and to each other. No government agency has accused them of wrongdoing related to the case, and Knipel believes the result will be upheld on appeal. But such connections may color litigants’ perceptions of whether justice is being carried out impartially.

“New York City’s court system is intertwined with the kind of party politics that should not exist in courthouses,” said Ben Weinberg, director of public policy at the government reform group Citizens Union.

Late last year, Knipel retired from the bench. His retirement party was a reminder of his ties to a political party responsible for making him a judge. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the event was “officiated” by the former longtime chairman of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, Frank Seddio — and organized, in part, by Michael D. Benjamin, a longtime party regular.

A year earlier, in his capacity as Knipel’s hand-picked court referee, Benjamin had conducted the bidding in the Emigrant case where the price was allegedly inflated. Benjamin declined to answer questions about how closely he scrutinized interest calculation documents submitted to him by Emigrant’s attorney before signing off, or about his ties to Knipel.

New York’s court system has long had a patronage problem. In New York City’s heavily Democratic boroughs, county political party machines play a decisive role in determining which state Supreme Court judges are elected. In turn, judges often appoint people associated with county political parties to serve as court referees charged with double-checking lenders’ interest calculations in foreclosure cases, along with other paying, court-appointed roles. The result, critics of the system argue, is that case appointments are based on connections, not competence.

Benjamin is a veteran officer of Brooklyn’s long-influential Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club. Soon after graduating from law school in 1977, he began landing a series of jobs in the state
legislature, spanning much of the past five decades, primarily for Brooklyn lawmakers.

Benjamin, an attorney, was disbarred in 1994 over 15 charges of professional misconduct, mostly related to a lack of diligence on behalf of clients. (Benjamin has said that he’d suffered from a debilitating addiction to marijuana.) Yet the disbarment did not curb Benjamin’s ability to land local government jobs.

In 2002, while working part-time for the state legislature, Benjamin began simultaneously holding a second job — this one full-time — working for a Brooklyn city councilmember long associated with the same political club. In 2007, he was hired by the Council speaker —- a job the councilmember later implied was offered as a “favor” to him.

In 2015, Benjamin successfully sought the reinstatement of his law license in New York. He has since landed hundreds of appointments from Knipel to serve as a court referee, charged with ensuring funds from foreclosure sales are properly distributed.

For more than three decades, Judge Knipel’s wife, Lori Knipel, had served as a district leader in the Brooklyn Democratic Party and led a different Brooklyn Democratic political club. Lori Knipel long controlled a campaign account associated with the club, to which Benjamin and family members have donated $2,850. Since 2010, Benjamin has received far more court referee appointments from Judge Knipel — 301 — than any other person.

Emigrant’s law firm, Borchert & LaSpina, has its own connections to the Brooklyn Democrats: One former partner was the longtime party attorney, while another former partner is the party’s recent law chair. Meanwhile, the firm’s Helmut Borchert, Gregory LaSpina, and the firm itself have donated a combined $9,200 to the campaign account controlled by Lori Knipel.

Even as Borchert & LaSpina represents banks before Knipel, the judge has appointed Borchert to serve as a neutral court referee 135 times, making Borchert the judge’s second most frequent appointee since 2010. LaSpina has received 59.

The attorney representing the foreclosed homeowner in the Emigrant case has had close ties to the Brooklyn Democrats himself. Those ties were scrutinized by The New York Times in 2003. Decades ago, Ravi Batra took himself off the list of those eligible to receive court appointments. He donated $2,000 to Lori Knipel’s campaign fund in 2002 and has since donated a total of $600, according to state records.

Judge Knipel said his approach to making judicial appointments was “not political.”

To take a “stranger’s name off the [appointment] list that you don’t know — that you’ve never heard of — I don’t think anybody really does that,” Knipel told New York Focus. “I’ve appointed many, many people who I know for a fact have nothing to do with politics, or they’re involved in Republican politics.” Knipel noted the Brooklyn Democratic Party has factions, and that his wife’s political club had long been at odds with Benjamin’s.

Knipel said he doesn’t “know or care about the people who contributed to any campaign committees.”

State election law bars spending campaign dollars strictly for the candidate’s personal benefit, and Lori Knipel has recently faced media questions about her campaign spending.